Mind bending problem

Client has W11.....but booting up VERY slow....about 10 minutes....
Asked client how often she turns the PC off......she says never.....always on....
Took it home and on my workbench...booted up about 10-15 minutes......
Rebooted again and went faster........booted up 5 times in a row and now the
PC is booting in a normal time......

So...took it back to my client and it won';t boot.....wont get out of POST....
I bring it home to troubleshoot.....didn't do anything and it works perfectly....
Took it back to client and will not boot....

So brought it back to my workbench......run DISM....sfc and chkdsk....everything looks good
PC is running perfectly.....
Back to client and will not boot......

Unplugged PC from surge protector.....plugged pc directly into wall outlet.......no boot....

Moved PC to clients kitchen....different 110v outlet and it booted up normal.....

So something with the 110v outlook at the normal pc location.....

Question.......maybe low voltage....but if that were the case I don;t think the pc would even start up at all....monitor would not turn on.....

So I'm thinking maybe a circuit breaker problem in the breaker box.....

Any thoughts and ideas appreciated...
Steve

Random thoughts...

stevem5000 said:

Moved PC to clients kitchen....different 110v outlet and it booted up normal.....

So something with the 110v outlook at the normal pc location.....

Click to expand...

You need more than one test of doing that to confirm its 100% repeatable behaviour with the suspect socket and that happens, even once on any other.

stevem5000 said:

Question.......maybe low voltage....but if that were the case I don't think the pc would even start up at all....monitor would not turn on.....

Click to expand...

That would be a curious one. All power supplies for PC's (that I am aware of anyway) are 'switching types' referred to as SMPS and essentially these are normally rated to run from around 85 to 265 volts AC input which ensures global compatibility.

Up to now it sounds like you have tried the normal socket your client uses and the kitchen. I think you need to try another socket in another room as a double check to prove that it really is just the one they use all the time that gives an issue. Try plugging something else into the suspect socket and give it a wiggle to see if anything odd happens.

Interesting. Is this a desktop? Can you list the specs? Can you measure the AC voltage in customer's home. Could they have some equipment generating distortion on their mains. Do you have one of those plug-in mains checkers that checks the wiring? Could the wiring in the house have live and ground reversed?

The symptoms of intermittent connections can be both mystifying & seemingly inconsistent.
Perhaps there is a loose wire in the line to or in that problem socket causing a strange undulating pattern in the computer's supply voltage even after it's been through the PSU.


Denis

stevem5000 said:

So I'm thinking maybe a circuit breaker problem in the breaker box.....

Click to expand...

If a circuit breaker "trips" the switch on the breaker will be loose. All the working breaker switches will still be tight.
That's how you know which one tripped.
Just turn it OFF then ON.
If it doesn't work then, it's either a bad breaker or a bad wall outlet.

It could be bad wiring too, but that hardly ever happens, especially if the building was built after say 1960-ish.



Now if there's a fuse box, instead of a breaker panel, just look at the fuses with an LED flashlight.
You'll be able to "see" which one burnt out.

It also has the fuse amperage written on the part of the fuse you can see.
Just get one with the same amperage at any hardware store.

Fuses look like this. They just screw in an out like a light bulb.





All this assumes you're in the USA.
You used the term wall outlet, so I am guessing you are in the USA.

Disconnect all externally attached devices to see problem resolves.

If the PC turns on, the circuit breaker can't be tripped!

stevem5000 said:

Client has W11.....but booting up VERY slow....about 10 minutes....
Asked client how often she turns the PC off......she says never.....always on....
Took it home and on my workbench...booted up about 10-15 minutes......
Rebooted again and went faster........booted up 5 times in a row and now the
PC is booting in a normal time......

So...took it back to my client and it won';t boot.....wont get out of POST....
I bring it home to troubleshoot.....didn't do anything and it works perfectly....
Took it back to client and will not boot....

