My desktop died.

[The Duck]

My hp pavilion elite e9220y desktop made several loud popping sounds and smoke came out of it and that's all she wrote it has that something burnt smell.
I immediately pulled the power cord and unplugged everything from the desktop.
I pulled the side cover off and expected to see some capacitors blown apart.
I've had that happen with another desktop computer.
I didn't see any capacitors blown apart.
With a flashlight and a magnifying glass I saw what appeared to be a couple of little square diodes or power regulators around the processor socket had exploded.
I'm wondering if one of the voltage rails in my power supply may have failed and over volted I've read about this kind of thing happening.
It was a good power supply a 600 watt Corsair 80 plus rating.
Oh well it was an old desktop from 2009 I believe and it served us well.
I'll take it down to the local computer store down the road and see what he thinks might have happened he checks them out no charge.
I'll most likely pull what's salvageable and toss the rest to the curb next big trash day.

 

[KGIII]

I'm wondering if one of the voltage rails in my power supply may have failed and over volted I've read about this kind of thing happening.

As I was reading from the top down, I was already thinking it was possibly a power supply issue. It just seems the most likely, but you can test your power supply to see if it's still good.

It seems you let the magic smoke out of the bottle. Sadly, there is no genie.

 

[bob466]

In 2019 my power supply failed in my Tower after 6 years...no smoke or popping sounds.

Computer kept starting and shutting down...put in my spare power supply...problem solved...of cause I got a new one.

I think in your case it's time to build or buy another Tower...it would be much safer.

 

[The Duck]

I think in your case it's time to build or buy another Tower...it would be much safer.

I think so.

 

[bob466]

I can't talk...my Tower is 10 years old I've got my fingers crossed.

The HDD wont fail because it was replaced with an SSD 4 years ago but you never know.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

we are just having a thunderstorm and I have unplugged my desktop pc and tv, because i don't want the lightning to destroy my stuff. am i over the top on this? I now am on my laptop while writing

 

[The Duck]

I remember when we would unplug our computer and disconnect the Ethernet cable but that was before battery backups.
Better to be safe than have a burnt up computer.

 

[Brickwizard]

I would definitely go with PSU failure, seen it before, the popping was probably components exploding as they cooked,

 

[sphen]

we are just having a thunderstorm and I have unplugged my desktop pc and tv, because i don't want the lightning to destroy my stuff. am i over the top on this? I now am on my laptop while writing

Not at all. We live in an area where thunderstorms are not normally a concern and nobody would bother to unplug devices. Years ago a heavy thunderstorm passed through our area. We lost multiple devices in the same night. There was very little difference between them and your personal computer. Having lived here for a while, we treated it as a once-in-a-lifetime event for us. It can happen to anyone.

I was on a project that suddenly began to have excessive motherboard failures. They were custom designs and expensive to replace. I was put on the "tiger team" that was formed to deal with the crisis. We learned that the problem was not confined to our project, nor our company. The root cause was latent damage to the chips on those motherboards due to poor handling. Moore's Law had crossed a threshold. As chip densities kept doubling, the actual chip elements had shrunk to the point where ordinary handling caused electrostatic damage inside the chips. The damage was mortal to the chip but it took time and use for the chip to fail. Companies everywhere instituted new Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) handling procedures. They made it mandatory for everyone to wear grounded wrist straps and use designated protected "workstations" with grounded mats whenever anyone handled circuit cards with chips on them.

For that project, motherboard failure rates declined slowly over the next two years, then dropped to "normal" quickly after that.

(Some parts of the country face far more severe risks than our area. In the United States, my personal rule of thumb is to estimate the distance from the site to central Florida. The farther you are from there, the lower your risk of severe thunderstorm damage to your electronics. I do not remember where I learned it, but it is a very very very rough order of magnitude way to judge the risk. Use it with skepticism - treat it like licking your finger and holding it in the air to judge wind speed.)

 

[Brickwizard]

i don't want the lightning to destroy my stuff. am i over the top on this?

you could always invest in surge protection .. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=tripp+...ollar+150+000+insurance+black&geniuslink=true

 

[The Duck]

I have a whole house surge protection device installed at the meter base by the power company.
I use battery backups and good surge protectors on every electronic device in the house.
Everything now including appliances has some form of electronics interface that controls it.
Can't be to cautious now.

 

[KGIII]

Let me see if I can remember all the details.

This is how I learned to back things up properly.

So, I brought some work home with me. It was on a laptop - which were giant, heavy, and expensive things. Under normal circumstances, I'd have copied my data off to the server. This time, I didn't.

The tree next to my house, though very close to my house, was hit by lightning.

Almost all the magnetic media was ruined - even when it wasn't plugged in. The laptop I brought home with me wasn't even turned on. Hard drives that were sitting in anti-static bags were erased. Even some VHS tapes had issues after that. Optical media was fine, as memory serves.

Surge protectors did nothing. However, you should definitely use good surge protectors. They will help if you're hit directly with lightning. In my case, I assume it was the massive amounts of EMR thrown about by a lightning bolt that did the damage.

But, I've been pretty diligent about properly backing up important things.

You can actually get special paint that'd make your computer room into a Faraday cage. However, doing so would mean you couldn't use wifi very well. It'd work in the same room, but not outside of the room.

 

[The Duck]

I have a whole house surge protection device installed at the meter base by the power company.
I use battery backups and good surge protectors on every electronic device in the house.
Everything now including appliances has some form of electronics interface that controls it.
Can't be to cautious now.

I have surge protection and battery backup protection for protecting my electronic devices from electrical power surges and electrical power interruptions from the power company.
There's not a surge protector made or available to my knowledge that will protect anything from a direct lightening strike.