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Your Most Damage-Resistant Hardware?
questamor writes "After reading the recent Slashdot article linking to drivesavers and their list of damaged hardware that was still recoverable, I'm curious about the worst things slashdot readers have done to their hardware and still had it work. So far I've been lucky, and in more than a decade of owning computers I've hotplugged almost everything except a CPU (sometimes accidentally, sometimes through laziness) and never knowingly broken anything. What have you all done to your machines? I imagine there are many stories of dropped, drowned, stolen and generally abused machines still working and doing their thing; or at least, able to be brought back to a working state"
But sometimes you have to sacrifice quality for price.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
I threw the thing around, against walls... pounded it... punched the lcd... cut it's lid w/a knife... poor thing... but it doesn't seem to die!... damnit
Let a friend test out his fried CPU in my MB. Lots 'o smoke, but the MB still works!!
Thank you.
Never had any problems with the SNES console, the cartridges, or the controllers.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
I installed Windows.
You know that garbage compactor from starwars?
Yeah. My Machine once fell in there, and I dove down a chute on a prison block to save it. Funny thing is, everyone thought I was rescuing a princess.
I've dropped my HDs, left an IDE cable plugged in while that HD's power was unplugged, etc.
Every time my old box crashed while playing GTA3 I'd hit the top of the case. The CD-ROM was in the top slot, and I once hit it hard enough to scratch the CD.
I've also had PCs running while I messed around inside, i.e. changing cooling, which involves moving all the cables around.
One time I accidentally dropped a floppy from about 2 inches above the desk, and yet it still worked! (although I did have to completely reformat, losing the data already on it)
Just a second, let me see how well my Thinkpad survives a 20 foot drop. I'll be right back.
But I installed Windows XP on my computer and it still runs.
.
The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think).
this one time.. at band camp
...but I remember that an N64 Cruis'n USA cart still worked after three hits with a sledgehammer.
(Yes I really hated that game).
(Yes, the fourth hit killed it).
there was that one time my hardware ran windows ...
poor box. never was the same.
Well, not me, but my mother. About 3-4 years ago she drove her Explorer over her (i think) Satellite.
:)
It looked horrible, all cracked and what not, LCD and keyboard destroyed.
But for grins I hooked it up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse and she booted right up.
And I've been using Toshiba lappies ever since
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Please stop trying to make us think this is an artical, its just a ad for a disk recovery company.
A friend had rewired his power supply leads into his motherboard. Plugged in the CPU and it promptly started smoking. Take out the CPU, and the ZIF actually has burn marks on it. We put the CPU in another machine, works like a charm. Hook another power supply up to the MB, swap the CPU back, works like a charm.
AMD - takes a burning, keeps on churning.
Barbie of Borg - She doesn't just Assimilate, She Accessorizes too!
PCI + ISA cards and IDE drives aren't as non-hotswappable as people think. ;-)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Not sure if this actually qualifies, but here goes.
:^)
A friend of mine who frequents here once had a video card that would not fit into his case. I forget the exact model. He called up the manufacturer and asked them what he could do. They told him that everything on the board past a certain point was just redundant, and that it could be safely removed without affecting performance. Naturally, he got that in writing before taking a hacksaw and hacking off almost half the card! It worked when he finally got it in.
Nope, I didn't believe him either.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
The key to all of this is easy access!. But that isn't abuse, is it?
After my baby sister came over, touched a Western Digital Hard Drive, created a lovely ESD, turned the computer off, and I threw the hard drive across the room, having part of the MOLEX connector break off. The sucker still worked.
:P
I was amazed... and that drive is still running in one of my boxen
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
my hda is currently hanging by its ide cable and happily reading and writing away
I have never regretted my speech,
but I have frequently regretted my failure to speak.
One time we filled a gas BBQ with charcoal and used it in that way... we didn't know it was gas at the time, but apparently, we could've all died! Boy, that would've been a story to tell the grandkids about, if I weren't dead...
one time i was replacing a bad cdrom drive in my computer. i was talking on a corless phone and didnt realize the computer was still on. i got the old one out with no problem. when i put the power cable in the cdrom, sparks flew, the power supply shut off, and the phone shut off. i thought i had dreid the computer, but after a few minutes, it turned back on. the cdrom and computer fine.... the phone never worked again. my friend on the line said it sounded like a buzz you get from audio equipment when nothing is plugged in.
Once someone tried to steal my Palm IIIc... I set it breifly on a bench and turned to greet someone and a guy not far away swiped it. Being somewhat hyper-protective of my stuff, I was around and after him at speeds I had never realized on my own two feet before.. Our path carried us most of the way across the park, over benches, past old couples mumbling darkly about the wastage of youth, through puddles, etc... It ended up in me doing a flying tackle (another new one for me..) to the theif into a picnic table, the palm taking a small flight, and a bit of food being mussed.. ;-)
It's alright though. The palm survived and it turns out the people at the table were my ex girlfriend and a couple of her friends. She got pepsi all over her...
I had an incident where a nice solid zap of static electricity struck a stick of write only memory WOM, but its storage capacity only increased.
Have you guys ever stopped and thought about how must punishment your poor keyboard takes every day? Computer components come and go, cards fail, monitors burn out, CPUs die, but keyboards truely stand the test of time. I've had my $10 Logitech keyboard for years, and it's still typing away, strong as ever, while just about every other computer component I have owned has been upgraded or replaced.
Imagine how many keys you have typed on your keyboard throughout its life. Imagine how much frustration you have taken out on it during a rough match of Quake 3 or Starcraft. Imagine how many food particles and hairs have been caught in its grasp. Pretty amazing that it's still clicking away, eh?
I manged to get Windows installed on one of my machines. It was never in a useable condition ever again.
Those old CRT iMacs can take a beating. I know of one that fell off of a computer desk onto a hardwood floor. Twice. While turned on. You can't even tell. It still works perfectly and there's not a scratch on it.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Anyone know how to fix a laptop keyboard?
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
I used to be in charge of a small group of guys who did hardware integration on Sun and Compaq platforms. On a particularly busy day, one of the more 'weighty' of my co-workers was working on an Enterprise 250 server, and carrying it over to the rack for QA when he summarily tripped over a pallet on the floor, and landed the entirity of his bulk on the 250 he was previously carrying. Of course, I'm thinking oh crap, are you okay, followed closely by oh crap, that box costs a pretty penny and he just broke it.
Once we decided he wasn't going to die, I picked up the 250 myself and moved to the QA rack, by some act of god, it booted and showed no ill effects of having close to 400 lbs of human land on it.
You won't see those intel POS computers doing that!
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
While doing my laundry one week, I brought my laptop to the laundromat so I could do some work while I waited. Somehow, my Xircom CardBus Network Card (the orange one) made it into one of my laundry loads. Two weeks later when I came back to do my laundry again, the attendant handed me my network card, saying that he found it in one of the dryers. The casing was a little melted, but after a wash-rinse-spin-dry cycle, I plugged it in and it fired right up. I'm naming my first son Xircom, as it must mean fearless and indestructable.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
About 4 or 5 years ago, my best friend and I had just returned from what's referred to as "first saturday" in dallas (everyone goes downtown and sells hardware for cheap on the first saturday of the month).
We were pretty anxious as we had both just bought brand new machines... so we headed over to my house and started building the computers.
I swear that there's nothing better than the first time you turn on your computer after you've successfuly built it. Anyway, as soon as my friend was finished building his, he turned on the machine, and I kid you not, the motherboard caught on fire! the details of how we stopped the small fire alude me at this point, but after we finally finished putting it out... he turned it on again, and it worked perfectly!
arcane for life
After the slashdotting. Most damaged piece of equipment.
My coworker took a replacement monitor up to her. Then he turned the monitor upside down (after unplugging it of course), drained out all the water, and instructed the secretary to let the monitor dry in the corner for a few days.
A few days later he connected the formerly hydrated monitor back to the computer and everything worked fine.
Miko O'Sullivan
Appartenly, someone didn't teach her that while you have to put a CD in the drive to play her games, you also have to TAKE THAT CD OUT when you want to play a different game. I'm still trying to figure out how she managed to get the drive to open/close when there were 4 CDs in there.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
About 12 years or so ago, my father's friend had a housefire. The heat warped the monitor, attachable 3.5 inch drive, and the keyboard. The whole system was blackened by the smoke and then completely hosed down by the firefighters. He told my father he could have it for spare parts, but when my father cleaned a few connections and plugged it in, the bugger worked! We were both amazed at the amount of damage done to the casings and hardware(the 3.5 inch floppy had SERIOUS issues ejecting.) That's probably the worst I've ever seen done to a computer.
