Quick background my in-laws are at a technical level that they can turn on the light switch and know that it will make the light bulb light up. They will be the first to admit that too.
I got a call from my in-laws last night that their house had a brief power outage. They have had outages before, except this time their computer wouldn't turn back on. Everything else did but that. Over the phone I ran through the basic trouble shooting. Check the cable, see if there is a power switch on the back of the unit, unplug it from the power strip and plug it directly into the wall... all nothing. He kept saying he sees a green blinking light. I assumed it was the LAN card, but it had no power, odd. Anyway I had the day off today and I said I was going to head up there to check it out. Fearing a burnt out power supply or worse I had a feeling I was going to bring the unit home for surgery.
I arrive and sure enough no juice, not even a blip on the fans. Sure enough right underneath the power cable port there was a green LED light blinking. When you unplug the power cable it slowly faded out but it took about 30 seconds, so the power supply was holding a charge. I did the regular things, unplugged everything, checked all the seats, nothing. Before I was going to leave with it I had my trusty iPad with me and I hit the Google.
The power supply unit maker was a OEM mass production company, no website and the unit was in everything from HP, Dells, to homegrown. Luckily I found oodles of posts about this green light blinking. All signs pointed to a power supply failure and not the motherboard. I was in no mood to go to my computer parts stores looking for a 230W power supply from a computer I built for them in 2006. It was old and time and effort vs. money was not there for me to repair it.
I have never let a computer problem get me down so I kept reading to see if there was some way with household tools to crack open the power supply and de-charge it, flip a breaker out or something. Then I came across one entry in one forum that someone had posted and others tried and validated it worked. It was so simple yet crazy I gave it a shot.
Unplug everything from the computer except the power, keep it plugged into the wall and see the blinking green light. Take a hair dryer, hold it to the light and blow hot air on it for a few minutes. The post said after 3 to 5 minutes the light will go solid and everything will work fine. Yeah.... right.
I did it and the first round was 5 minutes and nothing. About 10 minutes passed and I tried it again, after 2 minutes the light went solid and bright. What!?!? I plugged everything back in and it fired up like nothing was wrong.
Ummm, OK.
I have looked and I can't find anything to what that green light is, what is hooked up to and why heating up the power supply makes it trip back to normal. I looked at my powers supply and I don't have an LED like that. I can only guess that that light it some kind of safety measure that blocks the primary power that the sudden loss of power tripped it. Heating it up 'tricks' it to go back or it melts something and allows it to work. There were many people that did the same thing and it worked for them, every time. I didn't find one post that tried it and it didn't work for this scenario. I just can't explain as to why.
So this goes down as the most strange and unexplained fix I have done.
End of Line.
P.S. - A laptop will be in their near future... and a backup.
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