My main home desktop is a Dell Optiplex 960, about 18 months old.
Lately, if I need to restart it, it's reluctant to boot up. (I leave it
on most of the time, polling for email etc, but I shut it down for a
couple of days when the solar flares were supposed to be most intense,
just in case....)
"Reluctant is imprecise. Generally it fires up, gets to the BIOS
screen that lists the hard drives, but then never loads the OS. None of
the BIOS configuration/setup/diagnostics choices does anything -- then
again, I don't know if they ever did.
The box has one of Dell's front-panel USB hubs, and I've found that if
I unplug everything from there, it boots normally and then I can plug
them back in. "Obviously" some USB device is simply drawing too much
juice....
EXCEPT, the devices that need a lot of power -- the printer, the
external 2TB hard drive -- have their own separate power supplies, and
my work Blackberry which charges from one of those USB ports isn't
connected. Hmmmm.
One of those USB cables is the monitor connection to my APC UPS, which
I believe is failing. So my current theory is that when this is
connected, as soon as the APC driver loads, it signals "Battery Low!" to
the system which, based on logic intended for laptops, suspends the boot
process in hopes that if it just waits long enough, the battery will
charge up.
I've had a couple of instances in the last month or two where I've
found the PC apparently rebooted and showing a message about a battery.
So I'm finding it easy to believe that the battery in my APC unit (maybe
10 years old?) is dying/dead and I probably need to replace the unit.
Obviously it has been a while since I've bought a UPS.... Does anyone
have any recommendations of features I should specifically look for, or
avoid, especially features that might not have been available 10 years
ago?
David Gillett
Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
http://freepctech.com
|