Most consumer level hardware is now planned to be obsolete within 2 years anyway, so nothing needs to be damage resistant. When something breaks, it's a great excuse to go build a more l33t box.
And the only exception to that is probably keyboards and mice, which take years of punishment.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I have dual p2 400 running with no processor fans that survied a lightning strike coming through the cable modem blowing up my NIC, but the machine keep on running. Once the cable company sent me anew cable modem I just pluged it in to the other interface and keep it running till I moved. In the end I had a 140 day uptime with a blown up NIC that is still in the machine.
GTA3 is like the Sims to me - MC Hawking
I put high resolution pictures of snowflakes on my windows personal webserver running on a 56k and then posted a link to it on slashdot , the system still works!
A co-worker and I were in Thailand installing new weather display software at the airport. We had pre-shipped the hardware and were just getting around to setting up the printers in the common room for the initial acceptance tests. Said co-worker plugged in the printer and turned it on, then walked back into the test room to finish the tests. Aproximately 2 minutes later, we heard "aiyaiyaiyai" coming from the other room, and turned the corner to see a bunch of Thai workers running round with their shirts over their noses screaming un-intelligibly (well, to us anyway) and pointing to the clouds of black smoke billowing from the HP printer.
Those HP's are great machines, but you gotta make sure the power supply is set for the proper voltage, 240V can be hazardous. Needless to say we owed them a new printer.
My primary workstation for almost 4 years has been an SGI Indigo2 workstation (R10K, Solid Impact graphics). The workhorse has survived falling out of my pickup, winters of static electricity zapping projects hanging off the serial ports, frequent brownouts, and constant hot swapping of ps/2 and scsi devices. I've upgraded and downgraded the graphics cards once or twice a year, often trading with friends and roommates. I could probably field strip the machine blindfolded. I installed IRIX 6.5.2 in early 1999 and have successfuly run the OS updates and installed the newest freeware release every quarter since then. I still haven't had a need to do a reinstall and am currently running 6.5.17m + Feb 2003 Freeware.
Sure beats my PCs, Mac, and Sun for reliability of both hardware and software... maybe it's the fact this beast weighs over 50 lbs!
I've got a 10GB hard drive that went outside during a thunderstorm and spent a year and half on my desk as a coaster and still works. I've also got a floppy drive that has been through 3 computers so far, and has been crapped on by numerous mice. It smells nasty, but it works. When I was installing the heatsink on my CPU I stabbed the motherboard with a screwdriver three times, and didn't destroy it. Of course, I've had just as many failures. I've disassembled one hard drive, one cd-rom drive, and one floppy drive, none of which ever worked again. I kept the laser and mirrors from the cd-rom drive and the magnet from the hard drive. They entertain me.
Replace it. I don't know about Dells, but on most models, they pop right out. You should find some hinge-covers around the edges of the laptop, and then the keyboard should come right out, with maybe a ribbon cable tying it to the board.
Just get a replacement from Dell, and you're golden.
-9mm-
n/t
Editors, please try to pick stories that will provoke interesting discussions. NOT, "This one time at band camp, I dropped my laptop, ... and IT STILL WORKED!"
Here is a semi-detailed page describing what I did, with a list of pics here. The voltage regulator caps were blown, but I replaced them for a super-ghetto motherboard ;)
My server
For about a month, anyway....
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
We had a huge flood here quite some time ago. We had a bunch of B&W G3s in a building on campus that got hit by the flood. We didn't try to recover any of the power supplys or motherboards, but one hard drive did work, and all the RAM! I would think that the diluted sediment in the flood water would have small, conductive particles that would bridge circuit paths shorting out everything (possibly), but everything I listed above did work after the adverse exposure.
I guess I have seen stranger things in my life, though.
Idiot me left my shiny new $3000 Dell at a friend's house after a LAN. I came back later that night, in the middle of a huge rainstorm, to pick it up. Turns out his roof was leaking, directly onto my PC, which I found in a standing puddle.
After some grousing at my friend, I took it home, put some fans on it for a few hours, and anxiously pressed power... and all was good. It's been working perfectly well for the past two years.
Luck? Maybe. But I'll still be buying a Dell again next time around.
So
-- Azaroth
I dropped my star-tac cell phone into a bathtub once, it got angry, made a hissing/beeping noise, and filled the screen with static. Then it crashed. No biggie, I took off the battery, put it and the phone on top of the steam radiator for a couple hours, charged my battery, and it all worked. Go figure.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
broken many a power adaptor (and the part of the device to which they connect) by tripping of over the chord...some if these still work, and the rest sit in the broken box...waiting to live again
Dropped my laptop off my desk in class (ouch that hurt) and it still works! although the HDD does have some bad sectors
dropped another laptop (i seem to have a nack for this) and broke the feet off back of it, but it still worked...for a while.
i dropped a cd burner last night. but it was only a 4x.
I always hated those old simm chips that slide in at an angle then click into place. I definetly put some of those in wrong.
or how about the ZIF CPUs that had the notch on one side to tell you how to put it in...those were never safe
when i was first learning how to repair monitors, i had just started work on a nice 21 incher when lunch started. I came back from lunch to see my boss had fried it by using a metal skredriver to adjust it (as he had told me not an hour before to NEVER EVER EVER! do)
and of course iv plugged in my fair share of devices while the computer is running.
I really hate it when you stick a PCI (or any other) card in, and just after you turn on the computer you check to make everyting is secure, and end up pusind the back half of the card in (oops!)
my advice, dont do these things, i can honestly say i have never once had anything like this help me in any way
Oh yeah, and one time when i was being really really stupid...i didnt use an Anti-Static Wrist Strap
On the other hand, I owned a Winbook and that thing would fall apart if you were to breath in it's general direction from the other side of a football field. NEVER BUY WINBOOK. Junk junk junk junk. I could give you examples. I WILL give you examples:
And that's just a TASTE of what they put me through...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
2 weeks ago my Linksys 4 port router has the same plug as the access point's. But the dif was that there's an extra 4 volts coming from it. I saw "Linksys" on the adapter but sleepily plugged it into the AP. It worked for a few seconds and then lights out. The smell of burnt electronics came from it. Looking at the PCB, two black surface mount squares had cracks on them and stunk horribly. I took a couple of analog electronics class in the 80s and worked with far more easily identifieable components. I paid $100 on ebay for it and now it was gone. It'd be another $100 or so to replace it. Fortunately, a friend in the know who I described my problem to and did some magnified photos told me they were capacitors of the 47uF variety. But there was a likeliehood that where things blew, other things would've went out too. But for $0.20 worth of parts from the local electronics shop and a soldering iron, I can probably replace them. I did just that and it works perfectly again! Phew.....
My freshman year of college, I was in the process of upgrading a machine, and mistakenly plugged in a CPU (a Cyrix 486DX4-100, iirc) into the slot rotated 180 degrees from the correct orientation. (The socket had multiple marks that could be mistook for indicating the 0 pin, and from the angle I was looking I only saw one of them).
Turning the machine, I instantly knew something was horribly wrong, and the smell of burnt plastic filled the dorm. By the time I could pull the plug, a single hole in the socket had been burnt out to about 3 times its size, and the corresponding pin was singed.
Figuring I had very little to lose at that point, I determined my error, reinstalled the CPU in the correct orientation, and fired up the machine. To my amazement, the CPU and motherboard both appear to have survived, without any apparent problems. The machine ended up being used as my desktop for several years after that, and never had any noticeable problems.
The hardware gods definitely had mercy on me that day...
Let's see here....
Just the other day, I pulled a motherboard out of an old Mac Color Classic, updated the RAM on it (a couple of 4MB 30-pin SIMMS max. it out - woo!), and slid it back in. After that, I suddenly realized it was plugged in and the power switch was on the whole time. Oops! Well, I pressed the power key on the keyboard, crossing my fingers, and yep - it booted right up.
I've also watched a former co-worker swap internal SCSI hard drives on a PowerMac 7100 while the machine was running. (Dumb idea - but again, he got away with it. Of course, I yelled at him to never do that again afterwards. Heh.)
I did, however, kill a perfectly good 2GB Micropolis hard drive just recently, because I attached it to a power connector that had been ripped loose and improperly repaired. (It looked ok, but I guess a couple leads were shorted somehow from a bad re-crimping job.) The whole system powered off as soon as I powered it on, and then I smelled smoke. Luckily, only the hard drive died though.... Everything came up fine with a different HD in it.
I'd a video card that caught fire once. Luckily the case was open, so I grabbed it, hot unplugged it (in more sense than one!) and waved it until it went out. After it cooled down I put it back in. Some of the memory chips appeared to be corrupted, because the bottom quarter of the screen was all fuzzy... other than that it worked.
