"And then it exploooded...My work PC that is!"

Just thought I'd share this with you guys.

Our servers went down a couple of days ago at work, and weren't likely to be up for a couple of hours. My PC makes a right old racket (harddrive bearings? *what* bearings?), so I figured I'd shut it down for a while.

It got as far as displaying the message saying windows was shutting down, then (in the voice of Mathazar from GalaxyQuest),

"And then it exploooded..."

Not as in flying to pieces or anything, but it went *POOOMPH!* loudly enough that Dawn who sits next to me jumped clear out of her chair and buried herself in the coat rack, ending up buried under about twenty-five high visibility jackets. It then proceeded to smoulder lightly, leaving the office smelling of the aroma of barbecued electronics for the next couple of hours.

My initial reaction (no jumping), was to realllly slowly look down in its direction. "Oookaaaayyy.....it doesn't normally do that..." Then I reached over (after yanking the power cord out with my foot), picked up the phone, dialed 3434. "Hello, IT helpdesk? Yeah. Want to report a hardware failure. PC8222 just Frenchfried."

Methinks the PSU suffered some form of meltdown on the HV side. We'll see when they get an engineer out though. (so, so, itching to take it apart myself...but not allowed).

Wasn't anything major, but was the talk of the office for the afternoon anyway! Day after we had a blackout (for all of 15 minutes - whole of Aberdeen City centre went out - 55000 buildings! Power company have no idea what happened - or why it came back on for that matter!). Got windows all round though, so no flashlights needed. Shame.

Technically a non-passive end-of-life characteristic. I hate when that happens!

"Note to self...no more M-80's in the CPU"!!!!

Both my mom and I had this happen with montiors. In my mom's case; it was her co-worker, Donna's, computer. They recently switched from "dummy terminals" to actual PCs and also bought a bunch of View-Sonic monitors.

Well, from the start; her monitor would occasionally make a weird buzzing sound and/or blink every once in a while. A few weeks later; they were working and all of a sudden, the screen went black, there was a popping sound, and the "magic" smoke started pouring out of the top of monitor. No work for her until the IT guys got a spare monitor from an unused workstation.

My four year old Secptar "Dragon Eye" monitor went out with an arcing sound inside plus a burning smell. Now I've got a new LCD monitor but I saved the circuit boards from the Sceptar for parts that I use for projects. There were burn marks under the Flyback when I pulled it off so I think it arced there.

I love it when things go boom! If your going to have a failure in a piece of electronic equipment, it better at least be entertaining!!

:huh: !

--neg

I get this effect by plugging 110V equipment into 240VAC sockets.

I did it once in 2002 and you could see scorch marks all over the metal everywhere, and yes it did go up with a tremendous bang and yellow smoke.

I did it again in 2005.. three weeks ago. Again, earsplitting bang and this time, a solid SHEET of smoke pouring from the vents, but at least this time, I didn't jump (everybody else around me did though!!)

KevinL,

How in the heck are you jamming 110V plugs in a 220V socket,
its my experience that they are to ALWAYS be a different plug type. :thinking:

I havent had any bangs,,, yet.
Did have a hard drive scream once, something must have been in the computer,
murdering it, cuz it was screaming bloody murder.
Probably one of those damn grimlins.

~John

I can join in on this one! One of the most exciting equipment failures I ever witnessed happend when I was doing IT work for the Pentagon, (pre-9/11 and pre Pentagon renovations by the way) now there was a place with a lot of computers hooked up to an ancient, fluctuating, really bad, power system.

We had all the usual failures you get when power is flakey (memory, power supplies, etc) but one day I'm getting melted transparency bits out of a printer (another long story) in this Colonel's office and he looks at me and says "Jeez, I just don't feel like working on this damn computer today" and he flips the power switch on. The computer lets out a loud, sharp, report (bang) like when you slap a ruler on a table. Then smoke starts pouring out the back, then the office circuit breaker pops and we're now in semi-darkness and I can see flames inside the computer.

