Can You Damage A Motherboard by Plugging Something In the Parralel Port While The Computer Is Running?

[DolphinJay]

This is exactly what my sister did. I brought over a zip drive and she just unplugged her printer and plugged in the zip. The computer immediately froze. We figured whoops, reboot, no problem. Instead nothing. Drives power up but there is no picture on monitor and no beep codes of any kind. We've tried clearing the cmos. Booting without a video card. Booting without the memory. We did these to see if the computer would give any kind of error codes but nothing. We then put everything back and tried a different power supply just in case, no change. Also the atx power switch works to turn the computer on but not off. I'm completely stumped. So is it possible that we fried her motherboard over this simple in a rush mistake? All replies appreciated.


Thanks Jason

 

[Henry Kuo]

it's possible.

 

[AndyHui]

Yep. I killed the parallel port on my ASUS P2L97 by plugging in a printer while they were both on. A spark jumped between the cable and the port and I could never print again.

 

[DaddyG]

You usually just kill the parallel port but seems like you caused other damage. Chipsets are so highly integrated that you never know what you fry.

 

[Navi]

If the board was built correctly and your peripherals were built correctly (i.e the guy who did the design actually implemented common sense instead of trying to save $) it shouldn't break. This is the way it was only a few years ago.

In this day and age every possible short cut is made to reduce cost and increase profit. So I highly recommend not change cables while under power.

In the old days they used to have ferrite beads on all the ground and powers to prevent arcing as well as feed-back diodes to further reduce arching. They even used to moat everything to keep it properly isolated. Removing those off a mother board could save $5 easily. You start selling thousand of boards and that $5 adds up real quick for a CEO trying to earn a bonus vacation from the company. Even NIC's are going that route too....sigh...

-Navi (still designing hardware right <-- people don't like planes crashing)

 

[Mem]

I believe the only things you can plug in or out while your PC is on is USB hardware since this was designed for this.And yes to your question, it has been done before(damage to hardware)

 

[juyanith]

Oh yeah. I've done it myself on my old Pentium mobo. You really shouldn't go changing serial or parallel cables while the power is on...