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Is Your Computer a Fire Hazard Waiting to Happen?
whoppers asks: "I'm sure we've all had our share of computer fans die, but what happens if your box is running while you're at work and several fans go out? My in-laws spare TigerPC AMD K62-400's power supply fan just went out about two hours ago, and the thing was blazing hot. A little poke to the blade, and it started up again, but shouldn't these things be made to stop if the fan stops for any reason? I'm starting to wonder if I should start leaving my box off when I'm away for a few hours. Since it's usually wide open, I don't see too much harm, but these cheap boxes that never get opened and cleaned have to be a hazard right? I can't afford a halon system in my office just yet. The only link I found related to this is here and should a few more people read this, here's the cached version. Does anyone have any thoughts or stories related to this?" The fact that this article appears on July 4th, when most Americans will be lighting fireworks is purely coincidental. That doesn't change the fact that the submittor raises a very good point.
A general rule of computers is: the older they get, the more dusty they are and dust bunnies and their denser cousins are highly flammable. Unless you can keep such machines clean, it' is probably safer to leave them off.
At least my bios has an option to automatically shut down if it's too hot.
I've had my fan die before. I could only tell because a sick stench began pouring out of the power supply about an hour after it had stopped. I immediatly turned it off, hit it, and it was fine after that. Dust is a major concern, but just general life will cause fans to begin to fail I think..
I think a solution might be hard to find, as most would require a temperature check. But there's probably a power difference when the fan stops, so it might be easy to just put in a fuse that would break the power supply if the fan stopped.
Of course, this would mean crashing the computer... but perhaps at the cost of saving your power supply/not having a fire it might be worth it..
I'm pretty certain that if you live in the US you won't be getting halon ever again. Due to it's nasty effects on the ozone layer, and the fact that you have to change/test the system once a year, halon was banned in about 1994. I think existing installations can get it, but no more new ones.
I'd go for carbon dioxide. It's cheaper, and much less likely to kill you. Or you could just turn off your machines when you leave, or monitor temperatures via s/w (don't most modern systems allow this?).
The only link I found related to this is here and should a few more people read this, here's the cached version.
A link to the cached version? Come on, this is Slashdot. What's the worst that could happen?
Yeah, old comps do get dusty inside. However, even if the fan quits, it's still not a problem. That bit of dust is flammible, but the metal aint. There's a fireproof box around those bunnies. ANd once it smolders some, it'll burn out most of the O2 (since the fans dont pump air cause of dust). There goes your "fire hazard"
The only thing is it's a boring news day.
the new ASUS motherboads have COP : CPU Overheating Protection, which switches off the machine when temp goes baloony.
And they're damd fine MoBo's too...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
You have nothing to worry about. They test for things like the fan stopping.
Eventually, when the heat gets too high, the power supply will either shut off or destroy itself.
The UL/CSA logo (if its genuine -- many cheap power supplies don't put on genuine labels) "guarantees" the power supply won't be dangerous to you. A flaming power supply would be, obviously.
Hope that allys your fears!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Maybe insurance companies should offer discounts to those of us with common sense enough to buy and configure motherboards that have a "Power Off on High Temperature" option in the BIOS. Haven't these motherboards been available for a long time?!
IF you dont let the dust build up by useing a vacuum onece a month or so, that drasticaly reduces the fire hazard. Of course, that doesnt mean your CPU fan wont fail, causing your CPU to burn right through your motherboard if you dont have overheat protection. ;-)
First smoke started coming out then (as we watched) a chip on the board ignited and started licking the plastic on the top of the case. We quickly pulled the power at this point and all was well.
It's interesting to note that the case side panel was off. We figure that if the case had been closed and there was no one at the office it wouldn't have been too much of an issue because it would've been contained. With the case side open, though, there were flammables in the vicinity that could've easily caught fire.
We now enforce a policy at the office to keep cases closed at all time.
At work they made a policy that ALL computers will be completely shut down at night after a monitor caught fire one night and burned out an office. Normal hardware shouldn't catch fire even when old/crusty but there's NO guarantees when the hardware is defective to start with.
Many modern motherboards power automatically power down when the CPU gets too hot, but that is just the CPU .. I think the greatest danger in modern computers is the power supply.
At work we recently had a problem where a paperclip fell inside the grilles in the power supply and shorted something out, causing power surges which trashed the rest of the computer, which wasn't nice.
But what was worse was the smell of the thing, it was really nasty. When capacitors burn due to having too much current put across them, they release all sorts of nasty toxins and also fibres which can stick to your clothes and make them smell for ages. Or even worse, stick to you skin and eyes and burn or blind you.
It's not just fires that are a hazard. Computers, and indeed most electronic devices, consist of many environmentally unhealthy and hazardous chemicals.
If I had a webcam, I'd post a link to a photo.
:)
I'm running Win 98 on a Cyrix M2 233MHz overclocked to 300MHz (came when I bought it).
I paid 2500 rupees for the processor, [ 1 US$ = 48 Rupees - do your math], and thus don't really care much about it.
Anyway, it's 40 degrees here in Delhi, I don't have an AC, and my CPU Fan's bust for *over a week*. And it's happened several times before.
What do I do? I take off the Hood, Put my ceiling fan to "Maximum" and keep on Photoshopping.
I'm a comp Sc student, and I know what I'm doing is insane.
but, Hey, As long as it's running, Who cares?
I have an old E-machines 466id that i just mess around with and it used to sound like a jet engine. It's AMAZING how much dirt those thing suck up. I'm not gonna go into detail but many problems could probably be avoided with proper mainenance. I've been in so many old dirty computers with spider webs and dead bugs, dirt and dust etc... just keeping it clean does a world of difference
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
oh yeah, in your face!
My machine (using a Tyan mobo) turns off when it heats up. I was actually confounded once when I tried to turn on my machine & it repeatedly turned off... the cpu cooling fan wasn't working.
I guess this functionality is built into a lot of "workstation" mobos.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not) but I think the Insurance company would be well within its rights to withhold payment if your house burned down as a result of your Linux Zealot teenagers overclocking habit :-)
Or maybe I'm just ignorant.
Seig Heil, AngryDot!
Plus if you have an AMD, you CPU which just proceed to melt down within a few seconds. One of my friends installed a new fan, but didn't plug it in properly and began smelling smoke within 10 seconds.
Fans are designed to move air - like any fluid motion, air will move along the path of least resistance. In the case of a case fan, where the case is left open, you're pulling air from a very small area right in front of the fan before exhausting it out the back. The heat generating components (CPUs, hard drives, video chips, etc) tend to be far enough away from these fans that you'll see almost 0 airflow over them.
I used to work for a major hard drive manufacturer, and would get complains from users who said our drives were running too hot. Quite often, they said "I even leave the case off, and it's still too hot!". Many times, just putting the case on solved their heat problems. By creating essentially a duct for the air to flow through, the fan was able to pull air from the front of the case, across the heat generating components, and then exhaust it out the back.
In the case of components with their own fans (CPUs, video chips), this is still important - while you've exhausted the hot air from around the component, without a properly functioning (read: case on) case cooling system, that hot air is never removed from the general area around the component, and just gets sucked back in on the intake side of the fan.
Just my $.02.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Even if the computer never over heats dust and oils and other icks can still kill a computer. I once was trying to fix a women's computer that had stopped. I opened up the case and the entire motherboard was covered in oil and fur. Turned out she let her cat sleep on it all the time and never cleaned it. All that direct exposure to animal bits just killed it. She had to buy a new computer.
I now religiously check the dust levels of my computers.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Most computers have circuitry to shut themselves off when they get too hot or a fan breaks down. P4s slow down drastically and generate less heat if they can't dissepate the heat. Newer Athlons and Athlon motherboards are supposed to do this too.
That said, IF a fire starts, it's contained in a metal box. Unless you've got a stack of papers directly behind the fan intakes or CD drice openings, the most damage you'll sustain is a fried computer and a few melted cables. There isn't really all that much to burn in there either, so the unlikely fire won't last long anyways.
Forget dust-bunnies in older equipment; new equipment can have it's fair share of problems as well. After a recent experience with a brand new d-link switch powersupply that caught fire, I realized that I may be a little too trustworthy of things I leave plugged in unattended even if they were designed to be run continuously.
It reminds me of a scene from an episode of The Simpsons:
Krusty: [touches clock] Ouch!
Marketeer: I forgot to tell you that clock gets extremely hot if you leave it plugged in.
Krusty: Um... That's okay. In fact, all of these products is fine. [motions to venerable death-traps]
A general rule of computers is: the older they get, the more dusty they are and dust bunnies and their denser cousins are highly flammable. Unless you can keep such machines clean, it's probably safer to leave them off.
*runs around work turning off every VAX and Alpha in the datacentre* No, it's OK! Slashdot told me to do it!
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
We had an employee bring back her loaner computer from home. I opened it up, and it must have been at least a 1/4 inch of dust coated inside. The fans were so clogged I'm surprised they were even running. As to actually cooling anything, forget it. There were even dead potato bugs in the computer. Bottom line: clean your computer now and then.
Most boards I have seen recently have a temperature warning setting in the BIOS that will automatically shut off the pc if it gets too hot, my board(KT7-RAID) also has a setting to not function if no fan is connected/if the fan dies. Of course this won't save you from all fire hazards, but it will lower the chances of anything happening.
Take your PC to your garage or a gas station and use an air compressor on it to clean it. It's simple and quick. I do it to my machines and their clean so it take a very long time to get it dirty.
For heat, simple, buy a steal ball-bearing fan which is about $20-30. Then place many smaller fans inside. If your crazy like me you can hook up 32" fans to the side of computer tower but it looks aweful.
Just like anything else give it a simple cleaning. I'm sure every now and then you take a simple duster to some of your stuff. It's very easy to buy a can of compressed air and then use the compressed air to clean out the dust bunnies. Once every 6 months or so and you should be fine. There are also cases that prevent this very thing, as it's too hot for me to be on my computer right now I'll just explain the case I have. I have a Lian Li that I bought from thinkgeek it has a filter system in the front. A filter is placed above two high speed fans (who's speed can be set) that catch dust and that is removeable and cleaneable. Dust still gets in the case but it's alot less and my cleaning time is really only annual if I want. Even if you don't have fans in your case electricity can attract those dust balls at the foot of your box very easily so it's not just a matter of fans or moving parts it's really just a matter of cleanliness.. Smoking, dustballs, dirt, etc can all cause problems.. but a regular dusting helps.
The power supply fan on this computer has been giving me trouble for sometime. Right now it sounds like a car engine, and I've tried everything possible to fix it(besides getting a new PS). When the thing does stop, i usually need to hit it a few times with a pen or something to get it going again. During that time, however, the power supply gets real hot real fast. This is one of the weaker PS's too, I can't imagine what sort of fire hazard the higher wattage power supplys will be when they start to go bad. Also, what about the computer illiterate? I know tons of friends that are using old computer made by packard bell, dell, etc.. and they don't even realize when their fans go out. This could end up being a VERY serious problem.
We used to play jokes on new guys at work by giving him a "dead" motherboard to fix / rma, what we would do is stick in the L2 cache sram chips backwards; they would get unholy hot and explode like gunshots. Dumb i know but good for a laugh. Anyone remember those old ASUS mobos that would catch on fire if you plugged in the wrong type of serial cable?
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They are screaming:"Computer nerd started fire and takes down entire block of houses!"
I've always questioned this myself since I always leave my computers running and the athlons keep getting so hot. My parents used to hate it when I left home and left the computers running, but now I've got my own place it's much bigger an issue than before. I do like the fact that most of my Macs hardly use their fans, or don't have fans at all. This keeps me a little less paranoid when I'm not at home. It's also a bit of a problem that in my place (small town in The Netherland) does not have broadband access and I have no possibility at all to check up on my systems when I'm away. Anybody got a few hints fow me?