So I yank the plug out of the wall. The Colonel's secretary (in an adjoining room) is already screaming for security because she thinks someone's been shot or set off a bomb. Meanwhile the Colonel has already bolted into the hall, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and comes back in and EMPTIES the big extinguisher onto his desk (no controled bursts here).

DPS Security arrives to find the whole block of offices blacked out, people milling around in confusion, the Colonel's secretary all but hiding under her desk, and the Colonel and myself standing in a smoky office where everything (including us) is covered in a light yellow/white powder from the extinguisher. Needless to say it took a bit of time to get everything straightened out

Funny storys Zelandeth and zespectre :laughing:

The only time I had a computer or a peripheral let out its supply of magic smoke was during "The Rattle of Seattle" - the big earthquake of 2001.
Water from the fishtank slopped out of the aquarium and into a monitor, causing it to emit a loud buzzing noise - like a pissed off hive of yellow jackets who's nest had just been struck with a baseball bat. The picture went black shortly thereafter - before I could kick the plug out of the wall.

jtice said:

KevinL,

How in the heck are you jamming 110V plugs in a 220V socket,
its my experience that they are to ALWAYS be a different plug type. :thinking:

I havent had any bangs,,, yet.
Did have a hard drive scream once, something must have been in the computer,
murdering it, cuz it was screaming bloody murder.
Probably one of those damn grimlins.

~John

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They provide us with IEC320 connectors, we supply our own localized power cords

One of my pet peeves is that the world should standardize on ONE ******* standard and stop doing things "different" just because of "nationalism" or other stupid IRRELEVANT sentiments like that. Choose 110 or 240, I don't care, just choose ONE!

Yeah, the POP's are fun.

Many, many, many years ago I was into CB radios. I made $22 more a month than food and rent, so I did everything on the cheap. My "base station" was a car CB hooked up to a home made power supply (transformer, diodes and a capacitor taped together) and a wire running up a piece of plastic pipe for an antenna. Yeah, real cheap.

It worked great until one day when the conditions were just wrong. I heard a POP followed by a Whizzing sound and lotsof smoke. The capacitor had been over loaded. It burst and threw a streamer of smoking oily paper over my shoulder. The whiz was the sound of the capacitor's metal case flying by.

The neat thing about pops is that it makes the trouble shooting easier. First look for scorch marks, then look for leaking capacitors and finally look for resistors and ICs that are cracked by the explosion as something vaporized inside.

zpectre, that was funny! :laughing:

I'm waiting for the monitor at home to do something like this. It started emitting a high pitched whistle a while back (promptly solved by a "pat" on the top ), then it refused to display black as, well... black... more like a dull dark brown. Now, it's gotten into the habit of increasing/decreasing brightness on its own... at least black is black now

Heh, my trinitron is changing the brightness on it's own, as well as turning angry blue at times. Maybe I'm overdriving it too hard?

Geeze guys - you bring back memories. As I've said before, I used to be an electronics tech. The company I worked for made AC power supplies - think phase inverters etc. And not little ones. One unit had a MULTI tap transformer (I think it was 56 taps) that could put out serious power. There was a triac on each tap, and the CPU would turn on one tap at a time to drive the waveform. "Interesting" things would happen if more than one triac turned on at a time - and originally, there were no fuses - one time we managed to set off the sprinkler system with that one

Then there was the 2 phase (not 220 center tapped - true 2 phase - aka quadrature) unit that used to have some teething problems - used to take out a set of TO-3 power darlingtons - used to blow a jet of hot plazma through the stainless TO-3 can - we had a gallon beaker just filled with those. BIG caps failing is also kinda fun (BIG meaning > 1000 mfd at 300+ volts)

Working in the development lab was fun - things would go BANG often enough that it didn't rate much more than a look up to make sure what was going on. You get to the point you can ID the type of component by the smell - we used to joke that we could tell the value by the smell (sniff, sniff - that's a 47k, 1/4 watt, metal film resistor)

Back in the early '90s I worked at a university doing Unix sysadmin stuff. Our group had several offices which opened out onto a common lab/work area. At that time we mostly had Sun, DEC and IBM machines.

