Friends comp fried - need help...

Teh1337h4x0r

Teh1337h4x0r

New Member
Ok, my friend, being a total idiot, opened up his case and started poking around on stuff while it was on. He has the dell 17" CRT monitor.. (my old one) And he never degaus's it. So its always full of static and you get a HUGE shock if you touch the screen. (Can you see where this is going?) Now hes poking at his chip sets.. wondering what they do, cuz he doesnt know beans. WHAM he touched the monitor and the mobo at the same time. The computer freaks out. Screen goes blank. Computer turns off. Hooked up monitor to another comp. it works fine.. but its still crummy. Is the mobo fried or what?
 
He gave a little extra juice to the mobo... and prob shorted it. Tell your friend to stop being retarded (offense meant... there is no excuse for doing that kind of stuff unless you are on Jackass). He will probably need a new mobo and possibly RAM.
 
The discharge to the board may or may not have actually hurt the memory. But you can be sure that something like a diode or capacitor popped fast as well as a number of other possible items. A cap inside a monitor can hold a "lethal" charge at times. Most of the amps probably went direct to ground burning up a few things. The board acted like a fuse there.
 
Monitors degauss themselves every time you turn them on, you don't have to degauss them manually unless the monitor lives next to something that produces a large magnetic field e.g. a big speaker. That said, the glass does carry a sizeable static charge so your friend may well need a new board.
 
You can still get a few good stings from the esd there alright. But the problem was seen when most likely touching the lead on a main chip and the ground on the board at the same tiime while the board was live causing a direct short. The discharge of esd didn't help much.

Hopefully the memory and cpu can be saved there. Memtest each dimm separately when tried on a different board some time. You nay want to teach your friend some good esd precaution techiques so he doesn't see a repeat performance on another system from poking around inside.
 
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