--- In a world without fences, who needs Gates.
I have an IBM Thinkpad A20P. Great machine, but one day I was typing on it and felt unbelievable amounts of heat coming off the top of the keyboard. Just as I was remarking to my coworkers about it, the machine halted to a black (no, not a blue screen; I can't remember if I was booted into Linux or Win2K at the time). Anyways, I power-cycled, and the BIOS halted again with a "Fan Failure" error. Aha. So I whistled it over to the service depot (under warranty) and they found that a long human hair had been sucked into the air intake and wrapped itself around the fan, halting it.
Thank you IBM, for building systems that watch for this kind of thing. One step friendlier could have been a user warning (through a BIOS video overlay) that said "HIGH TEMPERATURE ALARM - POWERING DOWN IN 10 SECONDS" or something, to allow a user (if present) to save some of their work. Anyways, at least it didn't keep running and cook my CPU, hard disk, and everything else they pack into such a small space on these notebooks.
I used to work in an engineering shop. The place was dirty and dusty as hell which caused computer equipment in the engineering office (read "big shack in main building") to become dirty and dusty as hell. One day something was giving off a burning plastic smell...
Phil: What's that burning plastic smell?
Fred: It's your monitor, it's on fire.
Phil's monitor had caught fire. Of course the monitor was destroyed but people were around to put it out and keep anything really bad from happening.
Two months later...
Phil: What's that burning plastic smell?
Fred: Your monitor is on fire again.
Phil's replacement monitor had caught fire. That was the last computer monitor fire they had that I know of. It didn't stop Phil from leaving his monitor on every night when he went home from work.
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I've had a computer power supply fail on me a few years ago. The thing started to smoke and burn, and would probably have burnt the flat if I wasn't there to stop it at the time.
.. nothing happened in 249 days uptime .. why would it happen now ..
I've been extremely careful since then when leaving computers unattended. Specialy when it comes to do-it-yourself boxes with cheap power supply.
The critical point here is the internet gateway / file server at my house. Always a bit worried to leave it unattended for several days. After all
In any case, I just make sure I open the box and clean it regularly, and it's stored far enough (hopefully) of any other inflamable pieces.
I too had my share of dead fans in the past 2 months. 3 fans (out of 4) died on my 3 years old computer: PSU fan and both CPU fans (dual setup). Only the front fan survived (as of yet).
The thing is, even without sensors, I still have caught the failing PSU fan. When it stopped, the PSU got hotter (as what happened to the poster in-laws), but after reaching a certain temp it just shutdown itself. And I couldn't get the computer to restart immediately after (before knowing what was causing the trouble), since the temperature was still too hot for the PSU to allow power to flow. I'm talking about a cheap 250W DTK ATX power supply from 3 years ago. After letting it rest a little, I retried, and while booting it shutdown again. The third time I tried to access the something on the back, and then noticed that no airflow was going out of the PSU.
For the 2 CPU fans, the motherboard RPM sensors saved both my CPUs (and the fact that I was watching them at the right time).
On a modern computer (where fans can and will die given enough time), a plethora of programs can be run in the background to check the RPM of fans and the different temperatures in the system. Just make it alert the user (or shutdown if no action is taken in x time) in case of one parameter going outside it's normal range. Check overclocking sites for info on that, since they usually tend to have more problems with that then plain desktop users.
Also, the MTBF for cheap DC fans is usually around 20000 hours. That means a bit less than 2 hours and a half. Either replace them beofre, check them cautiously before that mark, or get some higher quality fans (which will tend to be quieter, too).
Another solution is to go with watercooling (but then, if there's a spill AND you're fluid is conductive, the fire hazard is still present). You've only got a pump and a fan (for the heat exchanger) which can die, rather than 3+ fans in a typical computer case (yea, I know, SPOF, but they're more robust).
I once had a computer at work that wouldn't boot up, and I couldn't tell if the power was on or not (sometimes we don't hook up the front panel LEDs if we are busy). I did what all of us do, I reached around and felt for air coming out of the power supply. Painful mistake. The fan had quit and that thing was hot enough to burn me instantly, which means it was probably near 100C. One plus is that the case itself acts like a heat sink in a case like this.
:) (Slashdot editors excepted)
My cluster at home is powered by a stack of bare power supplies, I always worry if one of their fans go out, there will be less heat sink in the form of a case that normal supplies have.
Other adventures at work involve cracked IEC connectors that short out when you pull on the plug on the power supply side, and monitors with fire and sparks (monitors are much more likely to arc over because of higher voltages internally than computer power supplies).
Don't view it as a fire hazard, view it as adventure! After all, how often does a geek's house burn down?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
My friend has an old IBM PS/1 that's a 486 with a Pentium Overdrive chip that he uses as a print server. While he's been away, I've had to fix the machine. It was scorching hot to the touch and I thought the power supply was going bad.
After considerable effort, I removed the power supply with the intention of replacing it with another AT one that I found. Unfortunately, the power supply had extra proprietary connectors and the replacement one didn't, so I was left to figure how to fix the original one.
I took a closer look and I saw nine (9) years (!) worth of dust clogging the power supply fan, thus blocking its motion. Ignoring printed warnings as "Caution! Shock Hazard" and "Warning: No User Serviceable parts inside", I carefully opened the power supply and removed the fan. Fortunately, the fan had a plaster connector for easy plugging/unplugging (as opposed to being soldered directly to the board).
So I removed the fan with easy and scraped (yes, SCRAPED!) the crap off of it and wiped it down. Then I applied WD-40 to the bearings to get the fan blade with more ease. I had to help the WD-40 spread by using a screwdriver to turn the fan both directions. Finally, after 20 minutes of effort, the fan blade was turning reasonably well with I'd tap it, so I put it back in, reconnected it, and reassembled the power supply.
Once the computer was put back together, I turned it on and felt for heat. Not alot. For the first time in a while, there was ventilation coming from the back of the power supply and the system was running much cooler than before.
So, let this be a lesson to you. Make sure you regularly (yearly?) clean your fans off, removing the dust before it cakes on. Make sure that you do this to any older PCs you have or are about to obtain.
Otherwise, your system will run dangerously hot and only bad things can come of that.
Twice I have had a (rather large) UPS explode. When a UPS goes, it goes spectacularly. Really explodes. Smoke, fire, huge BANG. Talk about dangerous. We actually had one UPS disintegrate into pieces... luckly nobody was close at the time.
Monitors can also be pretty spectacular. Where I live we get 150 to 200 inches of rain a year... needless to say, it's frequently damp. I've had monitors, when turned on, explode (luckly never the screen though, only the power supply). We tend to leave all our equipment on, and baking, to avoid this - but still we go through a monitor a year (we are starting to replace them with LCD, we'll see how those stand up to the elements).
But the worst were definatly the UPS - especially since they are near your feet - they can be very dangerous indeed.
We have this kid that comes in to our computer shop all the time, He calls himself Tweak Monkey and he is alway installing a new mod of some sort. The day after his installed a fan switch mod that had 4 3 position switches that turned his fans of and on in too many combinations to be usefull, he came in all excited and said he almost burnt his house down. He said he his alarm woke him up early in the morning. He tried to shut it off but it would not go off. When he got out of bed he realised his fire alarm was going off and smoke was poring out of his computer.
My computer has three fans, i installed some extra since the one fan on the power supply died and my computer started to become unstable. I started to get Compile errors, i destroyed half of my Memory or so memtest86 told me. machine temperature got over 50 degrees in the box, the cpu was at 70 degrees celsius.
:)
I bought two extra fans and a new power supply the machine is running like a charm ever since
You wont see three fans die at once, better save then sorry.
How come nobody has made a case with an air filter on it so you only have to brush off the filter every month instead of taking a can of air to the box?
I don't see a great fire hazard here. Sure, dust bunnies are flammable, but it would take an extremely hot processor to ignite them, and even then it would be more of a quick flame than a real fire. I just can't see the electronics or the case catching fire.
Bottom line: You might lose your PC, but it will be a very quick and self-contained fire. And considering how extremely unlikely it is to happen, I'd say don't worry.
It just ocurred to me that water cooling might double as a great fire-extinguisher... since a fire in the case would probably sever the hoses. Then again, if you're water cooling, your processor will never get that hot... never mind.
This is the exact reason why I make house-calls to my parent's house to clean their computers out. A shop vac and can of compressed air can get the job done rather quickly. I also built their computers in Lian-Li cases that have two intake fans that pull through some filters that filter out the larger stuff, although I must note that air filters are not recommended unless they're cleaned regularly, hence my regular visits (which you should visit your parents regularly anyway, damit).
However the article notes simple fan failure. This is why I like redundancy. Two intake fans and an exaust fan ensure that airflow in the body of the case doesn't simply quit, and the power supplies have one intake and one exaust fan as well. If any of them die, I'll catch it soon enough, and any one failure isn't a big problem. The computers don't make much noise, either, despite the fans. I also have the computers set up so they stop if the CPU fan dies. I think some BIOSs do that, but I know there are userland programs for Windows that achieve this.
Quite frankly, I don't know how people can get by without regular maintence/inspection like this. Many normal consumers who buy their computers from Dell or Gateway, I feel, have living, wurring Athlon XP timebombs.
Seeing as how you have an AMD I'm thinking your motherboard doesn't have buil-in protection against overheating. I'm not too familiar with hardware but isn't the chip the only thing that gets really hot? If so when the fan goes off either your chip should slow by its self or the motherboard should slow it down for you, in either case your chip shouldn't overheat.
As to the dust being a fire hazard and assuming it is still a risk at normal operating temperatures (which your box should not exceed by much for the previously stated reason), the only real solution would be to clean it out.
I stole this Sig
- All computer power supplies have temperature sensors. These are
bona fide safety devices that shut the supply down when it overheats -
regardless of cause. Some of them permanently disable the supply (under
the assumption that once they're triggered, enough damage has been done to
make the supply unsafe for use). Others disable the supply until it is
unplugged and the obstruction is cleared. I have seen dozens of
power supply fans fail on very old, dusty PCs, and not a single one has
caused any sort of smoke or fire.
- Fire suppression systems do not respond to smoke. According to
the current national fire code, the presence of smoke shall not be used to
trigger fire alarms - only local smoke detectors. Why? The cause is
simple: the ratio of burnt toast to uncontrolled fires is about 200:1. The
resultant false alarms would overwhelm fire departments and cause a public
safety nightmare.
- Computer fires almost never leave the case. Nothing inside a
computer is particularly flammable. The threat of dust fires is overrated
- dust is not sufficiently dense to ignite anything else, and when ignited
it burns up within seconds. Computers do not contain much wood, paper, or
any other inflammable substance. Face it folks - metal doesn't burn, and
plastic doesn't do much besides smolder.
Now let's take a look at some actual computer fires that I have witnessed:- My younger brother, a developmentally disabled individual, plugged in a
PCI card backwards and the motherboard burned up. Several members of the
chipset were burned beyond recognition. No water or other measures were
needed to put the fire out; it fizzled on its own within seconds.
- I have seen several laptops overheat because of poor cooling designs
(especially Dells). Typically this means that flames leap out of the
keyboard and melt the LCD. Again, this fire is contained, and unless the
laptop is being operated in a hazardous area, nothing happens.
- One of my "hax0r wannabe" co-workers thought he understood
electrical engineering, and caused a brick transformer to catch fire
because he had wired the + and - sides of the output together to "double
the power." The transformer was destroyed, but since almost all power
strips are flame retardant, nothing else caught on fire.