Another time I'd a power supply that exploded. A cap in the high-voltage path blew. It made a huge noise and there was considerable arcing in the dark room coming from the open case. I was able to find enough pieces that I could read the rating, so I bought a new one, soldered it in place, and pressed the supply back into service. Luckily all my equipment survived. It was attached to a dual processor Tyan motherboard that must have been invincible.
SONY. Because caucasians are just too damn tall.
I paid $700 for a 70 Meg "Hard Card", which was a hard drive that fit into an ISA slot. My IBM PS/2 286 couldn't take a 2nd hard drive, so it was my only option. At the time, my harddrive was 20 MB, so 70 seemed like "more than I could ever need".
.
Anyway - fast forward to the year 2001. I'm playing around with an "old" 266MHZ system I'm about to sell to a coworker, when I find my old HardCard in a box of old crap. I stick it in the ISA slot, turn the computer on -- and it works! With all my gay little files from when I was 12 years old. 16-color porn, anyone?
Anyway.. it starts to smell like smoke.. I hear a "crackle" noise.. and turn around to see the hardcard is ON FIRE. And it looks like it's been on fire for a while. It's melting. And I'm still copying the files on it over to my C:\ drive! Ack! Can I copy 70 MB before it turns into a pile of melted GOO? . .
The fumes get too intense, and I leave the room to find something to put the fire out with. I come back, and the copy is complete. I saved the data! I put the fire out... wait a few hours.. and turn the old 266 box back on. The hardcard works. It still works! To this day. And it dosen't catch on fire anymore.
Worth the $700 IMHO. Try that with an IBM Deskstar.
Well, :) The one time (about 7 years ago) I buy a not so cheap case, and I get pissy and toss it out a window. Damn, I'm glad I've settled down and only toss CDs now. :)
One day I got fed up with one particular system, opened my window, and tossed it. Two story drop onto a gravel driveway. Went along with my business for the rest of the day and decided to see how badly I damaged everything. Except for a cracked face on my cdrom drive and a dead hard drive (which was dying anyways at the time), everything was still pretty much intact. Damn, when I think about it, I want that case back.
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
Well, it didn't really survive, but this seems to fit in with the stories of hardware abuse:
At my old high school, where I did tech work, laptops were given out to teachers for free. One of the teachers (big surprise) put a BIOS password on the computer and promptly forgot it. To reset it on this particular laptop would've required soldering a chip on the motherboard. We called up the manufacturer, but they said that the warranty didn't cover it. They could do the repair, but it would cost us an arm and a leg. We quickly realized, however, that destruction of the motherboard was covered under warranty. A few minutes later, I look into the next room and I see two of my fellow techs. One has a desktop power cable in his hands with two paper clips stuck into the slots where it would normally connect to the computer. The other is holding the laptop open with one hand and shielding his face with the other. This was quickly followed by a tripped circuit breaker and a large scorch mark on the motherboard. One warranty claim and a few weeks later, we had a brand new, non-passworded laptop.
-Mike-
my schlong. it's been consistently beaten for years, but always starts up when i need it to.
My friend ran over his Palm III with a new Beetle. It fell out of his pocket as he got in and he didn't realize it until he backed out of the garage and reached for the Palm to get his grocery list.
He slapped it into its cradle and hotsynced his data out.
I have my original 120 MHz windoze 95 box with two hard drives that are attached only by the power and data cables. Suspended in air, they are. It's been running that way since 1998.
One particular gig I was working on in Morocco for a New Years gig was one commedy of errors:
We're in the middle of the desert, on an island, trying to run lasers off a wacky generator. Worse the eletrics are completely non-standard and wiring codes have been thrown out the window. Just because a cable is green doesn't actually mean it was ground!
To add to the fun our control gear was all 110v, while the laser is two-phase, all connected via transformers to a 220 generator. Well somewhere along the lines our live and neutral lines crossed when being patched into the laser. Lasers exciters humm, but that's about it. THIS laser started making some nice crackling noises and generating ozone. Bad bad bad. Flipped the wires real fast and tried it again. Amazingly it still worked.
Worse was firing up the copper vapor. The plan was to shoot the beam out the top of the tower of this old Kasbar that sat on this island. We were going to fire it right at midnight on new years. Carrying that damned thing intro ruins was entertaining all by itself... but the real joy came when we went to the Kasbar 20min to midnight to fire it up (it has a 12minute heating cycle before you get real beams from it).
We arrive and behold: the person who had ran the 220v run had wired a *male* connector on the end. Yup, 220v's live dangling at the end of the wire. Of course the laser also had a male connector.
I highly recommend against trying to strip and splice a 5watt laser into a live 220v circuit. The sparks were pretty though. It was the only way to get the damn thing wired in time to get the beam shooting out for midnight. Incredibly it worked... and none of us got hurt.
blockwars.com
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
One time, the field engineer forgot to shut the boot of his car and sent a 17" Iiyama hurtling across the carpark. Worked fine, thanks to gaffer tape!
On another occasion, I munged a working hard disk from two dead ones; one with a scratched platter, and another with a popped PROM (not identifiable by BIOS). Binned the dead remains.
Finally, once my monitor ground pin came loose, and the 3DFX card attached to it had trannies on the output glowing so hot you could see them through the card. Worked lovely tho'.
And I too have seen motherboards catch fire on first boot, only to work fine after that, to verify other tales of this ilk.
. . . and not have a BOFH quotation? =)
.. ...clicky..clikcy...clikky.. .. .. ...clicky. ...cliccy.. . . BOOM!
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... Ok, quick as you can, I want you to flick the power switch of your PC on and off 30 times"
"Should I take my disks out?"
"NO! Do you want to lose all your data!?!"
"Oh! NO! Ok.."
I listen carefully..
Amazing, it probably made it to 27 - the power supply usually shits itself at 15 or so...
"MY COMPUTER BLEW UP!!!" she screams at me down the line
"Really? Must've been a dodgy power supply! Lucky we found out now! Is your machine still under warranty?"
"NO!"
"Dear oh dear. Well, Best get it repaired then. Did you backup your files?"
"Yes, to the system, Yesterday, but all this morning's work is gone!"
"Oh dear. What was your username, I'll just check that your backups worked ok?"
She tells me....
<:
Ask for a replacement part from dell, the whole keyboard, palm rest, pointy stick and touchpad should cost around $25-$30 and replace it yourself. It will take a bit of screwing but it shouldnt be too bad.
When I worked at a support help desk I actually some techs suggest this to fix non working hard drives. The customer would be like "my hard drive stopped working, what should I do?" And techs would say to put in the dishwasher, just don't do the drying cycle (or you can melt the parts!). I would only suggest trying this if you about to throw the hard drive in the trash anyways.
I plugged the bios chip in the wrong way after removing it. When I turned on the system, the sticker on top started melting... Afterwards it was still working, but the motherboard died a few months later.
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
I came into my office one morning to find a waterfall running onto my desk and into the vent at the top of the case for my Osborne 1. An apartment upstairs had a high-flow sloan valve on the toilet freeze and burst, and the water poured down through the floors. The power cord was live on the O-1 but it was powered off. In those days it took only a few seconds for the PC to boot so we turned 'em off.
I poured the water out of the keyboard and the case. I think the keyboard shell held three quarts of water. I let it air dry then powered it up. It worked fine! I still have that O-1 to this day and it still boots.
One of our members had his Osborne One in the back of his hatchback car when the car was hit in the rear by another car. The hatch flew open and the computer flew high into the air and crashed onto the sidewalk along the street. The main case and the keyboard shell broke into large pieces.
Can you guess it? Yep. When he tried it, it worked fine. It just looked awful.
They don't make 'em let that anymore. I will admit that they didn't have cards in slots or a lot of peripherals that could break loose and do damage.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Let's just say, if you were one of those kids who couldn't color inside the lines with your Crayola's, don't try unlocking your AMD Athlon with a Bic .5mm pencil.
Aparently I was one of those kids.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
My old cheap 17" monitor (old means something like 7 years old), no brand just a standard "Made in China". I once threw it on the floor in a fit of rage (ehm I don't usually do stuff like that), it landed on a corner cracking the plastic case, has been working perfectly ever since......
About 2 hours ago, in a moment of drowsy, carelessness, I accidently spilt some Vanilla Coke onto the top of my Sony monitor. It immediately conked out. I figured it was done for and I'd be buying a new monitor today.
In a frenzied despair, I repeatedly kept turning it on and off, and about half an hour later it miraculously came back to life!
