Vandelay

Did you keep the can of compressed air upright at all times? If it's tilted too much or turned on its side, the liquid inside can spray out. I don't know if that would be enough to damage a motherboard or other component, though.

I may try that, thanks. I almost never switch off the PSU itself - only if I have to physically move the computer for cleaning it or around it, which is very rare. I have the system plugged into a UPS - do you mean that in the future, if I need to unplug the system, that I instead power off the UPS and unplug the power cable but leave the PSU switch on? Regarding the arcing, I understand a brief inrush is normal when a PSU is plugged back in (e.g. jonnyguru explanation here). In my situation when I first heard the very loud crackling I froze for a second or two, then switched off the PSU - the power cable hadn't been fully inserted since I had panicked a little. What happens when the arcing occurs for a few seconds? If the caps charge in <200ms, I'm wondering where the rest of that current went. I'm having weird issues related to entering and coming out of sleep mode, which leads me to believe it's related to the arcing event. One or more of my fans revving up to max speed for a couple seconds after waking the PC is concerning - if the motherboard/PSU aren't managing power properly, then I wonder if it might fry another component like an SSD or GPU one day. I'd assume the PSU should have prevented any surge of electricity escaping to the motherboard and other components during the arcing, but I don't have a good technical understanding of these things. For example, I saw this comment from someone who works at Antec: Along with 191x7's post above yours: "Electric devices are made not to take damage from such actions." So overall I'm just very confused. I appreciate all the comments thus far. I guess I'm trying to firmly establish whether it would be possible for this 3+ seconds of arcing to cause damage or not, whether to the PSU or other components.

Serenity now... insanity later. BIOS is already the latest version. FWIW I haven't had any such issues in 2 years. It's like the motherboard is suddenly not handling power management properly after this arcing event

I definitely don't plan on repeating this mistake. I understand very brief arcing might happen when people connect power cables to the PSU, but is a prolonged ~3 second arcing enough to damage anything? I realize my post is long but I just wanted to provide as much info as possible, since I don't have the level of knowledge/understanding of other posters here. I can say with 100% certainty that, since this arcing occurred, the system is behaving oddly sometimes when entering or coming out of sleep. That seems to be a power-related issue, which has me concerned that I did possibly damage the PSU or motherboard.

(please see signature for full PC specs) Back in late January I was doing some cleaning in and around my desktop (I open it up and clean out dust every couple months). This time I wanted to get a look at the underside of the PSU (EVGA 750W B2) to check for dust, which meant tipping the case on its side. So, I unplugged the PSU power cable (other end still plugged into my UPS) along with other cables - HDMI, mouse USB, and speaker cable. However, I forgot to switch off the PSU (I always do if I'm inside the PC cleaning, simply forgot). For the next 25-30 min I cleaned out dust from the case, checked the underside, etc. Then I got ready to plug the power cable back into the PSU. As I was doing so I heard a loud continuous snapping/crackling electrical noise - it sounded like it was coming from the other end of the cable at the UPS. This lasted for 2-3 seconds until I saw the PSU was on and switched it off. I did not smell anything, see any smoke, etc. After a few moments I removed the power cable (don't recall it feeling warm but I was just touching the plug), then plugged it back in with no noise occurring. About 15 minutes later I plugged in the other rear cables, switched on the PSU, then turned on the PC. Boot and login seemed fine, fans and everything seemingly working normally. ... (some additional thoughts) The thing is, I have had a few strange issues since this happened. Three times when going to sleep, the mouse LEDs have stayed on instead of turning off as usual. Once coming out of sleep one of the fans (CPU? or multiple?) was running at what sounded like max speed for 2-3 seconds - never happened before. The PC seems to be running okay otherwise, but these issues all relate to the system entering sleep or waking up. I'm concerned that something might have happened to the motherboard or PSU. I haven't been gaming (rarely do) or doing anything intensive - just browsing and youtube for the most part. No changes to system, settings, etc. Before going into some of those deeper details in the troubleshooting forum, I just wanted to get a better understanding of this 'arcing event' to see what you all think. Could any damage have occurred in my situation? Should a few seconds of arcing not be cause for concern? Shouldn't the PSU protect the PC components from any surge of electricity? To quote from a recent thread: Thanks very much for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I am absolutely fascinated by the guy in the background.

@colonel_mortis I haven't experienced the slow loading (or no loading) issue here or on the other affected sites for 1-2 days. Hoping that whatever it was, the problem is resolved. Thanks again. BTW, did Cloudflare specify what they think the issue is/was?

Thanks for your response. I'm hoping this issue is Cloudflare related, since I've been wracking my brain for a few days trying to figure out what the problem is (first thinking it's an issue with browser/PC, then router, then ISP, etc.). It was strange that the slowdowns sometimes happened, then maybe 10 minutes later they'd be gone only to reappear later in the same browsing session. If the problem is external to my hardware/software, that relieves any stress and anxiety since there's nothing I can do but wait for the issue to be fixed. Also, I've just been using this page to check if a website uses Cloudflare. I don't know how reliable or accurate it is. Other sites I've noticed the slowdowns or loading hangups: Feedly My Digital Life Forums Cheap Ass Gamer Forums Thanks again for taking the initiative to notify Cloudflare. Hopefully they can resolve whatever issues they're having. I wonder if other people/sites have noticed or experienced these same slowdowns with sites barely loading or getting "stuck" while loading.

I've experienced slow load times, too. It happens in Firefox and Chrome on two different PCs. Sometimes loading is fine, other times it's very slow or the site doesn't load at all. Was worried that it's something to do with my router. Then I thought it might be the ISP or something like Cloudflare. For example, I'm getting the same slow loading (or zero loading) with feedly, which also uses Cloudflare. I'm not too far from Chicago (~300 miles). Here's my trace output: Cloudflare has also posted this today: (I don't know if any of these issues would be DNS related... I'm not too knowledgeable on these things.) The rest of Cloudflare's status updates are here. I've been experiencing these slow loading issues for almost one week. Don't remember when I first noticed them on LTT (2-3 days ago) but feedly was the first since I check feedly quite frequently every day.

That was really enjoyable and genuinely engrossing. Looking forward to more Scrapyard Wars!

In unrelated news I had an outage on Charter internet/phone tonight for an hour or so. This doesn't happen often (maybe 2-3 times per year), so overall I'm happy with Charter. Wish the speeds were a little faster though.