Sam Hart

Wow, what a shitty day I had on Friday. In addition to some major issues with a project I'm working on at work, I had my desktop die on me in what was the most spectacular way possible.

I was sitting there, listening to music by Akira Yamaoka being played by Amarok on my desktop. I was actually working on my laptop and my desktop was only playing music at the time (my laptop has tiny horrible speakers, but it was where all my work was).

Suddenly, in the middle of Flower Crown of Poppy, an insanely loud "FZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAT!" erupted from my speakers, my monitor flashed bright white, and then my desktop died amid the wafting scent of ozone and toasted electronics.

Opening the desktop up, I found two popped capacitors on the mother board, and visible smoke from the power supply.

Now, this couldn't have been a power surge; Nothing else in the house or even connected to the same outlet experienced any problems. The problem was 100% isolated to my desktop.

I've not pulled the HDD yet to see if it's okay, I haven't tested the monitor or speakers to see if they fried as well, nor have I tested any other component (graphics card, sound card) from the desktop to see if they are all right. All I really know right now is the motherboard and power supply seem to be toast.

I didn't have any warranty on this box, in fact, it was actually a system I took in lieu of half a paycheck from my previous job. I managed to get around 9 months worth of use out of it before this happened.

At any rate, this has to be the most spectacular system death I've ever encountered. I almost wish I would have been filming it :-)

Oh, and because this happened, allow me to say, "thank goodness for rdiff-backup!"