The truth of the matter is that it is extremely difficult to start a destructive fire by accident. 90% of home fires in the country are caused by stupidity such as kitchen incidents and smoking in bed. There is no reason to suspect that your computer is any more of a hazard than leaving your VCR plugged in all the time.In the past three years I have had my power supply fans fail twice. The first time it happened it actually started a fire while I was away from home. Since metal doesn't burn that good the damage was kept mostly to the case and power supply unit. The other occurence was a fan failure in the power supply again, but this time I caught it before much damage was done.
While I still leave my computers on 24/7 to this day, I have invested in power supplies with fan headers (Enermax). In the even of a fan failure in the power supply my computer is set to shutdown. As an extra prevention I air intake filters in my case to protect against dust which can lead to fans seizing.
As a side note, water cooling has become a very reliable way of cooling computers. Not only has it be shown to be quiter but in most cases requires less maintaince. I seem to be replacing case cans every year or so. Fans seem to get noiser with age. Anyways, thats my canadian beef about the matter.
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
Thats one thing that i like about the Intel Pentium III and IV processors. If the CPU fan were to die on the PIII chip, the processor would simply halt all processing if the chip temp. got to high. In the Pentium IV processors, if the fan dies, the CPU will actually down clock itself until it reaches a safe temp. to keep running at. Although I dont know what you could do if the PS fan were to die; i wonder if you could rig something up similar to the fail safe in the P3 chip that would simply shut the power off if the temp. got to high. In any case, the one thing that i did that helps keep all those dust bunnies out of my case was to install washable filters on all the fan spots. That makes it a hell of a lot easier to clean, plus i dont need to clean out the inside of the case anywhere near as much anymore.
Consider what happens if only the cpu fan stops (thay are often simpler fans = more prone to failure)
you have a fire inside you case and the case fan is stil working, giving us lots of fresh O2.
most cases have plastic parts that burn quit well.
you could easly start a cascade the will end up in a nice office fire.
(water cooling shuld help thogh..:)
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
I should have tacked onto my other post.
You can repair some older power supply and CPU fans that won't turn anymore by removing the sticker on the backside of the fan (the non-moving part). Get some thin grease or silicone spray and squirt it into the hole. Clean off the area and put some tape over it. Now, turn the fan by hand for a few minutes to get it loose and you're all set.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Instead of chasing windmills, let's have a poll on this.
Spontaneous computer combustion:
( ) Seen it
( ) Heard of it
( ) Heard of someone who heard of someone who...
( ) Nope
My point is, is this really an issue to worry about?
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
I had gotten back from vacation, (when I worked in a bookstore), when one of the other employees informed me that a computer was getting hot. Sure enough, the power supply fan had died. It had been running that way for at least a week. Quite possibly it could have started a fire, on a flammable wooden counter, with thousands of flammable books around.
Last year I had a similar experience with my power supply.
I'd just finished off a huge term paper, hit the lights and crawled into bed. 45 seconds later, I hear a sound -- like someone hurling golfballs at the back of my desk. (Being scared out of my wits) I bolted up to see what was happening, and was treated to a very nice light show as my power supply exploded, blew all of its capacitors, and burst into flames.
I told this story to peole for bauot 6 months before someone was finally able to tell me what happened.
I'd been having problems with the fan in the power supply (loud... very loud... and then very very quiet). It had chosen that day to just die outright. With no fan running to cool the capacitors inside, they overheated and blew up. The larger ones starting a chain reaction in the smaller ones.
Looked real cool at the time. But scared the bejeebers out of me.
---
Moral: Don't by the cheap power supply, spring for one that is quality and has proper bearings on the fan such that it won't die in the middle of the night.
Had there been anything aside from old coffee cups, tea bags, and kraft singles living inside my case, I would have been calling the fire dep't.
- Grib
They had build an AMD Duron 800 system with a cheap lightweight 250W PSU. One year later, it started pumping out black smoke and hissing. We replaced the PSU with a 350W, and it works now - and crashes less often.
Somebody mod this asshole down please. :-)
What if the power supply fan dies, and the power supply itself overheats and dies? Thats a bitchen place to have a fire, as you have a nice high voltage (120ac) high current enviroment to feed it. Thats why i own a portable air compressor (one of those 150$ jobs). Its great for showing up at the client's site and blowing out all their machines.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
My motherboard (kt7) shuts down the computer if it gets too hot. I assumed this was a common feature on *most* new motherboards.
Cruise TT
Apple's rack-mount XServe has redundant power supplies, redundant cooling fans, and redundant hard drives. While this is not the low cost PC compatible that you're probably looking for, it is an option to consider if keeping a system up and running is important to you. As far as I know, Apple's XServe can even notify you through email if and when a component fails or will potentially fail. You can even keep tabs on the RPM's of the cooling fans if that is a concern for you.
The illustrated guide to breaking your computer shows you the correct and incorrect way to light your computer on fire.
"I have no choice but to compare Slashdot Moderation to the systematic genocide of the Jewish community in 1930's Germany. "
I may not be jewish , but i am a human. And i conside that statment an insure to us all.
If a critical fan dies, the unit its supposed to be cooling usually fails and shuts down the system. Im a PC tech, i see it all the time..especially from Tyan motherboard CPU fan plugs failing.
If you are worried about dust bunnies bursting into flames, open the case and blow it out.
adventure-today.com
Invest in a good power supply.
Well maybe if the europeans wheren't a bunch of anti-semetic racists there wouldn't have been a need for the creation of Israel in the first place...
The eurotrash should just be happy America is taking all the blame for the problems 20th century european emperialism has left as a legacy for the rest of the world...
Don't try and play innocent now after all you've done for the last 500 years or so...
If the motherboard supports temperature and fan monitoring (and the power supply and processor fan supply a fan clock to the monitoring circuit) you can install an utility like MBM (Windows) or lm_sensors (linux) together with a shutdown utility like "ShutDown NOW!" (http://www.dworld.de according to my link list, but the site seems to be down).
If a temperature, voltage or fan speed exceeds the limit set by you or falls below it, the system is shut down after a warning.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Which a great deal of them aren't. With most of the computers I've owned, if I took the side panel of the case off, the CPU ran a full 8-10 degrees C cooler than with the case fully closed. This is primarily because the poor case cooling meant that the air inside the case was 10 C or so hotter than room temperature, so removing the side panel let the CPU fan suck in cooler outside air to blow on the heatsink (since the CPU fan is at 90 degrees to the motherboard, it's good at sucking air directly from outside if the side panel of the case is off).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've read through many of the postings here and something is now apparent:
You guys buy crap.
That's why you have failures. That's why you have to replace fans every year. You buy crap.
Either spend some real money and buy quality components are just stick with a Mac.
You're getting what you deserve.
---" Reposting again. Managed to get up to 50 Karma, posted ONE pro-Troll message, and got mod-bombed. This diatribe was truer than I thought. CLiT, I shall be honored if you accept me as a member!"
Yeah, if you post something that doesn't get approved with the group-think of the Nazi -Moderators, you're modded to hell and back. I posted an article about being for the Spammer in the recent article and explaining why I dontt want congress involved. I was on topic and everything else, but some fuck-wad Thought I was a troll. Guess he doesn't have the mental capicity to understand other viewpoints. Still, Ringbarer, if you think you got mod-bombed, talk to "negativekarmanow tm" about his post.
This moderation evidently shows that MANY people wanted to see it, however, the thread was being bitch-slapped by moderators applying -1 to every article continously. Here's the totals...
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=377, Flamebait=4, Troll=27, Redundant=5, Insightful=98, Interesting=205, Informative=49, Funny=12, Overrated=11, Underrated=63, Total=851to every article continously. Here's the totals...
Before modding me down, if this isn't news, WHY WOULD K5 treat this as a story??? Perhaps editors, you shouldn't CENSOR people. You're who we look up to..
is that there is very little risk.
1. If the fan stops, airflow basically stops. Air contains oxygen, which is required for oxidation (!). There isn't very much air in a typical case.
2. Fire requires fuel. If you have two ounces of dust and three ounces of flame resistant insulation in your case you don't have much of a fuel source. You aren't going to reach temperatures to cause a metal fire. Fiberglass doesn't burn.
3. The third element of fire is heat. Paper burns at 451 degrees F. The burning point of your draperies is probably higher. Your CPU will fail, and at least temporarily stop generating heat, well below that temperature. I expect a power supply would as well.
So, the bottom line is that you could probably contrive a set of circumstances that would produce a "PC fire," but the odds of one happening spontaneously are virtually nil. Perhaps on a similar scale with the odds of your alarm clock/radio shorting out and catching your nightstand on fire. Undeniably possible, but undeniably remote.
-Peter
Why, yes they are!
Thanks for asking!
dmarien
...please enqueue under here !
Shutting down on overheating/fan failure is a BIOS option on most modern PCs.
Back in college I had an old 286 I kept around for stuff and it ran most all of the time. One day I smelled something burning. Houseful of smokers at the time and I was unable to track it down. Smell went away, so I figured someone dropped a smoke on the carpet or something. The next day I smelled it again, but it was even stronger and that's when I flipped out and began looking at every appliance in the house. that was when I found out the monitor to the 286 was blank and the box wouldn't reboot. Went under the desk and that's when I found it. Soot at back of the case around the fan outlet. Took it apart and discovered a thick layer of soot covering everything in the case. Motherboard was burnt all around the videocard, case was scorched badly above the slot, and half of its isa slot was just a big hole through the motherboard.
Lucky for me, it was one of those old fashioned steel 286 cases that were thick enough to make a ship hull out of. The stuff inside the case was burned up bad. Turns out the video card shifted in its slot after I tripped over the video cable or something, and something must have gotten hot.
If it had been a plastic case, that thing would have burned like a house on fire.
Oh, and you Americans haven't done anything bad in the last 500 years...
Besides, 500 years is a long time. Did you know they didn't even have telephones back then, for example? No, of course you didn't.
You should be looking at the last, say, 50 years. It sure starts well with using the atomic bomb on cities practically without warning...
Anyway, USA is the largest funder and supplier of arms to terrorists. Didn't they back the Taliban in order to quickly get rid of the previous Afghan government, no matter the consequences...
Food for thought.
One of the big no-no's were the daisy chained power strips. These could be deadly since most walls sockets cannot handle the load. The power strips themselves may work, but the wiring in the walls could fail.
The PPC runs much cooler than its x86 cousins. Mac cases also tend to be built with convection cooling in mind with vents on back and sides unlike most solid metal cases sold for use as x86 machines. The inside of my G3 didn't start running at all warm until I installed a VooDoo5/5500 card (that thing pumps out some heat).
I'm not looking to start a war here, but this is simply just one aspect of the Mac that most people seem to like: the cases. Many articles and revires pine over the Mac's enclosures, wishing some generic case vendor would attempt something like that for the modders on the x86 side.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I had a motherboard burn out a few weeks ago, but all the fans were fully operational. The problem was that I have an air filter in front of one of the fans and it was completely clogged with dust and dirt. One of the power transistors right by the CPU burned. And I mean *burned*. My girlfriend came home to a smoke filled room and the entire house smelled of burning semi-conductor. Those of you with electronic hobbies probably know that smell all too well. I managed to find a sub-par replacement for it. It was a super socket7 AT form factor, and my new board just doesn't compare in speed and performance. So take care of those cases and fans.
My whole father's house was burned because of my "network". The power socket was overloaded I think, then once I added the OpenBSD box...chuuuggggggg....you could hear the socket burn. I went to get something to remove the wire from the socket. By that time fire has cought up to the curtain. Thankfully I evaccuated all my family out. My room was completely burned, our house was ruined by smoke and water from the fire department. Lessons to learn from this story: Stay away from OpenBSD! It is just bad luck.
