In the five years I’ve been a network administrator/computer repairman, I’d yet to have any computers catch fire on me. I’ve seen power supplies fried by others. I’ve heard power supplies fried by others. I’ve smelled – well, you get the picture. I once had a monitor catch fire while I was teaching. (Simply unplugging it put out the fire.) But today, I got to have a REAL power supply fire! Flames and everything!
It was an old 233MHz machine that I had turned on looking to see if there was anything that needed saving off the hard drive. It had just finished its POST when I heard snaps, crackles, and pops and then saw fire. I turned off the power strip that the computer was plugged into and rushed into my computer lab for the CO2 fire extinguisher. Alas, by the time I returned, the fire was out. I sprayed it anyhoo. (Actually, I sprayed the one next to it first, accidentally.)
So now I’ve had a real computer fire – pretty cool. (Well, cool in that it wasn’t *my* computer and there wasn’t a lot of collateral damage, especially to *me*.)
The hard drive, BTW, didn’t have anything useful on it after all. I ended up reformatting it and using it in one of the first grade rooms.
Isn’t that a bit scary when it happens? When I was upgrading my past past past computer by taking shortcuts, I foolishly omitted the plastic footies separating the mobo from the chassis. As I pressed a card back into a slot, metal touched metal and and *POOF*, sparks, smoke and flames shot up and and died after a few seconds. I was scared not because I feared the place might burn down, but because I also foolishly left all my peripherals attached to the computer. Luckily, nothing fried but the mobo.
Isn’t that a bit scary when it happens? I’m sure it would have been scarier had it been my computer. 😉 But yeah, I panicked for a second before I thought “turn off the power strip!”
Wow…just like Nate you done blowed up a pc 🙂
Go on… admit it… you’ve always wanted to do that! 🙂
Yes…yes i have 🙂
*hands you the banana of technological combustion achievement*
If I keep this up, I’m going to have a lot of bananas! Guess it’s time to make some banana bread! 🙂