Killed my computer earlier this week

[barnburner]

No worries! The porn stash survived! lol

 

It was either an ESD issue or condensation/propellent from canned air.

 

Just got a new video card and power supply which resulted in a complete rewire of the inside of the machine, The initial install went uneventful, It ran for a few hours, then I went to tidy up my cables and do some dusting. Went to power the machine back up and once the switch was flipped on the power supply, my fans would light up and spin nonstop as well as my memory leds lighting up.

 

After some attempted troubleshooting and removing all unnecessary wires including the front power button wires, My video card started to smoke.

Not sure at this point what the problem could be, I requested a replacement video card from the seller, ordered a new power supply and motherboard, off chance the computer took the cpu and memory out with it as well. Admitting defeat that night, I went to go make my laptop my main machine, immediately ordered a usb sata ssd connector and ESD bracelet, it arrived the next day and I was able to confirm my ssd's survived, Friday came and the new motherboard and power supply arrived, I made quick but careful work with putting the new build together, While it was down, I took the chance to clean everything out of the case and tidy up and wipe down things. Got the new build put together with the old video card and was able to confirm the cpu and memory survived, Replacement video card arrived today and I am 100% back to normal with a new install of Windows 10 and a new 10 pro key.

 

Now I am left with thinking I fried the motherboard, I have 2 power supplies, one I tried to use to troubleshoot with, now I dont trust either of them in case I broke both of them that day, Gonna find a way to load test them some day. The fried motherboard also took out a powered usb 3 hub and the 2 things plugged into it, a new this year headset and my webcam.

 

I had great friend support through this issue, One of my friends fronted me the money to buy a new motherboard, I just have to pay him back when I can.

[DailyDi]

I'm scared just reading this. When times were better I upgraded to a new PC every year to avoid breakdowns. Now I'm on year 4 of my current machine and won't be able to even consider replacing it until the fall. I pray this one keeps chugging along!

[feralfreak]

2 hours ago, DailyDi said:

I'm scared just reading this. When times were better I upgraded to a new PC every year to avoid breakdowns. Now I'm on year 4 of my current machine and won't be able to even consider replacing it until the fall. I pray this one keeps chugging along!

i hardly ever change computers, i upgraded this laptop but only when i had to to keep it running(the old hard drive was dying, was getting bad sectors, crashing on me), thought "while im having to do this, i might as well go for more space" and stuck in a 1tb drive. if you are worried about breakdowns, why not just do some maintenance on it? i mean scans, defrag, at most wipe and reinstall the os? you could have saved a lot of money on more computers

[oznl]

Yikes.  Using an ESD is good practice but spiking a chip with static isn’t going to cause the magic smoke to escape I think.  That (and the fact that it was running before “tidying” the cables) makes me wonder if there was a short somewhere across the power supply outputs or, with some connector mix-up, some fan volts got fed to a TTL circuit and vice-versa.  I remember one of my kids managed to get 12V into the 5V rail on a PC she was “upgrading”.

  The parts list was endless…

Good job on recovering it!

[feralfreak]

what is an esd?

[oznl]

38 minutes ago, feralfreak said:

what is an esd?

Electro-Static-Discharge device: basically a way to stop static electricity in your body toasting chips you are handling by grounding your body at your wrist.  Some chips are quite sensitive to ESD.

[DailyDi]

8 hours ago, feralfreak said:

i hardly ever change computers, i upgraded this laptop but only when i had to to keep it running(the old hard drive was dying, was getting bad sectors, crashing on me), thought "while im having to do this, i might as well go for more space" and stuck in a 1tb drive. if you are worried about breakdowns, why not just do some maintenance on it? i mean scans, defrag, at most wipe and reinstall the os? you could have saved a lot of money on more computers

I do my maintenance and cleaning, I am more worried about a hardware failure than a software-based breakdown.

[Crinklz Kat]

I'm not into the gaming thing anymore, so I've been typically just picking up off-lease commodity stuff (all Dell at this point).  The business/commercial stuff is quite robust and parts availability is very good, even for models that are many years old.  That's also how I got my servers - The one I'm running now I figure would have been between 20-30K new and I think I only paid 1400 for it.   It had no drives, but I would have been putting in larger drives anyway. 

