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    Close call with electrical short (left-side USB port next to headphone jack)

    Discussion in 'Razer' started by TJCacher, Aug 28, 2015.

  1. TJCacher

    TJCacher Notebook Consultant

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    I'm quite used to my 2 Razer Blades at this point (2014 model, running Windows 10 Insider Preview and 2015 model on 8.1, where I do most gaming these days). I guess I've gotten a little *too* used to them. I often plug in my headphones in the evenings, so my SO won't be disturbed by the sounds of mayhem as I slaughter my enemies.

    It's dark in our main room at night, so I just plug the headphones in by feel (there are two USB ports on the left side, and right below the second one is the headphone jack).

    Last night, I started to plug in, and, as usual, felt along the left side for the headphone port. After locating it, I moved the headphone jack and started to slide it in place. All of a sudden there was a very loud "pop" and my hand felt like it had been pushed back out of place with the headphone plug still in hand. My SO was looking at me, and said "What was THAT!??".

    I had accidentally attempted to push the plug into the USB port next to the headphone jack, and created some kind of electrical short.

    The machine was still running, but I figured I'd messed something up. I unplugged my backup SSD and plugged it back in. It didn't mount. It wouldn't mount on any of the USB slots - even the right-hand side one, although my external USB wireless mouse was still working from that slot.

    I wound up going into device manager, showing hidden devices, and removing the driver for my external SSD. After re-attaching it, the driver showed an error, saying the driver failed because there was already a copy of it loaded into memory. I uninstalled it a second time, rebooted, and all was well.

    So, I guess the TL;DR here is that I dodged a bullet by shorting out a USB port with a headphone plug, and somehow wound up doing no permanent damage to my machine. Don't know whether that's due to Razer's good engineering design, or my stupidly dumb luck, but you can bet I'll be more careful with plugging in my headphones in the future!
     
  2. Farthor

    Farthor Notebook Enthusiast

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    My usb port stop working because i did the same thing... but i just broke one usb port.

    Now i think that razer should change the place of headphone jack but looks that they think this design is perfect and don't want to change it.