Something very scary just happened.

1. You hallucinated or dreamed it.

Another question which could literally point to the smoking gun:

1. Where did the smoke/smell come from ? (didn't see no smoke, but smelled it)

1. Why was there smoke/smell ? What caused it ?

A. Perhaps the smoke/smell was caused by the pentium III power supply "exploding".

Then question is still why:

1. Perhaps it was simply because of old age ?

1. Perhaps there was a spider web inside of it or a bug, perhaps a fly ? Causing some freaky short circuit ?

2. Perhaps fan cables finally short circuited ?

1. Perhaps plastic-tape touched something and short circuited it ?

B. Or perhaps the smoke/smell came from wall socket itself because of too high load ?

C. Or perhaps the smoke/smell came from DreamPC 2006 power supply ?!?

Hmmmmm.....

I think the most likely explanation is the smoke came from the Pentium III

450 mhz...

Other explanation:

D. Perhaps something fell into the power extension box. It has two power holes left uncovered.

Perhaps dust accumilated into it and it blew... causing the smell/smoke.

Perhaps even some metal fell into it like little screws or so but that's unlikely.

This could be an indication that "open power holes" on power extension boxes are a bad thing, this is probably already known since newer version have closed holes when nothing is attached...

^ So another explanantion of why dust can be dangerous... filling up power holes... hmmm...

The smoke/smell probably was a typical "burning dust" smell or so...

So my best two explanation so far:

1. Dust in power extension box holes short-circuited and blew up.

1. Power supply of pentium III somehow blew.

It was quite a powerfull bang to cause a circuit breaker to flip out like that...

So maybe it was 1...

But that doesn't seem to make much sense... power should be able to flow from + to - just like that ?

Or maybe electrical equipment is to have some slower ampere or so... so slow flow...

Or maybe some electricity leaked during the bang and was converted into energy... but then it would not have gone to the circuit breaker ?!?

Unless it detects a 'missing current".... or "missing energy" from returning...

Quite weird...

So maybe circuit breakers can work in two ways:

1. Either two much electricity being returned ? (no equipment using electricity but something whacky ?)

1. Either two little electricity being returned ? (short circuit with ground)

Never heard of 1.

Well now I am making up all kinds of crazy hypothesis... but it's also pretty crazy things around here ! ;) :)

It would be interesting if "myth busters" can test this theory:

"What happens when a lot of dusts accumilates inside a power extension box" will it blow up ?!?

Hopefully this is not what happened because that would be quite freaky...

Hopefully it was something more easily explainable... like short circuit or overload...

Bye, Skybuck.

Also something else came to mind...

Maybe coffee was spilled at electronics shop when I bought receiver...

So maybe receiver has some electrical problem...

Which causes it to leak electricity into "ground wire" and accumilate overtime which could explain the potential difference hypothesis...

Whacky !

Yup theory is all nice and clean but practice is messy ! ;) =D

Bye, Skybuck.

Nope, wide a wake...

I just woke up and went... ! ;) =D

Bye, Skybuck =D

There is also a festival outside happening with big speakers...

Maybe that has something to do with it...

Probably not, but ya never know... must not rule out anything ! ;)

Sometimes it's a freak occurence of many freaky things all happening and coming together ! ;)

Maybe they also plugged in their speakers at the same time as I was plugging in my pentium III...

And it cause some kind of weird power surge or frequency change... ya never know ! ;) :)

Bye, Skybuck =D

Some other thoughts that went through my mind:

1. How am I now going to sue my "landlore" for shitty electrical system... I have no more computer can't find a lawyer ! ;)

1. Shit I have no more computer, maybe I should go buy an ipad2 ! ;)

At least it will work without an electrical shitty system.

(But it will probably go dead in less than 24 hours, so it does need recharge, maybe it goes dead in just 2 or 3 hours, so also kinda shitty).

Now I am wondering:

What if it was actually overload because of my power-cable-plugging theoretical system... "all power on one box" to make sure ground is connected.

This does then have implications for the future:

1. I cannot buy additional computers AND run them at the same time... because of power limitations.

I would then need to have electrical system updated/replaced so it can do more power... but that might be risky at high ground levels... so I am not sure what the hell I am doing and how it works... and many people seem confused about that too.

+

Dangerous to modify electrical systems nowadays if you don't know what ya doing... especially because the weather is changing... more rain and more thunder storms.

The likelyhood of getting hit by thunder is increasing all the time...

+

Copper thieves making matters worse.

+

Higher load on electrical system in general because of more computers, and in future perhaps even electrical cars.

A recipe for more power fluctuations.

I'll even go into a stretch:

The death of micheal jackson has shown the electrical system to become unstable if massive ammounts of people turn on their TV's ! ;)

At least that's what I believe ! ;)

Bye, Skybuck =D

Hallucination it is, then.

