This is the story of my autopsy of my Alienware 7700m laptop powersupply. (Full images found on my Flickr account, jarod997). One day, not too long after turning on my machine, after XP had booted up (darn, I can't blame this one on Vista ) I heard a "poof" and the computer shut off. Heat? No, the room was cool. Did the power strip trip? No, the speakers were still on and in that case it couldn't be a power failure either. Wait... *snif snif* oh, that's not good. I look at the brick, no power LED, unplug it, bring it up to my nose and, yup, *snif* fried electronic smell. Mind you, it wasn't dead fish smell, so it wasn't a cap that blew. (Thank goodness, my 4 1/2 month daughter who was next to me might have lost her breakfast.) So here we go on an autopsy journey to determine if this unit can be repaired. The immediate suspects are moving parts (which there are none), capacitors (no dead fish smell, so again not my first concern). Next is a fuse and power resistors. After which we could look at power regulators. In that order