Quote: "What is APMI and what the hell does it have to do with a power supply.
You do realise that all the power lines are soldered to the same place inside the power supply. It makes no difference if the card takes the power from the mobo or the hdd lines. They are soldered to the same place inside the power supply."
No ATX power supplies are a completely different internal design to AT power supplies ... they specifically run along sides APMI (Advanced Power Managament Interface) which is part of every chipset since 8210 Intel (Pentium2)
You have 4 main power lines, Motherboard, Device1, Device2, Device3
each of the 3 Device lines have 2 male powerpoints ... with Device1 having an additional Diskette Drive connector.
They're also designed to only take upto 1200mA of power from the PSU, although a fan will only need around 100-150mA when you already have 2 devices connected it then pulls additional power.
There is always a small pool of power stored which allows the PSU to regulate and keep power constant as the power from an wall socket is generall unregulated and runs at the max Voltage only the actual power intake is limited by the Amp fuse (which should be a 13Amp for a 230-300watt PSU)
These changes will also be monitored and affected by the onboard APMI (even if you've turned it off, because it is there to make sure that if something irregular happens with your power it doesn't fry your processor or something)
old AT powersupplied you pulled too much power from would just slowly damage your hardware (which is why HDD shelf-lives weren't exactly grand)
Quote: "There is no point reseting the bios. If you want to reset the bios take the battery out or use the jumper on the mobo that resets the bios. Pulling out the leads for 30 seconds will do nothing to the bios.
As for taking the ram out for 30 seconds to remove any stored memory, what are you talking about most ram chips at room temp will loose any info in less than a second without removal from the mobo."
Again you don't seem to understand the technology within your own computer do you ... the Ram until it is disconnected or you actually fully reset the BIOS will not loose the data it has stored, this is why WindowsXP MUST dump the Ram when you shut down with a major problem else it will continue to bug.
Ram has a static life of around 30second (something to do with the material they're created with but i don't remember what it is right now), when you take the Ram out of newer boards that use FlashBios then this will also clear the PnP data stored within the Flash section.
The idea isn't to clear the BIOS setup itself, just makes sure the system is totally devoid of all traces of the old graphics card ... this can cause alot of problems if it isn't done, the old Voodoo cards area a good example because if you didn't make sure the shadow of the old card was gone they'd always display only on the Blue Channel (i never did figure out why exactly), but alot of people complained about this being a problem ... it wasn't a problem as such just that most VGA cards that you'd upgrade from would end up with a constant video shadow as there was a hardware problem with the Voodoo's which prevented correct Shadow Caching.
I pride myself that i don't kill...
well not without a good reason
