Can a house with low Amps/Watts/Volts prevent a desktop from booting?

[harbingerOTV]

I recently moved into a older home. I plugged in my desktop and it powered up but never POSTed.

Going through the defacto moves I did all this:

Reseated RAM
Unplugged all peripherals.
Ran the comp with 1 stick of ram.
Swapped out RAM in every configuration to test them all.
Changed between 4 different hard drives.

Nothing.

Changed out the PSU.
Swapped the MoBo.
Swapped the CPU.

Nothing.

Changed keyboards, monitors and mice.

Nothing.

So this has been going on for a month.

I recently got another computer from a friend who upgraded. It worked fine before.

Plugged it in and same issue.

Looking at my laptop power it says "100-240V/2A"

my PSU ( the lowest one out of 3) says "120-160V/10A - 200-240V/5A"

So comparing it, it appears the laptop needs a much lowers V-A ratio.

What comes on:

PSU
Mouse
Keyboard (flashes and goes blank)
Monitor (but no signal)
Fans
HDDs

Could it be that my house is delivering less than the needed power to start the CPU?

[oracleguy]

The voltage might be too low if the laptop charges/works but the desktop doesn't. If there weren't enough amps, when you tried to start the computer the circuit breaker would trip. Or in the case of fuses, it would burn out.

How old is this house? Does it have 3 prong outlets?

You can probably find a little thing to plug into the outlet that will tell you the voltage at Home Depot or Lowes or some place like that. The typical voltage is 110-120 volts.

[harbingerOTV]

The house was built in the 40's. It still has knob and tube wiring which we are in the process getting up to code. So the outlets were all 2 prong. I'm betting on the wiring it self as after all the toiling, there's just no way basically 3 different computers all have the exact same issue.

[oracleguy]

How were you handling the 3rd prong (the ground prong) on the power cable for the computer's power supplies? You can get those 3 to 2 prong adapters but you still need to connect the ground prong to ground, that could be part of the problem.

[harbingerOTV]

The outlets I'm plugging in to have all been changed to grounded 3 prong outlets.

The house had an addition that was built with grounded outlets. I tried those as well and same problem.

I'm going to have have my girl email her electrician later today.

[oracleguy]

When you figure out what the problem is please post back, I am curious as to the culprit.

[hitek]

You can find easily about input voltage details on the power supply. If you try to run your desktop on low vol/amp, then your stuff will get hot sooner, may be burn later.