That sucks, but how much smoke/damage is going to come from a paperclip stuck in a USB port, really?
All Chromebook ports are low-voltage, you know, so it seems to take a lot of work to get that huge volume of smoke as pictured in the article's photo. Is that real or staged?
A million years ago, I learned that I could hard-reset my VIC-20 or C=64 using a bent paperclip on the User I/O port. It worked a treat, until I accidentally shorted the wrong pins. There was virtually no smoke, no fire, just a little pop, and an expensive trip to the repair shop (that's when you could get computers repaired for reasonable rates, at the same place you could purchase them!)
Surely there are circuit breakers or some kind of protection on Chromebook ports, or the cheap ones simply cannot give off much smoke before they simply malfunction?
floundy · 11h ago
I was able to nearly start a small fire in a few seconds by cutting open a USB cable, stripping the pos/neg wires, and attaching them to the charging interface of a small electronic device I had lost the charging dock for. Powered from a standard USB port.
AStonesThrow · 11h ago
Ironically, the Ars Technica page containing this article had so many animated ads on it, it single-handedly caused my Chromebook's ventilation fan to noisily and grumpily spin up!
All Chromebook ports are low-voltage, you know, so it seems to take a lot of work to get that huge volume of smoke as pictured in the article's photo. Is that real or staged?
A million years ago, I learned that I could hard-reset my VIC-20 or C=64 using a bent paperclip on the User I/O port. It worked a treat, until I accidentally shorted the wrong pins. There was virtually no smoke, no fire, just a little pop, and an expensive trip to the repair shop (that's when you could get computers repaired for reasonable rates, at the same place you could purchase them!)
Surely there are circuit breakers or some kind of protection on Chromebook ports, or the cheap ones simply cannot give off much smoke before they simply malfunction?