I was cleaning up my brother-in-law's old Dell desktop last month. Thing ran great for being almost 10 years old, and ran non-stop for a few days at my house.

As I'm finishing up, I go to plug my external hard drive into one of the USB ports on the back of the case and see about an inch long blue arc shoot over to the case.

I think wow, never seen that before. I work on it for a few more minutes until it randomly shuts down. From that point on, it was never the same. Constant blue screens and random shutdowns.

I ended up pulling the hard drive and reloading XP onto it, then used it in another spare desktop he had, so that isn't what got fried.


Next day my uncle calls me. He has a 6-year-old Dell desktop that had been running fine. He plugged a network cable into the back of it and got an immediate blue screen, and from then on couldn't get it to boot. Thinking it might be from static? He's decided to take it to somewhere to be looked at, but I don't think he's done it yet.


I've seen other fried electronics that I suspected static, but that was the first time I've seen an arc like that that I'm 99% sure caused the damage. Anybody else?

 

check your ram on the dell

 

definitely, I work with circuit boards and always make sure I touch something metal to discharge any static before opening the bag. (they dont come in antistatic bags for nothing!) Never had it happen to me, but Ive heard countless stories of static killing boards before they could be installed

 

Never killed a board with static, but once did install the AT power supply leads backwards. I remembered from that point on that the black wires go together in the middle. Of course ATX makes that knowledge obsolete.

 

The microelectronics mgr in me says anything with a PC boards, IC's, and Discretes will fry with static and thats why anti static materials are used so much in their fabrication and pakaging.
Cleaning causes Static and the way to prevent is grounding or higher hummidity in the area.

Static kills ...

 

I used to get real bad static charge in my house before I got a humidifier. I got a big visible shock when I touched my receiver, it shut off and wouldn't turn on for a few mins. I got into the habit of touching the metal stereo rack before touching the components, would get shocks doing that many times.

The other time was when I went to turn down the heat before leaving the house, another big visible static charge jumped to the thermostat, it blinked for a few seconds and then looked normal. I came home a few hours later and the house was like a sauna, it made the heat turn on high and stayed on regardless of what you did at the thermostat. I had to cut the breaker to it to turn it off, turned it back on and it worked fine. The humidifier has resolved that issue though, it runs non stop in the winter, puts a few gallons into the air a week.