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Most Common Ways to Kill a PC
Sparky the Service Center Dude writes "PCstats covers the most common ways to kill a PC in this "what not to do" guide. Everything from exploding capacitors, to cat hair, to dodgy components and overclocking account for users killing their own PC's. The most common PC killer? The Power Supply."
26% PSU and power issues
23% Bad gear and user negligence
13% Heatsink related
15% Assembly and moving
10% Lightning strike and static
3% Computer cruelty
6% USB related
2% Overclocking
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
heres the Mirrordot copy incase the thing totally dies: http://mirrordot.org/stories/4ec4acbeb790ac0270a10 94afdd09d56/index.html
google to rescue
Probably because it's not sure-fire. I've been running Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 on my computers since each of those operating systems was released, and none of them have died on me. Say what you will, those are fucking rock-solid.
Once you've seen the gooey orange stuff, you'll be thankful for mere hairballs.
Not totally true.
My PC had a cheapo 250 or 300 watt PSU that came with the case (case+cpu was like $25 total)
i moved to my current apartment and within a few months the PSU blew. All the capacitors popped, fan died, smoked and smelt up my room. Luckily it was just the PSU that died
So I got a nice expensive PSU.. 6 months later i noticed the voltages were dropping on my monitoring program.. i thought it must be a mistake, bad sensors or something.. But it kept getting worse.. Until a couple of months ago when i noticed tons of RF interference with my TV tuner..
Then last month my hard drive would occasional click off then instantly spin back up and lock my pc.. a reboot would fix it for several days
Then last week, click, spin up, lock.. reboot, click, spin up, lock, reboot, etc.. the PSU could no longer power my hard drives
Why? Crappy wiring in my crappy apartment. Brownouts and surges. So I bought another PSU, and now an APC LE-1200 line conditioner/voltage regulator. It's working great.. except I found out the outlets in my room are not grounded (the voltage regulators Ground Fault Indicator came on, so I plugged in a cheap AC circuit tester, it indicated OPEN GROUND, so I used a multimeter to confirm it, yep not grounded.. argh!)
Wonder if thats why I always get static shocks whenever i touch stuff in my room.
Anyway, i guess what im saying is even good expensive PSUs can go bad cause of crappy home wiring and whatnot.
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I'm not surprised that PSU related problems is on top seeing how it's the most important component of the computer but the one that people seem to pay the least attention.
What people must understand is that they need a PSU that have the most stable rails (such as the +5 & +12 rails) and that isn't made by Mr. Bingo Bongo. Sure you can save around $20-30 going with a cheaper PSU but that action is a gamble. Are you a gambler? My friend sure was. Bought some power supply made by some unknown manufacturer and he's still surprised that it was the cause of his exploding CD-Rom.
People in general should take power supply reviews more seriously and consider to spend the extra bucks to hafve something that will work for years as you want it to.
1998: CD
2000: HDD
2004: PSU
That's it - since 1985! The CD was broken by impact. The HDD was garbage from Quantum, may they rot in hell. The PSU was overworked and gave up. It took the mobo with it, but not the RAM or CPU.
The worst part is that I only upgrade when I get a failure or when the parts are horribly antiquated. (My last upgrade was in 2002.)
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
No, part of the money I pay for the car is to cover the damage that assholes like that cause and don't have to directly pay for "because it's insured."
But insurance companies don't lose money, they just spread the losses around to other customers - which, in this case, is everyone else who rents a car. IOW, me.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nearly every review seems to place Antec at the top of the pack in terms of being able to actually output the rated wattage. That fact alone speaks for quality, in my opinion.
Additionally, reviews that place heavy/out-of-spec loads or nasty input power on PSUs tend to arrive at a similar conclusion.
On top of all of that, anecdotal evidence does tend to place Antec's products at the top of the pack, in terms of reliability.
Enermax also seems to do quite well in "round-up" reviews.
As to modems, I've wondered about that... My modem cables all run thru a heavy-duty surge unit; one hopes that helps
It doesn't. I did the math once on the Surge protectors I was selling at Sears -- the best one we had, with the $20K protection policy -- it could handle 2500 joule if I recall.
Assuming room temperature and nice even numbers (so 25 deg C), that could boil:
2500_J ~= 600 cal.
600cal/(75deg C) = 8
That is a whopping 8 ml of water.
