Smoke in the Basement

Monday, May 29, 2006, 2:01:03 PM, Ethan wrote: At least there was a visible cause. My incident #1 was me being dumb for not finding the 115/230V jumper on 'boromir' [1] so I did blow the PSU as well as a fuse in the hosue it was booted in. It actually took ~5 seconds for the fuse to kick in... no further damage then a shortened and currently dead/unrepaired PSU. Ok, that was pretty easy to resolve too. Incident #2 was 'sauron' [2] starting to smell badly... and he was actually humming happily 3 rooms further away in the basement of my parents house. I was testing a new board and currently I assume that this one is bad. I totally stripped the machine and couldn't find a source for the smell. The board also doesn't have a distinctive smell to it, or marks of the incident. No real reason ever found. The recent one (#3) was the currently unnamed 3130 IRIS [3]. The PSU seems to be the source of the trouble but I need to do closer inspection if I can come up with a real reason. The worst thing aside from the apparent danger of fire is that all three happened in my parents house. I no longer live there but the majority of my collection is in their basement and they don't really feel well with it. I guess I've covered/hidden the latest incident pretty well. ;-) I'm always quite surprised what the computers itself survive. Sparks, smoke, overvoltage and still... with some replacement in the infrastructure many of them come up again without trouble. The result of terribly expensive quality hardware? Gerhard PS / PR0N: ----------- [1] http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/collection/1201.php [2] http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/collection/1200.php http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/pictures/powerseries.php#outside http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/pictures/powerseries.php#cardcage [3] http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/collection/1500.php