My USB mouse fried my PC

[GiantBehemoth]

I have been planning to swich over to AMD for a while. I was going to start building and ordering the parts in a couple of weeks, but.....for some odd reason my PC decided to blow up last night and I am far FROM ready to start putting together my new PC (and ordering the parts is annoyin as I don't have the money in my CC account right now).

I guess now we have some proof that a crappy quality USB mouse can indeed take everything with it. So what happened? Lt me explain..

The mouse suddenly just decided to DIE on me while I was playing an online RTS game against another person. No mouse = I couldn' do crap and it affected my rating as I had to leave.

I get angry with it and slam my fist down on it (the mouse) and it decides to power up...so all working..3 hours later it powers down with a spark and smoke coming from my PC. I kneeled down wh ile basically %&$!ing my pants and I basically saw the Southbridge MELT infront of my eyes...it just melted!! So I OMFG switch all the power off and I smell some burning all over the room. CPU looked part melted as I took it out!

Ram is fine, so is graphics card and HD. Everything else is dead.....

After recovering and realizing the nightmare I am in, I tried to figure ou what happened. Here's what I came up with-

Mouse was so badly constructed that it must of screwed up and send a massive power burst down the line into the USB, causing it to blow the southbridge and other bits and pieces on the motherboard.

I know you're gonna ask about faulty PSU but all rails were pretty much perfect and I chcked 'em 30 minutes before this happened. I'm never buying a cheap WIRED USB mouse again. So yeah, I am without a computer for like a week and I have no backup to restore my site (I host all my stuff on my own PC)...:sigh:

To add to that stress, I have to hastedly build a new PC and that is AMD...my first AMD too! The amount of stress..so guys? any input on what might of happened? The mouse seems to be the cause as nohing was sluggish and everything was AOK, including temps. Northbridge looks intact to me. I'm trying to figure out how the damn CPU would blow.

 

[mountcarlmore]

a usb mouse cant fry your pc, its way too low powered. it was your motherboard itself that fried, that was also why your mouse was freezing, it wasnt the actual mouse, this was probably due to a faulty capacitor on the motherboard, those things regulate voltage, so it probably gave out, and the southbridge got fried.

 

[GiantBehemoth]

:sigh: but it was only a couple of months old...:/

Update:

Ater further inspection, the mouse is damaged after I took that SOB apart. The wires are all loose on the inside. I guess that would explain the power down and power up thing. One wire is completely disconnected on the inside. Now if that wire is the one that gives power, what if that was messing around and rubbing all over the inside of the componants while I was moving the mouse about?

I am like 80% sure the mouse did it. All my oher USB devices were working until the meltdown. I doubt the motherboard would just say "Hey, I'm working perfectly..now I just wanna die" and give up.

I don't think research has been done on how USB devices can damage the motherboard enough, but I sure in hell believe this mouse destroyed my parts.

Loose wires + Power + Connected to MOtheboard USB port looks like a disaster waiting to happen, especially if those wires are giving power to the mouse.

So I stick by my belief that bad design can result in the death of some parts..a mouse, that is..killing off what it can..

SHOCKING! argh

 

[pradeep1]

I agree with mountcarlmore. Highly doubtfull that any non-externally powered USB device could do anything to fry your machine. Looks like a crappy power supply took out our computer.

 

[GiantBehemoth]

Disagree...the mouse obviously had something to do with it..and ou know why? I just took my whole PC apart and ripped apart my motherboard. I opened up the USB ports (there's a little silver case just inside the rear) and it's all nice and..well...fried inside


Then the southbridge going. It could be the PSU and a combination of a crappy mouse.

All these hings point to the mouse + USB.

The onlu logical thing I can think of is-

PSU took out USB + Mouse + Mobo + CPU (mouse is broken btw and a litle bit fried on the back)
USB + Mouse + PSU took out Mobo and CPU.

The big question is..WHY IS the mouse FRIED!!!! on the back (once i opened the suckr up)

There is no way in hell all this isn't related. Unlses someone has run experiments on the effect of a USB mouse failures (especiall loose wires) then it's not only possible, but probably that something could give.

I'd like people to try to be helpful in actually finding out the source of this problem. I know for sure that if you weret o grab a big fat bit of metal and rub it all ovr the back, the mouse is going to fry..question is, will it possibly take the USB port and bridge with it?

I may atke this to some professional just to find out how.

 

[SilverTrine]

Peripherals can seriously screw up your computer.
I once had a seriously cheap Comp USA keyboard on my PC that was giving me problems, it would just freeze sometimes and not type.

Well soon after that my PC would boot and give one of those dreaded Disk Failure error messages. I spent hours changing out the HDD with a different one and it still gave the same error message. I was about to take out the motherboard and RMA it until on a whim I changed out the keyboard and the system worked perfectly.

I couldnt believe that a cheapo keyboard could almost destroy my system, but it did. I took my revenge on the keyboard and smashed it with a hammer, I felt a little better after that.