I don't have much luck with hardware do I ? Maybe I should just learn to keep my grubby hands off it. This weekend I went shopping with my mate Jake to replace his screencard and Motherboard that I had busted with static when I took it apart a few weeks ago. [hint: I want anti-static wrist strap
for xmas! the cordless IBM one...]

anyway, new stuff needs a new cabinet so I get one of them too - this motherboard being a bit bigger than the old. So there I am checking that everything works, electricity, ram is in, cards are in, everything is connected a-ok.. well, anyway, Lets try it....!

Machine turns on, and white smoke comes out of it, literally twenty seconds after me hitting the powerbutton! I turn it off rip the cord out, and start smelling around the parts to find what the heck just set on fire. As you can see, when Athlon's get hot, they bleed green goo.
Literally twenty seconds, and *pouf* CPU is dead. Poor guy didn't even have time to be a CPU before he died.

as you can see below, the board and CPU locking place is unharmed. I guess that counts for luck in the bad luck.

Why the fire? I have no idea. I'll be bringing my toys back to techie-hardware shop today and swapping theories with the boys there. beats me why it burned like that....

I have a witness to all this, Andreas who took the close-up pictures of the CPU with his new camera [a whole 'nother story it's a fancy toy with macro and all]. "never seen anything like it". great. well you have now!