Mac OS X will terminate on an overheat signal. On the new XServe, the machine can be configured to send an alarm or shut down upon fan failure.
But I guess you get what you pay for, since Macs can be significantly more expensive.
How easy would it be to integrate that sort of thing into all the flavors of Windows or into Linux?
Hmmm around the same time america was dropping the bomb let's see in europe 6 million jews where getting exterminated...gee that's just great.
If you're worried about your computer catching on fire, just get water cooling. That way the computer itself is like a little fire truck if one of the hoses rupture from the heat!
Why do you think the zionist movement started?
Here's a hint: it wasn't becuase Europe was making the jews feel welcome...
checkout 2cooltek.com, they have a filter for a 120mm fan which I had on my case for a long time. Problem was it got clogged with dust in about a week. I got sick and tired of cleaning it weekly, so I just left it off and blow out the dust in my case every 6 months or so...
america is the worst example of imperialism
If you're serious you are just as sad as the brainwashed jihadis in saudi arabia...
Actually england, france, spain...
Those are the worst examples of imperialism.
Shit the whole reason the 4th of July is a holiday is becuase the americans had to kick your imperialist asses out of the country...
Need some examples? Fine. TrustE refused to yank Microsoft's certification after several well-publicized privacy and security flaps. SquareTrade has continued to support many fraudulent eBay sellers, even after arrest warrants were issued. The BBB does nothing to resolve consumer complaints; if the dues-paying business "answers" a complaint, they will cease to publicize it. All of these for-profit companies are thriving, despite the fact that they do not look out for the consumer's best interest. Marketing trumps efficacy - and that's how it's always been. Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.
I don't have to worry about fans going out on my iMac DV, since I don't HAVE any fans. The G3 processor only runs about 120 degrees F, last time I checked, and the monitor goes to sleep in my absence. Not many ways for dust to get in, either.
My brother got a new case and motherboard for his PC recently, and with it's multiple fans, it's the most noisy computer I've ever heard. I've heard stand alone air filters that were quieter. It would drive me nuts if I had to put up with it all the time. Nearly the only unwanted sound coming from my iMac is a low hum from the hard drive.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
I've seen Watchdog cards used for this purpose. When the temp rises above X deg. it performs an orderly shutdown. I believe there are IBM desktops and servers that have this feature built in.
Perhaps more applicable in this case is that these boards also offer inputs for fan speed sensing when used with an appropriate fan (generally the ones with 3 wires and a small tach sensor built in). Unfortunately, I have yet to see a power supply that comes with such a fan and provides the sensor feedback to go back to the motherboard. (I'm not saying they don't make them, just in my limited experience I haven't seen any.) If you could find the right size fan with the speed sensor you should be able to install it in the power supply and route it to the MB though. If there was enough demand voiced I expect the sensor would start showing up, but manufacturers would have to know that some people we basing case purchases on this feature.
This doesn't help older systems like this Tiger system much, but the issue has been addressed. There also have been available for quite some time temperature sensors that you installed in the case and they would sound an alarm when a critical temperature was reached. Several years ago I had a programmer build some watchdog timers for some critical systems with PIC chips and we decided to add a Dallas temperature sensor. By tapping on the reset button a few times you could get it to beep the internal case temperature back to you.(Obviously, you didn't reset the computer - the watchdog took over the MB reset input so it could reboot the system if it detected a failure. A long press of the reset could still reset the system through the PIC chip.)
This is reasonably timely for me, just yesterday I started getting alarms that my CPU fan was erratically slowing down. So far CPU temp looks good, but I'm going to have to replace the fan (if I can find an available fan of the right size with a speed sensor) or the whole heat sink assembly. I do have another 12 volt fan with the right hole pattern, but it lacks the speed sensor and is much thicker. Maybe I could find some really long metal screws and stack both fans above the heat sink, count on the new one to cool the CPU, but the old one to help and to continue to monitor the RPM and airflow. Any thoughts?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I had a power supply fan die and then of course it made the power supply to over heat. It was at night and all I saw was sparks from the back of the computer. Guess I was just a little close to having the house start on fire from it.
ok true believers .. given that a number of us .. "the submitter .. think .. in .. at best, it'll be a short burst and likely
have been coding/hacking/whathaveyou while the
slashdot crew were still picking their noses
(well, while they were too young to know any
better and doing it), how many of you have had
your houses burn down from an overheated machine?
what, is dust a Brand New Thing?
raises a good point," blah blah blah
about it, slashfool - in an open case, there is
very little buildup of flammable material
a closed case where the fan has failed, there is
very little oxygen left to sustain the burning of
dust
not all of the available fuel would be consumed.
I guess uneducated speculation is pretty much the
bread-and-butter of the slashdot staff.
no big surprise there - we've been seeing that
for years.
One of my fondest memories was cracking open a Macintosh Plus (with the 'security' Torx screws) and sautering the board. You see, my particular fanless Macintosh had a habit of flatlining - literally, because the heat would melt the sauter. The only way to correct it was to open the Mac and sauter some connections on the board to get the video back. Even with a fan on top of the Mac, it would still lose video.
IIRC, didn't the fanless iMacs have a problem with heat if you covered the vents? People tend to do that...
Ahh..debunking fire safety now. *backs away slowly*
I am curious what is the point of Titanium bearings?
Bearings generally stop because of grease failure or contamination. There is rarely spalling of the raceways or rolling elements.
PS I work for one of those 3 lettered companies.
Leaving the cover off of a machine can actually make it run hotter, not cooler. When the cover is on the machine, it provides a path for airflow to move air over the processor and remove the heat.
I used to leave my machines on 24/7, but found that this accounted for the majority of my electric bill, not to mention sometimes needing AC, and having the disks wear out earlier. Just a thought.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I think the author of this article is quite pessimistic. As said by others, there are many ways to protect your CPU, power supply, etc from overheating.
Another thing: My computer, which is a little over one year old now, has recently had some of the problems addressed in this article:
"If the failure isn't catastrophic, the fan starts to moan, signalling that dust or other particles are in the moving parts of the fan. This can be very annoying but often, after it has run for a while, the moaning stops and everything's OK, right?"
My fan started to make weird noises a few months ago, but I didn't gave much attention to it, because the sound stopped after a few minutes.
Last week, the "moaning" kept going on, and didn't stop after a few minutes. My brother and I cleaned out every part of the computer, including the power supply fan. I was stunned by the amount of dust that came out of it. After we were done, the noise was gone.
I also have an old P2-266 which is about 4 years old now. I'm using it as a server now, and it's (of course) on 24/7. Now, I never had any problems fan or heat related with that computer. I never really cleaned the inside, removed dust from the fans or whatsoever. Of course this doesn't prove anything statisticly, but my newer computer got this problem, and my older one didn't.
I don't think you should turn off your computer just because it can overheat. There's enough protection to prevent it. I mean, how else am I going to make it to the top with folding@home?
An earlier case was with an IBM workstation, only 386 in architecture, a very small hdd, ie. very cool, nothing very hot in there. A number of these were used as cash register machines until one day.
Basically, pc's gather dust, like noted. If you place it into a tight enough place, they can gather a lot of dust. The end result was a sudden KABOOM type sound, scaring off a lot of customers, obviously. It was just luck that the fire could be put out quickly enough.
Now, you figure out what happens when you have a high end AMD CPU there. Similar cases have been seen and witnessed by yours truly on several P2 and P3 systems from IBM and HP. And only few companies want to buy the service of having their workstations air pressure cleaned regularly.
So yes, this threat is very real and companies should put the amount of five minutes into checking what's under the hood of workstations, especially in tough/tight places, such as cash registers often are in. Even once every three years is enough often, though once or twice a year isn't certainly a bad habit.
Some switches, especially some 3COM Superstack models seem to like dust as well, and have the same risk. If there's something that can get hot, this is just a matter of time.
A low class compressed air pump doesn't cost that much from a local hardware store. My opinion: worthy investment.
My PS fan on my older P200 tower died when I was away and eventually the surge protectors breaker tripped. Scary thought. I have three machines at the house that currently run 24/7. After that and a few more instances of fan failure, I now actually check the fans with my hand at least once daily. My main Samba server has had two fan failures in the last two years. One I noticed because I could not telnet in anymore. The second I felt the heat when I was reaching around to check the fan. The server has only been down 3 times in two years and two of them were because of the damn PS fan. A word of advice.. If the fan starts to make noise or you notice it running slower, replace it ASAP!
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
...is proportional to the mass of the bunnies...not much.
Some while ago, my 14k4 modem (half a year old) catched fire while sitting on my desk doing nothing more than being switched on.
There was no smell; I just saw something in the corner of my eyes blinking. In fact it was a flame burning under the ventilation holes of the device. It was really luck I was there and could blow it out.
After some investigation I found that it had been a capacitor catching fire inside. I don't know what would have happened if I had been in the bath or downstairs to talk to my family for half an hour...
(The modem was sitting on a wooden desk and its plastic case seemed to quite like the heat.)
I replaced the capacitor and it is still serving me well. But I really became cautious with electronic equipment. Sometimes, you really need something to happen or somebody tell you about things like this before you even think of some nice little equipment possibly going "boom" and burning down your house.
Sad, but true. Please take care out there.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Here in Europe we don't have problems with computers catching on fire. We tend to keep our machines cleaner than most places (America and Canada are especially bad about cleaning computers). And since our houses are generally cleaner as well, less dust makes its way into the cases.
If you didn't notice until the smell came out, how do you know it stopped an *hour* before?
Most systems today will check the CPU fan, but none check the power supply fan. As long as the thing produces power, who cares, right? The power supply produces a surprising amount of heat. I have had several power supplies fans go out on me as well. I have 11 computers in my room in varying stages of age, from a 486 running my FreeBSD firewall, to Pentium 133, to an Athlon 1800. Dust accumulates like a mofo, so after almost starting a fire with a dead power supply fan (it must have been running for a couple of days without a fan, because it burnt my fingers when I picked up the case), I regularly maintain all my boxes like a lab technician. I dust them, check the fans, including the cpu and video card fans, etc. It's the only way to go, until the motherboard includes diagnostics for every component of the computer.
I have come across this nifty little program called Motherboard Monitor 5 which lets you do all kinds of things. You can have it run a program to make it shut down your computer n such or send a SMS message to your cellphone, theres only one thing i hate about it.... windows only :/
My comment is a bit off topic: last week, i fitted a big fat Pentium III cooler to an old P1 133 MHz CPU. I had to trim the heatsink a bit with the grinder wheel: cut an angle and rectify the base. :-)
:-)
:-)
I ran this computer without fan and with a thermocouple attached to the heatsink to monitor CPU Temp: the temp rised to 45C after about a minute. I started a CPU-hungry process and i saw the temp rising to 55-60C: i shutted my computer down 'cause i didn't want to fry my CPU.
Finally i fitted a fan to this setup and started the same CPU-hungry process: the processor does not even reach 30C.
This oldie is in fact my server/firewall and it runs 24/7; my goal was to make it 100% fanless, because of the noise (i sleep with my server); but i realized then that this is not possible with this thing.
I can't believe someone would even go this far. You do know that these power supplies have built-in protections like fuses to protect against overcurrent conditions, right? You do know that anything that plugs into a wall that's sold to the public has to have government certification first, right? Ugh, these topics get on my nerves.
Besides, 500 years is a long time. Did you know they didn't even have telephones back then, for example?
They didn't have telephones but that didn't stop the Europeans from reaching out and mass murdering people in the name of god, the aristocracy or whatever else happened to float their boat...
Didn't they back the Taliban in order to quickly get rid of the previous Afghan government, no matter the consequences...
