Issue with Power Cords?

[mjblanco]

Hi! I teach a Visual Design class and have 12 aging (ie 4 year old) iMacs. They still plug along pretty reliably, remarkable considering the pounding they can get. However, Over the last two weeks, I've had 3 power cords die on me. They certainly are replaceable and if you are going to have something on your hardware to go belly up, that's the way to go, but I'm wondering if that is a problem for iMacs this age.

 

[Detrius]

No, it's not a problem for iMacs of any age.

Try plugging them back in to make certain they are bad. It's highly unlikely to have one of those power cords fail. What's far more likely is that the SMC on the logic board crashed. The act of unplugging the power cord for about five seconds resets the SMC on many models. So, if you only unplugged it to connect another power cord, and then it works (but you didn't reconnect the original power cord), then that's most likely what's going on.

Strange power flickers can confuse the SMC.