That depends,
a lot, on the PSU design. Certainly SMPSUs can do some
very odd things if a capacitor goes open-circuit or just high ESR. How
much damage that does to the rest of the PSU or worse the rest of the
machine depends on the design.
Do you think that the designers of this stuff have learned which approaches
they might want to stay away from? :-)
Alas my expeerience suggests the reverse. Back when computers were
expensive, and chips were expensive, the manufacutrers took the trouble
to put all sorts of protectinon in their machines to protect said
expensive decices in the event of a failure. Now they don't bother.
A triviel example, but it's almost a classic computer. As is well-known
when you have a multiplexed LED display, the instantaneous current
through each LED is much higher than the sort of current that you'd pass
continuously to have the display at a suitable rightness. High enough
that if the scanning fails for any reason, the display LEDs will be burnt
out.
In the HP98x0 series of machines, there are monostables triggered from
the display stroe signal so that if the processor side of things
malfucntions, the display will be blanked. It's impossible for one
digit/column to be stuck on.
They did a similar thing in the 59309 digital clock, but that's more
reasonalbe since the scanning cna be derrived from an external
oscillator. If you switch it to 'Ext' with no oscillator connected, then
the display could be damaged without this protection circuit.
But how many modern devices have such prtection circuits fitted? Darn it,
many modern PSUs don't even have crowbar circuits.
-tony
