I finally cracked why my old PC kept crashing after 3 years of deals chasing

So I grabbed this Dell Optiplex off Facebook Marketplace for like 40 bucks last summer, figured it'd be perfect for running old Steam games. Everything was fine for a few months, then it started randomly freezing during a session of Fallout New Vegas. I spent a solid 2 weekends swapping out parts, testing RAM, reinstalling drivers, the whole deal. Turns out the problem was the cheap power supply the previous owner had slapped in, which was only 250 watts and couldn't handle even a modest GPU upgrade I did. I finally replaced it with a 450 watt unit I scored on eBay for 15 bucks, and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Total time wasted debugging? About 14 hours across 3 weeks. Has anyone else dealt with a mystery crash that ended up being something stupid simple like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

noahclark1mo ago

Did you check if the 250 watt was even from a known brand?

mark7311mo ago

Did you buy it from a legit place or some random online shop?