Found a secondhand PSU tester that caught a bad rail in 5 minutes

Spent all last week chasing intermittent random reboots on a client's Dell at their warehouse in Akron, swapped RAM and reseated everything twice with no luck. Bought a used $25 PSU tester off Facebook Marketplace and it flagged the 3.3V rail dropping to 2.8V under load, which no software tool I ran ever showed at idle. Has anyone else had better luck with hardware testers over software diagnostics for weird shutdown issues, or did I just get lucky with this one?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela_harris1mo ago

Wait, so the $25 Facebook Marketplace find beat out every fancy software tool you had? That's both hilarious and kind of sad for the software world... I once spent two weeks blaming a graphics card for crashes that turned out to be a dying PSU, so I feel your pain on a spiritual level. Hardware testers are brutally honest, they don't care about your feelings or your client's deadline. Software just sits there reading pretty numbers while the actual electricity is doing whatever it wants behind your back. You didn't get lucky, you got smart, even if it took a used gadget from a stranger to figure it out...

hall.joel1mo ago

Saw a YouTube video last week where a guy fixed a $5000 server with a $10 multimeter, same exact deal. Those software suites just read what the components tell them, they never catch the stuff that actually fluctuates under load. Reminds me of that LTT video where they showed a dying power supply passing every diagnostic until they swapped it with a $40 used one. People forget that electricity is dirty, messy, inconsistent. A cheap hardware tester sees the real world, the fancy software just sees an idealized version of it.