I think I might have just let the smoke out of my home computer. I'm typing this on my wife's laptop.

If anyone can help me with the following information, it might allow me to narrow down the fault:

If an ATX power supply were to go faulty, how would I check the voltage on the pins to see if that were true?

Specifically, if I had a volt meter, which pin would I connect the ground wire to, and then how much voltage would I expect to read on the other pins? And how do I get it to turn on if it's not plugged into the motherboard (which pins do I jumper)?

I have narrowed the fault down to the CPU, the motherboard, or the power supply. Since the PC's failure was preceded by the faint odor of smoke escaping from the smoke-storage devices within the PC, and the motherboard and CPU components didn't feel excessively hot, and since the power supply is a cheap-ass Taiwanese number without a warranty, I'm seriously suspecting the power supply.

The motherboard gets enough juice to start all the fans and try and spin up the drives. But it never fires up the video card. And I know it's not the video card since I swapped that. Since the BIOS controls the power-switch behavior, and the switch does turn the PC on (just not off again), I get the feeling that some components are getting enough voltage while others aren't.

So, what pins do I test and how? Or any other advice?

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Tony Fabris