*whew!!!!*
I havent been that relieved since I was trapped in my seat at a taping of the David Letterman Show, (beforehand, foolishly having been at a bar having some beer), and having to take the piss of my life. (Your not allowed to get out of your seat, for any reason, until the taping over!)
There is no question these two experiences were the longest combined two hours of my life.
Damn thing sat, plugged in, in a puddle, overnight, being dripped on though a hole in the ceiling. We patted it down with a paper towel and let it dry in the sun for an hour or so, then backed it up. it worked for three more years before i scavanged it for parts.
Not mine but I built a friend's parents a new computer after their basement flooded. The computer was "always on" and the people came home to find a burst pipe had gotten the whole refinished basement.
I got the old computer with a waterline halfway up the mainboard (stunk - wastewater). The CD and harddrive got salvaged into the new PC - no apparent damage. The mainboard, processor, soundcard and modem all got tossed into the junk bin for a couple of months.
I decided one day to see what would happen if I tried hooking it up (would it pop and smoke). To my amazement it all started up fine. The modem was fried - no dial tone. But the P166 CPU and board were fine and the shitty old PacBell sound card worked as well as a PacBell 16 bit sound card could work.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I once overclocked a cyrix P150 (120mhz) to 150mhz. It booted about half way into windows then started to smell of burnt silicon and before I could power it off it locked up. I turned it off, let it cool down, put a 10" box fan blowing on it from the ac vent in the floor, booted back up and it ran stable. That was about four years ago and I still run that chip and mobo as a firewall today(though not overclocked).
I once had an old IBM Thinkpad for work. I was on top of the scaffolding doing a testing procedure on one of the tanks(about 20 feet or so up). Well, I stepped back and there was a dip in the metal scaffolding and I lost my balance and my laptop went over the railing and crashed on the floor. The the battery and everything from under the keyboard flew out when it hit the floor. I was like oops, tured around and went down and put it back together. Amazingly it still worked so I went on with my testing. When I was issued my new laptop they made me promice not to climb anymore scaffolding with it.
I've dropped my iPod many times onto carpetted floor. That's nothing for anyone. But once when moving, you know, with a hand truck, my ipod fell off the top of the stack onto concrete. I have 3 bad sectors and a really strange scratch, but other than that, works fine.
The iPod uses a ploptop harddrive, which is great. Just kinda cool that it worked fine.
Though the middle, small round button, that popped off. That was just plug and play.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Here is a story I posted on the debian-user list...
;-)
--
Dear all,
Thank you for the advise on adding the ide drive to my computer. I could not get the ide drive to even recognize. After some monkey-ing around, I decided to pull all the drives out of my computer and add 5 brand new 36GB 10,000 RPM 80pin SCSI drives to my computer. I printed out the Software RAID How-to, ordered a pizza, bought 4 cans of Mountain Dew from the soda machine, and went to work...
That was 2.5 hours ago. Now here I am writing to you. You see I could go home and tell my wife all that had happened but she would be half asleep and just stare blankly. Even awake she could not begin to sympathize with me, or even understand in the least what I am talking about. This is where you all come in. Tonight, you will unwillingly lend me a sympathetic ear.
Now where was I? Oh yes, my new hard disks. About a month ago my boss decided to order 10-15 (I lost count) of these hard drives. He did not read the fine print and accidentally ordered 80pin hot swap drives. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade right? I happened to have 5 80 pin to 68/50 pin SCSI converters lying around in the back and used those to connect these hard disks to my back-plane-less computer. Geocentric (my beloved Debian box) is a IBM Z-Pro with a Xeon 1Ghz (I could add a second processor), 1.5GB of RAM, a dual head video card, etc; all housed in a 50,000lb case. Way too much for what I use it for, but nice none-the-less. I haven't turned this computer off in months. Stable as can be, even though I was running SID. Btw, thanks to all Debian project people out there, I am constantly amazed at how functional even the 'unstable' tree is! I think I'll get "Debian 4 Life" tattooed on me somewhere... Ok, I'm loosing focus. Geocentric has 6 or 7 slots that you can add drives to on these little rails that come with the case. It took about an hour to figure out how to insert all of those drives in such a way that they would all fit. But, I did it! I then had to somehow cable these together, with the one cable I had to daisy chain them all together. It was impossible. In a moment of "ah-ha" I carefully removed two of the pressed on connectors to the ribbon cables, and then just as carefully pressed them back on with the help of a vice and a micrometer. With my newly customized cable I went back to work. After some twisting to get the connectors oriented correctly with the SCA -> 68pin adapter, they all snapped in perfectly. I would like to take a moment to add out of the 5 converters I had, I had three different brands, mismatched throughout the chain. Finally getting the computer assembled I plugged it in... A smile on my face... A 1 INCH SPARK ARCED FROM ONE OF THE CONVERTERS... Then... My main board started to smoke. I unplugged my computer... Put it on a cart and wheeled it to the back room.
I'm going to sleep now... tomorrows another day...
---
About two weeks later I got a new SCSI cable for it plugged everything back in, just for curiosities sake, and it worked with NO problems... amazing...
Michael
I was building a desktop on the cheap when I was still in college-- so keep in mind while reading this that the whole system was made from the lowest-quality and most inexpensive components i could find. I'd built probably a half-dozen before, and serviced more than a few other peoples' machines. Which, of course, means I got lazy and overconfident-- and accidentally connected the "Power" LED line to what should have been the power switch connector on the motherboard. Manged to get the polarity right, and everything. Finished putting it together, and plugged it in.
It came on instantly, but as this was before "soft" power switches were everywhere, I just figured the pushbutton switch was already in the ON position. After watching the POST and seeing everything okay, I started to walk away-- and then the room filled with smoke. Fast. Those little case fans are wicked efficient for that, apparently. So I dove for the plug, and pulled it out.
I opened the case back up, and the inside of the PC was blackened with soot, and the tiny LED wires were still glowing-- their insulation burned clean off. Clipped the wires off and taped the ends, plugged the switch line in instead, and everything just worked. And continued to do so until today, 6 years later.
Took forever to get that damned burnt-plastic smell out of my room, though!
I have long preferred deskside systems to desktop systems.
That way, when they act up, you can kick'em!
I didn't witness this myself, but I have it on good authority.
A tanker truck hit a toll booth on the Kansas turnpike. There were too IBM industrial PC's inside. After the clean-up, one of the PC's booted, and the other's hard drive was completely recovered.
...it fell off of a car and dropped glassfirst onto a concrete curb... NO damage to it, not even a scratch. never judge a book by it's cover i guess...
Of course, the cellphones of the day wasn't called bricks for nothing.
Well, when I was around 12 years old, my Nintendo quit working.
My Dad decided to fix it.
My Dad is a truck driver.
Needless to say, I got a Super Nintendo that Christmas.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I was working on the machine, and the drive was acting kind of fluky in the machine. Pulled the drive and was going to try it in another machine. I ended up dropping at the top of a flight of stairs...funny enough the card was still intact, and the HDD still worked.
Better then before...and was no longer fluky.
Yeah that wasn't your grandma's flight of stairs...some how it went down 32 steps. The way it was spinning end over end I thought it was going to stick into the plaster wall at the bottom. Now that would have been something to see.
Om, nomnomnom...
I have no horror story ready. But, the post made me wonder. What is currently the most sensitive part in a PC (in terms of MTBF)? A logical answer would be 'the mechanics': hard drives, keyboards, etc. But is this still true with submicron-technology processors clocked at GHz speeds and consuming 50 Watts (as much as a good soldering iron ..) ? In other words, are aging effects in silicon chips worse than PC mechanics or not ?
Well, I've got a nice tale to tell.
You see, it all started with this LCII I had, back in the day. You know, the oldschool pizzabox macs. Anywho, we were taking it cross country, and apparently it was being dragged behind us. Thirty miles down the road, after hearing this awful scraping noise, we got out, and lo and behold, there was this completely beaten box out the back of the trunk, and it looked TOTALED. We went to our destination, plugged it in, and it still worked. I don't know how that happened, but it did.
Lesson: Apple boxen take a beating.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Just to add to that, the crappiest piece of hardware I had was a sony discman. The skip protection stopped working after it fell off a three foot table.
that thing can take a damn fine beating and holds its functionality as good as when it was new
On my old p133 i was doing some work and i had to reconnect the power supply to the motherboard...well back in those days it was two separate sets of wires to connect, side by side. I though it was black wires on the outside, except the opposite is true.
