On a lighter note...

Its as funny as when I put memory chip in one of my users pc's the other day, and didnt seat it properly. Whats that smell I thought as I booted up the pc. Then suddenly realized something was drastically wrong.

Ahhh the things an Admin thinks are funny. If only are coworkers really understood us.

LOL
Rad

I haven't experienced any smoking issues with PCs yet, but just bad bearings in fans that would have lead to the same kind of problem. The users never understand it from our angle, that's for sure!

Things we think are trivial the users think are tragedies... (-:{

Hehehehee that's pretty good.... haven't seen that yet. Have had an arcing powersupply smoke a little less than billowing because some dork stuffed a few paperclips in the fan opening, but billowing sounds really good :)
I did get to a machine about 3 months ago that exploded a cd-rom drive. Pieces everywhere. CD fragments, broken up drive door and pieces of the front cover as far as 7-8 feet away. 52x drive... that was pretty amusing! :)

I have seen smoke billow out of many electronic devices, but never from a PC.

Much as your trying to keep this light, I am curious as to the source / cause of the smoke.

I hope that it was just the power supply giving up because a fan failed, and the user did not report it.

If there was a more serious, or humurous cause, I hope you will add it to the discussion.

Chas

I once had to replace a power supply on an older AT machine, and I wanted to avoid the hassle of removing the front panel to access the off/on switch. So I just unplugged the four wires that were connected to the back of the switch, thinking I wouldjust keep the old off/on switch, and simply plug the wires from the new power supply into the old off/on switch. I assumed that the color-coding of the wires was consistent between power supplies.

I’ve been wrong about other things as well.

Talk about smoke, you would have thought there was a fire. I fried the new power supply and the motherboard, not to mention my dignity. I was very lucky the smoke detector didn’t sound, (I was very surprised it didn’t) which would have necessitated an evacuation of the building, and would have also automatically alerted the fire department. So it could have been worse.

Oh well, live and learn.

Where's theres smoke theres fire....not always.

I seen a computer with literal flames coming out of the rear of the case through the fan vents. There was no smoke though - until we doused it of course then there was that lovely aroma of black smoke that burning silicon and plastic give off.

This was the case of an extreme overclocking experiment gone horribly horribly wrong. These basically underscored the EXTREME importance of proper cooling (especially when trying to nearly double your CPU's core clock speed.. ;) ).

(Tip of the day: Every tech should have a fire extinguisher at his work bench) ;)

Back when I started building PCs I made a mistake I'll never repeat.
I placed the CPU into the socket the wrong way. I powered it on and about a second later *poof* smoke.
I took the CPU out and found it had melted the pin and put a hole in the socket.
Luckly it was a P90 CPU and old MB so it wasn't much of a loss, but it was a good lesson learned.

I have yet to see a CD-ROM drive bust a CD just from vibration.

It is documented that some poorly made CR-R and CD-RW disks have exploded in the drives.

Seems there is trapped air molocules in some blank CDs.
When written to with a high speeddrive, the heat build up so fast that the CD explodes from within.

I suspect if CDs are breaking on regular CD-ROM drives that they are not balanced properly, and are banging against parts of the tray, or the inside of the drive.

Chas

I still have a 386 under the bench that had a few 'upgrades' a while back. The 386 was retired for serious use, but we kept 3.11 and DOS 6.22 on it for sentimental reasons. The tower case had 3 5.25" bays, one for the CD (2x Panasonic...remember them?!!), one for (bizarrely enough) a 5.25 1.2Mb Floppy and the third (right at the top of the tower) was a 'special'.

On a business trip to Germany, my sparring-partner and I found an ex-DDR Trabant car abandoned in a lay-by. The thing was pretty smashed up but still had a few bits left, so my buddy removed the ash-tray as a souvenir. Oddly enough, the dimensions of said accessory perfectly matched a 5.25 bay front, so with some careful brutalisation of an old Creative single speed CD drive with a defunct laser, a 5.25" motorised ash-tray was subsequently fitted to the 386. The added advantage of this 'user convenience' was that the AT psu fan used to suck the smoke away from the front of the machine and blow it out of the back towards the window! I would not recommend this as a 'serious' upgrade, but for the hardened smoker who is prepared to 'de-nicotine' the PC every six months, it does make an ideal Christmas present for 'the man who has everything'....naturally a sticky cpu fanwasn't an issue as the 386 had a passive radiator and no fan! Anyone seen my 5.25" floppy-drive head cleaner?!!