Op Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:19:52 +0200 schreef "Skybuck Flying" :

Please die, Skybug, pun intended.

Magic mushrooms.

Take up gardening or something. Electricity doesn't like you.

John

I had seen this happen at a place I used to work at some years back.

One of the guys (there were three in the end) come in to me to ask about CDROM drivers in their config.sys (this was back in the DOS/Win95 days).

I offered to do it, it would only take several minutes.

They said they were happy to do it anyway, so I let them.

I shouldn't have. Three guys, a large part of afternoon and some smoke later, they were finally done.

I never did find out where the smoke came from, or why everything still worked (still working some four years later when I left the company) but I put it down to Idiots Incorporated playing with things they probably shouldn't have.

--
Never hit a man with glasses. Use your fist!

huh?

Op Wed, 31 Aug 2011 05:55:56 -0400 schreef JW :

LOL

3rd explanation:

GOD HATES YOU?

A mind is a mind, even if it contains only two working neurons........

Ok,

I just took a risk and decided to plug in the power cable again of the extension box which has the pentium III computer and monitor connected to power.

I touched plastic part of power plug only, not the screws or anything and plugged it in, then nothing happened.

So then I tried to turn on the pentium III and it remained dead.

So possible conclusions:

1. The pentium III power supply is now dead and blew up.

or

1. Some resistor in the power cable blew up and the power cable is now bad.

But first I will describe one more time what I saw happen during the incident:

1. I saw a spark flying over the power cable metal points/plugs that go into the power wall socket.

So possible explanations of what happened:

1. The flow of electricity was so powerfull that it jumped across the metal pins and somehow caused damage to the power supply.

I have seen this happen before when I plugged in my dream pc fortunately it didn't die... so that is somewhat inconsistent... but perhaps the dreampc has a power supply of higher quality then the pentium iii.

Another explanation:

1. The pentium iii power extension cable has been lieing on the ground for a long time now... I once unplugged it because of a thunder storm... perhaps the power cable sucked up a lot of "ground electricity" into it's cables. Then as I tried to plug it in it somehow cause an electrical spark... and somehow damage power supply or power cable.

Last explanation which does start to make some sense:

1. A short circuit in the power supply of the pentium 3:

The plastic sticky tape came off and the electrical wires crossed and damage it.

Another explanantion:

1. The little fly which I saw flying around enter the pentium III power supply and caused it to short circuit.

Last explanations:

1. Dust build in pentium III power supply (or very maybe monitor but I dont think so, monitor was probably off during the incident).

1. Simply old age of electrical components in power supply, maybe they evaporated or so.

Or perhaps the power supply is not dead and a safety switch flipped it off... but I don't think it has a safety switch but I could be wrong... there is no switch on the back/outside that's for sure.

So my main backup system is now dead, this leaves the pentium 166 as a backup system but it's probably to slow to surf webstores for new computer supplies in case my dreampc also dies... which it should not because heat issues pretty much solved, but could also have more dust build up... will see how that goes.

I kinda way overspent money on dreampc so according to budget I should only buy a new computer in the year 2016 or so... however I do plan on buying a cheaper one then and low power and low heat.

I am currently not too happy with the main system but it's not hardware wise, hardware wise it's ok, except that it has multiple harddisk, and one harddisk has a bad sector, having multiple harddisks is a bit annoying especially with the old crap which is great too, but ok.

It's mainly software wise that I am not very happy... Windows 7 is a mess, and I now have my applications fragmented across old Windows XP installation/harddisk and Windows 7/new harddisk... This kinda sucks... I blame this partially on Microsoft and mostly on application developers themselfes. They should not integrate applications with windows and if they do they should make sure that it's easy to "de-integrate" and "re-integrate" into windows so applications can easily be installed on filedisk images and then re-integrated into windows.. unfortunately this idea will probably not completely work because of microsoft and the changing of windows registry entries, so that's why Microsoft is partly to blame as well... windows 7 would require a new "re-integrate.exe" executable for each application to successfully reintegrate it.

So in the future applications should have:

1. Install.exe
2. Deintegrate.exe
3. Reintegrate.exe
4. UpdateIntegrationExecutables.exe

The 4th one is funny, this should contact application developers websites and update the deintegrate and especially reintegrate executables so applications can easily be moved to new windows installations and reintegrated.

Another alternative is maybe updating windows to new versions but I don't like doing that... it might also not work for applications.

Finally my old XP system did have some "bit rott" because of a corrupted memory bit, probably because of heat, so also hardware and hardware decisions are partially to blame for this mess and the requirement of having to reinstall an operating system, also new hardware requires new windows

7/operating system or so... and also cuda support for windows 7 or so... which kinda sux that it might not work on xp... but that might be because of new windows driver system.

