I setup a computer for a client and i bought a 350W power supply in a case. After i made sure everything was setup correctly, i flipped the switch, checked the bios to make sure everything was good, and then proceeded to install WINXP Pro. After a couple seconds of showing "Setup will now inspect your computer's hardware..." the whole system did a hard shutoff. I started to smell what smelt like some burning computer component so i immediately took the plug out of the back of the psu. I tried to turn it on again after a couple minutes and nothing happened. Luckily, i had an extra 250W power supply at my house so I exchanged them and everything works fine now. Why would a 350W power supply fry after minutes, and a 250W power supply work? It isn't a problem with too many things using power either...The computer setup is as follows:

AMD Athlon XP 1600+
Abit KR7A-Raid 133
Creative Live! Platinum 5.1
Creative 52x CDRom
3 1/2 1.44mb Floppy
GeForce 3 64mb

Probably just a defective component in the PSU. Have you opened it up to see what it was that fried? If you smelled it, I would imagine there are probably black marks around the component that burnt out, probably a resistor or capacitor. It could have been a transistor or SCR though or even the primary or one of the secondaries on the transformer. It could also be as simple as the fuse, there could have been a power spike in the line. Finding the problem might help determine the cause.

Even the best companies have a bad product slip out once in a while.

Oh, almost forgot....I know this is simple but I thought I mention it anyway...you did have the voltage selector set correctly right?

Correct, in fact pc won't even turn on. A common prank in the office several years ago.

LoL uncleel.

I made sure that it was set to 115 so that isn't the reason why. I dont want to take apart the psu because i'm gonna send it back to the company where i bought all of the components for the computer. Thanks for your help anyways guys!

I didn't know he lived in the US, I've never noticed, I just wanted to cover everything.

Basically:

1) This kind of incident is the kind of thing that, when happens to you like once in a giraff's *** (not often), co-workers laugh at you and call you inexperienced and stupid, you burned out a PSU, etc.... However was probably indeed caused by:

2) Now and again you get a defective component. Lets hope its not that HDD with all of your important data on or that heat sink fan an athlon cpu.

3) I would not use a 250 W PSU with the system you have recorded here.

yeah, i think i'm going to send back the old psu and get a new one. Hopefully the second one doesn't have the same problem...