My computer let go of the balloon.

I purchased an Acer around two years ago, and it's been an "okay" computer. I originally purchased it with a 2-Year Geek Squad warranty for hardware; this came in handy around 15 months after purchase when it needed a new motherboard and graphics card due to a power surge. I originally skimped, thinking "there's no way I'd keep a computer more than two years!" thinking back to my time in high school and early college where I (who knows how) had far too much disposable income and built a relatively cutting-edge computer about every year.
I came home from work today, unlocked my Windows 7 PC, and began catching up on the day's Internet happenings. A few sentences into a Google Chat conversation, there was a "tick" and the screen on my machine went blank. I hit the reset button figuring the noise was a hard-drive retrack indicating the system had crashed but the blank screen appeared after POST, and my apartment started to smell really, really bad. Kind of like it was filling with magic smoke, the type that powers all electronics.

I quickly powered off the computer and called the Geek Squad: it turns out my warranty expired yesterday. Yeah. Your heard me.

I really have no idea what happened. The explosion and resulting fire happened around the header for my front-panel USB ports but these have not had anything plugged into them for almost a year, did not have anything plugged into them at the time of the incident, and had not been disturbed since the motherboard was replaced about 9 months ago.


I'm just glad I've been keeping my PC off lately when it isn't in use; that's a pretty serious amount of char on the board and the metal case. I'd really like to know why this all happened, it was literally out of nowhere.

The particular computer in question is an Acer Aspire M5630 desktop computer, stock with 3GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive as two 250GB partitions, an ATI Radeon 2400HD video card, onboard gigabit Ethernet, DVD Burner, and slick front-panel media reader. I really don't know what to say about the quality control on this one, it seems an awfully odd mode of failure and kind of scary.