So anyways i put them on backwards. The thing made a loud buzzing and i though hmm thats stupid, lets turn it off then on again...more buzzing. Lets leave it on and see if it sorts itself out.
a little while later i realized i put the power on backwards. Swap the plugs and bingo, it still mostly worked. I sorta fried the video card, temporarily. I had to swap it out, cause it wouldn't wrok. Tried the video card a week later and everything wroked nearly perfect(the computer could *never* run java applets...go figure)
Unplugged items with a system on:
RAM, Video cards (PCI+AGP), Harddrives, G4 Upgrade CPU's, CD-ROM's, Soundcard... most of the time without noticing the system was running. That's what happens when engineers don't have enough cool hardware and most cases are open G4's lying around and way too many machines turned out and buzzing to figure out which are on and which are off.
Craziest tool for fixing something:
A guy I knew dropped food into an ISA slot while he was plugging in a card. Didn't quite work when he powered it on so when he noticed the food near the slot, he pulled out the card and tried to clear the crumbs. The only thing in arm's reach was a 4 prong fork. So he forked it. Forked it good for a few minutes - then decided it was a good idea to turn off the computer while doing that. Replugged in the card and everything was good.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
I looked all over my room for it and after two weeks I found it under my chair, I can't imagine the abuse it must have been through. It works fine and to my joy I can still transfer my stupid z80 assembly programs to my beloved calculator/pocket monster.
People seem to have vastly different experiences with Dell laptops. I personally have a Latitude CPx 750mhz PIII, which I bought used, and have dropped several times, and still carry with me half the time in my backpack; it hasn't blinked, I even get more than 2 hours of battery life (while using wireless internet no less!). Of course, right before the extended warranty runs out this fall, I'm going to send it in and tell them everything in the world is wrong with it...
So, if you have a Dell laptop, or really any hardware, and have a horror story, please share the model? It could help the rest of us know what to stay away from.
I was at work, stripping down an old Pentium 100 desktop machine, trying to salvage parts. Took the processor out of its socket and noticed a black burn mark on the socket -- one pin on the CPU had bent against another when the processor was installed, causing a short which melted the socket and the pin. The amazing thing is that the machine worked fine, and had been in use like this for years.
I had a Samsung Cellphone (forget the model) that was all small and stuff so I would just stick it in my pants front pocket. Well, one evening me and the missus were watching some TV and I heard some rhythmic clanging coming from the direction of the clothes dryer.
Turned out I forgot to take the phone out of my pocket, and the wife put said pants through a full washing cycle, and then slapped it into the dryer. It was quite warm and there was a lot of moisture under the screen. I let the sucker sit out a few days, then sure enough when I turned it on, it worked fine. Continued to function for a good year or so after.
-cybowolf
first it travelled 1000km in the luggage compartment of a bus. no problem for it, since it's 5 years old and has proved itself as very reliable.
then, one cloudy stormy day, it had the thrilling experience of being struck by lightning. there were power surges in the power cables and in the network cables. i was just working when i suddenly heard a loud explosion right next to me, and a bright light then i realized that it was a lighning bolt, and frantically moved the mouse around hoping that i was dreaming or something.
ofcourse the box had frozen, so i pulled the plug (all plugs for that matter) and after the storm passed (i was too scared to boot it again during the storm) i brought it back up... or tried to.
it seems that the mobo didn't like the processor anymore, or atleast it didn't recognize it. to my suprise though, when i rebooted, the box started as though nothing had happened.
everjoyed, i immediately started testing the components to see if anything had burnt. the pci and isa bus weren't working. but, again, in a few days time the isa bus suddent came back from the dead (and after a _lot_ of hotplugging my soundcard).
after a lot of changing stuff, i found out that the pci bus (the only thing that still hadn't recovered) worked if i put the mobo in another box. so i swapped mobos.
later i decided to upgrade my cpu, and it wouldn't be me if i didn't overclock the cpu with 50%. ofcourse, i forgot to plug the fan in, which i noticed after several hours and a couple of kernel panics. and well... that was one month ago.
the soundcard (which is 7 years old) is doing weird things from time to time, but that's about it.
and that is only a tiny fraction of the things that have happened to this box (surely vacuum cleaning it every week while it's on, as i've removed [read:lost] the covers doesn't count).
there's simply no space on slashdot to post a full story of the ordeals of my poor computer.
Hostes alienigieni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
I left my brand-new cisco 2610 router on a desk over the weekend and a leak formed on the ceiling above it. The router was in a cardbord box, and the entire box filled with water and stayed filled for an entire weekend before we came in monday morning and found this major problem. After a week of dry time, the router was plugged in for the first time, and I has now been running for 3 years straight. I have no idea how the box didn't burst. It was a box lid that was just deep enough to fix a 1u-high object in it.
EPoX EP-7KTA+. One tough motherboard. I run Windows 2000, and I never shut the thing down, just put it in suspend-to-RAM mode, where everything shuts down except for 5 Volts that keeps the RAM charged. Anyway, I got a new network card. Being too lazy to shut down and being confident Windows would survive when it wakes up finding a new card, I tried putting in the card in a PCI slot.
"Hmm, that doesn't fit right, maybe there's something jamming it inside the slot. I'll just take this slot cover (the thing that covers the unused slots at the back of the case) and see if I can dislodge whatever it is.". So it went into the PCI slot, until the (metal!!!) slot cover connected a +5V with ground (my guess), and there you go, sparks!
Front power button didn't work. Switched the PSU to off, and on again. Pressed the power button, it boots. And still works. Pheew...
The PCI slot works fine as well.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I always thought that if you plugged a CPU in backwards, the kernel boot messages would start from the BOTTOM of the screen and scroll downwards.
Me, eh?
My laptop has survived years of slashdot.
I had a 386 back in '93. The thing had 2 megs of memory and a 540MB Conner harddrive. It wasn't cutting edge, but it was better than what all my friends had.
A while later, the Internet came to town. I could use Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to dial in and use my Netscape browser.
Well, it was VERY hungry for memory. And it surely wanted more than 2 measly megabytes.
So every web page I ever saw made the memory page out to the HD hardcore... it churned and spun and clicked and whirred... until one day, it just decided it didn't want to do that and "took a break."
There was this distinct "clickety, clickety, clickety, PING!, Whiiirrr...." then the drive powered down. About 30 seconds passed... "Whiirrrrr" spun back up and decided to work again.
I decided it was time for my computer to have 4 megabytes and the HD never complained again.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
My little OpenBSD firewall is an AST Bravo 4/66d my little brother and I found in the dumpster behind his high school - it's been running almost non-stop for three years now.
Some years back I worked for a company that had several large HP plotters. If you're not familiar with them, they are basically large ink-jet printers, capable of printing on sheets 48-inches wide and up to tens of feet long. They're obviously useful for printing CAD drawings, GIS maps, etc.. And highly-precise ones can cost big $$$ (precise meaning the scale of the drawing that ends up on the paper is accurate to less than .01" of distortion over the 48" width of the paper) - at the time at least, these plotters cost over $10k each.
Anyway, we grew out of our office space, and we therefore rented new space, and started moving. Myself and another college-age guy were in charge of moving all the computer equipment, since we were the "geeks". We took a couple of these plotters - which stand about 4 feet tall, 5 feet long, and only about 8 or 10 inches deep - and all of the mechanics are along the top - so they're tall and narrow, and very top-heavy - and loaded them into the back of a small pick-up truck, and headed down the road. Being a dumb 20-year old (and driving like one) we zipped around a corner, and both plotters lauched themselves over the side of the pickup-bed and bounced across the road. Needless to say, we nearly crapped our pants!
We stopped to pick the "garbage" up out of the street, so it would be out of the way of other cars - we assumed that the plotters were a complete loss, and that we were going to have a fun discussion with our boss. We placed them back in the pickup truck (including many broken-off pieces of their plastic cases, a few gears, belts, etc.)
Well, we got them into the new office space, set them up, and snapped back together all of the parts that we could. To our amazement, not only did they "power up", but they actually worked! And not only that, their callibration wasn't off by a hair! In my mind, this was absolutely amazing (and a god-send)!
Aside from looking ugly (cracked, scuffed, and holy cases), there was no problem, and (according to my former co-workers) they went on to work for several years.
I've never been a fan of Hewlett-Packard PCs, but their plotters and printers sure hold high respect in my mind.
My first hard drive I bought used out of "The Want Advertiser", a weekly magazine of classified ads here in New England.
My computer at the time was a Tandy 1000SX, so it had 2 low density 5.25" floppy drives... I spent many afternoons playing the original MechWarrior on this machine.
