Hardware Failures

Hello, today I am going to speak about hardware failures due to what happened to me last night.

The computer where I run my bots is right next to my bed. Its a silent water cooled setup witch is quiet enough to sleep right next to it. Last night at about 3AM I woke up with a bang! Unsure what was all about, I noticed that the PC was off. I tried to power it on and nothing happened. Checked my power switches downstairs and the sockets switch was off, pulled it up into "ON" and jumped back to off and heard another bang coming from upstairs. It was obvious to me that the PSU was shorting.

Unplugged the PSU off the power, turned the sockets on, plugged the PSU again with a different power cord and nothing happened. I was 90%+ sure it was the power supply but I wanted to be sure before ordering anything or getting a replacement.

I do have a few spare parts, such as an old HDD, 2 sticks of 4GB ram (atm i use 8+4+8+4 GB), a "old" graphics card, etc. In between these parts i had a old 400W psu. It did not have the 8 pin EPS cable that i needed, or the 2 PCI-E (only 1), but i hooked it up to the board, push the power button and the PC turned on. I was now 100% sure it was the power supply.

Saturday morning, bots already offline for 6 hours, I cannot afford to have the PC off up to Tuesday or so without my bots running. After a pointless trip to PC World to find out they don't stock PC components in store (????), I've ended up having to go to town center and buy a "slightly" overpriced power supply.

I taken the opportunity of having my PC all apart to clear all the dust, service the water cooling and tidy up the cables around my desk. Its all running smooth now.


My questions to everyone are: 

Do you keep any spare parts for diagnosis/repair in case any of your components die?

Do you have a plan in case your Disk/CPU/PSU/RAM/Board dies on you? (backups, close-by shops, etc)