[pchelpers] "What's that burnt smell?"

Hi folks,

I had an interesting day today.

I had a bunch of hard drives that I wanted to wipe, so I pulled an old
Dell out of the pile, hooked it up, opened the case, plugged in the
first hard drive, popped in the boot floppy, and turned the system on.
I don't recall exactly what was wrong, but I think it couldn't detect
the hard drive. So, I turned it back off, swapped hard drives, and
then TRIED to turn it back on. No power light, not fan, no nothing,
except for the light on the motherboard which indicates that the power
supply is good. After a few minutes of head-scratching and poking, I
realized that it was starting to smell very burnt.

I hooked up the hard drive to the next Dell, and got near-identical
results, except I pulled the plug sooner. :)

At that point, I realized that the hard drive was apparently killing
computers, so I didn't hook it up to the third Dell which I knew was
working; it had a note on it saying that the NIC was bad); I just
turned it on as it was (although I had to add memory to it first),
without the hard drive -- same results. I was feeling rather paranoid,
so had one of the other guys look at it. I got another power cable and
plugged it straight into the wall for him. After some poking, he said
that it looked like the memory was flaky, which I doubted. He
proceeded to try to show me, and, as I expected, he wasn't able to
show me anything except a blank monitor.

I then tried it with only the power cable, no video or keyboard, and
it turned on. I plugged in the video, and it turned on and showed
every sign of working fine. Plugged in the keyboard and it just
ignored me.

I got out a brand new keyboard, and it worked fine. I tested the first
two computers, and the original one was toast, but the second turned
on.

Learn something new every day; I bet you didn't know that a keyboard
could literally cause a computer to fry.

-- 
Scott.



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