<DIGRESSION>
The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics! Because the processor was a lowly 8088 and MechWarrior was a true-3d engine (one of the first? filled polygons, but no texture mapping or anything), my mechs would take a step every 10 seconds or so... Battles would have taken forever, except for the fact that it was very easy to win in this game: Just take a Locust mech (the fastest), and use only machine guns (which generate very little heat)... It was very easy to run around behind enemy mechs, and then just shoot out a leg (which makes them fall over and die)
</DIGRESSION>
Anyway, I bought a Seagate 40MB RLL hard drive out of the Want Advertiser for a measly $25. (HDs were far more expensive than this at the time). This was a godsend for me because I was only like 14, and my parents did not approve of my "computer habit." I had more money than other kids, although still not much... I babysat 4 days a week after school, 3pm til 9pm, for $10/day.
The guy said on the phone, "The drive works fine, except for one thing: Sometimes you have to turn the power off and on a few times to get it to work, it doesn't always spin up on the first try"... I got the drive, and it worked fine, I almost never had the problems the guy mentioned.
Another digression: The drive was RLL, but I only had an MFM controller (which I had also bought used, for $10). You could hook up an RLL drive to an MFM controller, but you could only address 17 out of the 32 sectors per track an RLL drive had, or something like that... So I only got like 20MB of usefulness, but after years of swapping 360k floppies, I was still happy.
Anyway, the drive got worse and worse over time, until finally I was afraid to turn the computer off because the drive would take sometimes 20 minutes of monkeying to get it to turn back on.
One day, I just couldn't get it to spin up for the life of me. I let it rest for awhile and tried again, and it still wouldn't work.
What I ended up doing always gets some people calling bullshit, but it's the truth: I took the case off of the drive, and I could see the platters and the arms and everything right there... I tried turning it on and I saw how it sort of jerked in one direction... So, I started it spinning in that direction by myself, and then turned it on, and it spun up fine, and I could use my drive. I replaced the cover and used the computer and everything was fine. The drive lived maybe 3 or 4 months after this, with me powering it down as infrequently as possible, but it was growing steadily worse in terms of bad sectors... I didn't have scandisk or anything, so every couple of weeks I would reformat the drive (the lowlevel format marked and avoided the bad sectors), and reinstall DOS and the software I used... (I had been used to having no HD anyway so this wasn't such a huge deal). When I finally gave up, more than 60% of the sectors were bad, and the top platter on the stack had fingerprints on it from where I had occasionally slipped while doing the manual spin up.
That's my wacky hardware story.
Some friend and I got to a third friend's house just after he'd finished bolting his new motherboard into the case.. without using those little risers they give you to seperate the board from the chassis.
He couldn't figure out why the thing wouldn't power on. Every solder joint on the board had been short circuited to each other for who knows how many flips of the power switch.
Fearing the worst we corrected the installation and powered it up.. machine promptly gave us a cheerful beep as it completed POST.
phew.
I used to clean my keyb+mouse with rubbing alchohol the hard way. But recently I started using the dishwasher. I just stop about 5mins after dry cycle and wipe it off. works great 5 years later.
EOU
I admit it, a few months ago a friend brought his hd over and I poppd it in my computer and started my computer up, next thing I know there is thick black smoke wafting out of the back of my computer.
I hurriedly shut my computer off and look inside to see what the problem was. Turns out I had plugged the power to my friend's HD into a molex connector on a fan that I had spliced to run off the motherboard 3 prong fan connector the year before. The ground wire had completely melted and vaporized.
I unplugged it and tried turning my computer on and no go, nothing that was plugged into my ups was working. I turn the UPS on and off and nothing, finally i unplug the ups from the wall and turn it on and off and suddenly everything turns back on. Everything worked fine after that, even my friend's hard drive.
It really freaks you out when you have thick black smoke coming out the back of your computer though. Or at least it did me.
Messing around inside a power supply while it was on, wondering why the fan wouldn't spin.
:)
When i came to, I was on the floor and the lights were out.
I'd almost killed myself, and this was in australia where we have a full 240V (not wimpy 110)
The power supply still worked, but I wouldn't touch it again
--- I hate my sig
I work with 5200/5400/5500 PowerMacs at work, the all-in-one design. We had a technician once slip while carrying a 5260/120 up on his shoulder because it had been raining, and he ended up chucking it forward pretty good. It landed on the concrete sidewalk and slid into a fairly deep puddle of water. We took it back to the office, let it dry, and it actually came up. Even more interesting, it had been broken, the hard drive wouldn't come up, and it did after that. I suspect the bearings had seized up and the impact affected that. We ended up having to replace the back part of the case, which had split open, but the rest of the machine was fine.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
On the other hand, the shiny metal and plastic does show scratches very easily... but then, I didn't buy an iPod to LOOK at it!
Even though it's a no-no, during my days in the trenches at the now-defunct BMUG helpline I encountered a machine that wouldn't boot when one of it's HD's (this was when Apple was still using SCSI for everything but the Performa) was plugged in. Other machines wouldn't boot up with the drive plugged in either. To get the data off the drive, I started the machine up, plugged the drive in, ran good-old SCSIprobe and mounted it. It worked and I got the data off the disk.
I forgot to reinstall a shielding plate and left it lying on the expansion port of an Amiga 500. Random reboots were the first symptoms, but when I took a closer look at possible problems, I saw sparks fly. The only other time I turned off a machine that fast once I had realized my mistake was when I shortened out an ATX-PSU, which surprisingly wasn't enough to stop the PC from booting. The plume of smoke from the burning cable insulation took a few seconds to escape the case, so I didn't notice anything wrong at first. Both machines worked fine after these incidents.
I used to have a 386 lying around as a glorified alarm clock. Since I'm an insomniac (i.e. I don't wake up well because I don't get enough sleep), I used to write alarm clock programs that would require me to do some mentally challenging (but not impossible) work.
I'm also a math major going for my B.Sc so my idea of mentally challenging can be a little bit much sometimes...
I didn't realize how bad it was until I woke up to ``what's the last digit of 7 to the 103 power?''. Easy question to do if you know modular arithmetic and you want to think about it, but first thing in the morning...?
Anyways, the case of the 386 was open (and the alarm was going full bore) so I started throwing stuff at the computer in the hopes that I'd jar something. Eventually there was a loud crackle and my room started to smell like ozone.
Close inspection revealed a penny magnetized between a pair of pins on the motherboard. Turning the power off on the case made the penny fall out of the pins.
Imagine my surprise when the computer actually powered up afterwards... from that point on I would throw pennies from across the room whenever I wanted to get some extra sleep...
ID-10-T is a way of life
My HP calculator has never been through anything very brutal but I've heard a great many stories.
Dropped from the thrird story of a building?
Ran over with your car?
Why do we always hurt the ones we love???
While I was in highschool I was taking apart my computer for fun one day. I was new to the whole hardware side at this point, but that didn't stop me from removing every last component from the chassis. Seeing as I hadn't built the system myself, this wasn't the brightest move. I start putting the thing back together, and I remember how every piece went in except one: the CPU.
This was back in the days when the chip didn't have one pin out of place on the grid to keep you from putting it in wrong... One in four odds, what the hell I said. Slap it in, lock down the ZIF handle. Push the power button with my crossed fingers. Nothing... nothing... nothing... *blap blap blap* and a burning smell. Half the powered transistors on one side of the board had blown apart.
My old Amiga1200 had a little problem with over heating. (too much multitasking on a 14Mhz computer) . More than once I had worked over night on a paper, listening to music the whole time, only to find that it wouldn't print. In frustration I unplugged it, dropped in a few inches (just to make sure the chips were seated properly) and stuck it in the freezer for 15 minutes. No problems after that. At least until the next time I pulled an all nighter...
I once ran an 80mb hardrive without the cover on for almost a year. I would actually hold the arm and move it around on the platter (while off). It was fun to watch boot up and work, and even back then I knew I wasn't supposed to be doing that.
John Susek
I had a CD go through an inkjet printer, and end up with a photo printed on it's face. Amazingly, the cd survided getting bent around a 40+ degree angle. I think the CD ended up in the feeder during a CD/shureken fight...
My former boss ran over a 500mhz dell latitude
with her Cadillac. The screen was shatered but it still booted. After replacing the screen It
continue's to run fine. I think the massive amount of paperwork in the bag was what saved it.
#### ## Laroue ####
I once had a game called Karateka for my Apple ][e. It was a fantastic game until it stopped working.
