Did vista just ruin my thousand dollar computer?

[Bry Man]

Im completely baffaled as to what this may be, chalk it up to almost near impossible probability perhaps but hear me out.

I dont use speakers on my computer, but today i wanted to watch a movie so I grabbed my headphones and poped em into the headphone jack at the back of the tower...put em in the right jack and everything (the green one). Vista in an effort to be helpful...for some reason...asks me what I just pluged into the audio jack, so I check the "headphones" jack and hit "ok" and as soon as I do, my monitor flashes white and shuts off and everything in my tower dies, I could hear sounds inside which sounded like the Hd trying to spin but not doing really well...and all the lights on my keyboard flashed for like 30 seconds and then everything went completely dead.

I tried clearing the Cmos, turning off the power to the tower for several minutes, poping the battery off the mainboard for a few minutes...something apprently fried but dont know what, and dont know why.

So like..should I be mad at something, myself maybe? I use the headphones all the time and they arent faulty...the jack was properly seated, im totally confused.

Has anyone any input as to what the heck just happened =S

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

Its very possible you released a static charge of some sort and fried something. Vista really though shouldn't have asked if you put something in the headphone jack as its not considered "new" hardware which makes wonder if you really did put it in the right spot.

[Bry Man]

Yea you would think, but if it was a static charge being released you would think it would have been instant rather than 30 seconds later when i hit the Ok button.

[oracleguy]

Are your headphones still good? It could be possible there was some something wrong with them and when you plugged them in they caused the sound card to short out.

[BWiz]

Is it possible that a fuse blew somewhere? Try checking for blown fuses on the motherboard or the power supply. Mind you though, fuses on the motherboard are nothing like normal fuses, and are difficult to find unless you know what you are doing.

[Bry Man]

Good news! I left the battery off the mainboard and unpluged the whole thing from power over night and when I put it back together this morning it worked...its the darndest thing, great, but still a mystery as to what happened and why...my headphones still work, I have yet to try and put em back in and test the sound though for obvious reasons haha.

[firepages]

Not that I want to defend Vista ;) ... but its not Vista that asked about the headphone-jack plugin but probably the HD audio software package, e.g RealTek does this a lot, and is not even very good at guessing which port got what.. you can probably disable jack-detection in the advanced properties of the HD audio packages control panel.

Not that I have ever seen the above bring down a computer b4 :)

[Bry Man]

Yea now that you mention it I looked back at the situation and it was the Realtek sound management app that was asking it...not vista, vista sucks on its own perfectly fine apparently. My sound no longer works or at least not well at all even with speakers, and my soundcard is integrated integrated....surprised the whole board didnt fry...Damn thankful its the only thing that did though because a soundcard is the least expensive thing to replace (imo, since im happy enough to have noise and not so much crystal clear audio perfection)