How much energy you think is in that lightning bolt traveling down the phone line?
Modern surge protectors are to protect against in-home spikes -- buy them based on how much insurance you want, and ignore the power rating. But make sure they say that they cover lighting!
Or buy transformer / inductor based protection, which costs an assload more -- something like these
I'm a firm believer in surge protectors. Years ago (back when the Pentium 100MHz roamed the plains), a lightning storm decided to play havoc on the neighborhood.
When I came home from work, I smelled ozone and burnt plastic. Looking around I noticed that the surge protector power supply plug was melted and fused to the wall socket. Though ruined, the surge protector did its job. Nothing attached to it was affected by the lightning strike that hit the powerline outside.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Water is not conductive, the impurities are conductive. If the electronics are off, water usually will not cause any damage. It is common practice to wash old mainboards in the dishwasher for retro computing.
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Better yet - put air filters in front of all of the intake fans. I got a large sheet of cut-to-fit air filters at Home Depot for $5. I've made around ten filters so far from it. If your intake fan is in the front of the case, there's usually room under the front panel for a filter (well, it's not usually designed for one, but a bit of tape holds one in quite well).
Some people use panty hose for that, and you can buy foam-type filters made as PC fan covers, but ISTM that you're better off to let the very finest dust float on through and out the PSU fan, rather than forgetting to occasionally clean such a fine-grained filter.
I assume you got something like swamp cooler filters, or force-air heater filters? either should work well -- not so fine-grained as to get clogged with microdust, but sufficient to catch any lint, cat hair, etc.
However, I've never bothered adding a filter, and thanks to the intake fan, my machines stay very clean inside.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Get one pin bent on a CRT display cable and you can surely and silently fry your mobo as well. That lesson cost me (okay, the client) about 3 pc's. Lesson -- check the cable pins before you plug it in.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Probably dust, hair, cat fur, that sort of thing is very flammable. From the dust bunnies I have seen under most beds, it is no place for a running PC.
He probably forgot to install the little things that raise the motherboard up away from the metal case...he was likely shorting the mobo out on the case...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I still don't understand what the problem was. Lead (solder) doesn't rust, neither do aluminum connectors, or the nickel-plated connectors most computer hardware uses. If it was just the case, you can always get something aluminum, or ones that are mostly plastic.
I'm guessing you are not a sailor.
Aluminum, copper, steel, lead and brass will all corrode beautifully and almost any combination of two different metals in electrical contact with each other and an ionic solution (like the salty moisture in sea air) will form a battery and hence corrode in all sorts of wierd and wonderful ways.
Mom insisted upon running the sweeper Sat. afternoon. Charged up the whole house, fried my laptop backlight. Yet another reason to wear headphones and drown out the p's: I can hear the static cling, and know when to get the hell out!
Last summer we had a ground strike at our neighbors house's backyard (about 75' from my house, about 10' from theirs). Trashed their house pretty bad, to the point of even melting a hole in their propane feed line. Nasty bolt
So while I'm watching the fire department, cops, etc...show up at their house (The occupants were all scared shitless, but otherwise fine), I decided to go check the National Weather service. I had mistakenly forgot to turn it off before the storm, so I just sat down and started typing. Worked fine.
Except it said the network cable was unplugged. Huh?
Long story short: 6 (yes, 6) trashed NIC's, 1 trashed router, 1 trashed motherboard, 1 trashed VCR, and a trashed thermostat. Before you ask me about line protection, etc, consider this: the thermostat for the furnace is not on line power. It's battery powered. As for the computers and router: all are on UPS's. Big (2000VA+) industrial ones. Yes, Virgina, the power does suck where I live. The UPS's all reported a mild line spike (147v, if memory serves), but nothing crazy.
As best anyone can figure (though I'm open to other ideas), the spike got in one of two ways: either though the grounding wires (which would make sence, except for the UPS's protecting that line, too, and that still does not explain the thermostat), or some sort of strange transient voltage created in the wiring of the house by having that much current and voltage passed so close (sort of like creating a big A/C alternator).
Point being: when Mother Nature decides to pWn your equiptment, she's going to!
Chris Knight is my hero.
I popped open one of the failed PSUs once and found that, yes indeed, the blown caps were made by that company in Taiwan.
If your machine has a PSU from Deer, replace the unit ASAP, even if it's working fine right now. It will eventually fail.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!