I’m not having a very good week when it comes to breaking stuff. While removing two tuner cards from boron for the fantastic new pc for the living room (details coming soon) I decided to blow some of the dust away with a can of compressed air. It certainly did the job, but when I plugged the power back in nothing happened. I suspect that when I cleaned out the power supply, the very cold air coming from the can (since gasses cool as they expand) caused one of the components to experience thermal shock thus causing it to fail. So a new power supply is on order, and I’m hoping it will arrive tomorrow though I’ve not had a despatch notice from Dabs yet. In the meantime I’ve found an old PSU that used to be inside aluminium, but was replaced because it sounds like it’s arcing, so to avoid a fire caused by that PSU boron is currently switched off.
Moral of the story: don’t air-dust warm components.