Okay, first off I'm guessing that my PSU is bad on my eMachine T3958, since it will no longer power on. The odd thing is that it happened after I moved the tower (all power was disconnected) and I discovered that one of the card slot covers had been left inside the tower and I thought that it may have caused a short when it moved around inside the tower a little. Now in looking at these covers they doh't appear to be the best conductive material, but possibly good enough for shorting/frying something.

There werre some pre-symptoms that I thought were software related, but may have the PSU going bad. One of the symptoms was the inability to shut down or reboot the PC. I had to simply power it off.

I only paid $100 for the unit and it has worked just fine for several weeks.

I have read MANY, MANY stories of eMachine PSU's going bad and taking motherboards with them. Is this ALWAYS the case? I'm going to see if I can borrow a PSU from one of my older PC's at work, so at least I won't be losing any more money if my motherboard IS bad.

Any other thoughts or answers to the "Does the motherboard ALWAYS go, too?"

Thanks,
JP

OH... and either way I think I have plenty of parts to salvage into something new.

The eMachine T3958 Specs:
CPU: Intel® Celeron® D 340 Processor
Operates at 2.93GHz
256KB L2 cache and 533MHz FSB
Chipset: Intel® 845GV chipset
Memory: 512MB DDR 333
Expandable to 2GB
Hard Drive: 80GB 7200rpm, 2MB cache
Optical Drive: DVD±RW, 16x Multi-Format double layer
Media Reader: 8-in-1 digital media manager
Video: Intel® Extreme Graphics 3D
64MB shared video memory
Sound: AC '97 audio

AND it came with an added DLink wireless ethernet card, so THAT is cool, too.

IF I need to replace PSU and mobo, does anyone have any suggestions on what would work well with the hardware? I don't need anything TOO fancy or with TOO much of anything.

Emachines has well publicized problems with some of their motherboards. These boards are made by Tri Gem, and usually are also installed with a Bestec 250 Watt PSU.

Many later Emachines have a Bestec 300 Watt PSU which doesn't seem to be lethal to the board when it fails, but make no mistake, fail they do!

Part of the question is actually which Emachine boards fail and take out the PSU, not the other way around. The Emachine number you give seems like a later model, and you might luck out with just a bad PSU.

I had a Bestec 300 fail on me and the Emachine is still running fine. But, it's a T-5026 with an Intel board.

An Antec "Earthwatts" EA-380 (Watts) might be a nice choice. Unfortunately,you just missed a great sale, . As long as you're not going to try and stuff in a high end video card, any decent quality 350 watt PSU is plenty for your rig.

Since Intel's 845 chipsets/boards only offer an AGP port for graphics anyway, it probably wouldn't make sense to consider an upgrade, since not much is available in the way of AGP cards anymore

Here's an Antec "Earthwatts" EA-430 (Watts), $35.00 if you don't mind waiting for a rebate. That's actually $25.00 less than the EA-380 at the moment. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817371006