Last Sunday, I had just finished playing a game of Warcraft 3 with some friends, when WC3 quits to the desktop giving some error message. I open up WC3 again and it immediately quits out with the same error message. So, I reboot my computer.
Well, at least I tried to reboot my computer. It turned off like a champ, but when I tried to turn it back on, the piece of **** comp didn't get very far. The fans were spinning, but it didn't give the bootup beep and it just showed a black screen.
This kind of behavior wasn't really all that out of the ordinary for the Scooter-Computer, so I started troubleshooting. I unplugged all the components from the motherboard--video card, sound card, network card, hard drives, CDROM, ram--and tried turning it on again. This time it showed signs of life, giving a beep error message, which is normal when there's no RAM or video plugged in.
Somewhat relieved, I thought maybe a stick of ram had gone bad, so I plugged one of them back in and turned the comp back on. As before, it made no beeping, so I was pretty sure the problem was that stick of RAM. I took that stick of RAM out, put in the other one, and turned the comp back on.
Once again, the computer just sat there making no noises. Confused, I just sat there staring at it, unsure of what the problem could be.
That's when the smoke appeared. Actually, I smelled it before I saw it. At first I thought it was the soup I was making. But then I noticed one of the capacitors right next to the cpu started emiting a stream of smoke and changing from a dark green color like all the other ones to a light blue. I scrambled for the power switch, but that did nothing. So I darted for the power cord, yanked it out, and then covered the smoke alarm in my room with a blanket.
GG. To be honest, this is probably a good thing for me, because it's forced me to spend much more time on my classes. It happened at a good time, too, because I had several exams this week, all of which I did very well on. I'm not even going to bother looking into getting a new computer until the summer. I'll stay active in the forum because I still have to use computers at work and in the library all the time. So feel free to remove my reserve slot from the server, but please leave me with access to those forums.
I'll miss playing with you guys, *sniff*, but this summer I'll make up for the lost time
So, until then, good luck and have fun!