PC hardware forum: Chemical smell coming from PC

Now that sounds pretty bad (or maybe I should say smell..).

First of all; thermal grease should not smell, at least I have not experience it.

It is obvious something is burning. Some may not agree with my method. but here is how I would do it. Take the case cover off then turn on the computer. When it start to smell, I would unplug the computer; Then I would discharge myself by touching the chassis, and I would then use my hand and see if there are anything that is too hot to touch. Good luck.

As it turns out, I started to have problems with my PC. It started with not being able to reboot my PC, no power no fans... nothing. Upon reseating my RAM it would start up. This happened four or five times. I thought it was some bad RAM and was in the process of determining that, when it started randomly shutting down. Reseating the RAM would still allow me to reboot, but then it shut down randomly for one last time, and anything I tried would not fix it. So I pulled the power supply, and voila, everything worked. No problems with RAM.

As far as the smell went, well that is going to remain a mystery. It has slowly dissipated, but still continued after I put in the new power supply. I don't think the smell was coming from the Power Supply, as it didn't smell, but it could have come from my x-fi front I/O connector bay as this no longer works. But I am unsure, because, in all of the frustration, of trouble shooting my PC, I may damaged it, as I found a small resistor or something like that, had become dislodged. I don't know if a power supply failure could cause that. I tried soldering it back on to no avail.

One thing that does have me concerned though, is with the bad power supply, when I would flip the power supply's toggle on switch to on, the PC would just boot without me pushing the front power button. Which I have never had that happen on any of my previous PC builds. When I switched power supply's this behavior stopped ... for the first few boots. But now when I disconnect the plug and flip the switch, I am getting the same thing. The PC just boots up on its on.

The only thing I can think of that would cause this would be the bios setting that has to do with the power going out. But I have the soft boot option selected. (where the PC stays off when the power is interrupted.) Anyway is this normal? I've never seen it before... that I recall anyway.

That Would be the smell of BURN IN all new electronics smell like that the frist time they fire up and run for a while if this smell dosent go away in a day or so then you may have some bad componets

In a similar vein, I recently posted the below limerick:

Samsung's LCDs made me ill,
Epoxies outgassed like to kill!
Strong phosphors so silent
They seemed quite non-violent...
Yet proved worse than some poisoned pill!

(I'd also included another re: Samsung printers - btw, those printers come loaded with chemicals too - the Chinese don't outgas their goods which then piles up a nightmare of chemicals in this country.

In the book InvisibleDisease by Nordstrom, it explains that when machines warm up, chemicals outgas and can be absorbed by the human body which then react to EMFs (such as EMFs of "light"). Like a vicious cycle.

These URLs are relevant & may interest you:

http://www.electrosensitivity.org/cause.htm

http://www.etoxics.org/site/PageServer?pagename=svtc_electronic_industry_overview

MESS Cartoons: http://www.freewebs.com/eclectives/messtoons.htm

http://www.lemnet.com/guestbooks/show/?user=monitorp&book=1a&e=0

ridiculous semantics - who cares
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgassing