On Sat, 19 Aug 2006, Gilboa Davara wrote:
[...]
> In general, smoke that is followed by computer death usually means:
> A. Damaged PSU (power supply unit).
> B. Power surge.
> C. Over-heating. (Dead CPU/MB fan. Though new computer should shut down
> in-case of over heating.)
> D. Short circuit in one of the computer components, most likely the
> mother board.
Additionally, I have seen peripherals burn out motherboards. My boss
toasted two machines by plugging a bad printer into them successively. If
you are burning out multiple machines the first question is 'what is
common'. But the OS specifically is extremely unlikely to be the cause of
multiple machine burnouts.
Bad power (all of your computers are plugged into good quality UPS units
and your building power and grounds are good, right?), bad attached
devices (PCI cards, USB drives, printers, monitors, even keyboards (think
'soda in keyboard') and mice are possible), 'toxic environment' (if your
office is 110 degrees or in a damp basement you may have your problem
right there), or unknown damage while in storage (IOW: Maybe someone
stored them in a toxic environment while they were turned off and got them
wet or something...).
I concur with the below that installing windows instead will probably only
result in more dead machines until you identify your hardware or
environmental issue.
> Reading through your description of the problem I'd wager it's 3.
> Open the machine's case, check the CPU and mother board FANs. Are they
> spinning? Do you see large piles of dust on the heat sinks? (Large
> metallic object under the fan). Is the heat sink seated firmly?
>
> As I said. This is purely a hardware problem. Installing Windows will
> only kill more machines.
>
> Gilboa
>
>
--
Benjamin Franz
"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
for a prediction and keeping track of one’s past record of accuracy."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