Having been a good 10 year old who never wanted to damage a disk by touching a magnet to it, I decided to use my broken game to see what it might actually do. So after wiping a magnet all over the disk, I booted it up, and the game worked fine -except- the screen was inverted. Absolutely playable, but upside-down! Thinking I could do it again, I rubbed the magnet, and the game was lost forever.
comptuers in my opinion are nearly indestructable. I am currently running my athalon breadboarded on my desk in the dorms, due to selling my case(without psu) for beer money. its been going strong for 3 months, despite me dragging the whole thing onto the floor using they keyboard several times. thanksfully the harddrive never fell. My old 100 gig seagate just gives me garbled bios and no disk when i plug it it, and it just feel off the top of my old case to the ground below.. weakling... anyways, what else? hot swaping my vooodoo 2. if its in when you start and you put it back, it should just work again, but you can't ADD it hot, the cpu doesn't know what to do with it then. go figure? accidentaly stuck a live 5volt psu wire to the cpu heatsink and POP no more running system. unplug, wait 5 mins, and it boots right up. but then again, after trying to stuff the whole thing into a suitcase last week i don't get any sound... hmmmm....
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
I've used my Sony Vaio (PCG F304 for those interested) nigh on every day for about 4 years now. It's been dropped, bounced, kicked, carried by the screen only, carried by the cdrom drawer, and dropped hard a few times off the car seat when i have braked hard a few times. The bugger works perfectly and im still using it to code on in university. It's quite funny to plug in in to thewlaptop dock areas next to the spanking new rich kid laptops, and theres my hammered smoothened cased PII 366 vaio (it used to be a nice metallic purpley colour one, now its a patchy grey), but it's going strong! It's currently on my bed under a pile of library books ;)
Working as a technicican i usually do lazy things...Today ive hotplugged a few drives (seagates and maxtors) whilst in the bios to get the boot config correct, and i hotplugged a radeon 9700 pro without thinking...hell, if it breaks ill get another off a shelf ;)
My brother and I were working on our 486, and knocked almost 12 oz. of ginger ale into a running 486, hitting all of the cards and part of the motherboard. For reasons unclear, the machine kept operating correctly (even on Win95!), though we did shut it down and clean everything off for safety. No damage at all. We're still using most of those components in newer machines now.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Anyone know how to fix a laptop keyboard?
replace it. You can probably find the part on Ebay.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Well they're not computer hardware, but I've been brutal on VCR remote controls over the years and they all still work perfectly. Throwing them onto the bed and missing, fumbling them and dropping them hard onto my (concrete) floor, spilling on them, etc. They all still work perfectly. They easily outlast the VCRs themselves.
Computer hardware makers should take notice, especially when producing portable stuff. I'm already getting a bit of button flakiness from my Palm handheld. It's barely a year old, and I've never even done anything noteworthy to endanger it.
Here in the UK we don't quite get real guns but this is bad enough... At school there was a bbgun craze. Needless to say a friend got a high-strength gas power desert eagle. While he watched a friend racing around on GTA one day he accidentally shot the screen of his large, expensive Dell laptop. It still worked though, except for large blackbars coming in from the closer two sides of the screen to the point of impact. He, and his parents who had just bought it, were less that impressed with him. That the screen worked at all impressed me. Another friend decided to demonstrate the abilities of a hard drive to withstand g-forces of a certain strength. He removed the drive and dropped it on his desk from a height of about two inches. When he plugged it in agin it failed the boot up test. It needed to be replaced. It might be worth pointing out this wasn't a new drive. It had three years worth of school work and notes on it, mostly unbacked up. I also superglued ram into a computer once because the clips wouldn't hold it in. I fried the motherboard at the same time, so I don't know if the ram worked or not. It was new ram too... well off ebay, so that could be it. So i lost ram, the mobo, and infact the whole computer: it was an apple, but an old one, so it didn't really matter, it wasn't working that well anyway. The fans had problems, they whined like mshing gears on a car on startup.
A few years ago, the guys at college laughed at me when I outfitted my brand new machine with this old brown 3.5" floppy drive. This thing has been through a flood, dropped, rained on, and just plain BIG and OLD. I ripped it out of a junked '286 or so; it's about the size of a CD-ROM. They just don't make 'em like this anymore. As a heavy 3.5" (ab)user, I watched with mock amazement as new floppy drive after new floppy drive in the dorms bit the dust after 4-6 months of light use. When it's running you can almost hear it from the next room, but this beast will read ANYTHING - people would come over asking me to copy a disk because their machine kept asking if they wanted to format it. Bad sector, what's that? This thing is going to outlive me.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
My computer caught on fire once. Scared the crap out of me. The wires leading to the PC speaker made contact with the metal case. Something shorted, the wires heated up and the casings on the wires started smoking. Whoops.
The good side was that my computer stopped mysteriously locking up after I took out the speaker. Everything else continued working.
Back in the old days I had a friend who posessed some strange magical powers. He was able to fix any hardware with almost anything tool he found.
Once he was working on my Amiga 500 with a russian military bayonette. He took out a diode which was controlling the brightness of one of the two leds on the front. Snap-snap, it was done.
Then, just for fun, he took out all the chips and the processor from the sockets (paula, denise, m68000) and put them on his T-shirt like buttons. It was fun. Then he put everything back nicely. After switching on, the computer did show any sign of life. It was not fun.
The guy looked at it, said "whoops", took out the processor (M68000), turned it around by 180 degrees, then inserted it again. The computer turned on, and worked perfectly.
Just about three years ago I moved an AXPpci33 from my friend's house to my house in one of the worst rain storms ever.
As if that wasn't already a bad enough idea, the case was poorly assembled, the motherboard wasn't screwed or snapped in, and i was trying to carry too many things in.
Well, as the title hints I dropped the whole thing in a 3" deep puddle of water that had collected in front of my garage. I cursed for a little while, picked it up and carried it into the house. I used a blow dryer and carefully blew everything dry and then assembled it on my bureau without the case.
I plugged in the AT power supply that also took the fall, and a monitor I had lying around.
Didn't work. I cursed for a little while, again.
About three weeks passed and I decided to try it again, for some reason I decided to attatch a keyboard this time. As if for some reason I felt like typing on the drowned board.
I turned it on, the screen did not indicate any functionality, and nothing else interesting seemed to happen. I walked away.
I came back after some time and found a blue SRM boot console awaiting me! Either I didn't wait long enough for the boot sequence the first time or it required the keyboard to realize there was a video console, I don't know. I tried a couple of times to figure it out back then but I don't remember my conclusion. Probably for the same reason I didn't remember it back then.
Amazingly it still works. It ran linux for a while, then sat in a pile of other worthless computers for a year or so at the shack. Sometime last year this stupid fat ass, robby, spilled a couple sodas on it. We told him that we boned his girlfriend and what not, but that's for the subject of another post.
Anyway, as recently as last April it was out of the pile and running OpenVMS Alpha 7.2-1 and Multinet 4.3. We didn't use the CDROM drive to install VMS, I made the system disk using another vms system.
The CDROM drive was used after the soda incident to install Solaris 2.6 on a Sparc IPX.
Its a little ironic that even gross incompetence and stupidity don't always result in destroyed hardware as frequently as hardware inexplicably dies. (iBook screen, iMac DV that sufferent a quadruple failure for no reason, VAX TOY????, every AMD I've ever owned, the list goes on and on)
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
As far as Dell laptops go, if you've got one that works you're better off just keeping it the way it is.
I've dealt with Dell on repair of over 100 laptops. Several of them go in with a pointer stick problem and come back unable to POST. I'll never forget the one I sent in for LCD replacement and it came back sans keyboard.
You're really rolling the dice if you send it in to Dell repair with nothing wrong with it. When it comes back you'll be lucky if it boots.
Well, there goes my Karma.
photosMy Photostream
Every time GNOME decides to stop liking the keyboard for some reason and just beeps, I generally blow into the keys, then pick up the keyboard, shake it, tug at some of the keys, pound some of the keys, shake it some more, pound some more of the keys, then repeatedly hit the back of it as hard as I can with the pad of my hand. I've been doing that for two years and it still works (mostly).
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Goddamn this joke was said no less the 4 fuckin times. Seriously. People. R.T.F.S.C.!!!!
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
I went to a conference once and met a guy who would hot plug and unplug SCSI drives. "I always heard that could fry your electronics," I said.
:-)
"Nah," he said. "I do this all the time."
I saw him again the following year and noticed that he didn't do it anymore.
One day I was carrying my Amiga 4000 into work in a re-inforced plastic bag. I had just climbed to the top of a double flight of stairs when the re-inforced bag decided that it wasn't re-inforced enough. The bottom of the bag split wide open, the 4000 dropped and began cartwheeling back down the stairs. It managed to get some pretty good air before it reached the bottom of the stairs and slammed into a heavy wood door.
I walked back down, picked it up, carried it back upstairs anc plugged it in. Worked perfectly and had hardly any marks on the case.
