power supplys

[A Nerd]

Will any old power supply fit into any old PC tower? Or are there different ones for different towers? I need to put one of these in too. Is it difficult? Require any tools? I took a look at my power supply when I opened the case awhile ago, but didn't think to note how it is fastened. Any opinions would be welcomed! :)

[Scienter]

Will any old power supply fit into any old PC tower? Or are there different ones for different towers? I need to put one of these in too. Is it difficult? Require any tools? I took a look at my power supply when I opened the case awhile ago, but didn't think to note how it is fastened. Any opinions would be welcomed! :)

AT and ATX towers use different types of power supply, they have different connectors. Swapping one out isn't hard, I've done it before. The only tool I used was a screwdriver. The tough bit for me was hooking it up because I have a lot of junk inside my tower.

If you play a lot of games, I'd get one that puts out at least 550W. Probably more. I think mine is 600W but I can't remember.

[Lemur]

The vast majority of cases and motherboards take ATX power supplies. All bets are off if you're fixing a Dell, however.

No special tools required. It only gets funky when you have a lot of high-draw components and you have to think about how many devices you want riding which rail. Probably not something you're going to encounter.

[A Nerd]

I have an HP. So an ATX would be fine? 600w would be what I am looking for. Nice to know that installing one won't be too difficult! :)

[Lemur]

I'll do you a favor, JuJuBee, you get me the model of your HP and I can probably get you specs for everything. Doubtless they've got documentation on it floating around, waiting to be found.

[A Nerd]

OK, thanks! I have a HP Compaq dc7900 Convertable Minitower.

While I have you here I have another question. My TV has an HDMI port to hook up to my PC so I tried it. It runs a resolution of 1360 x 768 but will let me go up to 1920 x 1080. 1360 x 768 looks great, but anything over that looks awful. It is blury and the text is hard to read. Is this a limitation of my graphics card? The card is a ATI HD 4550. My current power supply is 240w :P so I wanted a more powerful one and a better graphics card for PCI express. Would this help my resolution issues or should I switch back to my smaller monitor?