[Dan Roper]

My PowercenterPro 210 has been working well since I bought it about three years ago. Recently it refused to turn on.

I traced the problem to the printer (Epson Color 600) The computer won't turn on if the printer's power is on. I must turn the printer off first, then the computer will respond. After that I can turn the printer back on.

Can anyone offer an idea as to what is going wrong here? Everything works fine otherwise. I'm just concerned as to what is changing here.

[druber]

dood, that's the strangest thing i've ever heard. if you don't find an answer here, try posting over at powerwatch.com. they're the pcc kings.

[Celos]

That *is* exceedingly strange. Are you sure it's the Epson and not (say) the power strip that they're both plugged in to? What about the serial cable from the Epson to the Mac? Is it flaky?

Any event, the power supplies in the PowerComputing machines are known to have problems. I had to replace the one in my PowerCenter. It manifested itself in a much less strange way...it wouldn't turn on unless I used the power switch on the back (keyboard power wouldn't work) and sometimes it would spontaneously turn off. So I replaced it with one from PC Power & Cooling. The PowerCenters (and, AFAIK, the PowerTowers) just used standard ATX power supplies. Since then it's been rock solid.

The powerwatch site is a great place to check.

Good luck!

I worked as a tech for the only Power Computing distributor in the UK some years ago, and seem to recall this being a problem with some Stylewriters and HP DeskJets - if I recall correctly this was a problem with the serial chip on the board. The solution was to power on the printer after the cpu. I asked my contact at Power about this once, and you could almost hear him shrugging down the phone line ;-)