Hello all and welcome to Lesson seven of our free Computer Repair and General Use Training Program. Remember, if you’re watching this video on YouTube or Vimeo or Viddler or something, you can always go over to BeYourOwnIT.com, and set up for free training on the right, and you’ll get weekly tips and advice, access our forum, and also some good stuff all for free. So on Lesson 7, we talk specifically about the computer’s power supply. It’s often overlooked, and it’s actually pretty important. You can spend anywhere between $40 and $400 pretty easily on a power supply. But the reason it’s not often talked about is we can probably apply the 80:20 rule here, and that is for 80% of the people, whatever comes with their computer ‑ whether it’s a 400 or a 450 watt or whatever ‑ it’s just fine.

But there’s that 20% of people who do upgrades, or require a little bit more juice around their system. This lesson is just about understanding the difference. So if you’re a gamer, I’ll say you’re going to want a high‑end video card, something 550, 600, 700 watt ‑ they keep going up and up as video cards get bigger and bigger.

It’s important because the computer will run on less than optimal power, but you will have all sorts of problems. So the rule of thumb, I usually say, “Whatever your computer requires, I will try to get a 50‑100 watts more than that.”

This is because most power supplies are, for example, 80% efficient, or 90% efficient. So if you get exactly what your computer needs, you’re never going to actually have exactly what you need.

If you’re somebody who’s a pack rat or an upgrader, as well, you have multiple hard drives, or multiple ROM drives, typically most systems are fine with what’s in there if you just throw in an extra.

I’m not saying you need to upgrade your power supply if you just throw in an extra CD‑ROM. But if you have three hard drives, two CD‑ROMs, and the original power supply, it might be worth the 50$ investment just to pump it up a little bit to make sure everything’s getting properly powered.

There are a lot of reasons that you can find yourself in a situation where you’re going to need to pump up your power supply, whether or not it’s for upgrades ‑ like you upgrade your processor, or your video card, or motherboard.

It’s important to remember that every time you add something to your computer, it’s making it a little less efficient. Odds are, if you bought it and it’s out of the box, they’re not going to give you anything extra. So if you’re computer needs a 300 watt power supply, that’s what you’re going to get.

Nowadays, a lot of people are getting more comfortable with upgrading their computers, putting in new video cards, and things like that, it’s just important to understand not to forget about the power supply.

What it really does, all the power supply really does, is convert the AC current from your wall down to DC current, which your computer needs inside. But it is important to understand the capacities.

You can actually add up what your components need, if you want to get really technical. But odds are, if you just look at something like your video card requirements, things like that, they’ll say right on the box , “This requires a 550 watt power supply.”

Though I try to use the rule of thumb where you get 50 ‑ 100 watts more than that because most things aren’t a hundred percent efficient.

So that’s Lesson seven on power supplies.