When my display went blank followed by two intermitten pops, I immediately assumed I blew out the monitor's tube. I'd been tweaking the X settings on a recent linux installation and those warnings in the man pages left me a bit paranoid.
Only after I followed a faint but distinct odor to the back of my computer did I find the true cuprit.
When I extracted and opened the power supply, sure enough, two capacitors had blown, throwing festive streams and curls of cardboard and what looked like gobs of hot glue in all directions. Despite such self-scrificial heroics, my motherboard could not be saved. Though everything else remained undamaged, I took the opportunity to upgrade my processor and video card, renaming the box "leemajors" on the local network.
Most interesting, however, is that when those capacitors exploded, they smelled just like fried crabs!
But here's the funny part: I ended up getting a new power supply by just puchasing a new case that came with one. Since then, I've added on a CD-RW and a couple of hard drives. Perhaps I will once again have my room perfumed by the scent of fried crabs....
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Um, I thought this was exactly what bitTorrent was for, as opposed to the animatrix series (which actually was fed faster by the originating servers).
When my display went blank followed by two intermitten pops, I immediately assumed I blew out the monitor's tube. I'd been tweaking the X settings on a recent linux installation and those warnings in the man pages left me a bit paranoid.
Only after I followed a faint but distinct odor to the back of my computer did I find the true cuprit.
When I extracted and opened the power supply, sure enough, two capacitors had blown, throwing festive streams and curls of cardboard and what looked like gobs of hot glue in all directions. Despite such self-scrificial heroics, my motherboard could not be saved. Though everything else remained undamaged, I took the opportunity to upgrade my processor and video card, renaming the box "leemajors" on the local network.
Most interesting, however, is that when those capacitors exploded, they smelled just like fried crabs!
But here's the funny part: I ended up getting a new power supply by just puchasing a new case that came with one. Since then, I've added on a CD-RW and a couple of hard drives. Perhaps I will once again have my room perfumed by the scent of fried crabs....