I've had bad luck with a few CLD-A100's, the first I had suddenly died, the PSU suddenly gave up.

The 2nd I ordered simply to replace the PSU, but the new 'working' PSU makes things smoke. The working PSU would heat up a video chip till it smoked on the System it came with. When I put the PSU in to the older 'working' unit, the Laser starts to smoke.

I've read a bit about this issue, apparently pretty common. Checking the IC Fuses (IC101, 102, 201 & 202 I think) on the Power Supply usually finds a short, but my fuses have checked out OK. Also, the fuses on the mainboard (IC 811 & 810 ) also check out fine. I've found a faulty resistor at R301 which was replaced, but didn't help the problem.

I've also re-capped the INTI Board which is recommended. Any ideas on what else would cause this error? Thanks

Wow.
Sorry I can't help but stuff smoking may be already too late.

The smoking laser is documented as a common issue. Normally it is a fried IC Fuse, but they've checked out so I can't be sure what else would cause laser smoking issues.

Apparently the laser will die but I'm not bothered about that, just want to have it working again.

Could be the coils that are smoking and fried from the laser.
Sounds like you or someone else was tweeking the gain and focus pots past where they should be and then now you think it may
be a power supply issue.

I'm no tech so good luck.

Consider the possibility that whatever short is causing the laser to smoke is what killed the original power supply. That’s often how it goes with stuff. I don’t know anything about A-100s really but still, that would be my assumption from what you are saying in this story.

Good advice, thanks. I've tackled the original PSU, it had a bad Power Transistor on the AC side, as well as another bad one. I think it has a lot of bad nearby diodes all over the board (it's completely dead the old PSU) but I can't source the diodes, my experience is minimal. I'll start to check those areas on the new PSU and see if anything's off.

The thing is a mess with 4 different boards, the schematics are here:

https://console5.com/wiki/Laseractive_CLD-A100


When the working unit died, as a witness it struggled coming ON/OFF for a few minutes, would work and then shut off randomly. Eventually completely died. I had it at a repair guys house for a while even when it was working. He told me he transferred some LaserActive videos to Digital media, I'm not sure what he tinkered with to accomplish that.