Alright, I'm gonna hit the pause button right there,

because this is where things just get from bad to quirky.

But we maybe found some stuff out.

I took some time to contact my buddies at Mac Yak, these guys are way smarter than me.

I was talking with Greg, the host of the Mac Yak show and Jay, primarily, Jay asks me what model PowerMac is it.

And to be honest, I had no idea.

I didn't boot it up, I didn't look at the system profiler, nothing.

So, I went back to the photos that the donor sent me.

These photos show that the computer was working just fine,

but I go to the system information and I tell that to Jay.

He says, "Oh, you have a liquid-cooled one,"

And,

I had to change my pants.

I had no idea that this was a liquid-cooled system.

The joke I made earlier about the reactors inside this computer, I was actually not very far off.

What we're dealing with is kind of similar, you know, radioactivity and everything else aside.

So Jay gives me basic instructions on how to access the pumps.

I take off the covers and boom... Lo and behold, there are pumps.

There's pipes, there's coolant.

There's coolant.

Yeah, there's coolant where there shouldn't be coolant.

Something is dripping, something is leaking, and thanks to Apple's amazing engineering,

the power supply is located right below where the liquid is.

Why? I don't know.

(sound effect)

Upon this discovery, I was surprised.

And I was thinking "Well, this liquid might be non-conductive, right?

I mean, that's not super uncommon,"

WRONG!

Yeah, apparently wrong. I didn't know any better.

Greg Hrutckay from HrutckayMods,

he's also on the Mac Yak show, by the way,

reminded me of something really important.

This was one of the first, if not, the first commercially available personal computers to ship with liquid cooling built-in.

So I guess that means, not all the kinks were worked out.

The coolant in this thing is GM Dex-Cool.

This stuff is corrosive and conductive,

so if it did leak out, which it looks like it did, and got into the power supply, that is what caused the short.

Another theory was that I blew a cap.

Possibly.

Again, I'm not an electrical guy, I'm not really too into that,

but I think I would have smelled that if a capacitor exploded.

I didn't smell anything.

The sound I heard was an arc.

I didn't mention this earlier, but there was a flash. I could see a flash in the power inlet right when the flash happened is when I heard the sound.

So that popping noise was an electrical arc, not a capacitor blowing.

So I think we can put that theory aside.

So now, we're dealing with this. There's liquid.

Jay wanted to make sure it actually was... coolant liquid.

I dab some up and the properties resembled that of coolant,

not of typical water where it would just dissolve up pretty easily into a napkin and evaporate on the surface of metal pretty quickly.

It's... it's remaining there, it's like smearing kinda and it felt kind of oily.

I noticed there was some liquid, even on the foot of the computer and it felt oily, it did not feel like water.

But to add to the complexity, 'cause this wasn't already (beep) up enough,

I go back to my emails from the donor and recall that this thing was in a water sprinkler accident.

What the shit? Seriously.

So, now that was mixed into the equation.

But thankfully, I think it's fair to say, we

can quickly remove that from the equation, judging by the fact that the donor sent me photos of the computer working.

So whatever incident it was in earlier, that issue must have been rectified.

This liquid is not water from the sprinkler incident or from poor storage or any of that stuff, it is from the cooling system.

So now we're stuck with the power supply that likely has liquid in it, so the computer is inoperable.

Could it be fixed?

Potentially, yes.

The power supplies of these things are kind of a bitch to remove and I don't want to futz with it,

nor do I want to ship this out to get it repaired because,

one: it's expensive,

but two: it's probably gonna get damaged even worse.

Even if it got fixed, it would still have to be shipped back.

My theory is, during the shipping,

even though this thing was packed brilliantly,

it still got jostled around and there was a leak.

I'm open to suggestions.

I'm open to ideas of where I can maybe find someone to fix this locally,

but to be honest, I don't know if it's worth the hassle right now.

So that was my discovery.

Thank you, Mac Yak guys for helping me through this.

Oh yeah, and there was this warning that I totally missed the first time on the inside that says,

"If you see liquid, you know, turn off the computer, yada yada yada,"

Yeah, I, yeah, I didn't see that before.

I don't know, maybe it was covered up by something.

Huh, got a read.

Let's get back to the tech video blog.