Slow shutdown one night and now a Disk is missing

I hope these pictures are thumbnails else i'll have to redo it with how big they are (why on earth are my low quality cameras making such large pictures?) see all those big lumps of what looks like cream cheese oozing out of every coil and all over inside the rest of it too?

There must be tons of things in the house using large bursts of electricity, powerful electric kettles that are 1000w and all sorts, and I think i remember someone saying the plugs in my room are rigged up extensions of plugs from the kitchen?! combine that with my mum always saying the electric cooker won't heat up properly at certain times of the day and I can really believe the whole system isn't right.

The dell only has the one plug brick thing I think, although I'll check the bag, it was my deceased brothers and not mine, but i think he might have had a replacement battery and it's possible he just kept the broken on and i've been using that all this time.

I'm hoping to get this UPS CyberPower CP1500EPFCLCD-UK Backup UPS PFC Pure: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics it's a blistering £280 though, so i'd really like to hear if for a 900w computer I could get the 900VA model or the 1300VA model instead of this 1500VA model, after all I don't know if the electricity even goes off, I just need something to clean it up for me

I asked this morning and I was told the cooker and the shower are on a seperate ring-something, I have no idea if that's true though what with being told often the heat from the cooker fluctuates.

Some of the following is going to sound a bit miserable but it's necessary to explain why I can't do certain things that would be simple if it was just me in my own house, for example being given advice about getting an electrician in. If it was just me as an adult in my own house would be a simple as a phone call booking one, but I live with two grumps who think this is still the 1930's, I have about as much weight in the decisions as a 12 year old in the house suddenly saying he wants to book an electrician, the "Dad" in the house is just going to say no way that's way above your station in the hierarchy.

The old man in the house is a bit of DIY fixer / window fitter / labourer and although he used to spend all day when he was employed complaining that other employees weren't doing things to his high standard his work on anything at our own house is absolutely garbage. As I'm typing this right now I can see areas where he's ripped the wallpaper while working on the radiator and the door, pencil notes are still on the door frame and the door doesn't even quite fit the frame despite him specifically shaving it down to do just that. The keyboard tray that we transferred from one old desk to the new one rolls out by itself because the measurements are wrong and that's just an example for my room... a room he is barely in. The rest of the house is worse.

So if i say "lets pull out the whole electrics system and start again" he is going to say no. He is going to say "This lamp turns on, that cooker turns on, the TV turns on, that's good enough." Any mention of my power supplies being fried is going to be met with "that's your problem" backed up once again by "the TV works" and there isn't anyway i can distinguish a computer from a TV for him as they both end with a display showing a picture and that's all he is ever going to see.

This way I definitely think buying the UPS for my room is the way to go * if * the electricity is the problem as solutions contained solely in my room is my business and doesn't require anything to change with the rest of the house. For example running a physical network cable to my room was met with months of extreme shouting about we aren't going to drill any holes in the house for someone as unimportant as myself for something as unimportant as the internet, followed by shouting about how any cables we eventually ran through the house anywhere remotely near the floor would suddenly catch fire from the friction of people walking near them and would "burn the house down"
I think i would go with the 1500va UPS in the end, might as well just do the whole thing with as much extra as I can for peace of mind, the only reservation i really had was that I was going to put that money towards a new graphics card but it seems like the new ones are pretty crappy anyway so no big loss there.

Someone from the internet I've known for years says I should get an electrical multimeter that should just cost around £8 from any old shop, he was saying that using it I could test the socket and test the PSU so I could both know if the problem is the power from the wall and if I need to refund the PSU, which sounds pretty good value for £8 but I have no idea how to use the thing, how to use it safely or what to do with the results and I only have access to ask him questions for a couple of hours every 24 hours minimum when he gets home from work and finds the time to be at a computer but some days he doesn't even log in after work, so it's not really a good window of opportunity to ask him questions about what I should be doing with a electrical multimeter if it's hard to use.

So i really need a plan of attack, what to do, what to buy, what's probably wrong and what order to do it all in:

Is my PSU what's dead? I don't have another computer to plug it in to and I don't have another PSU to plug into this computer, i'm pretty jealous of people who can afford to have a second of everything just laying around! PSU is the easiest of my things to get a refund on as it's only a couple of months old from Amazon.

Should I get a multimeter even If I have no idea what I'm doing with it? it would definitely be easier than trying to get an electrician to be able to move around freely in my cluttered room, I don't get any space in this house and crawling around under my desk is ok for me but I couldn't really ask a guest in my house to get under there and there is barely even a corridor the size of a human being to walk down the middle of my room without knocking things over.

You can buy a PSU tester, with currency conversion not sure of price there. Mine was about $50

https://www.amazon.ca/Thermaltake-Au...50309915&psc=1

In your opening comment you said cooker and shower... is shower a reference to electrical hot water tank?

A simple test. When Dad is out

Turn off PC. Find breaker that supplies the power point (wall plug) for cooker. ( Use a light in wall plug rather than messing around with Mum's cooker). Shut breaker that supplies cooker off. Plug a light in PC wall plug, does it work, yes, then separate.

