I realize its fairly old now, but my question about bench testing a power supply was voted closed, and cited "recommendations for specific products or places to purchase them" as the cause. Here's the original question
I meant to ask a question more along the lines of "how do I choose the correct value for a resistor in my particular context."
What should I do in future to make this more clear?
I'm only seeing that question now due to this meta question. I probably would have voted to close for unclear, not because it is a shopping question. You wrote:
I want to bench test a power supply.
OK so far, but this bring up lots of questions about what you want to test. Do you want to verify the current capability, voltage regulation, ripple, noise, transient response, etc, etc? I am expecting these questions to be answered in the next few sentences.
The Sam's computer facts troubleshooting manual says to use an #1129 on the +5v rail as a load.
Huh? So you apparently have a specific troubleshooting manual for this thing? Does that mean your supply is broken and your real question is how to find the problem? But no problem has been stated. We don't even know what this supply is supposed to do.
But the real problem here is what the heck is a "#1129"? How can you possibly expect anyone to know what you think that means? This is where I would have thought to myself "screw this", stopped reading, and voted to close as unclear.
I might have skimmed the rest of the question and downvoted for good measure if I could catch anything at all wrong. At this point I'm looking for sloppiness, like not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, not capitalizing the word "I", not ending sentences with proper punctuation, wall of text, and the like. Unfortunately, the rest is written well enough, so I probably would not have downvoted.
Provide more information, remember you have free access to professionals and other experts, most everyone time here is valuable. A few paragraphs giving background on what you are actually doing. We don't really care what supply is for but more about the specs of the supply and exactly what kind of test you want to preform. You did ask a specific question, so kudos for that. But you didn't list the specs of the power supply.
