Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Do you know what happens if you plug a PC into the mains while it's
> configured for 110V rather than 230V?
>
> I do now... ;-)
>
> Mmm, the acrid smell of fried capacitor, with a hint of inductance coil
> winding. My favourit smell in the morning.

I actually had something like this as a *literal* wakeup call one morning...
except that I hadn't plugged anything wrong, just my display spontaneously
frying some of its electronics "just for fun", after one of the first overnight
renders I did on my then-brand-new Linux machine...

.... interestingly, it turned out there was nothing wrong with the new computer.
I guess it was probably a freak error in the display, which had gone unnoticed
for almost 2 years only because I had never used the analog input for any
serious duration before.

(Oh well, there *was* something wrong with that brand-new computer, but that was
the hard drive, which failed suddenly and fatally after just a few days...)


And some two or three years ago my other computer gave an *impressively* loud
*BANG!!* when I turned it on - emphasizing the obvious fact that it had no
intention whatsoever to gonna run that day... until then, I wouldn't have
expected such a petty thing as a medium-sized disc capacitor to be capable of
producing *that* much noise...

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