As far as losing data - been there too many times.  I try not to keep anything important on my computers (desktop or laptop).  I run a VM on that server above for a home file server and everything is stored there.  I can access anything from any computer.   I used to be diligent about backing it all up to tape, but I do not have a means to do that at this time.  So my alternate backup is to simply dump a copy of the data to an external hard drive, then stash that away where it's safe.  But haven't done that in a bit too long... just can't motivate my ass to put in the effort.  I've got 2 layers of safety in the RAID array and a few spare disks around.  But that's still a little bit like playing with fire.  Yeah, you got an extinguisher, but you can still get burned. 

[Mars.inDiapers]

I've handled thousands of computer parts at my previous job, in an ESD safe environment but not always grounded, and outside work, hundreds of components and few notebooks. When I work on someone else's machine I always observe ESD safety rules, but many times with my own stuff I can't be bothered, and many more times other people just don't give a damn. When I sell my stuff I always make sure to send them off wrapped properly in an antistatic bag, but I've had people hand me CPUs they were advertising for sale online in a paper envelopes, sticks of RAM or other components wrapped in newspaper, which anything but ESD safe.

But I've never had a single component die whose cause of failure was with good probability an electrostatic discharge.

PC components can handle more abuse than we might think.

https://youtu.be/nXkgbmr3dRA

That's not saying one should go and abuse PC components, or not follow ESD safety rules. Just that, damage due to ESD is unlikely.

I'd cast more suspicion on the canned air.

[barnburner]

2 hours ago, DiapersOfTheStorm said:

I've handled thousands of computer parts at my previous job, in an ESD safe environment but not always grounded, and outside work, hundreds of components and few notebooks. When I work on someone else's machine I always observe ESD safety rules, but many times with my own stuff I can't be bothered, and many more times other people just don't give a damn. When I sell my stuff I always make sure to send them off wrapped properly in an antistatic bag, but I've had people hand me CPUs they were advertising for sale online in a paper envelopes, sticks of RAM or other components wrapped in newspaper, which anything but ESD safe.

But I've never had a single component die whose cause of failure was with good probability an electrostatic discharge.

PC components can handle more abuse than we might think.

https://youtu.be/nXkgbmr3dRA

That's not saying one should go and abuse PC components, or not follow ESD safety rules. Just that, damage due to ESD is unlikely.

I'd cast more suspicion on the canned air.

I did run a braided fan cable behind the motherboard, could the rubbing the cable on the back of the board do anything?

[feralfreak]

7 hours ago, DiapersOfTheStorm said:

I've handled thousands of computer parts at my previous job, in an ESD safe environment but not always grounded, and outside work, hundreds of components and few notebooks. When I work on someone else's machine I always observe ESD safety rules, but many times with my own stuff I can't be bothered, and many more times other people just don't give a damn. When I sell my stuff I always make sure to send them off wrapped properly in an antistatic bag, but I've had people hand me CPUs they were advertising for sale online in a paper envelopes, sticks of RAM or other components wrapped in newspaper, which anything but ESD safe.

But I've never had a single component die whose cause of failure was with good probability an electrostatic discharge.

PC components can handle more abuse than we might think.

https://youtu.be/nXkgbmr3dRA

That's not saying one should go and abuse PC components, or not follow ESD safety rules. Just that, damage due to ESD is unlikely.

I'd cast more suspicion on the canned air.

i used canned air on my desktop before i replaced it, the canned air bought me more time until i could afford a new, didnt damage it, it cooled the overheating caps that was leaking from the top vents

[Mars.inDiapers]

17 hours ago, barnburner said:

could the rubbing the cable on the back of the board do anything

Also probably not, unless the insulation worn off completely and shorted something.

[Crinklz Kat]

20 hours ago, barnburner said:

I did run a braided fan cable behind the motherboard, could the rubbing the cable on the back of the board do anything?

