Date: 02/10/09 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: no keywords

    Heya computergeeks members.
Long story short: Do power supplies short-circuit?

Short story long: I was writing up a lab report up until 5 in the morning today, and set it to print as soon as I turned on the lights in the room in about two hours. The room where this computer is has one outlet that is controlled by the wall switch (the printer is plugged into this), and two outlets that work all the time (my computer was plugged into one of these. I turned my printer on, and then turned the light switch off (so that the printer would be on when the ligtht swtich is turned on), and then plugged it into a USB hub attached to my desktop, made sure the print jobs were still there, and then went to bed for the short two hours I had to spare.

    Two hours later I woke up at the smell of burning plastic, and my housemate complained the house smelled like plastic but he couldn't find the cause. I have three computers I had on, so I checked all three, but they were not on fire -- in fact, nothing looked like it was on fire, so I looked elsewhere. Finally I noticed the computer I had worked on my lab report was off even though I had left it on when I had went to sleep two hours prior. I kicked on the switch, and bright flashes of sparks came shooting out the back of the computer. I hit the circuit breaker and unplugged the plastic-smelling desktop with socks on my hands (perhaps a life saving device?)

    I have never seen a computer blow up like that, so I won't know what caused it. Sparks makes me assume something happed with the power, thus the power supply, but I'm curious if turning the printer off, and then hitting the wall switch perhaps let a big charge of electricity flow into the desktop when I plugged the USB cable in (can USB carry such a high voltage?)

This is such a bother I just bought a new Serial ATA hard drive to store personal files, and all of my external hard drive cases are designed for ye olde ribbon-style IDE hard drives.

So.. is it my power supply that's the culprint?

If it shorted, how can I tell? I have a simple volt/amp/om-meter, a screw driver, and some time to kill this weekend.

And if not, what could have caused sparks to fly out of my computer accompanied by a sickening stench of burning plastic?

I took a quick sweeping glance inside the case when I got home from work, and I don't see any obvious signs of burning/melting.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/1241475.html