rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_smoke.shtml
Click Here Computer Stupidites Smoke When a computer starts smoking, it's typically an indication of a problem mo re severe than one tech support could remedy. Monitor is working fine b ut has sparks and smoke flying out back. Our Help Desk got a call fr om a customer who was new to mini-computer operations. The call went som ething like this: * Customer: "There is smoke coming from the back of the computer. This sounds apocryphal, but I swear it's true: * Customer: "I've been connected to the Internet for about ten minutes now, and my computer started smoking about five minutes ago. The most shocking call I received came from a student at a local college here. He had received a CD for a n ISP from an American friend. I got this CD from an American, and he says that his ISP is better than mine because the calls are free. Because if so, I don't think it will work with your computer." I know exactly what I'm doing, so don't insult my intelligence!" I couldn't get through to the IS P So, I changed the computer to American power." He'd changed the voltage switch while the computer was on, causing the po wer supply to explode. A user phoned me and complained that her monitor was smoking, smelled of burning, the display had gone wrong, and the monitor was too hot to touc h I suggested that she switch the monitor off until an engineer could l ook at it. I'm the manager of several computer network and desktop technicians. Rece ntly, a user had been rolled out with a new desktop PC a day earlier. Sh e insisted that this new PC was "giving off some kind of electrical rays or something." When a technician and I got to the user's office, she go t a very serious look on her face and brought me over to the offending P C She placed her hand, palm down on the desk, directly in front of the new computer. I ev en heard some kind of static on my phone for a second or two, and I've a lready had the phone guys replace it! When I placed my hand on the desk, I felt distinct but almost miniscule v ibrations from the PC chassis cooling fan oscillating on the desk surfac e Just to check, I had the technician lift the PC about a half-inch off the desk to see if the "electricity" still was present. Trying hard to suppress the laughter, I told her it was only the cooling fan of the computer and that there was no electricity coursing through h er desk. As we left, she called after us, "We ll, if they ever come in here some morning and find me fried, you'll kno w why!" One of our junior executives called me frantically one afternoon to infor m me that his computer was sending out smoke and hissing at him. When I got there, I realized that he had over-watered the plants on hi s window sill and the excess water was running down into the heat regist er located behind his PC. He had all the parts plugged t ogether on his desk, just sitting in the open. One day he was working on it while someone was playing a game on it. What happened was described by him as "blue lightning from the power supply." He was in the process of disassembling it when he touched the capacitor . We discovered that the poor fellow had inadvertently stepped on his power strip, turning the whole thing off. And, it turned out, he was smoking a cigar at the time, and he thought the smoke curling around was from the monitor. By the time we figured that out, though, he'd already emptied a fire exti nguisher into the mess. A few years ago, my daughter took over my computer sales and service busi ness. Although she is probably "techier" than I am now, at the time she was pretty inexperienced, particularly when it came to hardware. As part of her training, she assisted me while I did various repairs. I remembe r stressing to her, "When diagnosing and repairing problems, it's import ant to stay calm. We were installing a hard drive in one particular machine. The workbench was cluttered, so she had the case, and I had the keyboard and monitor a few feet away. After plugging everything in, I told her to hit the powe r switch while I got ready to access the CMOS from the keyboard. I was l ooking at the monitor when I heard her calmly say, "Ok, now the drive's on fire. I had certainly never seen a drive actually burst into flames before (obv iously it was VERY faulty), and I immediately shouted in a panicked voic e "Turn it off! I had a disk that I wanted to put in the computer, but it wouldn't go, so I pushed harder, and it wouldn't go, so I pushed REALLY hard, and now it's making funny noises. After a few more repetitions of this, I heard someone, presumably the cli ent's roommate, scream. Then I heard the dorm fire alarm go off in the b ackground. Those things are awful loud, but she didn't seem interested i n unplugging the computer, fleeing the fire in her room, or anything els e other than arguing with me. Figuring I was doing her a favor, I hung u p * Tech Support: "Hello, tech support, can I help you?" Everything was workin g fine, I had no problems whatsoever." " * Customer: "So I decided to open it up and have a look inside. There were grey flat ones, and small red, black, and yellow ones, and it seemed like they weren't connected to anything. I saw pins sticking off of some of the boards that didn't have anything on them, so I plugged all the loose wires in to make it run better." " * Customer: "And so I plugged them all in, and I hit the power button, and there was this loud bang and a flash and a puff of smoke. I related t he story to some co-workers between gasps for breath. Several of the tec hs and I had quite the laugh fest while he was on hold. After about five minutes of eye-popping, sweat-beading laughter, I wiped away the tears, took a sip of water, and came back on the line. I knew it'd be futile t o even attempt to troubleshoot it. And so another computer newbie learned that the extra power supply cables and unused IDE ribbon cables don't have to be plugged in for the comput er to work just fine. A lady's power supply was smoking, so she rang tech support and asked, "I s there a fire in the file server room? At college we had a lesson in which we set up problems for each other to diagnose and fix. For example, we'd not put the RAM in properly, plug ID E leads the wrong way, etc. Some clever person thought that it would be a good idea to switch the voltage on the PSU. The person "fixing" the PC plugged it in, turned it on, and BANG! Thing is, when I look at it from the side, I see red hot components." Back when I was in high school, I was in my first programming class. It presents a fake C:\> prompt and prints mi ldly rude messages instead of executing commands. After showing it to a few classmates, I ran it on the teacher's computer when he wasn't lookin g After a few messages, he figured it out. Someone said, "Heh-heh, he d id it," and revealed the culprit to be me. This particular program, after being rude for about a screen or so, start s getting apologetic, and finally ends with "Wait! Right when that message printed, the screen started wavering and dimming. Then smoke beg an to pour out of the back of the monitor. The screen went completely de ad and smoke and big nasty flames were pouring out of the back of the mo nitor. Luckily, he was smart enough to realize that this would be a very hard th ing to do in software. It turned out the monitor was so dusty that the p ower supply had caught on fire. But for a moment I was terrified that I would be held responsible.
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