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Power Failure.. what a surprise?
LockedSorry bout the long post, figured I should add in as much information as I could..
Prior to my problems, we have had a problem with the power supply which had burnt up my old video card and caused ram not to work. After replacing it the computer wouldn’t boot up with a usb device in it.. but the usb device worked after it was booted up.
Last week I smelt something burning while using my pc. It took me a minute to realize that my computer was actually on fire, because I thought that it was something melting in the dishwasher, same type of smell. My tower has a window so I could easily spot the flame once I stood up to inspect the burning smell. I turned it off and it immediately turned back on by itself, flame still lit. I didn’t know what to do so I ripped the plug out from the back. This was at three in the morning so I was quite tired and decided to tackle what it was that went into flames the next day.
When we pulled the pc apart, we saw that it was the mother board that had caught fire, right above the usb connector a little about 3mm black piece that said “P 15”. What was there now, was a burnt hole that made it’s way all the way through the mother board.
I unplugged the front usb connector, thinking that was what caused the problem, and tried to boot it up. I plugged everything in and IMMEDIATELY after I plugged in the power supply and flipped the switch on it, it turned on by itself.. no power button on front. The problem with that is there was no power to the monitor, there’s no beeping, and I couldn’t turn it off using the front switch. Other than the fact that there’s no video, it sounds like it should be working.
I figured it would be the motherboard, since it did have a hole in it, so we spent the money to buy as brand new one, installed it today, and we still have the same problem.
Thinking it might be the case, we unplugged everything from the case, and tried that. It worked just the same, and as I was typing this it turned itself off, turned itself back on, all the interior lighting started flicking, and everything is now at half power.
Also, we tried unplugging everything from the power supply, and it still turned on when we flipped the switch.
What is the problem? We think that the fire might have also caused the power supply to short, but it’s only a 2 month old power supply, and everything else in the computer is basically new too.. Any ideas?