A few years ago, I stopped my life partner’s office to see how she was doing. When I glanced in her office, there was smoke coming out of the back of her desk. She was saying that she smelled something burning. I quickly told her to shut down her computer and unplug it. I had never seen a computer on fire before so it was a little awe inspiring. Luckily, she didn’t have anything flammable near it (who would have thought a computer was flammable?!). After we got the computer turned off and used a little fire extinguisher on it, we concluded that the computer was quite dead. Now I have had hard drives die, and motherboards go bad, but I have never had a computer go up in flames! I didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. I’m sure the lack of damage to anything but the computer tilted me towards impressed.
Fortunately, my partner had saved all of her important stuff to a thumb drive so she didn’t lose anything too terribly un recoverable except her spider solitaire scores. We got her a new computer that weekend and I hooked it up the following Monday. The reminder of that fire still gives me chills, but I was thrilled that because she had been properly backing up her information all along, she didn’t lose anything.