So brought it back to my workbench......run DISM....sfc and chkdsk....everything looks good
PC is running perfectly.....
Back to client and will not boot......

Unplugged PC from surge protector.....plugged pc directly into wall outlet.......no boot....

Moved PC to clients kitchen....different 110v outlet and it booted up normal.....

So something with the 110v outlook at the normal pc location.....

Question.......maybe low voltage....but if that were the case I don;t think the pc would even start up at all....monitor would not turn on.....

So I'm thinking maybe a circuit breaker problem in the breaker box.....

Any thoughts and ideas appreciated...
Steve

Click to expand...

Using your post as the guideline, there is a chance that the outlet the pc is plugged into has a loose wire on one of the leads attached to the outlet. In my life experience's this has been a problem on a couple of occasions. You can test the outlet with a circuit tester; if you buy one I suggest spending an extra couple of bucks to get a better quality.

The way I see it, the only way to isolate exactly what the problem is, is to use a multimeter and the process of elimination to find where in the house circuitry the connection is breaking down. You're not proving anything, other than it's not the computer, by moving the computer from room to room.

Unless you know the schematic of the way the house was wired you don't know for sure which outlets are on any given breaker/fuse leg. You can't always go by the markings on a breaker panel. One circuit breaker can control entire rooms, multiple rooms, or even only some outlets in multiple rooms. It all depends on how the house was wired and many times it is not according to Hoyle.
Unless you hit it lucky and find a defective breaker (or thrown breaker) or a bad connection to that one particular outlet, I would think it would require an electrician to go any deeper than that.

Not a simple low-voltage multimeter. It will almost certainly not be able to identify intermittent connections.
Use a meter that is described as having insulation testing capabilities [up to, say, 2MOhm] that can output at least as high a voltage as your electricity supply.


Denis

Mains are extremely simple, at least here. Any electrical contact problem can only lead to one of these 3 results:

1) The appliance gets the full poles voltage. I mean 110 V if that's the voltage there.

2) The appliance doesn't get any voltage at all (for example -imaginary accidental narrowing of a conducting cable-, it's impossible that sub-200W appliances work and over-201W appliances don't, the most it can happen is that you plug several several sub-200W appliances one after the other and all work fine, then you plug a 250W one, you may hear a spark or not, but since that moment the outlet doesn't have any voltage for any appliance; this situation is imaginary b/c it's extremely difficult with copper -fuses are made of more fusable metals- and only 200/250W).

3) The appliance gets mains voltage sometimes and sometimes not at all, or intermittently (this is happening with a bulb here although the failure is in the bulb itself, it's used seldom and it has a twin one totally fine and its "resilience" amuses me).

If the ground wire is involved I would expect funny results depending on what means "ground" there. I understand well the electricity but I'm not expert in electrical installations. I once heard that in certain region(s) they connect the ground wire to one of the poles (I don't know well the practical distinction between the neutral and the live poles, maybe this is only valid with one of them) to fix problems or as a norm. Here, the entire ground wire is precisely a device anti-accidental connection of ANY of the poles to the appliances metallic casing = the real ground. If nothing else is done, the next person that touches the casing will close a "circuit" with his or her own body and the earth as conductors, and receives a cramp (the earth conductivity isn't high but seen as a cable it's very wide; one of the highest "resistors" of this "circuit" is the shoes soles, using any kind of shoes will weaken this cramp). In such situation, the ground wire will close the circuit before any person, a "differential" will detect that both poles have different currents and will break the circuit. In practice, simply plugging any affected appliance will trip this circuit breaker (when I was child I noticed that an old fridge gave cramps, afterwards I noticed that the original fridge plug had been cut and a two wires one had been attached,... later on I learnt enough to decypher the situation; a teacher showed as that the differential can break the circuit w/o the ground wire when a person touches the pole, but part of the cramp is already done).

Physically, ground wires here aren't connected to anything of the electric system. They go along with the poles, but they are all connected to a nearby "pica", metal things buried deep enough to find humidity.