Another happy memory just occurred to me.

Back in the good old days (circa '93!!)when the standard spec for our simulators was the good old DX4-100, we'd often need to add perhaps as many as 12 ISA cards to a system, so we manufacured our own 'breakout' cards, that mapped the ISA bus (or at least the lines we were using) onto a 64w ribbon cable. This then went to a box with a passive backplane, power supply and a 'reverser' which translated the ribbon connector back onto the ISA bus. We'd often be on a deadline and be waiting on our supplier to deliver the 0.1" pitch ISA connectors and there were a few times we had to 'recycle' a few from an old 386 or even 286 mobo to complete a production job on schedule. On a multilayer board with so many pins on an ISA slot, the easiest way to remove them for reuse was to use a blowtorch on the back of the board to melt the solder on all the pins and then give the board a good hard smack on the edge of the bench to make the connectors drop outof the PCB. They could then be cleaned up in an ultrasonic tank and fitted to the new backplanes. The by-product of this process was, needless to say, a few very fried (and very dead) mobos with serious burn-marks and scorched fibreglass. The trick was to throw the smouldering board out into the corridor just as the Boss happened to be passing, with the words 'Shit! I put the CPU in wrong way round again!' or 'Last time I use MS DOS on a damn PC!'.

Back then a DX4-100 used to cost up in theseveral hundreds and a decent VLB-ISA-PCI mobo didn't give much change from half a grand! You should have seen the sparks fly...not only from the burning mobo, but from the Boss!

When I worked in retail, our head office was very reticent about taking back slightly damaged or faulty stock unless there was a 'serious' fault or defect. Sometimes there would be a software 'funny', an incompatibility with existing hardware or some other reason the customer had returned the goods and we'd have to restore the machine and re-sell it as pre-owned with an appropriate discount. Our manager did not like discounting and head office wanted us to do anything rather than lose margin, so myself and two other techs came up with an entertaining solution.

Place iffy computer on a bench, preferably near to the Customer Services Manager's desk during her absence to fetch a hot brew.

Connect to mains using a very long power cable,keeping the supply turned off at the socket located as far away from the computer as practical.

Switch the voltage selector from 240v (European)to 120v (North America). Turn on the computer at it's switch.

Wait for said CSM to sit down at herdesk with a hot coffee.

Casually lean over remote desk and appear to be in deep discussion over some important technical issue with a colleague whilst flipping the power socket switch to the ON position.

Roar with laughter as smoke, a flash and a loud 'BANG' erupts from the computer, and coffee, obsceneties and a scream erupts from Kirsty, our CSM!

Flip switch back to 240v position while Kirsty is in the 'little girls room' attending to coffee-stained attire , pack computer to send back to head office with a note stating 'Will not power up. Dead On Arrival. No idea as to cause. Some sort of burning smell.'

Walking into the NOC first thing on a monday morning and smelling "Burnt Chips".

Nothing like smelling every server to find out where the smell is coming from.

"Sounds like someone has a case of the mondays"

So I did the geeky thing and did a quick google search and found the dictionary version of the word.

NOUN: Slang 1a. A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy. b. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept. 2. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.
ETYMOLOGY: Perhaps alteration of dialectal geck, fool, from Low German gek, from Middle Low German.
OTHER FORMS: geeky —ADJECTIVE

OUR LIVING LANGUAGE: Our word geek is now chiefly associated with student and computer slang; one probably thinks first of a computer geek. In origin, however, it is one of the words American English borrowed from the vocabulary of the circus, which was a much more significant source of entertainment in the United States in the 19th and early 20th century than it is now. Large numbers of traveling circuses left a cultural legacy in various and sometimes unexpected ways. For example, Superman and other comic book superheroes owe much of their look to circus acrobats, who were similarly costumed in capes and tights. The circus sideshow is the source of the word geek, “a performer who engaged in bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.” We also owe the word ballyhoo to the circus; its ultimate origin is unknown, but in the late 1800s it referred to a flamboyant free musical performance conducted outside a circus with the goal of luring customers to buy tickets to the inside shows. Other words and expressions with circus origins include bandwagon (coined by P.T. Barnum in 1855) and Siamese twin.