PC Power supply question

[patchoo78]

I have an old PC that was given, I have just plugged it in and the power supply blew up...

I have 3 spare but I'm a bit confused about Voltage and Wattage..

The power supply that blew up was 400 watts, one of the power supplies I have is 430 Watts.

2.8ghz CPU

2 Hard drives

CD/RW

Running Windows XP

Is it safe to put the 430 Watt power supply in the PC? 

[rogespeed]

Hi , interesting low cost refurbishing project,  just wondering wether you reinstalled Windows , as this will have removed any previous owners parasites , system file errors, unlicenced applications , possible nannywre, zombie controls etc - is a bit odd that you would notice a "huge" difference between 1GB to 2GB running XP Windows unless you are using very high resource programs or multitasking, sounds like something big and ugly might be running in the background , unless a previously installed ram module was incompatiable or faulty

[patchoo78]

XP Runs fine on just under 1 Gig but I was intending on eventually installing Vista if I could still find a copy 

[kobies_costume_jewelry]

Hi Patch

Dont go to Vista as you will be extremely dissapointed not to mention frustrated with that operating system it will eat up all your ram.

Try Windows 7 lite it's designed to run on a smaller (older) computer and doesnt require as much ram or cpu and the bonus is it's very similar to XP unlike Vista which is totally different and takes a bit to get used to.

[rogespeed]

VISTA service pack 2 runs just fine using supported hardware - but need to upgrade to service pack  2 which is not obvious as you need to first manually upgrade explorer browser to version 8

After installation of original version need to first install another browser like chrome, then manually download and update the explorer browser 6 ( a real dog) to Explorer 7 using a 3rd party download site to download the distributable file ( the ms site defaults to explorer 8 which will not install)

Then install updates  and sp1 via Windows update and manually install latest adobe flash player and java runtime

Then install Explorer 8 via the Microsoft site

The run WIndows update again which should eventully include sp2

or technically can download sp1 distributable file and install , then download sp2 distributable file and install , then run Windows update for latest version file updates including hopefully all activation / validation processes ( although might become messy for the home licensee)

VISTA upgrade tends to be much cheaper than WIndows 7 upgrade

I would suggest 2GB total installed ram memory - remember VISTA / Windows 7 graphics drivers tend to support using ram memory space to augment onboard graphics device memory , particularly if using a pro graphics card, so for another reason ram memory usage does tend to be higher than if using WIndows XP