Tonight I went to the bother of unhooking my PSU completely from my PC to try and swap it for another unit, only to discover the voltages are different, so I didn't swap it out in the end.  I did however open it up and blow an insane amount of dust from the inside of it, and hooked it back up and it ran fine.  The scary part is yet to come.

I then hooked up my HD's, booted, ran ok.  Shut it down again and installed a gigabit ethernet card and then rebooted.  Here's the OH SH#$ moment.

Just after turning it on, the pc shut down....tried again same thing.  Waited about 30 seconds, booted it up, and it ran but I smelled a faint burning smell.  I thought, "OH F---"  immediately powered it down. 

I waited a few minutes, and in that time I unhooked all my drives power cables, my dvd/cd power cable and then picked my c drive to plug in...ran fine, hooked up my other two hd's, one at a time, booting every time, went well.  Then the cd-rom, still ok.  *whew*

I'm on it now, running just fine.  My question is:

Could that have been cause I got the ethernet card from a discarded PC, that was used Point-Of-Sale terminal in the restaurant I work in?  The place can get kinda greasy.  I wasn't a pure electrical burn smell, just a general burn smell.  And very faint.  I figured the pci port might have burnt off some residue on the contacts on the card. 

thoughts?  comments?

Could have been fresh dust burning in in your PSU :)

I have had a card or two from someone who obviously smoked, these tend to smell when for the first few days.

oldskool wrote on 27.03.12 at 21:26:32:

Could have been fresh dust burning in in your PSU :) I have had a card or two from someone who obviously smoked, these tend to smell when for the first few days.

Well I shold have posted back ages ago but I just lost track of the topic, but here goes. 

The smell might have been just dust, but I will never know; about 4 months later the PC died completely, but not in the way I thought it would.  The power supply still ran, but was even then a little wonky at times and sometimes did not want to boot, but usually did.  I suspect the dust accumulation had over time wore parts in the PSU's control board out and was causing it to malfunction.  Added to that was the fact that the PSU's fan bearing were wearing out causing the fan to rattle off and on.  But what finally killed it?  lol god it was a not so funny day.....

What I discovered was that if I kept up with blowing the dust out of the PC, it ran reasonably well.  That's where the trouble came to a head.  I went to air dust the CPU and its fan and by god if the little can of compressed air didn't blow the CPU fan right off it's mounts, breaking them.  Funnily enough one mount held, and the fan could be hand set back onto the CPU.  It did boot, but only after like 8 attempts, and ran fairly ok, if hotter at the CPU, but the noise was terrible.  It also put more strain on the PSU fan, which was starting to wobble and squeal.  I said screw it and took everything I could save off the rig and trashed it.  Better than the thing catching fire.  Why did I get rid of it?  The only answer; money. 

At the time, I had no money for parts of any kind, let alone for much of anything else.  Plain and simple.  I kept all the ram, the vid card, all HD's, the sound card, all ethernet cards, the modem, nearly everything, save the case, cpu fan combo and the busted ass PSU. 

I ended up getting a PC for free like a week and a half later anyways, running on that now.  But what a funny (not!!!) ride it was.  All's well that ended....okish?  lol