Amp-Man, a few questions;
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[*] Is the PC crashing to a "Blue Screen" (AKA The Blue Screen Of Death)?,
[*] If Blue Screens, does this bring up an Exeption OE within NDIS and NWDIR, or similar NIC responsive Kernals / DLLs?,
[*] Do the blue screens become less frequent when either the monitor is powered off for a while, or when the TVSS strip is not used?
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I have serviced this type of problem a few times and found it to be faulty MOVs in TVSS strips and failing power supplies in the Monitor.
These hard errors were results of randomly occuring drops in line voltage and current, which probably do not go more than 4 cycles per drop. Just enough to create havoc on the motherboard, but not enough to bring the PC power supply into "Low Power" state.
I have only seen a handful of Low Power situations, and these commonly result in a "Warm Boot" restart, rather than any types of Protection Faults or Blue Screens.
These normally restart the machine and lock it into error status at the POST on the more expensive machines. Cheap-o's will simply reboot to the Operating System once the "Power Good" signal is sent from the Power Supply to the CPU [taking it out of restart loop].
I like your testing and results! Keep up the work!
Paul stole
my ideas! <joking>
I could see the mG levels being through the roof with the first two setups! Can't figure why they are so high when the circuit is connected as normal - especially when driving a Linear load!
Something with Harmonics would be a No-Brainer to figure odd mG readings, or maybe I am not thinking correctly here!
Also curious about the test bench - is it Ferrous metal [Iron, Nickel or Cobalt based]? Something that would cause an Inductive Effect to the coiled cables.
As you know, if the coil was wound with two wires carrying currents of equal intensity in opposite directions, this will [somewhat] nullify the Magnetic Field created by Inductance. True for AC and DC.
If there is a difference in Intensity, this will create a significant Magnetic Flux. If this current was AC, this would Induce currents into nearby conductors [basis of GFCI's]. If there is some method of "Harnessing" the Magnetic Flux, this would result in XL influencing the circuit's Currents, resulting in a noticable Voltage Difference on the "Load" side of this XL.
Paul hit the nail on the head when mentioning the heat build up. This is the result of Series Resistance in the Conductors, so there is a transfer of True Power at these points - we feel the result of the True Power transfer as Heat [or smell it as smoke
].
Poor Power Factor [50% or less] will draw an excessive level of currents, which overloads or "Saturates" the conductor materials with too much current. In this case, this can result in Heat and corresponding Voltage Drop, due to the increased currents drawn through a fixed [and increasing with heat] Resistance.
Enough of the babble!
Good luck with the T Shooting!
Scott S.E.T.