---------------------------------------

In short, my bet is something wrong involving the ground wire(s) (and supposing the "ground system" is completely different from what I know).

Wow...so many responses....was not expecting this....Many thanks....
Ok.....I have a Fluke voltage tester....about $125 about 10 years ago....I know how to use it.....
So.....tomorrow I am taking another computer to the client.......One that I just finished setting up today......gonna try that.....
See if the outlet is actually at 110v........This is St Louis County and I have their reg book and I know that this house does NOT have 3 prong
outlets......and the ground wire for the house is attached to the cold water pipe.....that's how all the houses were built in the early 1950's.....
The outlet that the PC plugs into has a 3 prong outlet....but I will bet you hard money that there is no ground wire attached......so in that case a surge protector will not work......right now I have the surge protecter out of the circuit.....

I can have the client watch a lamp plugged in at the outlet in question and I will flip the breakers on/off one by one and she will tell me when I
find the breaker in question......

I did forget to tell you in my original post.......the PC starts up....fan noise.....power light at the power button.......and I get on the screen the ACER logo......i takes about 4 minutes for the logo to appear.......then nothing......I can let it sit for 15 more minutes and just the logo will be on the screen......So the PC is starting up but not doing a POST.....

Now the PC worked at this outlet before....client called me because PC was so very very slow.....she could't deal with it anymore......
The PC is an Acer desktop....and I don;'t have the specs at the moment.....about 3 years old....

Hope this additional info shines a littlel more light oon the subject...

Ghot said:

If a circuit breaker "trips" the switch on the breaker will be loose. All the working breaker switches will still be tight.
That's how you know which one tripped.

Click to expand...

I've never experienced a tripped breaker being loose. Every tripped breaker I've experienced show a red or orange bar in the little window. Turn it off then back to on to reset it.

Winuser said:

I've never experienced a tripped breaker being loose. Every tripped breaker I've experienced show a red or orange bar in the little window. Turn it off then back to on to reset it.

Click to expand...

They may have some kind of color indicator, but a lot of the time they're dusty and what not, so I just feel the breaker switches.
I can just run my hand down a ton of them and find the loose switch.

stevem5000 said:

Client has W11.....but booting up VERY slow....about 10 minutes....
Asked client how often she turns the PC off......she says never.....always on....
Took it home and on my workbench...booted up about 10-15 minutes......
Rebooted again and went faster........booted up 5 times in a row and now the
PC is booting in a normal time......

So...took it back to my client and it won';t boot.....wont get out of POST....
I bring it home to troubleshoot.....didn't do anything and it works perfectly....
Took it back to client and will not boot....

So brought it back to my workbench......run DISM....sfc and chkdsk....everything looks good
PC is running perfectly.....
Back to client and will not boot......

Unplugged PC from surge protector.....plugged pc directly into wall outlet.......no boot....

Moved PC to clients kitchen....different 110v outlet and it booted up normal.....

So something with the 110v outlook at the normal pc location.....

Question.......maybe low voltage....but if that were the case I don;t think the pc would even start up at all....monitor would not turn on.....

So I'm thinking maybe a circuit breaker problem in the breaker box.....

Any thoughts and ideas appreciated...
Steve

Click to expand...

This reads like you have may an outlet with high resistance on the connection to the outlet. If they've installed the outlet using the backstab connectors this is pretty common. The simplest repair is to just remove the wires from the backstab holes and attach them using the screws. Frankly, I'd do this for all outlets, or at least check them all if this is the way the outlet is attached. Failure rate is pretty high compared to using the screw terminals.

If they own the house I recommend that they have a electrician check it out. If they rent they should call the landlord or apartment manager.

I'm sorry that I didn't see these posts sooner!

I had a similar problem a year ago: Intermittent response on the usual outlet for my PC in my home office room. However, my PC was plugged into an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that was plugged into the outlet in question, and the UPS had logged the temporary voltage fluctuations. So I knew I had a problem.

