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apartment wiring causes pc death?

M

markuskidd

Senior member
For almost a year, my main PC was a Dell Optiplex PII 350mhz that I purchased for cheap when a corporation went out of business and had to liquidate. I was running it with two 256 SDRAM chips, an old Maxtor 4x CD-R drive, an SB 128 PCI card (well, I added that around January), the original 4.5 GB HD and a 40 GB HD I added in November 2001.

Around the beginning of June, I moved into an old house that has been converted into apartments with some friends of mine. This place had all the amenities (sloping floors, crappy furnace, whatever) you might expect in near-campus cheap housing. After about 1.5 months, my PC starts exhibiting very odd behavior -- after some boots, it seems to be running reallly slow and one day in the middle of printing, my printer stops talking to my PC. I take a week-long vacation in the middle of July, and come back to find that, while the PC boots, it takes about 45 minutes just to load Windows (98).

I begin to troubleshoot the PC by taking out all non-essential hardware, with no result. I reinstall Windows 98, to no avail. At this point, I realized that I had a friend who also bought an identical PC at the same time, so I got ahold of him and convinced him to let me borrow his complete setup. First, I switch my ram , CPU, and HD into his PC, and they run fine. Just to be sure, I put his corresponding components in mine, and the PC is still running at abysimally slow speeds.

At this point, the Dell warrantee is 3 months expired (of course), and the Dell tech support people check their database for any known issues that cause this result. All they can tell me is what I suspect myself -- that my motherboard is toast.

Having no budget for a new computer, I unearth a Celeron 233mhz Aptiva that's been in my closet, fit it with the two HDs, the RAM, the sound card, and the CD-R drive from the Dell. Things run fine for about .... 1.5 months. All of a sudden, when I came home yesterday, the PC won't boot 4 times out of 5, and when it does boot.... once again, it takes a really long (about an hour this time, give or take) to boot up. I emphasize -- you can do anything you like with these computers, it's just that simple tasks like loading internet explorer take half an hour, etc.

I tried troubleshooting again: using the original 32MB stick of ram that came with the IBM, disabling all advanced motherboard features in BIOS, removing all non-critial drives and cards, with no result.

Partly, I'm hoping that someone here can help me save these PCs, or at least avoid doing this again. One idea keeps coming back to me though -- since I've moved in, I can't help but notice that several times an hour, the lights very noticeably dim in my room (presumably when the central AC kicks on). Somewhere it seems like I've read something about brownouts like that adversely affecting computers. Note that I had these PCs on a generic Office Depot surge protector.

Can anyone offer any advice? It seems unlikely that the same exact thing would occur twice, on two very different systems. Could one of the pieces of hardware I shared between the two be suspect? Do I have any grounds for approaching the landlord with complaints about the wiring? I'll really appreciate any advice you guys could share.
 
You are the one with sensitive equipment--up to you to protect it. Should have been using UPS w/brown out prot. all along--first time you saw the lights dim you should have been off to Staples et al. I don't compute without one...
.bh.
 
The air conditioner should be on a separate circuit by itself and the lights on their own circuit while outlets in rooms should also have individual circuits. But, you ought to know that old houses usually don't comply with current electrical code and many times don't even have properly grounded outlets. This happens because old houses don't have to comply with current electric code unless they upgrade their outlets/circuits/panels since many old places were built many years ago before current code.

If you have power service problems or surges related to appliances activating this can cause problems with equipment, but usually the greatest problems occur in conjunction with surges if there is no ground, a poor ground or voltages on ground. My guess is that you may possibly also have a grounding problem (regardless of the outlet).

The safest way to test electrical outlets is to go to a hardware store and buy a $4 to $9 three pronged electrical outlet tester. It should have a ground indicator.

The quickest way to test the grounds if you have experience with multimeters (preferably with high input impedance like 10MegaOhms) is to find two different outlets on differenct circuits and test from ground to ground with a multimeter (AC voltage first!!) If there is no AC voltage, then switch to Ohms. If the ground plugs work and are properly grounded, you should see something close to 0 (zero) ohms.
If you can't get a reading close to zero Ohms, then they probably aren't grounded. The only other not so easy way you can actually verify if the ground is the problem is to find a metal water pipe (unpainted) and which at some point is buried in the ground outside (like a exterior water faucet) or sink drain pipe - which runs under the house, then use a multimeter and a long wire to connect to the pipe and test to the ground plug on the outlet where you plug in your PC. You should get close to zero Ohms - 0 - if there is a proper ground.

