What could kill both an AGP videocard AND a PS/2 mouse?

[atomicd10]

Hello,

My friend's computer died the other day, and so I offered to fix it. After swapping a few parts around, I found that the videocard (Winfast GeForce 2 Pro) and the mouse (MS Intellimouse Explorer optical) had both died. The machine seems to run fine now that I replaced them with some stuff out of my closet... I tried to use the 'dead' devices on my machine, and the same failures occured.

Why would devices suddenly fail like that?

My friend's computer has the following stats:

AMD 1.4 GHz Thunderbird
Gigabyte 7VTX, with BIOS F8
512 MB Corsair PC2100
75 GB IBM Deskstar HDD
Winfast GeForce2 Pro (now running some old 16mb riva tnt2 agp card)
I can't remember what the PSU is, but it's AMD approved

I'm not sure if this is relevent or not, but a few months ago I replaced the heatsink / fan with a Zalman CNPS3100-Plus, and I noticed that there was a small chip on the side of the processor itself. The computer worked fine without any instability whatsoever until the other day. Another thing is that there have been periodic blackouts in that area as well.

Could it have been a power surge, or do you suppose it could be something else?

 

[acemcmac]

Until version 3.0, it wasnt uncommon for an intellimouse to only last a few months because there was a manufacturing defect in the cable. thats why microsoft will send you a brand new mouse if you fax in the bottom of your old mouse in an rma request.

Whatever knocked the mobo, its prolly totally unrelated to the mouse. good luck.