I do because i repair them as a part time job....

Let alone the PSU's, here is a picture of a power cable that came bundled with one of them. We had huge stock of those imported in 2008 (they came bundled with cheap cases and PSUs), some of them allready caused house fires, others are still "waiting to happen" throughout the country. Every now and then i find something like this on a service call, complete with a scorched patch on the carpet behind the computer desk and a horror story from the user



Can show you some pics of PSU insides as well....

Every time I order one of those adapters fOr 12 volts where I need a lot of power the IEC cords normally get damaged outer jackets so I usually use an older one. The ones that have Ben around since windows 98 are sturdier than the Chinese crap.

Here ita more of a mix. We had good and bad cables back in 98 as well as today

I have quite a lot of cables, the best i seen/have are -

R-wolf - Israel
Longwell - China (some of their older cables are 1.5mm2, thats thicker than 16 AWG - And they have some of the best IEC connectors too)
Pencon - UK
Volex - UK (made by Pencon, older ones), China (newer ones)
HL - Israel
Waissboard - Israel
I-Sheng - China

In the old days (80s/very early 90s) we had some good cables which were Japanese or American, and used the US color code inside (black / white / green) rather than the European (brown / blue / green-yellow) - they usually had rewirable plug on the wall end, so i could open and see. On many of them the IEC connector as rated to only 125V as well (but it does not matter, it can handle many 100's V anyway). Looks like they were the ones before manufacturers started making cables with Israeli plugs, so the users here just took the cables with the US plug that arrived with the PCs, cut it off and fitted the Israeli one



The bad ones rarely have any brand on them. Even the printing along the cable, in the good ones it specifies conductor sizes, standards, manufacturer name etc, in the bad ones it is like "PVC ISOLATED COPPER WIRE AND CABLE", in the worst ones (the ones that blow up) there is no printing whatsoever

One manufacturer of bad cable from the 90s i recall is Fan Jet. The Pentium computers we had in lower school in 1996 or so were all pluged in with them (computer plugged into wall, monitor into computer with IEC320 C13-C14 extender). Those for some reason tended to lose Earth connection, and we had many "lightly shocking" computers. Replacing the cable would fix that

The cables here are generally 18 gauge thick and they can heat up with extended use.

Most cables here are 0.75 that is a bit thinner than 18AWG. But it takes current on the order of 5A to heat up 0.75, most desktop PCs  won't take that much, even on 120V

There are a community of computer overclockers who enjoy big beefy supplies and lots of lights and vent fans. The people also use the skinny cords, and it makes the computer like it skipped leg day. 

I planned on eventually posting pictures and writing about all the vintage PCs I acquired here, but stuff happened and I'm too lazy to finish lol. So instead here are two videos I've uploaded on YouTube so far. The first is an introduction to all the computers I saved from recycling, and the second is an in-depth overview of one of the PCs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5OjudzyBY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC-v83xHnPY

And here's a video of the pile I saved all the computers from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfV0fcEbEK0

R-wolf - Israel
Longwell - China (some of their older cables are 1.5mm2, thats thicker than 16 AWG - And they have some of the best IEC connectors too)
Pencon - UK
Volex - UK (made by Pencon, older ones), China (newer ones)
HL - Israel
Waissboard - Israel
I-Sheng - China

Here in Australia, it's being flooded with Chinese stuff. I've seen the older Volex Pencon ones and more modern Volex stuff too, and they are pretty good as well as Longwell/Linetek, I-Sheng as well.

I looked on my computer, it's plug is made by "LEONI" and they appear to be German, feels of high quality compared to more modern stuff.

Classic Australian power cable manufacturers are CMA (Cable Makers Australia) Peaston, Burton and Hartland. Many of them are unfortunately defunct since the 90s.

The classic here is R-wolf. They eventually merged into Waissboard, that are still in business, but are not much in the computer cable business anymore

Waissboard now make only sockets/plugs/lamp holders etc (thats what they made in the beginning as well), and unfortunately started importing some Chinese stuff under their name instead of making it here, now some product lines are made here and some imported. I have some of the older Waissboard stuff,
ther newer is no match to it

In America it doesn't matter about the cables. People here are so bent on being wasteful that they throw the old cables that will not catch your house on fire even after years of service.

The cables here in the US that I have seen ar generally pretty good cables.  Never had any issues with them.  Wether they be the big thick cables are the skinny flat ones where you can see the individual wire runs, I have never had na issue.  And we keep them around for years, whenever we get rid of skemthing we keep the cable, it seems like we always need cables...even when we keep every one we still need cables. I have an Asus G20AJ gaming desktop and it actually has 2 cables they runs to external peer supplies, one is for the main system and one is for the GPU.  One of them is a flat cables that has the lines for the individual wire runs and the other is a small regular cable, rather small.  But they haven't given me any issues in the 4 months I've had it.

The cables with trouble are the ones that come from untitled plasces in China, you dont know who made them, what conductor thickness he used, .... FFS in some cables the conductors are springy like steel, not copper and not even aluminum...

As long as you have a look at the cable before you use it, and avoid what looks like REALLY bad idea to plug into the wall, you are fine

The conductors in the frayed cable of a new power pack was 18-2 copper with ground.

I saw this old NEC thing at the flea mall today. They wanted $40 for it.

Oh wow. If it was in good shape and worked I would consider paying that for it.

Coming back to this thread reminds me, I scored another couple of computers recently. An IBM NetVista A22p (circa 2002, 1.8 GHz Pentium 4) and an IBM ThinkCentre type 8171 (circa 2005, 3.2 GHz Pentium 4). Sadly, the ThinkCentre turned out to have a bad motherboard, which is a real shame because it was a really cool machine. It was tiny and well-built, and the 3.2 GHz was the second-fastest desktop Pentium 4 ever made. Oh well, it yielded a few parts. The NetVista's Zip drive is also bad, but I won't lose sleep over that. Also got a circa 2005 IBM LCD monitor.