smoked ram, pc works fine, cause an electrical fire later?

my ram was defective because I kept getting the blue screen (bsod). So I swapped it. When I installed the ram, I didn’t realize that I didn’t fully insert the ram into the board (stupid!). When I turned on the computer, it immediately started smoking. I held the power button to shut it down. i put aside the smoked ram. I had an experienced family member look at the pc – looked ok. Put the old ram back, computer powered up and seems to function ok.

Question: can my computer be damaged, without it being obvious, and catch on fire later on, if I leave the pc on for a few days? Makes me nervous. I may buy a class c fire extinguisher for electrical fires but I can’t baby sit the pc all day.

No, It wont catch on fire.

I had a dual socket a motherboard with 2 athlon mp 2400+ that touched the Tray and caught on fire, I cleaned it and reseated the stand offs, The crappy standoffs the ATCS 100 had that are little clip things, Worked fine.

Almost all the plastics in the computer are fairly fire resistant and are unlikely to cause long trails of flames to shoot out. Also having a metal computer case with the sides installed helps a lot more.

download and run memtest86+ to be sure.

i put the "smoked" ram aside and replaced it with a spare set of sticks. do i still need to do memtest? computer is in an antec 900 case.

It will ensure that the ram dimms are ok.

I have been running memtest86 for 10 straight hours and not a single error over 14 passes with both sticks in there. so i guess no sporadic fires to worry about in the future when i'm not home.

btw, how do i make sure that my motherboard is pristine? any special test for that?

common man said:

I have been running memtest86 for 10 straight hours and not a single error over 14 passes with both sticks in there. so i guess no sporadic fires to worry about in the future when i'm not home.

btw, how do i make sure that my motherboard is pristine? any special test for that?

Click to expand...

prime95 is good for that. I suppose. The motherboard's purpose is to connect other components, so there isn't a direct test for it.