channel-e information in an electronic age.

Failure Gallery

A mixed bag of images. Most are of component failures.

Dirty Mouse: This sent to users to show them mouse rollers that need cleaning. On their copy I red circled the dirt.
PSU Failure #1: ISTR that this failure caused an over voltage that destroyed the hard drive, mainboard, memory and processor in the machine. In the PSU there was evidence of resistors overheating and the board getting hot too.
Modem Lightening Damage #1: A PCI modem. The first image shows a surface mount resistor that has been cooked. There is evidence of damage on three of the (blue) capacitors next to the resistor. From above the board you can see that the top of the resistor is partially missing.
HP LaserJet 8100dn fuser: This failure occured during a big print run. We think something melted inside the fuser and caused a jam. This resulted in some teeth being stripped from a gear.
PSU Failure #2: This unit went with a bang. Opening it up shows why; two electrolytic capacitors had burst! The cans are shown beside the PSU.
Hot D-Link PCMCIA NIC: An illustration of just how warm this card was getting! Warm enough to bubble the label.
Fujitsu HD Failure: Fujitsu had a problem with their MPF range. Here is the BIOS message from one of those drives. The Fujitsu drive is primary master.
Exploding Windows CDs
: Back in 2003 we had a few Windows 2000 CDs shatter in the drive. On this occasion the drive survived.
Modem Lightening Damage #2: Another PCI modem. This time it's a surface mount transistor (Q3) with it's top partially missing.