Actually they helped the Mujihadeen kick the Russian imperialists out of the country...The Taliban showed up later with support from Pakistan...
On my Linux box, I am using NetSaint to monitor the temperature. I have added scripts to kill SETI@Home and Folding@Home when the temperature gets to the warning levels (45C Mobo, 50C CPU) and start an orderly shutdown when the temperature gets to the critical levels (50C Mobo, 55C CPU). Killing the NULL tasks drops the temperature 5 degrees Celsius.
The power supply will burn itself out before it catches anything on fire. "Dust bunnies" are highly combustible but they typically don't burn long enough, only a couple of seconds, to catch anything else on fire. The real danger with the computer is probably the power strip. Make sure you spring for a good quality, UL listed power strip. The cheap ones make poor connection with the plug and use smaller-gauge wire internally and for the cord, thus increasing the risk of fire under heavy load.
maru
you sould get a new mobo that supports that kind of stuff your going to have to go to a athlons system to get something like that
Got Athlon?
Tom's Hardware Guide showed how the CPUs had reached 300 and 370 degrees C in the infamous thermal tests once the cooling was shot. The ignition temperature for paper is typically in the 175-200 degree range.
A computer I maintain had its fan die a few years ago and the harddrive died because of this. This computer was only a year old at the time and was clogged up with cat hair and dust. Shutting down via a powercut wont kill as much data as letting a hot box kill it in some cases. I do think its a fire hazard and I will replace my 2 month dead fan soon - thanks for reminding me. =)
Pixels keep you awake!
As the day before yesterday I had to change the power supply fan in my firewall box: it probably had been dead for at least a few days, but the computer didn't catch on fire (thank God, because I leave it on while I'm at work) it might have something to do that since when the power supply fan failed in my main box (a few weeks ago) I started leaving the computer cases open (no side panels), it is uglier, but maybe it saved me.
Funny that when the fan of the other (newer) PS failed it started smelling really bad, I mean, like burning or something, when I got home it did scare me quite a bit...
I also had major problems with dust .. I had to clean my box every 3 weeks.
Then, one and a half month ago I put some thin air-filters at every grid where the fresh air comes in. No problems since then.
My dad's PC had an unfortunate accident that could have easily sent the house up in flames if it weren't for the people there at the time.
His system was an Athlon 1.4 with SCSI, a Radeon, lots of RAM and other suitably expensive stuff (at the time), excepting the NIC. The NIC was a generic cheapo and for some unknown reason it decided to spontaneously burst into flames.
If it wasn't for the various case fans blowing the smoke out into the house, we wouldn't have known. Luckily we got to it before the rest of the PC (and potentially the house) followed suit. The motherboard and the NIC were the only things that needed replacing, but we took the hint and replaced all our cheapo NICs with hopefully less flammable 3Coms.
It was a lucky escape and it certainly made us think twice about leaving our boxen running 24/7, especially unattended. Flammability isn't something I usually take into consideration when buying components. Suffice to say, no more Happy Value components for me.
Oh, and if anyone's wondering; The smell of a burning PC is very nasty. Incredibly, the OS was still alive before I cut the power. I'm also persuaded that if we had bought a cheapo case with poor ventilation, the component death toll would have been much higher. Heh.. maybe those watercooling monkeys can set up an internal sprinkler system or something. Hahah.
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
1. I had a Mac II fx power supply blow when I plugged a 13" tactile monitor in to the power out. A nice vertical and horizontal erruption of green smoke came out of the slots in the case.
2. One of the fans stopped on the Athlon 600. The one that stayed working blew 100C air on to the RAM. The RAM chip did not like that... the server went down. The hard disks in that machine run too hot to touch.
3. I always vacuum the inside of cases when they are open for mods/upgrades. While they are running I vacuum all fans/vents/holes where dust accumulates about every three months.
4. Macs I have owned always have shut down when air temperature gets too high.
realkiwi
I don't think there's much chance of my CPU catching fire. I keep it cool with a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen ;)
In 1991, I was given the assignment of having a halon system installed in our computer room.
Part of job included making the room as airtight as possible. This made the halon more effective. I had to order a special airtight door to replace the existing one.
So the day comes where everything is done and the last thing to do is get the local fire chief to sign off on it. Everyone gathers outside the computer room and looks though the glass panel in the door as I punch the halon switch.
The halon goes *poof* and all the hanging ceiling tiles fly up into the air and come fluttering down to the floor.
Everyone's head turns to stare at me.
We ended up ordering special (heavy) ceiling tiles.
I recently bought 2 old 486's for 15 dollars, one of them was a gateway when I plugged it in a fire started up on the motherboard I tried to blow it out, but that didnt work. I had to pull the power cable. It went right out. I plugged it back in, turned it back on and it lit up again. Now I have to worry about the computer in my bedroom catch on fire while Im asleep. Sorta sobering.
I came home a few months ago, turned on my new system, and WHAP! Hard drive exploded.
It was a Seagate, so I wasn't suprised, but losing 9 gigs worth of MP3 slowly began to gnaw at my brain.
I recently got an IBM hard drive on sale, but re-ripping my CD collection is going to take till the end of the month. I don't have a record player, so getting my Vinyl on MP3 is going to take even longer (if ever).
Anyone have Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. singing "Mt. Dew 1969"?
I am diagnosed as having minor OCD. No I don't wash my hands 1000 times a day or over-organize things. If I ever leave my computer room I check and recheck to make sure none of the cables are slightly out because I believe they could spark a fire. I do this many times a day, and If I leave the house I turn off and unplug all the computers. While I'm out I constantly imagine a fire in the house burning all my work and the like. This problem has plauged me for a few years now and it really irks me. For a while now, I've been meaning to clean out the dust in my machines, but just haven't gotten around to doing it. I should do it soon.
Curious though, does anyone else have problems like this?
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
So, one night, I go to sleep with my computer on like I normally do, and when I wake up, it's off. So I try to turn it on, and nothing happens. Then we try a new power supply and that works. Then we open up the other power supply and find out that it's pretty charred and melted. So, we thought we'd at least salvage the fan, and that was seized up like nobody's business.
Moral: What? There has to be a moral now?
Not directly related, as there were no fires involved (that we know of), but a good story none the less.
Around 1990 or so (think "386's are brand new) I was working in a computer store. At this time motherboards didn't have I/O on them, it was all on a multi I/O ISA card, including the real-time clock w/battery. Well, the maker of the cards we used switched from a rechargable battery on this card to a long life lithium battery. However, they neglected to remove the recharging circuit from the design. Apparently it is not good to try to recharge lithium batteries, as we started getting frantic phone calls from our customers.
Me: "Hello, can I help you?"
Customer: My new computer just exploded!!
Me: You mean it crashed?
Customer: No, it EXPLODED! There was a loud BANG and sparks came out the front!!
Sure enough, they brought the systems in and we inspected them. The battery had disintegrated. In one case the floppy cable had been pretty much lying right on top of it. The cable was all black and scorched and had little bits of metal shrapnel embedded in it.
Fortunetly it didn't do much real damage. We just replaced the card, cleaned all the little metal bits out and sent them on their way.
Needless to say we did a quick recall on the others! (Only about 5 systems went out like that.)
Have you ever told a newbie to "not be afraid" and "you can't damage the computer no matter what you do"? Man, I felt sorry for these people!
My friend and I were troubleshooting a computer that seemed to have everything go wrong at once. So, we took the power supply apart to see if we could see any burnt components or anything. We then plug it in, and jump pin 14 (power on) to ground to get it to spin up. We're looking inside and I say, "hey, why does that look like an 'ON' light inside of the power supply?" To which he replies, "it looks like it's getting brighter." Then, it gets really bright, pops and the board catches on fire. We scrambled to get the power off/fire out as to not set off the smokes (smoke dectors) wired to the fire department. Fun fun.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I had just turned it on. I went into the kitchen to get a snack while it booted. When I went back to the computer, the screen was full of ascii characters and there was smoke coming out of the box.
The motherboard had lit on fire. Several expansion slots were melted and burned. Melted part of the motherboard. Burned the video card. Quite bizzarre. Yes, there were actual flames.
A lot of the talk here seems to focus on the CPU and the power supply. The powersupply on this flaming box still worked just fine.
A standard powersupply can pump 50 amps of 5v juice out. All it takes is a bit of a low resistance section to act like a resistor and enough heat will be generated to light things up.
Personally, I don't leave my PC on when I am not home anymore.
hmm isn't this how Dust Puppy was created ? :)
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things
I open up my systems each year and blow them out with compressed air to remove dust. I started doing this after I had a power supply go out after 1 1/2 years. I was curious (I know, it kills cats...) so I opened up the power supply to find it coated with dust! Thank God it didn't fry the mother board. I took it as a lesson to just clean out my systems each year now... Until I build myself a dust-free clean room :)
There is a useful program called mother board monitor (MBM) which will perform various actions based on the BIOS reading from fans and voltage indicators of newer mother boards.
See: http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
Hope this helps!
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
So far I've been unlucky enough to have two systems go ablaze, and they've been fairly dust-free for most of their operating lives -- I tend to dust (and vacuum) them every month or so.
The first was a dual-processor Pentium II board that caught fire around an inductor about a year ago. Thankfully, the case was closed and the little blaze starved itself of oxygen, and was fairly controlled. It was a small fire around the inductor, so it was going nowhere, although several nearby chips actually popped off the board. See the pictures, if you dare:
Burnout 1
Burnout 2
Burnout 3
Yeah, it was pretty nasty. My room was filled with smoke for a day or so, even with the window open and a fan blowing exhaust out my window.
The second was the ATX connector on a Pentium III motherboard actually heating up to the point of melting both the connector on the board and the connector on the power supply, so all that was left was a mess of molten plastic and some bare pins. Needless to say, both the power supply and motherboard were thrown in my local dumpster.
Anyone have similar experience? Or am I just an unlucky bastard?
A month ago I received a clients PC for repair. She claimed that it just up-and-stopped running one day.
Being kind of doubtful, and suspecting user stupidity, I cracked it open, and found nothing wrong...supposedly. I then popped the cover off the power supply, to find some nice char.
A bit more testing found that the motherboard would take _no_ power. I had picked up the machine from her house, so I knew the power was fine, and she was also using an excellent surge unit.
The PC was a bottom of the line Gateway, with a no-name power supply. Not suprising.
That's happens when your fan dies, if you buy the right motherboard. But if you aren't there to hear it... I'm sure someone will enjoy the blazing inferno.
lm-sensors will cook many IBM systems. The ThinkSpas 600s, and those series immediately preceeding will go *pooofter* upon running lm-sensors.
It's a hardware screw up by IBM. Other systems don't like lm-sensors, too
oh if only it were just the power supply that would die...
;) I cleaned the contacts, put a new powersupply in (one without a melted/scorched power plug) and all was right with the world...
From what I can determine, a dust bunny wedged itself between the power cable and where it connects to the motherboard.
I came back to my computer that still had the powersupply humming merrily along, and a scortched/melted plug..
thankfully no major damage was done to the computer (or apartment
You might hate me for saying this, but hopefully one day you'll be happy people said it to ya.
Lay off the smoking. It isn't worth it. People in my family (like my father) almost died from it.
I see a few steps I can take to improve my shelf o'computers. I'm going to move my printers to another table, remove excess wires and monitors, and other non esential materials. The insides of my boxes are clean. Smoke detectors and insurance can't hold a candle to prevention.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Americans" did not exist 500 years ago. So of course they did nothing bad. Consult your history books next time.