One afternoon when several of us were out working in the common area one of our colleagues comes running out of his office shouting "The Sun is on fire! The Sun is on fire!" We all looked at him like he was crazy since everybody knows the sun is on fire... But indeed his 19" monochrome Sun3 monitor had burst into flames and was shooting sparks and smoke around the room.

It became sort of a running joke whenever there was a problem with a Sun workstation after that to shout "The Sun is on Fire!"

the world should standardize on ONE ******* standard and stop doing things "different"

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Europe and other places standardized on the 220 volt system because they could use less copper in buildings and less copper is cheaper and thinner wire is easier to snake through old walls when retrofitting ancient architecture

In the US, I guess we weren't worried about that and went with the more expensive, but safer 120 volt standard Anybody who tells you that it's not any safer hasn't ever been bit by both of them in a way that they could compare!

As far as burning computers, I've never had one go like this, but when I used to program for a Major Retail Pharmacy Chain, store controller PC's would routinely catch fire or send large amounts of smoke out the back due to the HUGE amoungs of dust and crap that would collect inside and then heat up to the point where it would catch fire. Sometimes it even ruined the PC too But we were happy to get rid of the oldest machines anyway. THey were still running some stores with IBM AT machines in like 1995 or 6

PC's would routinely catch fire or send large amounts of smoke out the back due to the HUGE amoungs of dust and crap that would collect inside and then heat up to the point where it would catch fire. Sometimes it even ruined the PC too

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Even though my old High School is new, we still used older equipment from other schools in our district.

One of my English teachers, Mrs. Hochgurtel, (We call her Mrs. H) keeps an old PC in her classroom while most teachers were provided with iBook Laptops. She is very concerned with what's on her computer though and keeps us far away from it.

I have no idea how old the computer is but it was probably made in 1998 (There are similar computers on campus) She does run her computer probably everyday and I've never seen her or any of the IT guys clean it out.

If you shine a light into the back of the powersupply fan or any of the air vents in the case, you'll notice about a 1/8" layer of dust all over the circuit boards and components. I'm surprised it still runs fine under that thick layer of crud. Too bad; there wasn't enough heat buildup in her computer to turn all our grades to "A" the year I attended her class :naughty:

Heh, next one I'm waiting for is my TV to go out like this.

It makes a soft "hissing" noise every now and then occasionally accompanied by intermittant arcing someplace right down the back, and when first turns on the picture behaves wierd almost looks like it's zooming in a little then out again randomly. Fine once it's warmed up, but picky for the first ten minutes or so.

I had a quick look inside a while ago, but of course - when I could actually see, it refused to act up like it usually did.

But hey, how often do you get a 34" widescreen TV for free? Like I'm gonna complain if it's a bit temperamental!

...and that the bottom corners of the screen are purple. It used to be in the bar of a local hotel, and someone attacked it with a magnet.

I got the colours 95% sorted with no more than a couple of harddrive magnets and a lot of trial and error! Can't justify tracking down a degaussing coil for the sake of two corners.

Other real quality bang I've seen recently, well, two actually.

1: Osram HQI-T 70W metal halide lamp. Ballast failed, shorted directly to the mains. What produced the main bang I am unsure, either the lamp or the ballast bursting into flames. I was seeing an afterimage of the shape of the arc tube in that lamp for about an hour. What a flash...

2: When me, totally idiotically, plugged a 12V 40W bulb (normal PS60 shape! Used a heap of these at college) into a 230V socket...and switched it on. That scared the living daylights out of me! It was four in the morning, the bulb in the bathroom had gone (and already made me jump in doing so!), and it was the first lamp I came to. Never even considered that it wasn't a normal 40W lamp as it appeared to be! *click* *BANG!* Cue me falling backwards out of the bathroom door, across the hallway then backwards though my bedroom door as well which is directly oppisite it, and landing on my back on the floor. Again, seeing an afterimage, of the bathroom in this case, which was for a split second illuminated a phenomenally bright blueish white. And for the second time in one day (these both happened on the same day!) I had to climb up the ladder and reset the darn circuit breaker.