I opened Firefox and it just went off and would not restart. The power supply has failed; seems it won’t supply the load.

It’s a AMD dual core something-or-other, about 3GHz I think, 4G ram and a 1G low profile Asus ENGT220 video card on a Asus MB. Asus; that’s another story.

It was in a low profile case with small form-factor 270W power supply and has been running 24/7 for a few years. It is probably repairable but I thought it would be quicker to swap the guts into a spare standard size tower case. That’s about when “quick and simple” went out the window.

Both were dusty and needed a good clean out. I had to find the full height back plate for the video card and front bay blanking covers for the tower. The power supply had to be swapped out as it had no SATA connectors.

After almost 3 hours of messing about it’s up and running and with the VCR removed only just fits (on its side) in the media cabinet.

It is much quieter and probably runs cooler.

Interesting: there is a lot more background noise coming through the speakers now. The only difference is the power supply and internal layout.

It’s a near-new 350W standard type power supply (dual 12V rails and large-slow fan).

I’ll see if I can find a replacement case/psu but I’m definitely buying an over-priced “media” case. There’s no rush.