[24jep05]

my 4 year old son switched the power supply button on my computer from 240 to 110 whilst it was on ....it booomed and stunk , iv taken the power unit out but dont know were to go from there , is the whole thing bust? ....help

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is the whole thing bust?

Hopefully not. But you should prepare for the worse.

I would suspect the power supply is gone - mainly due to your qualifying, "stunk".

Now that you have it out, if you sniff the back, can you still smell "that smell"? Regardless, I sure would not use that PSU again without a thorough testing. See my canned text on testing PSUs below.

If me, and definitely if it smells of burnt electronics, I would use another PSU - buying a "quality" new one, if necessary. It can be used in a new computer, if it comes to that.

That said, preparing for the worse, milliseconds before the PSU shut down, it could have destroyed everything plugged into it - that is motherboard, CPU, RAM - everything. That's extreme, but some PSUs, when they go, go catastrophically. So I would pull your hard drive now and install it in an enclosure, or another PC as a secondary drive, and backup all data you don't want to lose.

To check for further damage, attempt to boot your computer with minimal configuration - that is, with only one stick of RAM, the CPU and fan, graphics card if used, monitor, and keyboard only. No drives. You should see the start of the boot process, and it should make it through RAM count and stop when it cannot find a boot drive. If you get that far, you have a good chance the PSU being the only problem and you can start connecting the rest of the RAM and disks, holding your breath and fingers crossed and see how it goes.

[Digerati]

is the whole thing bust?

Hopefully not. But you should prepare for the worse.

I would suspect the power supply is gone - mainly due to your qualifying, "stunk".

Now that you have it out, if you sniff the back, can you still smell "that smell"? Regardless, I sure would not use that PSU again without a thorough testing. See my canned text on testing PSUs below.

If me, and definitely if it smells of burnt electronics, I would use another PSU - buying a "quality" new one, if necessary. It can be used in a new computer, if it comes to that.

That said, preparing for the worse, milliseconds before the PSU shut down, it could have destroyed everything plugged into it - that is motherboard, CPU, RAM - everything. That's extreme, but some PSUs, when they go, go catastrophically. So I would pull your hard drive now and install it in an enclosure, or another PC as a secondary drive, and backup all data you don't want to lose.

To check for further damage, attempt to boot your computer with minimal configuration - that is, with only one stick of RAM, the CPU and fan, graphics card if used, monitor, and keyboard only. No drives. You should see the start of the boot process, and it should make it through RAM count and stop when it cannot find a boot drive. If you get that far, you have a good chance the PSU being the only problem and you can start connecting the rest of the RAM and disks, holding your breath and fingers crossed and see how it goes.