The article is quite old (dated 10-19-2007) and yet, it sent chills down my spine. Seriously, this collection of stories shook my confidence with the way I handle my rig. You can get the full writeup
here but for the people who just wants gore served straight, then, read the stuffs below:
"...The customer came in saying that the PC wouldn't start at all. Of course I suspected the PSU, but had to test it anyway. Plugged in the unit and pushed the power button and was illuminated by a flash of light. The PSU had indeed failed, and now had also blown a MOSFET on the system board and scorched the 512mb stick of PC3200 RAM..."
"...when I switched on my computer at night, suddenly there was a loud firecracker sound and lots of blue sparks came flying out from the back of my computer. It was from the PSU..."
"...my friend was over and we decided to have a small 1 on 1 LAN game of half-life. I grabbed a rocket launcher and fired it at him as he was jumping. as the rocket hit him he froze in mid air. lag I thought. so I yelled downstairs "It'll fix itself in a few seconds" and he yelled "I'm fairly certain it won't", "whys that?" "come downstairs for a second." so I walked downstairs and into the office. smoke was pouring out the back of my New PC! The virtual rocket had made my very real power supply literally explode. I unplugged it and brought it out to the shop, opened it and some blue sparks shot out..."
"...I fried a processor - a AMD Duron 950. I was testing out a motherboard, and tried to do things a little quickly. I knew that Athlon processor run hot and can burn out quickly, but thought I would have a little leeway with a Duron. So instead of clipping the heatsink in place while I started up the motherboard, I just held it down in place. It only took about 5 seconds (or so it seemed) before I realized that the motherboard wasn't going to boot, and I noticed a funny new smell..."
"...a friend of mine bought a new 1.3GHz Pentium 3 processor and installed it into his PC. He then plugged everything in and turned the power on. After realizing he could smell something burning, he noticed he was still holding the processor's heatsink and fan in his hand!"
"...while putting in the motherboard I forgot to put in the metal spacers. Booted up first time and nothing came up to the screen. Turned off fine. Then tried to boot again after checking connections. This time nothing, and there was a glow coming from within the case, getting brighter and brighter. Look inside, and viola. A little random chip on the mobo is glowing bright orange... Oops."
Again, the complete article can be found here:
Beginners Guides: Most Common Ways to Kill a PC - PCSTATS.com
A must-read for people who are just starting their own rig. Oh, and by the way, there's a table there that graphs common problems which account PSU at 26% and overclocking at 2%. Not relevant anymore though, since the article is old.
A Horror Treat for Computer Enthusiasts
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