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."

Comments

In my opinion

[Jozer99]

In my opinion, the most common killer is spyware. With $400 computers, people are more reluctant to clean their hard drive every 4 months and take security precautions then to just throw the computer in the trash and head back to walmart.

The keyboard lock..

[sr180]

Back in Highschool the 386 and 486 pcs had the old standard keyboard lock. By rubbing your shoes on the carpet, lifting them up and holding your finger milimeters away from the metal keyboard lock a static discharge would then hit the lock. Monitor would go black and an instant fried motherboard was the result. The school just kept replacing them under warranty claims. And these were dropping about the rate of one or two a week.

Water In Monitor (CRT)!

[temojen]

Routed CRT internal voltage levels down VGA cable to motherboard. Bad bad, very bad. The magic smoke escaped, while making several bangs.

Re:Entire glass of coke

[ninthwave]

I knew a sound engineer who would clean out mixing decks with sprite. He would just dump it down the fader slots. I managed to get him to switch to plain tonic water. The theory being if you did not have it plugged in or on the liquid would not conduct and the carbonation would remove grime sticking the faders. You just let it dry before turning it back on and all would be well.

I only witnessed this act twice and it still gives me shivers.

Re:Most common problems

[robbo]

Wow, considering that very few people actually try to overclock, the percentage of overclockers who fry their systems must be pretty large. Any guesses? 80%? more? less?

Nearly burned down my house

[Bitsy Boffin]

Just a couple of weeks ago a PC nearly burned down the house. I was out the front and heard frantic calls, came round the back to find smoke pouring out one of the windows, I mean thick acrid black smoke. Neighbours had already called the fire brigade.

Anyway they arrived in a couple of minutes and went inside and put it out. Luckily there were two windows open and a good breeze blowing in one and our the other so the damage was minimal (all smoke went straight out the window).

The PC was completetly incinerated though, I've never seena anything like it, the hard drive was actually warped from the heat generated in that steel case. The plastic fascia was gone, just, not there any more, the motherboard, well what loosly resembled one was pretty much ash. The solder holding the ICs obviously melted and they had popped off etc. Luckily, it wasn't my PC, and it was only an old P200 or something, or I'd be up shit creek.

It burned right through the carpet immediatly under the case, and burnt a good impression into the wooden floor beneath. Burnt a chunk out of a couch next to it, but it was caught early enough that there wasn't really any other damage.

I can't see what caused it, the heat generated inside the case was incredibly intense, basically anything inside it that could vaporise, did.

Let it be a warning - install smoke alarms near your PC if you leave it running unattended.

Re:Nearly burned down my house

[takochan]

I am starting to wonder if these PC fires might be due to the "exploding capacitor" problem from that era (where the Taiwan company that stole (and miscopied) the recipe for making capacitors, which then, after 5 years or so, pop, spilling eletrolyte all over a running PC motherboard).

I have read around the net recently several cases of fires happening (but someone was near the PC and shut it off right away, then saw where the smoke came from (around the board where the eletrolyte had spilled out of the pop'd capacitor) after opening it.

Urban legend or is this going to be more of a problem as PCs from this era start exhibiting this problem more as their capacitors 'expire'?

Re:Nearly burned down my house

[darrylo]

I am starting to wonder if these PC fires might be due to the "exploding capacitor" problem from that era (where the Taiwan company that stole (and miscopied) the recipe for making capacitors, which then, after 5 years or so, pop, spilling eletrolyte all over a running PC motherboard).

Well, the "exploding capacitors" that I've seen, are really more along the lines of "leaky capacitors" (hey, given the choice between "leaky" and "exploding", which one do you think people are going to use? ;-). The electolyte slowly leaks out and dries out to a light brown crusty substance. No explosions, there.

However, depending upon the capacitor's purpose, changing the capcitance (or changing the capacitor into a "not-quite-a-capacitor"), could also have Very Bad Effects. ;-(

Another (rare?) possibility is hairline cracks/fractures in surface-mount components (possibly caused by the way the device is soldered to the board, IIRC). Some years back, I ran into a web page that had some pretty detailed descriptions of surface-mount component failure modes. In some cases, surface-mount capacitors (I think) could pass some phenomenal amounts of current in some failure mode, easily burning an hole and possibly causing a fire. Very Scary Stuff. Unfortunately, the site that had the page took it down and started charging people to see it.

(Soon after I saw that, a co-worker's laptop got Real Hot, and something burned a nasty hole in the bottom, and scorched a piece of desk, too, I think. I always assumed that it was some kind of surface-mounted device failure, but that was just a wild guess on my part.)

Re:This is so true.

[ScrewMaster]

Odd ... in 1985 or thereabouts I worked tech support for Mindscape at the Consumer Electronics Show (technically I was a programmer but we got hauled off to McCormick Place during trade shows) and the C64's drove us nuts. That show was in the dead of winter, the air was bone dry, and we had a row of Commodore 64 machine set up to demo our games. Every time one of the sales guys would touch one of them without grounding himself first ... zap. Blown video chip, blank screen. We had to keep a stack of spares just to get through the show.

Re:Corrupted Power Absolution

[UserChrisCanter4]

Unfortunately, that's not always the case. This assumption was a pet peeve of mine, when I used to work in the computer repair business. I'd have some guy talking up the specs on his computer, and they would usually be impressive up until he bragged about the 450 Watt PSU that he picked up for $35.

Not only do cheap PSUs introduce stability issues, but a lot of PSUs take things down with them when they blow.

My favorite example is an absolutely spectacular one involving my brother's friend. He had a 1.4Ghz Athlon (back when that was impressive), along with the requisite DVD, CD-Burner, brand new GeForce 3; the whole nine yards. The PSU blew. Both optical drives ejected and shot sparks from inside. HDDs presumably lost their motors (they never spun up again). Mobo died, CPU died, sound card died. The only thing that survived was the video card, which was at least a small consolation since it was still top-of-the-line.

PSU replacements did tend to be my second most common hardware repair (HDDs were first), and most of the time they didn't damage anything, but I saw enough problems then that I'll only buy reputable PSUs now.

Modem

[ImaLamer]

The number one killer of PC's, IMHO, has been the modem.

Lightning usually doesn't even have to enter into it. Everytime the phone rings you get voltage running into your PC.

Once I heard a long ring and the PC never turned back on (well, for a year at least. Later the machine was revived but using any PCI slot mysteriously disabled DMA. On a 333Mhz machine you can imagine boot times).

Another killer was USB related too. Microsoft's Trackball Optical cable shorts out occasionaly which for some reason killed my $3000 custom-built PC about 3 years ago. Someone here on Slashdot told me I can get a refund or some sort of offer but it wasn't worth the hassle.