If it's metal braid and there's no other insulation over it - absolutely.  Fabric braid should be ok unless for some crazy reason they used carbon fiber in the braid - that's conductive!  ESD shouldn't cause anything to release the "magic smoke" -- it'll usually just fail because the damage is internal.  If it's smoking, that's burning and usually the result of a short-circuit or over-voltage situation. 

 

As far as static discharge..., as DOTS said, modern electronics are fairly sturdy.  I've zapped my laptops (both personal and work issued) on a number of occasions by accident and none have ever stopped working.  I handle equipment at work that costs in the 10s of thousands of dollars -- some devices run well into 6 figures.  Quite frankly, I rarely ever use an ESD strap.  I usually just try to remember to touch something that I know is grounded before I start poking into the innards (and that it's unplugged first unless it's just a hot-swappable component I'm inserting or removing).  We have fiber optic interface devices called SFPs (small form-factor pluggable) or QSFPs (just a bigger version for faster speeds).  These things are about the size of a large thumb drive but can cost up 3 to 4 thousand dollars each depending on the speed and fiber type they are designed for.  I routinely toss these things in boxes and just have them lying around on my desk.  Never had one just fail due to any static charge.  But, I also have the luxury of a service contract should one fail. 

[barnburner]

I also subscribe to the theory that my canned air spraying could have knocked something conductive in the dust that was being blasted onto a circuit.

[Firefly 35]

I suspect it was a short in one or more of the cables.  I had a power supply short out once, resulting in some brief arcing and a tripped circuit breaker.  

Hope you're able to restore your old machine somewhat.

[barnburner]

On 5/28/2022 at 10:03 AM, Firefly 35 said:

I suspect it was a short in one or more of the cables.  I had a power supply short out once, resulting in some brief arcing and a tripped circuit breaker.  

Hope you're able to restore your old machine somewhat.

Im back up and running, new power supply, new video card and new motherboard, but Im gonna eventually replace the motherboard with something more fully featured, this one is missing built in wifi and bluetooth and rgb headers, My video card covers the available pcie slots which I would have loved to use with a wifi card.

[Princess_August]

oh thank god the porn survived LOL

[BabyJune]

Killed my brother's keyboard about a month ago when I spilled coffee all over it. He wasn't happy about it, but I got him a new keyboard and it even works better than the old one.

[feralfreak]

my ps4 controller is probably fixing to die on me, i had to change the pads on it that lets me hit the buttons, that worked for a while but now i cant hit the square button(well i can but it does NOTHING, and l1 button got finnicky), i ordered a new conductive film for it, im hoping that fixes it, i cant afford 60 to 75 dollars for a new one.

[barnburner]

On 7/19/2022 at 9:11 AM, feralfreak said:

my ps4 controller is probably fixing to die on me, i had to change the pads on it that lets me hit the buttons, that worked for a while but now i cant hit the square button(well i can but it does NOTHING, and l1 button got finnicky), i ordered a new conductive film for it, im hoping that fixes it, i cant afford 60 to 75 dollars for a new one.

I did some surgery on my brothers PS4 controller, usb port was wonked out, replaced the usb port and it charges now, but, the light doesnt work anymore on the controller ?

[feralfreak]

5 hours ago, barnburner said:

I did some surgery on my brothers PS4 controller, usb port was wonked out, replaced the usb port and it charges now, but, the light doesnt work anymore on the controller ?

might need to replace the white cable, i think it powers the light on it. i got my new film, put it on and the square button worked but i couldnt get anything out of the up on the d pad and the l2 button, so i put the old one back on and had the problems from both present, talked with the founder of the star trek group "archangel marine corps" and he said something is keeping contact from being made, i took a closer look and it seems there is a small foam thing that is suppose to gently hold pressure, it was compressed on one end, so thought "ill experiment with a piece of transpore tape", thank God for that idea, i used just enough to cover the low part, managed to get it back together, the menu and store worked perfectly but in the games the controller didnt work at all, except for the ps button, i tried resetting and resyncing the controller and nothing, so guess what i did, .....

 

I GAVE IT A BITCHSLAP TWICE! , not even close to kidding, surprisingly it works almost perfectly, only thing bad on it is what it did before, when i slam the left joystick forward it makes my guns in sto fire, i can live with that.