486 dies terrible death

My voicemail PC died a pretty terrible death this morning. I was still groggy from a late night of hackering and sitting at my computer (my back is to the voicemail system) and all of a sudden this loud popping begins. At first a wave of terror washed over me as my not quite totally functioning brain was trying to determine just what the hell was going on. At first I didn't want to look but I turned around in time to see some serious arcing going on inside the exposed PC (the case is off). It went on for a good 4-5 seconds (start to finish). It was probably the power supply but I can't tell for sure until I do a post-mortem (right now I'm getting my voicemail back up). Luckily it didn't take out any hardware. The hard drive is fine and as far as I can tell so far so are the voice boards. That was some crazy shit. The power supply fan went bad on it a while ago (over a year, surely longer) and I never bothered replacing it because I always use just whatever hardware I have laying about whenever something goes bad on the box, and those damn power supply fans go out all the time and it's a pain to have to replace them. Anyway, I wonder if it was some critical thermal failure of some sort. The P/S was hot but not abnormally so (abnormal in this case would be scorching but usual temperature is very hot to the touch but not burning). Wacky. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]