The smell of burning electronics…

Wednesday, 19 January 2005

When one of our computers fail I am always the lucky one who needs to investigate the problem. This time too… First thing I did was opening up the case.

20050119-chip This is when I noticed that after turning on the computer the cpu fan would not even run. I immediately suspected the power supply. Unfortunately I was right, the power supply did not work anymore. When I replaced it with a spare I had lying around and turned the computer back on, I started to smell a very distinct odour. Burning electronics… Crap!

One completely burnt chip on a Seagate Barracuda II hard drive resulted in two failed power supplies, one broken mainboard, one broken CD-ROM drive, one broken ZIP drive and some lost data. It took me a complete day to rebuild a new computer from scratch and another day to install all the software again. It will probably take another to rebuild the lost data. Sigh…

3 Responses to “The smell of burning electronics…”

admun wrote on February 3rd, 2005 at 5:51 am ✦

I still remembered when I was young, my dad has a OSI (http://www.trailingedge.com…) After we get our Apples II, once he tried to clean it up and put it back into service…. when he power up the machine, I saw a thin line of smoke raise from one of the chips….. it fried and burned.

That’s end of the life of this OSI.
taro yamada wrote on July 31st, 2005 at 9:55 am ✦

I bought the eMachine,and useing for about two months.
I smell bad.
What is the couse of this smell?
I opened the cover of the pc.
but I could not find anything bad.
harry potter wrote on October 13th, 2005 at 11:40 pm ✦

i turned on the computer and smelled a burning
smell, i opened up the cpu and it was melting
and it smelled soooo bad