Voltage on 12v rail

Here's the Hardware Scan for this machine, courtesy D-A-L Forums:
http://www.d-a-l.com/hardware-scanner/app/…20cf6d300c222e6

And here is the image from both Everest and Speedfan, both indicating about .11v on the reading that should be 12.0v
📎Everest_and_Speedfan_Sensors.JPG

What's up with that?

This machine "died" a few days ago. Wouldn't boot. Instead it immediately flashed a message in a white box on a all black background (kinda like the "out of range" warning) "Going to Sleep" Then it would shut itself off. Total time involved is only a few seconds. _____________________________ What I've done: Disconnected Floppy and and optical disk. Then tried firing it up again. It seemed like it was getting a little more juice, and got or almost got the HD involved before dieing. Next I pulled off the CPU Heatsink and fan. DANG !!! It had what was probably the HP original Thermal Compound Patch from factory. But it was all bubbled and hard, and no longer evenly distributed. Looked like it would be "insulative" rather than dispersing of heat. So I cleaned that off, and applied new Thermal Compound. I connected everything back up. Machine fired right up and has been functioning like a champ. Of course, I wanted to see what the CPU Temperature values were. Looks OK… not great, but OK. Then I noticed the Voltage where it should be 12V and instead reads about .11v As I said, machine is functioning well. I'm online right now typing this and did the light-weight image editing for the screeen-shot above. Any ideas? I don't need anything "great" out of this machine. It belongs to an 85 year old guy that I correspond with regularly. Pretty much all he uses it for is email, browsing, genealogy research, and keeping a spreadsheet for a service club where he is treasurer. He uses the machine maybe every other day. Your diagnostic observations and recommendations will be appreciated. Doug

I'm hoping one of you Hardware Guys will tell me it's probably just a bad sensor.

I suppose that it could be a bad sensor or one incompatible with the programs or it could be windows or even the MB. Does the voltage show up in the BIOS? I've never heard of anything like that but if it works it works. Can you substitute the PSU with a known good one? I'll have to admit that I don't know. Did this come up suddenly or could have been like that for quite some time?

The symptom of "Going to Sleep" had been reported to me irregularly for maybe as much as a couple of weeks, over the phone. It would appear when he turned off the machine or rebooted the machine. From the sound of the description, I had thought maybe he had selected a Hibernate option.

Then two days ago, he couldn't get the machine to boot and asked me to come over to fix it.

I experienced the same difficulty booting, then once it was as if "it caught" and the engines turned over, allowing Windows to boot. The machine ran just fine, connected to the internet and such. But then permanently failed after that.

Today I brought it over to my bench to pull the HD and salvage his documents.

Since I was opening the case, I decided to try the procedures I mentioned above.

As to subbing in a different PSU, I suppose I could rig one up "outside of the case", but there won't be any permanent internal replacement.

This is a "slim line" case, very compact.
The PSU is enlongated two x two x the width of the case.

Ultimately, the machine is going to run for as long as it does, and when it croaks it croaks.

This is not going to be like the cynical definition of a boat…

"A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into."

Not his machine… nope, nope, nope.

Does the voltage show up in the BIOS?

This is HP System BIOS and SETUP Utility Copyright 1984-2004 version 1

Options are F10 = Accept, Esc = Cancel
That's all folks.