Hopefully the trouble of re-installing a new windows system will be worth it... hopefully windows 8 will be better... hopefully my windows 8 computer in the future will last longer...

The time to buy a new windows 8 computer is not yet... first more graphics power for the same power/watt budget should come to market, preferably so all games can be played at 1920x1200 again ;) :) Either better gpu or better cpu+integrated gpu.

^ These are new chips, so it will take a while to see how that "plays out" ;) :) and what these chips can do... also nvidia might be working on integrating an arm chip into their gpu's or perhaps something else, so time will tell ;)

My DreamPC2006 will have to hold out and work for some time/years to come ;) :)

If it does fail then a tablet might be a nice and easy replacement... no big component decisions to make... just an integrated decision, but by that time there will probably be some many versions, that choosing one might just be as difficult as choosing pc components ;) though perhaps a bit less, since less tablets on market ;) but maybe that will change...

I am not sure if tablets work well for "webstore surfing" but I would hope so... and then there is mam's computer... but not really an option to go there everyday that would kinda suck... I would need 30 days at least to select new pc components, so I would need something that is easily available for 30 days, though visitting mammie everyday would be kinda fun as well, but she would probably get fed up with that real quick/soon as well ! ;) :) =D and then I would no longer be welcome and get into a fight and that would not be cool ! ;) =D Though she does also have an old computer which could also be used but still...

Last possibility is fixing pentium III and replacing it's power supply, it's kinda a good thing that I didn't order so many old components for the pentium III because like I concluded in the end: it would have been wasted money... and so it would... it would be literally dead money by now ! ;) :)

Perhaps that money is better spent on some tablet... though there is one little danger with tablet "wifi" (I typed wife by accident lol) and "electromagnetic radiation or something like that"... which has me worried ! ;) and will probably be a reason for me never to buy one of them... so this illiminates phones and tablets... though if there was a tablet without wifi/bluetooth/gsm and instead use ethernet or usb for connection options I might buy it ;) but then the thing might up in bed, and reduce my sleep so maybe not a good idea... but it is tempting a bit... I also read laptops in bed bad for "marriage" but I am not married lol ;) :) (Gje I wonder why ! ;) :) =D)

Please don't feed the trolls....

Skybuck, You experienced a well-known, but little publicized, phenomena called a "dry" dream. A "dry" dream is the opposite of a "wet" dream, in that something bad happens and makes your member shrink.

Take two aspirin and forget it. Don't go to bed though.

--
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure."
-Clarence Darrow

Today I opened the pentium III 450 mhz for the first time and inspected it and made some photo's.

There is no apperent damage to the power supply which I opened too. There was some slight blackness on the metal casing on the inside though.

The plastic sticky tape around the wires for the power fan were still intact so a short-circuit in the power wires for the power fan is most unlikely, unless the sticky tape itself somehow became conductive, people say sticky tape does not conduct but I know it does so it's still possible. However I cannot imagine an entire power supply going dead just because the power wires to power fan short-circuited this seems somewhat unlikely and I would expect the conductence over the sticky tape to be very low.

There is also no apperent damage to the motherboard.

I did find a broken off washer which was probably used to lift the motherboard of the metal case... I can vaguely remember losing a washer in the case and never finding it or something... but this rememberance is unsure.

So there are now a number of possible hypothese of what happened:

1. The washer broke off because of old age/heating/cool down, it's a flexible tiny little washer and it's plastic cracked away... causing the motherboard to short circuit with the case. This is a plausible theory considering the potential difference which is on the ground wires. Therefore the potential on the ground wire short circuited the motherboard. Perhaps the motherboard of the pentium III 450 mhz is now dead too. I should try and re-build the system with spare parts to see if the power supply is dead or the motherboard.

If the motherboard is dead then I am pretty fed up with it... because that would be the zillion-th motherboard that blew up like that... and then I am going to immediatly call an electrician to replace those power wall sockets.

1. Other theory is a design-flaw in the entire computer system in relation to the power supply and the power button. I could not tell if the power button was on or off when I plugged it in. But I do know old systems do not have a "software controlled power button". If the physical power button is on on it will power on. Thus the theory is that the power surge went through the entire system damaging the system. This could be a reason why newer systems are always in a power off state. Thus design error could also be cause of death.

Other less likely theories:

1. Age of power supply, stuff evaporated and died.

1. Dust made some sort of connection.

2. Spider which I killed a few days ago short circuited it... unlikely but cannot be ruled out.

1. Spark during plug in, caused a weird power surge through ground wire of plugs.

2. Cable electronics dead.

I am starting to suspect "ground wire" does more damage than it does good ;)

Bye, Skybuck.