The bright sparkling computer. Literally.

This has never happened to me before. In fact, it freaks me out a little bit.

So my SO has his own system and I have mine. Nothing strange there... we're both big on online things and PC gaming.They're in different rooms, and as a general rule, mine is always more stable and reliable than his, mainly because I enjoy tweaking and playign with it, and keeping it in good shape. He doesn't . Lately, his comptuer started to spontaneously shut itself off, or just not boot when asked to, so I started to fiddle with it, to see if I could make it better. I got rid of all malware, I took it out on the front porch, opened it and blew all the dust out using the cold setting on my hair dryer. (There was a thick, thick fur coat of grey dust on the CPU heatsink... :eek )

Then I took it up, plugged it back in, and it booted beautifully, ran smoothly, and all was grand, until I tried to go online and check my forums. That's when I discovered that I had forgotten to plug in the internet cable. No big deal, just down on the floor, grab the cable, put it in the computer, then we're good, right?

Wrong.

When the internet cable was about three inches from the back of the computer I heard a brief crackling sound, a few light sparks flew between the cable and the general vicinity of the PSU, and the computer died.

So. just how concerned should I be here. This has never happened to me before. The PSU of that computer has never done that before. And yes, we will be replacing it.

/Mimsy

 

Well, maybe when you blew it out, something got into the PSU ...

Parks mean electricity. Electricity = not good for mobo's .. lol Id be worried, but id hope its just the PSU that needs to be replaced ...

Probally not any help ..

 

Yeah, I'm very much hoping the spontaneous shut-downs and refusals to boot where indications of a dying PSU. I'd hate to be the one that killed my SO's computer...

/Mimsy

 

Most likly it was, but if you saw sparks, id be worried about anything thats sensitive to electricity (RAM, mobo, videocard, everything on a computer. lol)

And i just realized, this happend to me, my friends computer(in my computer reapair class) had the same prob, we replaced the PSU and it was fine.

But we didnt see any sparks lol.

 

Sparks are usually very bad, prepare for great expense...

 

Actually that sounds more like static electricity, which is just as bad. Static can blow almost anything out.