I've worked as a technician for a few years now and have actually seen flames from power supplies. To the response about keeping the case on to create a duct I ask this: If the exhaust fan on the power supply pulls the air out and it stops (like in this case) do you REALLY think it better to have the case on for your "duct" or off to at least disperse the heat? I've found CPU fans dead and customers replacing processors and even motherboards, but when psu's go, they often end up with an equal bill. Any idea what happens to a psu when it overheats? The voltages often spike, and current levels can change - damaging MORE than just the psu...However, a CPU fan dying doesn't result in a burnt to crisp house...not that I've ever seen anyways. just my 2 cents
Sad story in the news (sorry, couldn't find any links) in Australia a couple of years ago about a guy who bought an el-cheapo monitor for use at home and left it on overnight. It caught fire and burned his house down. He survived the fire, but his wife and kids didn't. Now I always turn my monitor off when I leave my PC on overnight.
The iMacs, and the Cube, use the convection effect caused by the hot air inside the computer to cool it. No moving parts, no noise, no trouble :)
:))
There's more in Apple design than fancy colors and shinny plastic!
Oh, there's also MacOSX with incredible powermanangment
--computer cases run hot because NONE of them I have ever seen vent out the top of the case like they should! Ya, I imagine someplace there's one, but I've seen hunnerts of boxen, have yet to see a vent on the top, heat rises, duh. It's a marketing/cosmetic serious flaw. Monitors all got vents on the top, why not cases? Because people will set crap on top of them, that's why. S-o-o-o-o-o, you do top venting AND side/back venting, do BOTH and it becomes a lot more idjit proof.
My dad was a radio/tv guy when I was growing up, then he went into mainframes. Anywho, whenever he did a tv repiar for people, he always installed a fan, usually mounted in a coffee can. them old tube job tv's never broke after that. they threw more heat then the next of ten of your overclocked 3 mghz althin jobbers do now, bigtime more heat. and he used a serious big fan, too, a low RPM but heavy air mover. Ya, he mighta lost some biz from his repairs actually *working*, but he gained a lot of new customers word of mouth from satisfied old customers.
Personally, I think computers should all be designed passive cooling only, designed, re designed, designed again until that is possible and common.
Many modern power supplies (notably those from Antec or Enermax) actually have a lead coming off the fan inside that connects to one of the fan connectors on newer motherboards. That allows you to monitor the fan RPM in your power supply just like you monitor the case or cpu fans. It might be worth the extra money to purchase a high quality power supply if you having problems sleeping at night :-)
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
a friend of mine had his computer lock up and noticed that his hard drive was in flames, apparently due to faulty wiring in the pcb.
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~atwell/toast/
it didn't hurt anything other than the power supply (apparently overloaded from the short), but i'm told it was a harrowing experience.
I am a certified MCSE with over 15 years' experience in the computer industry.
*yawn*
This makes you qualified to speak about ELECTRIAL ENGINEERING and the design of the highest quality Power Supplies to the lowest quality?
Thought not.
# Fire suppression systems do not respond to smoke.
Errrp. Thanks for playing. Some systems use heat. Others use smoke. The best use both a change in heat AND air particle count.
* All computer power supplies have temperature sensors.
And you know this because you are Microsoft certified? I've seen schematics for cheap switchers that do not have any temp sensors.
My qualifications? EE degree and 4 years dating a fire protection engineer.
( ) Coyboy Neal poured gasoline on it
Most modern motherboards, ASUS is about all I use, have thermal overload protection built in for CPU, and Powersupply. The new ATX 2.5? or is it 3.0 now, allows for a thermal connector from the Power Supply to the mobo, to auto-shut down the system if it gets too hot. Look at the new ATX spec, and Asus mobo's for more information.
This is done via the bios, so no tools or other memory wasting or CPU hogging tools required.
Om, nomnomnom...
I use alot of junkyard computers. I can personally attest, that I have had AT's with high power needs that had noisy fans. I just cut the fan lines. ONe has been working 24/7 for a few months. Makes a great silent computer. I have also put a PS in a vertical duct with no fan and it self cools with convection, for a silent PC.
I have blown one up that was inside a suitcase, and another that just got too hot. I have also poured a cup of water on one. It died a quick but very boring death.
I tear apart those things all the time. They have thermal fuses, and they also have fusable resistors in addition to ordinary current fuses.
If the temperature of the switching transistors gets too high, they lock up and create a direct short. If the fuses don't blow the resistors do, or the board traces, or the transistor itself, as the last line of defense.
The transistors become direct shorts LONG before the flashpoint of anything reasonable, even paper. I believe it's about 180 or 200C.
The worst you will get is a horrible smell. You cannot get the power supply to go up in flames. It just won't do it.
Now, I HAVE seen crt monitors actually go up in flames, but they were fairly old ones.
Try it! It's fun! and after all, computers are free.
=rMortyH
Toms Hardware did a test where the heat sink was removed from 4 kinds of processors while they where in heavy use. The P4 stepped down the speed until it managed a safe temp. The P3 halted and the two types of Athlons incinerated. (It hit 698 degrees almost instantly once the heat sink was removed.) Maybe the P4 is worth the extra cash. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/index. html
in those tests, the heatsink was removed completely.
in reality, when your FAN fails, your heatsink will still be attached.
so that 300 celsius will be spread over a very large surface area designed to dissapate heat.
chances of igniting paper from the heatsink itself are pretty much nil, though you could probably burn the hell out of a few fingers.
for the last time, i didnt do it!
The DC fans that inhabit most PC equiptment are notoriously unreliable. The most common mode of failure is lubrication failure. The added expense of lubing these puppies is miniscule; why it isn't done is a mystery to me and lots of others. TIP: Take the risk to your warrantees and open your equiptment take the fans out and LUBE THEM. Usually there is a plastic label over the bearing; Feel over the label for a hole or depression, then either puncture it or carefully peel it back, then put a drop or two of a good oil in it. Then you can reseal it with tape. Do not use WD40, it has poor lubricity. Fan failure has been the prelude to computer failure for many decades. IBM used to put 'thermal' switches downwind of ventelated components; if the switches got hot the ENTIRE computer complex would shutdown. Imagine being in a '70's IBM Mainframe computer room (an acre or two) with all it's seperate machines and airconditioning equiptment when the entire complex "thermals down"! Sudden silence; the only thing to hear is the spinning down of motorgenerator units. There is an alternative for those of you who are comfortable working in the PRIMARY side of your power supplies. Get a Radio Shack or similar 117VAC fan and BOLT it to the back of each powersupply in 'airflow-series' with the DC fan air outlet. If you are qualified you can wire it directly into the PRIMARY side of the PS; or you can simply put a plug on the 'booster fan' and plug it into a power strip.
Also, depending on what failed with the fan, you might well be better off replacing it if at all possible. Just because it spins again doesn't mean it is going to continue spinning for another few years, it might very well fail within the month.
Actually the fact that the power supply was still running might be testament to the quality, I've seen too many newer power supplies fail way too soon, some taking most of the rest of the computer with them.
Bleh!
If it was a significant problem, there would be more stories of it happening. "My fan died and burned my house down" is the kind of story that would spread pretty well on the net.
It seems I forgot to make my point in the last post. :-)
My point was that there are lots of other fire hazards in your average home, most of them more dangerous than the computer. I've never seen a computer catch fire, but I've seen pics of appliances as diverse as refrigerators and washing mashines (!) be the cause of domestic fires.
So, my point was along "I'd take precautions for the general case and don't worry so much".
There are quite a few different kinds of paper. While 451 deg is a great meme, in reality it's lower for household paper (such as newspapers). It's higher for book-quality color prints.
:-)
Besides, most of this is hypothetical. I wouldn't worry about the CPU igniting newspapers
Be really careful with those buggers, namely the box between the wall and the computer. It puts out a ton of heat. I once had one get stuck in the couch overnight and the plastic had *melted*. That was a close one. Be ye warned.
Josh Woodward
I've had several computer fires in during my career in the systems dept. (before moving on to bigger, better, Perl flavoured things :) ranging from your motherboard catching fire, right through to a monitor PSU exploding, with one of the caps blowing a hole clean in the side of the case.
:)
Worst one, though, was an old 386, which had the PSU short to the case. This had no effect at first, but then it made contact after jarring the case, and BOOM! blue sparks flashing across the mobo. Three small fires started, and the chip on the video card blew out. We kept that one as sobering evidence of what happens when good wiring goes bad
Incidentally, it had metal mounting posts, instead of the nice plastic ones nowadays.
Another fun one was my 3DFX voodoo 1. The monitor ground pin had come loose in its cable, and so one of the trannys on the board got so hot during Glide gaming sessions it glowed so you could see it through the PCB. Worked fine, and, AFAIK, still works now!!
Is there some reason you like to waste power? Is it so bad to wait a minute at the most for your computer to boot up? When you're away from your computer for more than an hour, just turn the darn thing off. The common argument against this is that repeatedly booting will wear down the hardware, because extra strain is put on the hardware the instant it boots up. But that'll only take a year or two off of a 30+ year device. It's not like you won't upgrade before then.
And people wonder why we have an energy crisis.
I can't count the number of fans I've unclogged over the years because people have pets.
If you have pets, peek at the fans every month or two and make sure hair/dander aren't stuck to the blades.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
This article is filled with so many errors it isn't even funny.
/50 was a 50 MHz chip running on a 25 MHz bus.
#1--Monitors in sleep mode typically drain between 1 and less then 1 watts per hour--hardly the "power hogs" she makes them out to be.
#2--There never was a 486-4/50. That would imply a bus speed of 12.5 MHz. The 486 DX2
Similarly, there was no 486-2/100. There was a 486DX4/100, made by AMD, but this article implies the CPU was an Intel design.
#3: The article implies that the CPU fan is actually the power supply fan. It states that if you don't hear the CPU fan "moaning and groaning", place your hand over the rear of the power supply. In reality this is a totally separate fan.
#4: The implication that systems need to be checked regularly for fan failure is overkill. I'd check them about once every six months or when problems occur.
As a final note, I have been in the PC repair business for almost ten years and have, in that time, seen exactly ONE CPU flame up in the method described here. It exploded only because it has a vastly-underpowered heatsink on a very hot CPU--when the fan died, the chip eventually caught fire. Even a proper heatsink, however, would've likely prevented this.
Computers are not designed or approved to be run open. It's a stupid thing to do if you are afraid of fire--they get less air circulation, they run hotter, and if they catch fire, the fire can more easily spread. Running your computer open also violates FCC rules because it will cause lots of interference, affecting radio operators, police and fire communications, baby monitors, and medical equipment.
Computers are designed with metal cases for good reasons: they allow the fans to work, they conduct heat, they keep RF inside, and they offer some protection against fire. Don't run your computer open--it's just stupid.
dust bunnies in the case you probably have under control, but don't forget the psu. that has shock warning stickers on it because it _can_ kill you, so if you're not qualified, take it to someone who is for a quick cleaning once in a while. bring them sushi.
the amount of crud in an older psu can be just incredible. a few AT's i've opened had charred dust.
a few people have mentioned UL safety tests. generally this is correct, but keep in mind some outfits ship cheapened components hoping they won't get caught in an inspection.
some have also mentioned that the pc isn't likely to burn down your house because of some dust smoldering inside the steel box. likely this it true, even if the capacitors explode. make sure this is true for you by not burying your box under papers and pushing it against a curtain behind your desk. just have a look -- if it was on fire right now would it ignite anything alongside? no? then in a worst case senario you'll be woken by your fire alarm and can leave the house okay. some dust on fire isn't going to asphyxiate you.
don't forget the monitor. one of mine tried to catch fire but i caught it and yanked the cord. just got some smoke. probably the UL safety would have saved it anyway, but if those capacitors had burst first... now i shut down when i leave the area.
now guestimate how many offices leave monitors running screensavers all night since 1985 versus how many fires you've heard of. computer fire is a very low risk. take some basic precautions and relax. traffic is what you should be afraid of, and your bathtub, and maybe tetris.
