Holy Smokes!

So, it's my "on week" with my "Casual Peek" YouTube videos, and I was editing some of my vids late last night. I was going in and out of the computer room, watching some TV (some cool show on the History Channel on snipers) while monitoring the processing of one of my vids. When I returned to the computer room during a commercial break, I noticed my PC was turned off. "Well, that's odd," I thought. I pressed the power button on the PC, and a quick series of loud "snap, crackle, and pops" started emanating from the back of the PC, followed by that "electronic burning" smell, and a small waft of smoke.

Now, I don't mean to brag, but I know my way around a PC (I have built most all of my PCs, and haven't owned a store retail PC since 1989), and I knew exactly what had happened. My poor power supply had "gone belly up", "kicked the bucket", "deep sixed", "bought the farm", "flatlined", "given up the ghost", "bit the dust", "was 86ed", "checked out", "went kaput", or just simply died. Even though it was just the power supply, there was still an initial fear that went through me, considering the power supply is connected to many components and may possibly have "shorted" or "fried" components such as the motherboard, memory, CPU, video card, CD/DVD, or (most importantly to me!) the hard drives.

When I built my PC, I was actually building a second PC at the same time (to rip a Contact quote, "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?") to be the "family" computer. It wasn't as powerful as mine, but it still had the same computer case (with the same power supply). So in my fear of wondering what else I may have lost, I began a power supply "transplant operation", using the second PC as the donor. It didn't take long to perform the operation, only the time between two commercial breaks, LOL!

So it was time to push the power button. Would I hear the familiar sounds of the fans start to spin? Would I get a sequence of beeps indicating a fried board, CPU, video, or memory? Would I receive a message indicating no bootable partition? Would I get any response at all?

Well, everything turned out fine. The components were OK, no corrupted OS, even the video that was processing was fine (it must have completed before the power loss). The only casualty is the now powerless family PC. It had donated its component to a worthy cause! Now I'll just have to find a replacement power supply before I start to hear it from the munchkins, LOL!

Keep it casual!