Very Bad News For Celeron Users

[WilZ]

Steve

"I've smoked too many things in the past to list. "

Don't they have treatment programs for that in England?

Wil

[Wombat]

Well, there was that one time I static-shocked my old hard drive. It couldn't find an operating system. Lucky for me, I just had to touch it again to bring it down. Then it saw the old partition, with no damage. Lucky me. This happened several times.

-Wombat


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503+ rev 1.2a, 128MB PC100 RAM, K6-2/350@400,RH6 & Win98,G200 Millenium (SGRAM), no plans to buy a G400

[Coily]

I would watch that HDD if I was you - it could turn on its creator...errrmmm...owner if you're not careful.

BTW Did the chap with you have a hunchback and kept saying 'Yeeerrss MASTER'

[billko]

My friend was upgrading printer memory when he touched it after taking it out of the bag. We heard a crackling and the module smoked.

Having worked in the defense electronics field for quite a while, I had to read an ESD manual as thick as the New York telephone book before I could work on any of the stuff. In it, they brought up some interesting points:

A common rule (not a law) of physics is that for every centimeter of air a spark must jump, it needs about 100,000 volts.

Also, the average human cannot feel a static spark of less than 1,500 volts.

Wiping your arm on a piece of plastic can generate about 5,000 volts of static charge, which can be felt when you place your arm by the plastic and the hair stands on end.

You can blow the average FET with .5 volts if applied in the correct place.

So what does this mean? Let's say you are sitting in your chair and you get up to get that hot little CPU that you've been waiting to install all week. The action of you getting off the chair generates a few hundred static volts of electricity (on both you and the chair - one will be positive, the other, negative). You grab the CPU with your hand. Unbeknownst to you, there was a tiny spark that happened just before your hand touched the CPU - maybe the spark was only a fraction of a millimeter, so you didn't see it. The discharge was only a few hundred static volts, so you didn't feel it. But you can bet that the voltage traveled up the gold leads and kicked some poor transistors in the ass, where only .5 or so volts will kill 'em.

Maybe enough survived so that the CPU still worked, but since there are less transistors doing more work, it runs hotter than usual, and you can't overclock that chip as much as everyone in the newsgroups said they could OC theirs.

Bill

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People call me a computer god; I remind them that I am merely a minor deity...

[This message has been edited by billko (edited 07-23-99).]

[rekamlias]

All you need to make electronic parts is the dark secret magic of trapping the blue smoke inside the little part with the little metal legs. Once the blue smoke is trapped inside it will work wonderfully. And that is how computer chips and electronics are made.
Once the blue smoke leaks out, for what ever reason, it is no longer an electrical product.

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p3 450 underclocked to p2 266 Mill2 pci card running @ VGA 16 colors ,I'm jusk kidding

[agallag]

I agree with SteveC... I used to work in the IT department of a manufacturing plant. They had cheapo clone PCs on the factory floor for data entry. If you opened one of those puppies up after about 6 months of service, there was a 1/8" thick coating of thick black goo covering everything inside. I only ever saw one die.

Monitors on the other hand... they liked putting on smoke shows. I tried to tell them to get some industrial one-piece sealed computers, but they preffered to beat up the cheap ones

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Andrew Gallagher - andrew@agallagher.com
Asus P2B-S, PII-350, 64MB PC100, 12.7GB Quantum Fireball EX ATA-33, 3.2GB IBM Deskstar3 EIDE, 2 Quantum Atlas I 2.1GB UWSCSI, Toshiba 6201 SCSI CD, WangDAT SCSI, MillG200 8MB (Anxiously awaiting my G400MAX), SBLive! Retail, Win98SE