I wish my computer would set on fire, then maybe i can get a new one with the insurance payout...and a new house... I do my best to keep it in a fire-ready state
I leave my PowerMacs running all the time. Every now and then, I open the case and blow out the dust. No problem. The ability to easily open the case (without tools) and to keep running is a nice feature.
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
All my A7V333 does is bi*chbi*chbi*ch randomly trying to run an AMD2100+ in an aire/conditioned room (70_F). WinME "energy savers" all turned OFF. No heavy crank. The mid-tower has 3 fans ( including the Nvidia ). PC_Probe shows a CPU_temp under 62_C. I think the MoBos temp sensor from day-to-day is a bit bluey, ... and when it crashes, it often crashes into the BIOS bi*ching that the CPU speed is fluxed. Not likely. Basically, I'd watch your azz before buying that ASUS MoBo.
I did much the same.... My celeron 266 was overclocked to 400. Didn't realize it was. Computer company screwed me over. The switches on the motherboard were fine, set to 266, but they placed a piece of tape over one of the pins of the processor, fooling the motherboard, overclocking the cpu and running it hot. Actually, I couldn't tell what was wrong until my roommate started blowing on the cpu and we found out it was running too hot when he stopped and the comp shut off itself. Anyways, I left off the case and set a desk fan blowing in there for a year or two, until the motherboard eventually fried. The computer company was out of business by the time I found that piece of tape, btw. I wonder why.
Under both Windows (Motherboard Moniter) and linux (lm_sensors) software exisits that can moniter the built in thermal and fan sensors that most modern motherboards have, and can be configured to shut down your computer when it overheats or a fan fails.
My p200 mmx is running fine with no cpu and PS fan at all since 3 months. I have removed the case cover and put the hard disk in the box of a bigger one. Very quiet!
Once left my computer running for about an hour or so while away from it, and when I walked near my room I smelled smoke.
It was just a bad powersupply, but I am much more reluctent to leave my computer turned on all day now.
Blog,Twitter
I went home from work today
:P
leaving a computer running
wondering if I should turn it off
for this exact reason
lucky it wasnt running AMD
http://mbm.livewiredev.com/ has the programs. they're for windows...motherboard monitor keeps you informed of the temp (and you can set it to email you if your equipment hits a certain temp or something) and you can also set it to trigger ShutDownNow (linked from that site above)...which will do the shutdown routine for Windows.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
I've had PSU fans die more than once.. happend recently on a dual PII 400mhz machine, needless to say this thing got fuxoring hot.. the entire case was heated to the point that it could barely be touched. (no exageration) Unfortunatly the machine was an X server for the fron office.. IE.. downtown in the middle of the day wasn't an option. I pulled the side panel off, stuck a rack of 8 120mm 6000 rpm fans blowing on it and hoped for the best. 5 hours later i was finally able to halt the thing and replace the PSU.
:P
I was hoping the PSU would be salvagable.. but no dice, it had gotten so hot that every capacitor in the thing had swelled, plus the insulated wire on the choke coils had got so hot it had started to shrink, to the point it was dangerously close to shorting out. Even the hot glue holding a few wires in place had gotten hot enough to melt!
My point is.. if this didn't start a fire, its not going to happen. I've also had several machine pop power supply's in my face, on my work bench, in the feild, etc... none of them have ever started fires either.
Really on this sort of thing, a can of air freshner is just as usefull as a fire extiguisher.. this things stink like shit when they pop. Thats not an exageration either
-Polyhead-
Actually Englands imperialist ass owned the land.
England gave the land to the jews.
So why don't you blame it on England eh?
America didn't have didly squat to do with the creation of Israel...
melted...as well as i believe i've lost 3 monitors(and TWO television sets! same plugin to boot!) in my room to fire ...amongst other things...loosing monitors sucks, they are hard to replace : anything to keep them cool.
:)
of course, being in middle - canada i'm lucky ; i open the window and i can get the tempurature of my room -30(or lower) degrees should i want it to be...which a computer *will not* overheat in
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This seems like a ridiculous and unnecessary design to me. There are already perforations in the metal front of the case where the fan should be mounted -- why not put some slits in the plastic front of the case as well, so air can be sucked in from there directly, instead of through the opening at the bottom?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I came home from shopping one day, to find smoke wafting out of my monitor. My housemate, in the room next to mine, said she smelled smoke and had been looking out the window to see where the fire was!!!!!
No fire alarms went off (one in my room, her room, and the hallway). Anyway, I simply turned it off, and binned it. But I can only think that it could have easily started a fire, that my house mate would not have noticed until it was too late.....
dunno what I do if the PSU copped out and went ablaze, perhaps the voltage would change a little. In which case healthd would spot it! Must refine my configuration!
My computer isn't waiting to happen, it has happened. I had a hard drive plugged in outside my computer and dumped a bunch of stuff on it without thinking. Came back an hour later to a very, very dead drive with lots of burn marks on the bottom and a funny smell. I have had accidents with power supplies twice. Once was when a Molex connector was worn down to being rounded on all 4 corners. I plugged it in upside-down and away the hard drive went, with a crackle and funny smell. Also, I got a power Y-cable that was wired BACKWARDS - blew up my vintage 1997 2x cdrom drive! (This was a month or so ago)
My friend had a run-in with this... His dad's computer is in one of those desks with a computer area with a door on the front. The desk back is pushed up against the wall. He had a Celeron 400, which already ran just a little hot. Anyways, he left for a week with the computer on, and the door shut accidentally. My friend describes the smell that eminated from it as 'burnt cookies.' He gave me the motherboard, CPU, DVD drive, and CD burner - all fried by the (very dead) PS. The DVD drive gave a solid green light and a bad smell upon power up. The CD burner didn't really do anything. The CPU was dead, but not burnt. The motherboard had a few burned patches - interestingly enough, the hardware sensor chip (detects fan speeds, temperature, voltage) was blown most of the way off the motherboard and had only a few legs and a crater left.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I have an Enermax power supply. It has one of those cpu fan or system fan connectors that plugs into the motherboard and the fans of the power supply (it has two) can be monitored as if it were the cpu fan. If the power supply fails, you can configure to give an alert, to beep or to shut down. /AC
This is true apparantly... Although, I haven't tested this myself.
Anyone know if the T21 is vulnerable?
I certainly don't have one. But then I just have a "cool" computer (iMac) ;-p
I've found that just laying my case down lowers the temp (only by 1-2degs to be honest). I figure this is due to the fact the CPU will be facing upward and so the heatsink is working more efficiently.
I've also found that adding a fan to the top of the case to pull the hot air out (on upright cases) makes a BIG difference, especially on smaller cases designed for the MATX boards. I had an athlon in a small case that was running at 60-65degs and very unstable until I cut a hole and put a fan in the top - it dropped the temp to 50-55degs and hasn't crashed since.
I think the biggest single difference I've made was adding a Coolermaster "Heatpipe" heatsink to an Athlon - that thing knocked 15 degrees off the CPU temp immediately! I had to remove it again though, as the noise was unbearable... It makes a nice-looking paperweight though!
Also little things like tidying up a rats-nest of wiring and putting dummy plates over unused expansion slot cut-outs in the case helps.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Though I have had one computer fire it was due to some idiot using scoth tape to wire in a new fan and without solder at that. I was poking around and bumped one; the tape slid off and the wire, as murphy's law would have it, flew right toward the other wire and hit the only lil bare spot on it shorting out my PS.... oops :D thankfully a fast palm at the power cord was sufficient to extinguish it.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
with a c02 fire system you need a CABA (compressed air breathing appratus) near by as the amount of gas dumped is a alot and it can kill you in seconds of breathing it.. as it tries to replace pretty much all of the atmosphere in the area effected. halon is banned by the UN i think i know that in australia its completly banned and you can face very harsh fines for it.
Who needs a microwave? :)
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
I assume its part of the ATI drivers, but Win2k displays an error message that the fan has stopped spinning whenever it happens on the FireGL card in one of my machines at work (I need to poke in there and clear the dust I think)....I assume it would be possible to write a script that shuts down the machine if such an event occurs. There are plenty of utilities that will monitor core temps and fan speeds from within your OS (as opposed to BIOS level)....and since most good power supplies run the fan as a variable speed powered off the motherboard....shouldn't be to hard.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Lead-acid batteries. Sparking UPSes. Fun. (and in case you don't trust me, it's also http://wso.williams.edu/~aramos/upsfire/ )
--pi
As for overheating, I have a case with 4 fans and a heat sink. There's a power supply fan, a processor fan, and two case fans. I have a heat sink for my video card. I leave my computer on more or less 24/7/365 and have NEVER had a problem with overheating. It's running a Pentium III 1 Ghz and a Geforce 2 Ultra. Assuming you have decent cooling and you don't overclock, it's unlikely that you'll have any problems. (I haven't even ever cleaned my fans in the 1.5 years I've had this computer...)
There are lots replies here about how various OSes and mobos can detect fan outages and do graceful (or other) shutdowns...
THAT'S IRRELIVANT.
Our poster, you'll note, had the power supply fan shutdown. Since nothing except very high end server power supplies are instrumented (or initiate shutdowns themselves on fan failure)... YOU (AND YOUR MOBO) HAVE NO IDEA WHEN YOUR POWER SUPPLY FAN DIES
(...Unless you can tell the difference in the sound. Everytime I see a really old PC which is suspiciously quiet, I poke a hand in back and - sure enough - the supply fan is dead.)
I don't worry much about old Intel Pentium or even K6 CPU machines, but I fear some of the hotter Athlon units may become fire hazards in their old age. (See Tom's Hardware's flaming chip videos)
- Many hard-drives fail in a variety of ways;
- CPU fans fail, combusting accumulated dust on/around CPU;
- Power supplies fail gracefully.;
- Power supplies burn their accumulated dust before failing gracefully;
- Power supplies burn their accumulated dust, dump high voltages to the machine internals, destroy mainboard components, and sorch, burn, and blister a hard-drive controller.
These have always been old machines (classic pentium era), and without exception there has been audible signs of failure first, "moaning" fans being the most common. In the case of hard-drives, reset or recalibration noises are a good sign something is not right.If your machine begins to make noises you've never heard before, it's time for an upgrade, clean, or making sure your back-ups really are up-to-date.
Most BIOS setups have a "turn me off" setting that is available and adjustable. I have all my machines set to 149 degrees, to shut down.
The system usually run around 85-95 degrees, unless I am doing something with them. They don't ever go above 125 (this is the CPU core temp I am referring to).
In the BIOS's of the machines, there is also a setting for if the CPU fan dies to shutdown.
Also, I have found several dozen "Heat Watchers" available on the 'Net that allow you to check the temperature.
Simple stuff if you know your machines are running hot.You keep going until you die..."Me".
Also, keep in mind that computer newbies aren't going to be aware of this kind of stuff until it is pointed out to them. And even then, if they are deathly afraid of popping the hood, they won't do this kind of maintenance until it stops working.
After a few minutes, I went to inspect the damage, fearing my linux box had died! It turns out that one of those mini-fan power hookups (the ones with two prongs sticking out) had touch another piece of metal inside the case and shorted. The resulting powersurge heated up the wires, melting the protective rubber coating. Fortunately, that's all the damage that occured. I clipped the wires out, turned on the computer and all was good.
The moral of the story is, don't leave those fan power hookup cables floating free inside your case. I can just imagine what would've happened if I had already gone to work and my wife and daughter were still asleep when that happened.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Many moons ago I was an onsite warranty PC Tech for several different vendors. One time I received a motherboard pre-shipped from Compaq for a Presario PC which had been troubleshot over the phone by Tech Support.
