Serious PC Static issues

[Franz Dano]

I need serious help figuring out what is going on with my friend's PC

 

So, my friend's PC was moved into our condo unit a few months ago and only ever since moving it here, any metallic area of the case would discharge static electricity though the PC would continue to run normally...

At least it did, until just recently:

• The speakers started making static buzzing noises in idle (sometimes) and during boot-up (always)
• Anything on the display would start distorting and tearing no matter the PC was doing
• The start menu, action center, settings window, and security options (ctrl+alt+del) would pop up out of nowhere; and
• The entire PC would go dark and sleep then wake a few seconds later
• And weirdly it has to use a WLAN card now because if was connected to the router via LAN, the internet wouldn't work

Both of us built PCs before and we've never experienced this

Also note that the PC has been working fine for about a year before being moved to the condo, and the static hasn't killed any of the components or corrupted any data in the rig.

 

I hope someone actually has at least an idea of what's going on here, because we haven't been able to do any work with it since recently.

[don_svetlio]

Thinking bout an unstable PSU

[Franz Dano]

One thing I might have forgotten to note,

The PSU set one of my friend's internal HDD's on fire when he accidentally forgot to attach the SATA data cable to the drive then booted up the rig

[Omon_Ra]

It could be a poor ground. Is the condo an older building? But I'm leaning towards lightening strike. Has the computer been powered through a surge protector/line conditioner? What about the router/ethernet lines? Even if the house/residence it was in wasn't hit, a power surge could have fried something. My only reasoning is that the LAN is borked. It's possible the telephone/cable line was hit and then killed the NIC card and did all kinds of weird electrical bad things subsequently.

 

Edit: Sounds like a bad PSU. Find a good one and swap it out. Though it seems there may be damage sustained to components that replacing the PSU won't fix.