Hot times with cold cathodes…

I was reading up on case modding and I came across a tutorial for case lighting. In my college days, my buddy Mike and I had installed a blue cold cathode light bar inside my case hooked up to a toggle switch.

Ever since I put my new power supply in, my system would mess up a lot when I attempted to turn that light on or off.

Not thinking much about it until tonight, I decided to dig a little deeper. Apparently, when I re-installed the new power supply I wired the light and my hard drives to the same lead. I noticed I heard the “booting up” sound when I hit the switch, I guess it drew too much power from that lead and was interrupting my hard drives mid-spin.

Probably not good for the drives.

So I swapped it to the lead that controls my often unused DVD drive. I just tried playing a DVD while turning the light on and off and it does not appear to have a problem, which is a good thing. I’ll have to run that by him and find out why the switch had that unintended feature.