I headed out to the customers site and asked him what occurred.. He told me that he heard a loud pop then smoke started shooting out of the back of the power supply and the computer died.
After opening up the PC I found that the motherboad had shorted on the case and went up in flames. Everything had smoke damage but some parts still functioned (such as the Hard drive). Rather than ship the customer a new PC Compaq made the decision to ship him a motherboard only.
He wanted a full new PC but due to policy Compaq would not replace home computers - only repair them.
I called Compaq and mentioned that the computer had serious smoke damage and it appeared the motherboard had caught on fire and the guy on the other end of the line said "Oh, it must have been model xxxx". They still wouldn't replace the entire computer.
Talk about some garbage. PC Manufacturers should be held to the same standards that car and other manufacturers are. If a childrens toy has potential of catching on fire damn straight they are going to recall it but since the Computer industry is who it is they won't do it.
What I ended up doing was fully disassembling the PC and writing down the part numbers for every component in the PC. I then called Compaq Tech suport back and told them that I needed to replace the following parts - then I listed every part in the computer including the case parts.
A week or two later I received all the components to build a new PC for him in seperate boxes. I took them all out, assembled them, tested and helped him get the installation going. I then had to disassemble the old PC and ship it back in all the boxes.
There were several other incidents like that from other vendors but I never saw a situation where the motherboard had actually caught fire. I did build my fair share of new PC's from individual parts though in order to try to make the customer happy and work around crappy PC manufacturer policies.
Over time I've seen a fair number of powersupplies and at least one hard drive controller "let the smoke out" but I've never seen a situation like that again..
Yeah all you nutsuckers from these crap-hole countries couldn't manage that, so know you fuckers hijack planes and crash them into buildings, strap bombs to children and gay shit like that.
Im not saying its a common occurance, but hey, these things happen
I recently had to design a forward converter power supply at work. We dismantled a PC CPU at to get some ideas and see how they work.
They had basically ignored many of the world-wide saftety requirements that apply to power supplies.
1) There space between the live and secondary has to be >6mm (or is it 10mm?). This had a PCB track running through it.
2) The transformers should have either the primary or secondary triple insulated. Neither was.
There were other issues as well. We had to ask the question, "how the *** did they get away with that?!".
In a humid climate this power supply may have had leakage between the live and secondary side. The voltages involved peak at around 1KV. As long as the unit was earthed that probably wouldn't kill anyone but it might fry some of the computer. If the unit didn't happen to be earthed....
Put another way, it makes more sense to me to think of my computer as either being a risk or not being a risk. It does not make a lot of sense to think of it as being at risk of becoming a risk.
Put yet another way, it would be nice if those who want to write articles (on Slashdot or elsewhere) would bother to learn to write.
The platters rang like a bell when hit, even when sitting on the carpet. Get a set of platters from different drives together and you could do the Anvil Chorus.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Halon works for fire suppression because it replaces the air, and oxygen at the same time.
Halon is dangerous because of that fact. A room with Halon dumpped into it has NO available oxygen for fires to continue. What makes you think that a substance that removes the O2 from the room as a method of fire supression is SAFE for humans? Try reading up on the subject and find out EXACTLY why it was banned. Ozone layer crap aside.
I was in a computer shop. The computer was installing Windows from the CD. Smoke started coming out of the CD Drive. Power button got pressed quickly.
guy I know had an Ultrasparc that lit up with a poof of smoke. Problem?: Harddrive. The circuitry burned. Bad for data, and...well just bad.
Try realizing that the USA is not the center of the universe.
(and yes, I'm an american. Morons like you piss me off.)
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
In my 20+ years of computing, I have NEVER had a computer spontaneously burst into flame. I've worked on projects where I was responsible for over two hundred separate computers of all sizes, ranging from dozens of PCs to Vaxen.
Not one, not a single one, popped a smoke alarm. Never have I been required to 'grab the fire extinguisher.'
Plenty of power supplies have burned out; in fact now my experience is that power supplies burn out faster than hard drives do. But dust-bunny-laden or not, no PC has ever been a fire hazard in my experience.
I had this happen on a beige box - the PSU fan stopped. It heated up enough that the smell (no smoke) was enough to set off my ceiling mounted fire alarms. Finally following my nose I figured what was triggering it. Took PSU apart (no user serviceable parts inside) and gave it a good clean and checked for burns to PCB or wire.
I keep a spare on hand now.
Back in India I used to use my pentium II machine without a fan on the SMPS for around 2 years. Nothing ever happened to the PC. I used the PC 5 hours a day, and shut it off when I dint need it (it was not "always on", as is usually recommended). There was a nice layer of dust hiding the actual components on the motherboard (I used to occasionally wipe off whatever was conveniently accessible). And in India the ambient temperatures can be quite high! The PC is still doing fine there. (I replaced the fan eventually)
A couple years ago I was sitting around watching TV on my computer (w/ TV card) and my power supply made a louding cracking sound (like lightening) and burst into flames. The flames put themselves out within a few seconds. I stopped leaving my computer on after that. The computer was sitting on a carpet under my desk. It don't recall if it was hot or not. The computer was a year or two old. I bought it at one of those Computer Show and Sales. Since then I've had two power supplies die on me, Some maybe it was something with my setup. I don't know?
Functionally, it works as a lubricant fairly nicely. Also as a cleaner. It also kills ants, and, with a lighter held in front of it, is a fun party tool. It may not be the best at any of these, but it functions pretty well as a general purpose tool - I keep a small can in my toolbox, and usually have a large one around. For parties.
I agree with everything you've said except for *one* thing.
Don't use WD-40 as a lubricant. Use it as a penetrating oil, to free stuck and seized moving parts. But once they're unstuck, clean them thoroughly with carb cleaner or something similar, and then use a proper oil or grease to lubricate them.
Speaking from experience, WD-40 turns sticky with time. Small machines (ie. computer fans) will seize.
If you *have* to lubricate a disassembled computer fan, use ONE drop of the lightest machine oil you can find - the smallest SAE viscosity number.
However, dust in the air passing through the fan will magically be attracted to the bearings and trapped in the oil, where it will eventually seize the fan again.
Good computer fans have graphite-impregnated sleeve bearings. When the bearing ceases to be self-lubricating, the bearing is worn out and it's time to replace the fan.
Cheap computer fans (and those sold to people who don't know any better) use tiny little ball bearing assemblies. With outside bearing diameters of less than 1/8" in some cases, the balls are absolutely tiny, especially relative to any dust which might become trapped in them. The "ball bearing" fans are especially prone to failure, and should also be avoided, unless you're buying expensive ball-bearing fans for use in your clean room.
Replace the fans. If you have to take them apart to clean/lube them, they're finished, and will fail again soon.
www.papstplc.com
and, manufacturer of the legendary Muffin Fan used everywhere from Cray computers to the Space Shuttle,
www.comairrotron.com
I don't believe in repairing cooling fans, and I don't believe in the cheap crap which washes ashore from Taiwan and infiltrates our computer cases.
Buy good fans. They'll outlast your computers, and you'll never need to do more than vacuum them.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
A couple of weeks ago the power cable to my laptop caught on fire. I called Dell right away and the first thing the tech told me was "Please unplug it immediately"... I wonder how many people would have actually left it plugged in and called support while the fire was still burning?
Anyhow, after 2 shot batteries, 2 motherboards, and 1 fire, Dell has take back the laptop and sent me a new one... Not a bad deal, I used it for two years...
One of the hardest things on laptops has to be the amount of heat they produce... Having worked in some of the major computer companies, I know they spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out ways of dissipating the heat laptops generate....
Anyone else had electrical fire problems on their laptops?
Also reminds of a few years ago when the Mac Cubes were lighting paper on fire that researchers would mount on top of them...
You know what sucks? How come there isn't a thread specifically for challenging moderation?
I had a chance to meta-moderate this post, and I said the 'troll' (or was it flamebait?) moderation was unfair. And I will continue to mark these types of things unfair as long as Slashdot doesn't have a forum for griping about unfair moderations.
Mod-bombing does happen. I got hit by it in April. Here's some proof:
http://www.nanogator.com/slashdot.jpg
I wouldn't go as far as to liken Slashdot to Nazis like the parent poster did, but I do think it's awful that there isn't a forum to discuss this. The worst part is that we can't bring it up in the thread that it happens in. I challenged a posting I made once and it got modded down as 'off-topic'.
So wtf?
I have a feeling this post is going to get modded down because I'm not talking about my computer as a fire hazard. Oh well, at least I've expressed myself.
I really wish that moderators would be careful about who they mod down. We've all seen too many instances of people getting modded down because their opinion's different from your own. I'll never forget getting modded down because I said Flash was a cool product. All the hatred against Flash anims cost me karma even though I was specifically talking about it from the development point of view. *eyeroll*
"Derp de derp."
I understand the problem - having a rack of servers here at home does this - but, for me, the solution is to use the built-in motherboard temp. monitors (yeah, they're off a few degrees, I know) and build rules. For example, under Windows, you can get MBM and a companion program, SHDN and set them to sit in taskbar and just monitor temps, voltages, etc. and shutdown the box when it gets too hot. Under linux, you can use the i2c kernel stuff and write a script that will poll the sensors and initiate a shutdown -h now command if the temperature line in the resulting file (piped to a text file, of course) exceeds a temperature that you set. I'm pretty conservative, so I set my systems to go down if the CPU temp is above 122F or the system temp is above 83F, and this works out well for me.
... if you put the script into a cronjob and set it to run every 5 minutes, say, then this should down your box before it explodes into flame. Also, you may want to head into BIOS and ensure that "power state after power off" is not set to "resume" or whatever - this would be a Bad Thing (tm).
:)
... umm .. dang (VDT's?). The vacuum tube displays (like you see in hospitals) are a good deal brighter and have more contrast than the LCD models ... but you pay for it.
Anyway
Now, of course, the thing to do is water cool everything.
My $.02
PS: If the internal temperature sensors being off a few degrees REALLY bothers you, you may want to look into some LCD displays. Typically, you can get them so that they plug into a 5.25" bay, and they're pretty useful. You'll want to check out the web for CrystalFontz and others, and as a rule V
I've dealt with quite a few systems that have had dead fans for unknown periods of time. Worst case is the system locks or a drive fails from heat. I've never seen a fire.
My big gripe is cheap cooling fans. Now, I don't really complain about the nasty sleeve bearing fans used on cheap power supplies, because...they're cheap. You expect it.
Now, take my Quantum DLT changer. One of the cheapo sleeve bearing cooling fans dies. Tape drive overheats. Tape that was loaded is shot. The two tapes nearest the drive in the magazine threw lots of errors. And for a while, I wasn't even sure if the drive had survived, but it appears to have worked. So I order a $25 fan from Mouser, snip out the piece of shit that was in there, and put in the new fan. Because somebody at Quantum decided to save a couple of dollars on a multi-thousand dollar piece of equipment, I lost three DLT tapes and hours of time, not to mention a night's backups.
What I'd really like to see is more use of paddles with microswitches. A lot of telecom equipment uses these little sheet metal paddles in the airstream of each fan. If the air stops, the paddle moves to resting position, and switches a microswitch. From there, it's alarm, cut power to the system, or whatever is appropriate.
How the hell was this redundant? I pasted a link to a popular mailing list where others could get more information and asked a question about a specific model. Neither of these were in the original? Without the link the parent post its basically an unsubstantiated claim. If it is redundant, where's the information I wanted. Why even bother marking it redundant? Did it really need to be modded down?
Stupid ****ing moderators!!