We’ve been having a lot of lightning here recently – just a bike-ride nuisance, we thought, until one fateful morning in June. We entered the studio to the familiar yet oh-so-delicious smell of burnt electronics.
A power surge had quite selectively attacked one computer in the lab… you guessed it, mine. Our resident IT guru diagnosed it as ‘fried’ and he was absolutely right; the motherboard had basically detonated in one corner, and two capacitors had literally blown themselves off the board and ricocheted around in the case. Pictures:

The strangeness off it is, other than the motherboard, nothing else (CPU, Power supply, HD, RAM, etc.) was damaged… the thunderstorm/surge theory seems to be borne out by the fact that 4 or 5 machines went up in smoke in the same period of time, and it stopped with the installation of surge protectors everywhere. Still, I’m quite amazed that I’m sitting at pretty much (one motherboard swap later) the same machine, typing this post.