Indeed. Thank you for your help. I certainly didn’t expect it to be the CMOS battery, but your post led me on the path and saved me from needlessly getting a replacement power supply. So thank you very much 🙏

feel bad that i didn't pick up on the cmos weirdness. I've seen enough failing batteries in motherboards to notice it. But the weirdness is such that you don't initially pick it up as that and you believe it to be something else.

Not related (but only in fault diagnosis), I saw an aio watercooling pump fail this year, it took me about 3 days to work out that the pump had failed, the computer was turning off at random times which could have been psu related and i went with that. I only realised that it was the pump when i accidentality put my hand on it. It was my first pump failure tbh.

Don’t feel bad at all. Just one of these weird things. It’s easy to sometimes just target what you instinctively believe the problem to be rather than apply a logical, step by step diagnosis

Guilty your honour 🙈

Again a good read with a positive outcome. Glad you are up and running again.

Cheers. Also £93 back on my credit card now too, for a falsely accused power supply - and just minus one 2032 button cell for a couple of quid: that'll cover the few (low alcohol) lagers I downed whilst tearing it apart last night 😀🤘

I assume you brought a multi pack of them for a couple of quid

Yeah whatever Amazon charge for 6/12 of them on Prime. There's always some kicking about as 2032 is a popular size for keyfobs on cars and gate remotes etc.

I can beat that ...

I was asked about a shower pump failure - it kept starting up every 30 minutes. A "pump specialist" told him that the pump was failing and he needed a new one at about £600 plus installation labour of £200. I gave him a diagnosis that took 10 minutes to fix with a 10p tap washer. A pity I was not on a commission of 25% of savings!

You should have at least got 25% of the cost of the washer.

In reply to a post by Taras:

Not related (but only in fault diagnosis), I saw an aio watercooling pump fail this year, it took me about 3 days to work out that the pump had failed, the computer was turning off at random times which could have been psu related and i went with that. I only realised that it was the pump when i accidentality put my hand on it. It was my first pump failure tbh.

Well, for odd hardware failures, I had a 486 computer I was loading with OS/2 It worked on my other computers, but it almost consistently failed on this computer, while unpacking one specific file. If I got past that one file, it was fine and the system would run. But for some reason, I needed to redo it several times with the same result, again almost consistently. The mystery was resolved when I opened the case and found the cpu fan had taken itself off the processor and was hanging in free air. Once I had refixed it, there was no more problem. really odd that it hung consistently on unpacking just one specific file.