Bill's Personal News

This past weekend, I was typing up an article for one of my blogs. Janet shuffled into the room in her socks and touched my shoulder, sending a big spark into me. Well, I felt a big spark come out of my thumb into my corded mouse at the same instant and everything froze. No mouse, no keyboard - even the second hand on my Vista Sidebar clock stopped moving. Sheer terror gripped my chest as I realized the static spark had gone straight into my computer through the mouse.

To get a feel for why I was so afraid, let me tell you about my current computer. Here are the main specs:

• Intel i7 965 Extreme Edition CPU liquid-cooled and mildly over-clocked to 3.6 GHz.
• EVGA X58 3x SLI Motherboard
• 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards in SLI mode
• 12GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair Dominator DHX triple channel RAM
• 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor Hard Drives in RAID 0 striped array
• 2 x 2TB WD Caviar Green hard drives
• 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Black hard drives
• LG Blu-ray burner
• Lightscribe DVD burner
• 30" Samsung 305T LCD flat panel display
• 24" Samsung 245T LCD flat panel display

So, with all of that top-of-the-line hardware, I was pissing myself to say the least when it went dead. I was envisioning having to use my laptop for a year while I replaced each part one at a time as we could afford it.

I told myself not to panic and to shut everything down first to see if it was just temporarily locked up. So, I shut it down, waited about 30 seconds, and turned it back on. The power supply turned on. The fans came on. But the displays remained blank. The BIOS never ran. It never beeped. Ok, now it's time to panic, I thought.

Well, the mouse is plugged directly into a USB port on the motherboard, so I figured the motherboard was definitely cooked. The real question was how much of the rest of the expensive items did it take with it? I sent Janet to Fry's to pick up a new motherboard while I took everything apart and removed the old one. I popped the new one in, reinstalled everything, turned it on, and it wouldn't boot up. UGH!

I took everything back out except one graphics card and one stick of RAM (out of 6). It booted! This meant the CPU must be fine. That was a big worry, since it's $1k to replace that one chip. So now I thought it must be the other graphics card or some of the RAM that got fried.

Well, to shorten the story a bit, I spent an entire day swapping components in and out before I realized that the brand new motherboard she just bought was actually bad. She ran back to the store, swapped it for another, I installed it, and bingo! Everything worked. All of the RAM, both graphics cards, the CPU, and all of the drives worked perfectly. I was ecstatic! The only thing that fried was the motherboard.

Now - How can you avoid the same thing happening to you?

The number one thing you can do to prevent a static discharge from burning your computer up is this: Don't use wired keyboards and mice. If there is no physical connection between your keyboard/mouse, and your computer, you won't discharge into the computer. You will only fry the mouse or keyboard. That costs a LOT less to fix.

The other thing you can do is to ground yourself before touching the keyboard and mouse. When there is a lot of static in the air, I touch the screws on light switches as I walk through the house. Before I touch the keyboard and mouse, I usually touch the metal case on my computer under the desk next to me. Both practices reduce the built up static charge you hold in your body.

Of course, this didn't help me when Janet shuffled into the room in socks and touched me. So, we're back to the first solution. I bought a wireless keyboard and mouse. My new setup is the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro. The keyboard feels really comfortable and the mouse is sturdy and fits my hand perfectly. Both are well-made and solid. Both have extra buttons that can be programmed to do all kinds of things, if you are into that. So far, I just left them at their default settings, which work great. Best of all, the set works perfectly on Vista 64 Ultimate, which is what I use because I run Adobe CS4 Production Premium.

So, learn from my ordeal. Get a wireless keyboard and mouse. Static electricity is a killer!

Labels: computers, news, trips

Welcome to my new personal home page! This is where I just post news about daily life and personal information about me. Enjoy!