[Frank4d]

My daughter has an old home-built Athlon XP 2400 PC in a cheap no-name case. Yesterday she informed me it was stuck in an endless reboot loop where POST would get to the point where it tries to find the IDE drives, then start over.

I smelled the problem immediately upon entering her room. I shut off power and opened the case, where I found the PSU was too hot to touch. I replace the PSU with an old Antec 380W that I had laying around, and all is well again.

I know L&C Technology OEM PSUs are bargain basement stuff ( I think the PSU case and wires weigh more than the components inside the PSU). But it probably would not cost L&C more than 25 cents to included some sort of thermal protection to shut off the PSU upon fan failure, instead of continuing to run until the PSU burns up.