Unfortunately, if you dont' have a correct ground, even power conditioning equipment, transformers, surge protectors, etc, may not help you as much as you expect. All these pieces of equipment require proper grounds to really function properly. Landlords are not required to upgrade electrical circuits unless they remove and replace sockets or remodel.
 
Anouther easy way to test for gound is to get a surge protector that has the red light for surge protection and the green light for gound. I recently found out that one of the plugs near my servers is NOT grounded. I got this feeling that who ever lived here before put it in and didn't connect the ground.

Shelby
 
ups is about the only answer. You may also want to get your hands on a voltmeter. With older wiring the voltage can get all screwy. And it may not even be the house (although it probably is). In my town (omaha, NE) the city's power is so screwy that whole city blocks get a maximum of 75 volts to their outlets. This plays hell with computers.... (remember you are suppose to get 120 volts in USA)
 
Several companies sell what they call "line conditioners". Had a computer in a bad place in a bank (the power line ran in parallel to the heaters power line) installation and it kept blowing motherboards and powersupplies. Finally had to try a line conditioner and never had a problem with that computer again.

We used Tripp Lites.

If you want UPS too, that gets pretty expensive but they make them.
 
I'm going to look into the grounding questions, really hoping to avoid buying a UPS though... argh... no $$

Anyway, has anyone had a motherboard that still worked, but only at really low speeds like this? Whether or not it ends up that I have to do something about this, I'm still hoping to try getting some help from my landlord -- just don't want to come out sounding like an idiot when I blame the house wiring.
 
Don't try installing a line conditioner or UPS until you've verified that the ground & neutral are connected, working, and sufficient. If you plug in some protectors with a flakey ground or overloaded neutral, they'll fry.

You can get a small plug-in testor at Home Depot that'll tell you that you have the connections, and that they're correct ... but not if the neutral is overloaded. Some electrical code allows using a single neutral (back to the main box) for several (two or three) hot connections if the neutral is near capacity....you get some ugly bad things happining to your stuff (and it's a potential fire hazard).

See if you can get an electrician in to take a look.

(I lived in an apartment where four circuits were connected to a common neutral ... a lot of stuff eventually fried, including some UPSs, surge protectors, and power conditioners).

Good Luck

Scott
 
ScottMac, as you suggested I checked out the grounding. I ended up going to Radio Shack and buying an outlet tester that checks for open grounds, open neutrals, open hots, hot/ground being reversed, and hot/neutral being reversed. According to the tester, the outlets are fine, and I also tested it on all of the sockets of the power strip I was using with the same results.

Without hiring someone else to do it, do you have a suggestion for how to check whether or not my neturals are overloaded?
 
You'd have to manually / physically trace and/or tone every circuit.

Unless you're working with every circuit switched off at the breaker panel, it'd be pretty dangerous. It'd probably be better to have an electrician do it, and they probably won't without the landlord's permission (it's his building).

IMHO, your best bet would be to talk it over with the landlord (you're losing / frying equipment under suspicious circumstances) and see if he'd approve bringing in an electrician or verifying the circuits himself. If he won't, then (this could get ugly) ... try calling the city's department of whoever-handles-this-stuff and express concern over a potential safety issue, and explain it to them ... then maybe they'll come out and imspect it or persuade the landlord to allow you to have it inspected.

Many cities have some Department of Landlord/Tenant Affairs to handle these kinds of disputes.

Be prepared for a sh!tload of negative stuff if it comes down to that though, generally speaking, landlords tend to have the upper hand over the renters, especially student-types.

It's a bad situation; be as diplomatic as you can for as long as you can .... then, put on a helmet, dig your trenches, and decide which hill you're willing to die on. Check your lease for a "Constructive Eviction" clause (basically allows you to move out / break the lease if the apartment is unsafe/unhealty/uninhabitable without losing your deposit(s).

If you're not familair with electrical stuff, you shouldn't do the work yourself, it can be dangerous ....


Good Luck

Scott


 
Its amazing what you find in old buildings. When I was trying to install a kitchen light in my unit years ago, I used the existing circuit to install a new switch box, but when I tested it, I noticed the circuit seemed to stay live all the time. I found out that the "ground" wire was actually carrying 80 volts all the time from somewhere...(it hadn't been hooked up originally). I ended up bringing in a new circuit, since I had no idea where the short was....
 
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