Mystery Total Meltdown

Like most opinions here I have to go 100% with power. A long time ago a company of mine had serious issues with a copier at a Government building. It would blow A/C power boards once a month regularly. After the 4th one went some bright spark decided to test the power supply. The live and neutral were reversed. However, the copier would put up with it and work OK until it just seemed to have had enough and then go bang. This looks sort of what you're getting with power. Just one more thought, does this woman live near a mobile phone transmitter, I mean REALLY near, as I've heard rumours of those seriously affecting some PC's.

you can get a chepo tester that just plugs into the wall out let fro places lke radio shack.
here

it will tell you if there is a major big time problem with the wireing.

I have heard of sillimar problems with people that live in rural areas or on city outskirts where their power is delived by under ground cable. It turns out that a burried cable can act as a capacitator when one leg of a 3 phase circuit is considerably longer than the others. This results in a massive discharge every so often usualy blowing all sensitive electronics on the long leg.

The fact that your UPS does nothing is interesting, it should have some kind of reaction... do the lights in the house happen to get dimmer / brighter ? The UPS may be unable to detect a fault due to cross wireing (Nutral/hot revers, or missing ground, or ground nutral reverse...)

In any event Your best plan of action is problay to do what you have done, and bail out on the client giving her a full refund, something is obviously wrong on her end and you should not be resoponible for any site problems that may be causing this. especialy if there are going to be problems getting her to investigate a possible issue, some times you just cant win.

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Originally Posted by Trout

Temps about 70 degrees, Case Has lower Front fan blowing in, A HS fan is rated for an AMD XP3200 on a XP2400
PS fan blowing out. Setting no floor next to desk. Clear of all furniture no carpet.
Power cord is the one I used here.

I checked case and CPU temp via bios, Everything was normal for that setup.
Com ED ( power company ) Is going to check her lines IN,, But they wont touch the internal.
Have you ever heard of an EMI/RFI Noise Filtering problem that might be the source?
Im looking for a ferrit cored Powercord now,, To try to see if its perhaps something thats needing filtered out.

Though Im Very Inclined to think its the wiring, Short of renting a generater Ive Bout hit the wall on this.

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Gee, what a thread. Go by a constant voltage transformer with a meter.
I have never in my life seen a situation where an item that is supposed to work on 120vac was replaced because it wouldn't work on 90??? (actually, most heavy duty equip. gives you the exact voltage you cannot go below before frying it).
The catch is, you are usually very lucky to find out that there was inadequete power. Attempting to run ANY UNIT (be it power tool , computer, television, guitar amplifier,e tc.,) on something other than the rated voltage, is classified as abusel, and that should be the end of that.
Another note; we had a studio for a long time, and even before computers became common, we always used "JUICE GOOSE" transformers to keep the voltage right at 117, tubes lasted much longer. and things behaved much better. The voltage could get down to under 90 volts (this is at close to 500 watts) before the voltage would even come down one volt).
After the first replacement, I would be asking her for payment for ALL repairs. It is VERY REASONABLE to assume that the power is at least somewhat close to what it should be. I agree computer power supplies are garbage compared to real ones, but they don't pull enough power to affect the voltage themselves.
it is WINTER, and if she is running a little elctric heater or something, that would easily pull the voltage down a few volts...especially if her a/c is not that hot..And especiallhy if it was wired with 14 ga instead of 12 ga.
OK , enough babble. I know little about computers, but a whole lot of experience with repairs caused by inadequete power.