I had always heard that old IBM desktop units were susceptible to mobo
damage if you hot swapped the mouse. So I always shut them dowm
properly. Other macines I never wooried about it much and I have
hotswapped virtually every peripheral device made on thousands of
machines. The only time I ever had any hot swap damage was when I hot
swapped an external Zip drive to the parallel port and burned out a SCSI
card (at least I think I did as it was dead the next day and I had
installed the Adaptec SCSI card only one week before).

  Doing a search on deja.com I found a recent thread on
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc that had the same topic as this group.
Here are three different responders who attest to damage from hot
swapping PS/2 mice:


>I have seen this blow out small surface mount fuses on AST and NEC motherboards. Sometimes you can jump the fuse, but usually they're so small the motherboard is toast.  Tim Mallery <[log in to unmask]>

> And IBM ones although these are usually large enough to fix (on early IBM PS/2s they were actually a clip in cartridge). Bob Eager <[log in to unmask]>

>Now that you mention it, we had this happen to an IBM 350. It was under warranty and IBM replaced the motherboard. Tim Mallery <[log in to unmask]>

>Add Toshiba laptops to the list where you risk a mobo fault. budgie <[log in to unmask]>


All the best,


Russell Smith
Edtech Consultant, Journalist
Region 14 ESC Abilene
http://camalott.com/~rssmith
mailto:[log in to unmask]

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