Topic awaiting preservation: The best/worst crash & burn yet

I've been having a lot of computer problems lately, lockups...crashes...out of memory bla bla bla... and I thought I was having a hard time of it until tonite when I was talking to a friend.

Last week my friend shutdown, unplugged - - and then moved his system from one side of the room, to the other. When he turned on the system again there was a not too noisey but - bright - flash. A diode in the power supply blew which sent illegal amounts of voltage through everything... I'm talkin' *everything*.

Destroyed as in gone..non-recoverable out the door in the basket...
Motherboard, CPU, CD writer, DVDrom, DVD decoder card, 30gig 40gig and 80gig hard drives...and of course the power supply. The ram, video and sound cards appear to have survived.

Even tho' it's rare...this type of all out devastation is not unheard of.... and what an ugly reminder of just how fragile these 'puter things can be.

My flakey system, for the moment at least, doesn't seem too bad. <lol>
and ya I'm doing a bit of back up. Man what an ugly rush that musta bin...oh ya and we figure that diode at most probably cost what...about half a cent? Now I'm really backing up. =)

I had a diode blowout in my power supply after returning from a lan party. Blow a shit load of dust out the back. See at this time my computer was under my desktop and next to my chair, so I was on all fours reaching around back to hit the power switch, then POP and all this burnt dust shoots out the back. I almost hacked up my lungs. Luckly a trip Ables Electronics for a new power supply(I actually paid for a 250-yeah i know-and got a 350) fixed the problem. Scared the shit outa me though.

On the same note, the first computer I ever built, I forgot to put the spacers between the motherboard and the case. Needless to say the computer never turned on, the motherboard was instantly ruined. I also tried hooking up my DVD-drive to my RageIIc ATI card(yeah I know-this was before I had my wealth of hardware knowledge). But I accidently hooked up my HD instead. Realizing my fooly, I switched the harddrive back out and plugged the DVD drive in this time(yeah I know). Nothing happened. So I put everything back how it was. Hit power, nothing comes up after post. Apparently the ATI RageII eats enything hooked up to those pins on it. Harddrive and DVD drive broken. So if you ever run across one of these cards, run(they sucked anyway, got better performance using software rendering in Half-Life with it in-I was amazed when I got my Voodoo3 needless to say).

Damn thats long.



[This message has been edited by RazorX (edited 02-20-2003).]

I don't have any computer horror history to tell, luckily, and I hope I won't have for years to come but I got really terrified when I arrived here in the US, September 1st, opened my luggage, the one that had my Brazilian computer inside of it (only the case, but fully mounted, with everything inside it, just as it was in Brazil) and guess what I found? Despite all my efforts to protect the case inside the big luggage, with a lot of blankets around it, big blankets, the case well put in the center of the luggage, well protected by all sides, something happened during the transportation (it came with me, as a regular luggage, in the airplanes) the case was skew (not to say screwed). Some very big crash happened that made the case deformed. Well, I thought to myself, my computer is gone, there is no way for the parts inside to survive to such a wallop, I just hope I can recover my HDs... Merda...
But, as I said, luckily and incredibly, the computer survived with no harm. All the parts were working fine. The case is still askew, crooked, deformed. The other day I tried to screw the bolts on the rear but it crooked the motherboard in a way that the fan started making noise, something started touching something else inside it. So, I gave up. The cover of the case is in place, but no bolts and deformed (just to lower the noise).
I decided not to buy another case and move everything to it for some resons: first, I never thought that a case could be so expensive in this country; in my country, I can buy a case with 20-30 dollars; here, some fancy ones can cost hundreds of dollars and even a cheap one is still 60-70 dollars or more. So, when it's time to go back to Brazil, I'll throw the case away and take with me just the parts inside.

My little cousin decided it'd be fun to play around at the back of my computer, he flicked the little voltage-change switch on the back of my power supply...the fatal charge only went out through one piece of hardware..my video card. Straight out through the RPG port...my monitor very literally want bang.

Thats strange, I have never heard of a power supply doing that. In fact, I think most power supplies do nothing if the voltage is set wrong, they like detect it or something(of course I dont feel like finding out). Musta been one unlucky day.

believe me, most computer power supplies blow when you set the voltage wrong... I never understood why this switch has to be reachable from outside the case...

I have already blew up a power supply by setting it to the wrong voltage (my home office, in Brazil, has outlets for 220v and 110v). I just had to buy a new power supply, nothing happened to the other parts of the computer.