The fact that cooker temps fluctuates must say something, the energy available is changing. Like when a light browns out for a moment. The intensity of the light changes as the energy available is changing.

Always amazed at European street wiring. One wire seems to support many homes, granted it is 230V. In NA we have high tension on every street and transformers every 10 homes.

This might not even be an issue with house but rather street. If you can't get electrician or utility involved your hands are tied.

I can't comment on multimeter for liability sake. Lots of Youtube. The issue is you need to monitor over time to see fluctuation.

So what I've been told by the old guy in the house is new houses that get build have three independent electric areas for upstairs, downstairs and kitchen, ours though is on one, but the cooker and the shower have been separated and can be cut off independently, I'm not sure exactly what comprises of the shower but the only part visible is a pull cord that shuts it on and off and then a plastic face with on/off on a button (redundant I know) and all the temperature dials on it and the shower head.

It definitely isn't an electric water heater though, I was told our water is heated by gas not electricity.

Trying to discuss what happened with the old guy was futile like I thought, first he says a problem with the electricity is completely out of the question because i'm using a surge protector and as far as he is concerned the only thing that can go wrong with electricity is a surge of electricity.
Typically all the uk surge protectors are a 1-8 plug extension cable affair that plugs into one of the 2 pair wall sockets and has a single LED somewhere down the strip, if you get a surge the bulb goes out, you throw it away and buy a new one, apologies if they are exactly the same there too, the bulb is not gone on mine.

So once he was done shouting ever louder about how it wasn't the electricity he got onto shouting how the melted power supply must have been caused by my room being too hot. First I started mentioning hot places on the globe that still have computers, I think I said Las Vegas and Texas, to which he quickly replied "I bet they have air conditioning" so then I said India, Iran, Saudi Arabia. But he had suggested heat now and he wasn't going to back down and risk being wrong, I tried mentioning that a lot of computer parts are rated to still operate at 80 degrees and 90 degrees but then he started talking about how a power supply isn't really part of a computer it's what is before you get to the computer (if he doesn't know about something he'll just make it up fit his overall point) and how hot ambient room temperature air going through the fans couldn't be cooling a computer anyway.

So it turns out one of our neighbours is an electrician and now to prove his point he is going to ask him to come over (unpaid I bet), but I think it's going to be the same as when he dragged someone from his work to take a look, they aren't going to be paid, they aren't going to want to be here doing this and after 10 seconds they could say "looks fine to me" and combined with the surge protector LED not going out i'm going to get a smug look and be told the electricity is fine and off the table as a potential problem.

There's pretty much nothing I can do to cool my room down, everything is rated for higher temps that we get in England but I chose my words poorly and described my power supply as "melted" rather than saying that stuff inside leaked out.

One thing I did remember though is that this is my second power supply that melted like that, it was years and years ago, back with AGP graphics cards and every computer having a creative soundblaster soundcard and stuff, i'd completely forgotten about it. I definitely didn't overheat the room or draw a lot of power out of the socket on something that old. It would have been anything from a 250-450w psu, no overclocking running games on windows 2000/ME or something like that.

I still think electricity is the right track.

Rather than that spending that $50 on a psu tester I think i'll just refund my PSU through Amazon, buy the UPS from Amazon and then hope everything shows signs of life when I plug it all in. Although to print the returns barcode I don't even think we have a printer with ink that isn't dried out as we don't do a lot of printing. The problems just never stop.

UPS arrived, read all the instructions and left it off but-still-plugged-in-and-charging for 8 hours before use for the maximum battery life ect, plugged a small device into it and it was powering it, so far so good.

Installed the new PSU and plugged it in and turned it on, I had some plain white LED's from my fans on the front come on for 0.2 seconds and then the whole thing was dead again, no fan sounds no lights no beeps, but a steady orange light from the network port at the back of the unit.

Then I noticed an electrical burning sort of smell just for a little bit, or it could be new electronics being used but it was a little bit like a soldering burning smell from back when I was in school in the woodshop and electronics class.

Either way after checking everything was firmly plugged in on everything PSU, UPS and computer subsequent presses of the power button did nothing, not even a split second of fan lights.

What else can die on a computer to stop it from even turning on / beeping / lighting up?

Edit: I ordered the same PSU so that I wouldnt need to reroute any cables except the one that isn't modular, is it possible I have a dead cable? or should i just leave them like they are?

EVGA 850 GQ, 80+ GOLD 850W, Semi Modular, EVGA ECO Mode, Power Supply 210-GQ-0850-V3: Amazon.co.uk: Computers Accessories

I had a really good and thorough look over the motherboard, it looks mint condition, if someone told me they had built the PC yesterday you'd have no reason not to believe them, there isn't really even any dust. Nothing bent, nothing deformed, melted, missing or otherwise out of place.

So what other things can stop the computer before it even starts? We tried swapping out the PSU so it really isn't likely to be that, the motherboard looks ok externally but could still have problems that aren't visible. Will a computer turn on without ram? should I try turning on with only one of the 4 Dimms? Will a computer turn on without a working hard drive,or processor?

I'm sure it'd turn on without a graphics card.

This thing is driving me nuts, thanks for sticking with me so far, a friend for years said he'd help me out with this and then just disappeared for days.