Last night, my computer suddenly stopped working. Today I fiddled with it some more, first by removing an old parallel port card that was installed quite a while back in an attempt to get an old printer working. After pulling that out, the system actually made a beep shortly after boot-up, and turned the screen on when I plugged in an HDMI cable! It wanted to run a disk check, so I let it, which only took a moment since it was only concerned about the EFI system partition. With excitement, I shut the machine back down to plug in all the rest of the peripherals, then brought it back up. It failed to boot (spun the disks a bit then reset itself) once or twice, but soon it came up to the logon screen. The keyboard didn't work at all despite Num Lock being lit, so I unplugged an unnecessary peripheral (the webcam) and rebooted. After another boot failure or two, I managed to get logged in. Everything now appears to be normal.
It's unclear how much of the fault lies with the parallel port card, but considering that it never accomplished anything other than blue-screening my computer, I decided to discard it. There are clearly remaining issues, though, which I am pretty certain are with the power supply. Alas, I have neither the tools nor the ability to make a definite diagnosis of which part of the PSU is problematic. For now, I'm trying to avoid strenuous workloads for the machine (no VMs for a while). Hopefully soon I'll be able to take the machine to someone more qualified to double-check that the PSU is indeed the problem and get a new one installed if so.
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