Originally posted by "jjeff1" ...

This is going back a while, when I worked at a mom & pop retail computer store. We took in a repair for someone who'd tried to build their own PC. The problem was with the sound. As soon as the tech took the cover off, he called us all over to look inside.

The system had an ISA sound card. The card had a 4 pin CD-Audio IN connector, for audio from CDs played through the CD-ROM. Instead of being plugged into the audio cable from the CD-ROM, the user discovered that a 4 pin power cable could be jammed on to the connector.

Amazingly enough, this caused neither smoke nor fire, but it did cause at least one stupid comment. Another tech looked at the machine and said "that shouldn't hurt the card, they're buffered". I believe at the time he was attending college for electrical engineering. We really never tried to find out what he was talking about. He didn't work there for long.

The card and slot it was plugged into was fried, though the rest of the machine worked normally.

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