The cause was not the outlet in question or the circuit breaker box. The real cause was loose wires in another outlet that was upstream on the same daisy chain of outlets.

If you don't have a wiring diagram for your cilent's home/office, you have to investigate what else is usually on that branch circuit besides the outlet for the PC.

You can try shutting off the power to various circuits via the circuit breaker box to see what circuit the outlet in question is on and what other outlets are on that same branch circuit.

By throwing a heavy load on another outlet, you can use a voltmeter or a lamp that dims to see which outlets register a momentary voltage drop. Furthermore, because of the small resistance in the wires themselves, the greater the voltage drop, the further downstream that outlet is.

stevem5000 said:

Wow...so many responses....was not expecting this....Many thanks....
Ok.....I have a Fluke voltage tester....about $125 about 10 years ago....I know how to use it.....
So.....tomorrow I am taking another computer to the client.......One that I just finished setting up today......gonna try that.....
See if the outlet is actually at 110v........This is St Louis County and I have their reg book and I know that this house does NOT have 3 prong
outlets......and the ground wire for the house is attached to the cold water pipe.....that's how all the houses were built in the early 1950's.....
The outlet that the PC plugs into has a 3 prong outlet....but I will bet you hard money that there is no ground wire attached......so in that case a surge protector will not work......right now I have the surge protecter out of the circuit.....

I can have the client watch a lamp plugged in at the outlet in question and I will flip the breakers on/off one by one and she will tell me when I
find the breaker in question......

I did forget to tell you in my original post.......the PC starts up....fan noise.....power light at the power button.......and I get on the screen the ACER logo......i takes about 4 minutes for the logo to appear.......then nothing......I can let it sit for 15 more minutes and just the logo will be on the screen......So the PC is starting up but not doing a POST.....

Now the PC worked at this outlet before....client called me because PC was so very very slow.....she could't deal with it anymore......
The PC is an Acer desktop....and I don;'t have the specs at the moment.....about 3 years old....

Click to expand...

I always could never fathom out about the USA (the most advanced technological country on the planet - even now) why it has such a primitive and non robust electricity supply system -- almost anywhere after any sort of bad weather major outages regularly occur and a shambles of a banking system so why a) does it use 110 V -- that means any sensible appliance needs 2X the power that typical European systems (220 V) use - meaning thicker wires (remember Ohms Law !!) and more heat loss / generation -- more current (amperes) generates a lot more heat - plus the 60 cycles (60 Hz)AC where capacitative losses in transmission lines are higher - Europe in general uses large scale 384,000 Volt for transmission lines and 50 cycles / Hz so less lossy and b) does it still tolerate their bonkers banking system.

If the property is rented get Landlord to check and fix dubious power connection, if it's yours get an electrician P.D.Q.

Try also the PC in another building. I doubt though if it is faulty mains from the energy company. The PC will either work properly or not. No half measures.

Cheers
jimbo

HeavyHemi said:

This reads like you have may an outlet with high resistance on the connection to the outlet. If they've installed the outlet using the backstab connectors this is pretty common. The simplest repair is to just remove the wires from the backstab holes and attach them using the screws. Frankly, I'd do this for all outlets, or at least check them all if this is the way the outlet is attached. Failure rate is pretty high compared to using the screw terminals.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, I always wondered which connector to use. I now feel exonerated by always using the screw connector.

jimbo45 said:

I always could never fathom out about the USA (the most advanced technological country on the planet - even now) why it has such a primitive and non robust electricity supply system

Click to expand...

Basically it had to do with the fact that at the time, Edison's DC voltage was only good for short distances. Tesla's AC voltage was able to solve the long distance problem. The reason for the 110 volts was because the main use for electricity was to power lights. The lights worked the best with 110 volts. The 110 voltage was later increased to 120 volts.