As a power supply ages, its internal components can fail, leading to an internal power surge that could damage your hardware. If you're seeing errors, or if you've recently upgraded a component and are having problems, it could be due to a faulty power supply. High-power video cards and chips, such as the Intel Core i9-12900K processor and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU, require more energy than their basic power requirements. If you're running these components, you may need a more powerful power supply.
So how can you tell if your laptop needs a new power supply? Pay attention to when your computer crashes - power supply problems usually manifest under load. If your computer crashes when it needs more power, it's likely that the power supply is the culprit. Things that generate a high load include hard drives or optical drives that restart after being turned off for a while and tasks that require intensive processor use. Random restarts and crashes are also signs of a bad power supply.