OT: Dell support

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, Richard Kreiss blurted:
> One of my neighbors called me after spending an hour with Dell tech support.
> 
> Her computer appeared not to be booting passed the post.  All that would
> come up was the Dell Logo thing. 
> 
> The tech support person had her unplug her flat panel monitor from her UPS
> and plug it directly into the wall outlet.  After plugging and plugging the
> monitor and doing other things, he concluded that either the processor was
> bad or she had bad memory.
> 
> Oh, by the way, she did tell them at the start that the monitor was smoking
> before she turned it off and shut her system down.
> 
> I had her bring the computer to me.  I plugged in one of my monitors and low
> and behold, like magic, it came up.  

I'm confused as to how this could happen.  Okay, the monitor is -smoking-,
so I'm thinking, "Unplug it and replace it -anyway-."

But the real question is how a dying monitor could cause a system to fail
POST.  Only thing I can think of is that whatever made it smoke was sending
such rubbish in feedback over the SVGA line that it made the video card act
oddly during POST and it failed those tests.

That's a weird one.

"Mr. Dell Man?  My monitor's smoking..."

"Okay, take it off the clean, filtered power source and attach it directly
to the power source that's prone to spikes, drops, and surges.  It might
help the smoking problem."

*boggle*

mark->