Ground Is Important

The ground wire will only carry current if there is an electrical malfunction like a frayed or broken wire that shorts to the chassis, or other problem that might cause the “hot” wire to connect to the outside of your appliance. By having a ground wire, the current travels to ground through the wire instead of through you; the wire being a much better conductor. This situation will usually trip the breaker if the short is bad enough, but on dry ground or something, the current may not be enough for this to happen. You will notice that modern day plugs that don’t have a ground wire will have a wide terminal and a narrow terminal. The narrow terminal is the “hot wire”. This is done so, say in the instance of an incandescent light, the hot wire goes to the center terminal on the bulb, greatly reducing the chance that the fixture itself will be connected to the hot wire.

That being said, if VNutZ79 had been able to simply turn the plug around on his computer in the socket (reverse terminals) the problem would have probably gone away. I fixed an outside Christmas light decoration that was giving shocks when it was wet out simply by doing this recently.

I found that the dining room in my house had all the sockets wired backwards, in other words the narrow terminal was where the wide one should be completely defeating any safety gained from this style of plug.

To sum it up, the ground wire is a safety which you would be glad to have if something were to go wrong especially in the case of a dryer where there is double the chance of this due to 2 hot wires used to get 220 volts.