What with the recent light shows and thunder boomers we've been having, the number of "dead" computers, network cards, cable modems and routers have spiked.
I've been in the computer business almost 20 years now, and in that time, I can only recall a handful of dead network cards - none of which were smote like this one. Usually they end up with an internal short circuit of some type which manifests itself in the form of a brown dot in the middle of the chip. The one pictured to the left obviously had more voltage channeled through it that normal though, as it literally blew a hole in the plastic casing of the IC.
The interesting thing about this machine, was that all we had to do to make it functional again, was to pull the dead NIC and install a new one. The rest of the machine appeared untouched by the surge of electricity that killed the network card.
The owner of this machine actually had two PCs affected by the recent storms though - the other one was fatally wounded. Similarly, the network card seemed to be the point of origin for the surge, but since the NIC was integrated in to the system board on the second machine, the damaged components were not removable, nor easily replaced. The machine would need a new system board in order to be resurrected, so it was deemed a write off.
Other victims of the latest round of Mother Nature vs. Personal Electronics, as reported by some of our customers, include large screen televisions that no longer work or no longer show the colour red; power supplies in computers, on routers, and on cable modems; cable modems and routers themselves and various other home electronic devices like telephones and DVD players.
Sadly this seems to happen every year around this time, but it seems like it is getting worse. Or, at the very least, Mother Nature is being more vindictive. I attribute the increasing severity of her wrath to the current "climate change" stuff that the media and Al Gore have been going on about for the last few years.
