- Joined
- Mar 4, 2003
- Location
- Portland, OR
Ok, here is the machine that a customer brought in to us recently. You guess what caused this cause we are not sure either hehe.
The next two are the motherboard in this thing...note the cracked and burned ethernet controller chip
This is what also happened to the hard disk in the same machine
And this is a pic of the hard disk next to the mainboard of course hehe
So, what do you think caused this? According to the customer they moved the computer into an office to do some database work on it and plugged it in, then after a few minutes he saw smoke start pouring out of the back of the machine so he turned it off and unplugged it. He didn't notice it until the smoke because he had a bad cold and couldn't smell anything lol. Anyhow, a couple of us are theorizing that maybe they plugged the digital phone line into the ethernet port and had a call ring through or something, but that is just guessing. We thought maybe that because of the particular damage done to the network controller on board, but who knows. What would be your guess?!
Oh yeah, and to make matters worse for this very cheap and less than savvy customer they ignored what they were told when they bought the system many moons ago when we said they should have at least a different tape for each day of the week. Well, in theory that would have provided them with a good backup for their database, but no, the tape you see in the picture is the same tape they got at install like 6 years ago, and has never been changed. What makes matters even worse is that they had the lock enabled on the tape so it wouldn;t have been able to write to it anyhow. But that is really of very little consequence seeing as how the tape apparently broke at some time in the distant past and when you flick the little door open on the tape itself there just isn't any tape there lol. Anyhow, hope you enjoy
The next two are the motherboard in this thing...note the cracked and burned ethernet controller chip
This is what also happened to the hard disk in the same machine
And this is a pic of the hard disk next to the mainboard of course hehe
So, what do you think caused this? According to the customer they moved the computer into an office to do some database work on it and plugged it in, then after a few minutes he saw smoke start pouring out of the back of the machine so he turned it off and unplugged it. He didn't notice it until the smoke because he had a bad cold and couldn't smell anything lol. Anyhow, a couple of us are theorizing that maybe they plugged the digital phone line into the ethernet port and had a call ring through or something, but that is just guessing. We thought maybe that because of the particular damage done to the network controller on board, but who knows. What would be your guess?!
Oh yeah, and to make matters worse for this very cheap and less than savvy customer they ignored what they were told when they bought the system many moons ago when we said they should have at least a different tape for each day of the week. Well, in theory that would have provided them with a good backup for their database, but no, the tape you see in the picture is the same tape they got at install like 6 years ago, and has never been changed. What makes matters even worse is that they had the lock enabled on the tape so it wouldn;t have been able to write to it anyhow. But that is really of very little consequence seeing as how the tape apparently broke at some time in the distant past and when you flick the little door open on the tape itself there just isn't any tape there lol. Anyhow, hope you enjoy