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My mom just called about her computer

Schadenfroh

Elite Member
"Fire just shot out of the back and now it wont work"


Going down to help her now, chances of me spending the rest of the night trying to extract her data from a fried hard drive?

Good ole cheap PSUs
 
i had the same thing happen to my cousin, i told him to buy a dell. luckily the hdd held out and he didn't lose any data.
the whole pc is fine as a matter of fact. he said smoke came out in the back.

why do people bother making sucky PSUs. i can understand if PSUs blow up in high end rigs. but for a sempron 3000 with a ATI Radeon 9600? WTF! PSU manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves.
 
here i though tyou were going to tell her $40 an hour with 2 hour min. if she does not like that she can call geek squad!
 
Originally posted by: Nohr
I had that happen once and lucked out. Only needed a new PSU.

Well, I got there and the wall behind the computer was scorched so she was not kidding about the fire:shocked:

Anyways, I cracked open the case and nothing looked physically damaged, ripped out the old PSU. It was a piece of crap, weighed about the same as a styrofoam cup. No brand name generic.

I slapped a factory sealed Antec TruPower 2 that I had brought with me into it and it booted up fine and nothing got fried other than the generic PSU!

posting from it now😉
 
I've had two cheap PSU's FRY on me... one destroying my motherboard! :Q This is before I knew anything about computers. 😛
 
I had that happen to my really old HP computer...PSU exploded and smoked up. Luckily nothing else was affected and I was able to retrieve all my data from the hard drive.
 
That happened to a brand new Dell XPS system right out of the box at work. Plugged it in for the first time and POP...sizzle. Sparks and smoke came out. It fried the motherboard.
 
Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Originally posted by: Nohr
I had that happen once and lucked out. Only needed a new PSU.

Well, I got there and the wall behind the computer was scorched so she was not kidding about the fire:shocked:

Anyways, I cracked open the case and nothing looked physically damaged, ripped out the old PSU. It was a piece of crap, weighed about the same as a styrofoam cup. No brand name generic.

I slapped a factory sealed Antec TruPower 2 that I had brought with me into it and it booted up fine and nothing got fried other than the generic PSU!

posting from it now😉

Well it was certainly nice that it died alone. I hate it when components die and start killing other things. My roommate's USB thumbdrive (free from the college, I'd love to know what they paid for these 128MB things) started acting flaky, not always detecting properly, and then it started destroying USB ports. It killed at least two on his parents' PC, and one on his old laptop.
Hardware Killing Spree!!!
 
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