My arousingly fast desktop is, apparently, sitting on the static equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. I thought it was just a speaker thing until it spontaneously shut down this morning before I left for work.
What can I do, do you think, to fix this? Should I have a coathanger attached to the case and the metal bits of my desk? Do I need a plastic floor-cover?
The desktop is plugged into my power strip, and the strip and the desktop have a grounded plug. This is frustrating.
Unrelatedly, I wanted to say again that this weekend was pretty much a blast. I laughed a hell of a lot, reconnected with some of my peeps, and even, maybe, kinda got some work done.
I’m only a little tired this morning, which is impressive considering KT and Melanie decided to make 8 dozen pudding/jello shots, for fun, yeesterday.
Call me sappy, but in the week ahead I’m pretty much exclusively looking forward to seeing my girl.
If it’s on the floor, that’s your problem right there — desktops should never sit on the floor. Put a few phone books under it and it’ll probably be okay.
Definitely fix it pronto, though; you wouldn’t want to zap your nice shiny new motherboard! The faster they are, the more sensitive, generally…
Alas, it is on top of the desk.
That’s very odd, and kinda worrying given that the grounding plug is supposed to take care of that… is it just a power bar or does your bar also have surge protection? If it doesn’t, you may want to upgrade; decent ones are cheap now. If it does, your power bar might be faulty.
You might want to take a look at grounding straps though they should be unnecessary on a three-plug system… a plastic floor cover would be Bad unless it’s one of those anti-static mats.
— Steve also has a brand new toy, and would hate to see yours suffer an untimely demise.
It could simply be not so much a static issue as a power-drop issue, too.
You need to be certain if it’s static issue and not simply brown-out-type power issue or even line noise (can both be caused by the same thing.)
First make sure the house ground is still grounded. A common issue in that the copper bar or the grounding strap that connects it to your system half-rots out. A small amount of information here:
http://everything2.com/title/How+to+test+the+electrical+ground+for+a+house
If you’re suffering chronic undervoltage (again tested with a multimeter) your best bet is to get a UPS. In fact, a descent UPS is a good cheapish way to fix noise and over/undervoltage issues and is not a bad idea anyway.