Still works to this day.
heh...the other day at our Lan party i was apllying some silver heat grease to my CPU and got it on the CPU pins (dont ask) we wernt sure about its conductivity (since it does contain silver) so i literaly washed my CPU with soap and water *chuckels* poped it back in and waallaa!! presto chango is still worked..
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
Here it is: Baked Apple
I thought this how-much-can-your-hardware-take theme was getting old but I forgot that this is Slashdot and not kuro5hin.
Spilled coffee into my computer. We're not talking some pansy 'web designer' coffee cup.
..That was about four years ago. The soundcard is in my current box, and still works like a charm.
:P)
We're talkin' a huge arse holds-half-the-pot *coder's* cup.
Anyhoo, I flicked the power immediately. Liquid + electronics == bad, you know?
Opened the case, started wiping things off. Didn't look like any got into the power supply (I probably would've noticed the magic smoke escaping if it had!).. However, the soundcard was soaked. Absofragginlutely soaked.
So I went to a different computer for the night. Next morning, powered back on, figuring the soundcard would probably be dead.
Nope. Covered in a thin film, but fully functional.
(I'm also a hell of a lot more careful with resting my legs on my desk.
Hmmm.. I think the worst damage that I ever tried to repair was a good lightning strike..
:)
:)
We used to have live cams running to a strip club. There were two cat5 cables and two coax cables strung up between two buildings..
Florida is great for it's thunderstorms. The odds are pretty good that no matter what your stuff will get hit.
Well, in this case, the lightning hit the cables that were strung between the buildings.. The girls in the strip club said they saw fireballs at the cameras, and that it sounded like a gunshot in the club. They had the best view.
At the other end of the cables was a server room (in the next building). Someone in the next room said they saw the flash, even though they didn't have a direct view, and again it sounded like a gunshot.
Three cameras in the club were destroyed. A digitizing server lost its video capture card, motherboard, video card, and network card. The switch that one of the cat5 cables went to lost one port (the other 15 were fine). An APC UPS was toasted.
All the parts smelled burnt. The components of the server had obvious burns in them. The chip on the video card had a large hole, like there was an explosion, where I assume the lightning came out and into other components. The housings on the cameras were chared and warped.
There were burn marks on the building, where the cable came in.. It was very visible on the white paint. The inside of the club was painted black, so we couldn't see burn marks on the interior.
I used the memory, CPU, hard drive, case and power supply from the toasted digitizing server, with a new motherboard, and cards, and it started right up. I was pretty much amazed.
The machine continued to work with the new components til we retired it a few years later.
The two coax cables were trashed. I think they melted somewhere around the impact point. One of the cat5 cables never survived. We couldn't find any single wires with conductivity. One of the cat5 cables worked, but we always had like 1% packet loss across the wire after that.
I can think of other damages that I've worked with, but it's nothing as exciting. Mostly overheated machines (90+ degree room temps, with no case cooling), dropped machines and monitors. Girls in cam houses have a tendency of not liking their equipment, and seeing if they bounce. I saw one throw a Sony HandyCam on the floor (from another cam in the house), then call me asking why the cam didn't work. "I saw you throw it down, of course it doesn't work." The boss wouldn't take it from her check though, dammit.
I do remember one day, a full height SCSI drive kind of fell out of a server, because it was never screwed in. The SCSI cable held it up, but it cracked the controller board. We soldered it, and it amazingly worked for a few more years.
I know of a 1u server that kind of fell out of the back of a truck, about 2.5 feet to the ground. It has shifted while the truck was being driven. Me and the other guy looked at each other and said "oops". We plugged it in, and it worked.. We did various things to see if anything had failed, and it had not.. So, we plugged it in and left it running. It's never had a problem. I think it's been running for about 3 years now.. Not too bad. Honestly, I think FedEx is rougher with the equipment than that, so we were easy on it.
I worked in a warehouse (WalMart distribution, Brooksville, Fl.) as Quality Assurance, years ago.. I've seen TV's fall from the top racks before. a 30 foot drop for a TV pretty much ensures that it won't be working, especially when the box crushed, and you can see pieces of glass on the ground.
A few times, we saw pieces fall from high racks. If the box wasn't damanged, and we didn't see physical damage to the unit, we'd put it back up to be shipped. I'm never surprised when I buy a component that doesn't work. I know someone in a warehouse did exactly the same thing. "Umm, looks ok, ship it."
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
My Game Boy went through a lot when I was a kid. I got it when I was 14 or so and I'm 24 and still have it now.
I dropped it several times as a kid and ran over it in the driveway with a minivan twice while learning to drive. The screen didn't even crack! My brother dropped it in the bathtub when he was 7 or so, and threw it at me once or twice. Batteries have exploded in it, even.
I'm still amazed at how well those things hold up.
One time, I ran a stick of 256 SDRAM through the laundry in a pair of pants. It still works great to this day (a year later). Another time, a HD wouldn't work, so I kicked it across the room and put it back in. It worked for awhile longer, at least until i could get data off of it.
i used to own a ZX-Spectrum -compatible computer... that thing was totally unbreakable. The keyboard (which also housed the computer itself) took books dropped from 30cm easily.
I don't remember if i dropped the case itself at one point...
But its monitor was built like they're not built any more (about 10" and monochrome). It had some sort of intermittent problem (can't remember what exactly).. anyway, I stored it somewhere up high... A few weeks later, I wanted to try and see if it was working and... dropped it from about 2 meters to the hardwood floor!
Guess what, the monitor survived almost without a scratch (which is more than i can say for the hardwood floor -_-') AND its intermittent problem disappeared for a few years!
See if your 21-incher can take that and fix itself X-D
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
We had a VMEbus-based embedded system. The graphics card was the top card in the card cage. We had a development system with the lid off of the card cage so that we could put scope probes on the cards. I was watching the display when a tub full of salt water (don't ask) got spilled onto the graphics card. I missed the drug days of the '60s, but I got an idea of what a trip was like from watching that display! We took the graphics card out of the system, rinsed it with distilled water, baked it at 120 or 150 degrees F (I forget which now) to dry it well, and it worked just fine!
The Apple Extended Keyboard II is quite possibly the most durable piece of computer hardware ever built. It should be of course given that it cost $120.
A friend of mine once saw an Apple rep hammer a nail into a board with one.
Yesterday morning I cold booted my desktop machine - did I remember to touch those metal screws to ground myself? Hell no!! That was over 24 hrs ago and no problems yet!
Except that it was the 'f' key, and also the star (*). Strangely enough, the u, the c, the k, the spacebar, the y, the o and the u were still working...
We tried to destroy a casio pocket calculator after our final exams, the way out maths teacher always recomended in in high school. We took a video camera to capture the evidence and went to the local bus station.
The bus driver was a bit surprised by our wish of driving over the calculator, but we got some nice shots. The first bus drove over it with the front wheel, so we needed another one for the shot with the back wheel. Obviously we wanted to present the results to our teacher.
The most amazing thing was that the calculator worked, the lid was cracked, so together with the video it was a nice present for our teacher and a great laugh for all when presenting the results.
After I almost broke a SIMM slot, and later short-circuited the motherboard on my old P166.
The first thing happened because I tried to install RAM myself and didn't know very well how (this was a long time ago). I ended bending a few pins in it, making some of them contact the nearby ones. This just made the motherboard beep when it was turned on. I spent about 2 hours with a thin screwdriver unbending them, and managed to fix it. The computer now has some problems with RAM in that slot, though, and sometimes I need to push on the RAM to get a good contact. Currently it's not used for anything critical, so it doesn't matter.
The second problem on the same motherboard happened when a screw remained in the case and connected two pins on some chip. This made the computer turn off instantly, and it wasn't actually able to do that! It has no ATX supply/motherboard or anything of that kind. I looked in the case, removed the screw, turned it on, and it worked.
My newer computer (Duron 850) also had some problems with a hard drive having a bad power connection and turning itself off and on when I moved the machine. It took me a while to figure it out, so it happened about 4 or 5 times. Linux didn't like that at all, and froze after the drive turned off. I also had to do a reiserfsck --rebuild-tree to fix a partition, but it doesn't seem to have caused any permanent damage or even serious data loss.
Changing a sound card in my sister's machine, without removing the power cable from the back. POP! Szzzzt! Got a shock. A strong one. Reinstalled it, and it worked fine. Weird.
My computer was giving me a lot of trouble -- specifically my RAM. I took it out and put it back in, over and over, in different combinations, while running numerous scanning programs.
One time, I didn't quite put it in all the way. Next thing I know, my computer wont boot, something smells awful, and half my motherboard is yellow-hot. Literally, a quarter of the ram stick was lighting up my entire room; it was that hot. You see, I stuck it in unevenly; half of it wasn't in at all.
So I quickly pull the plug, pull out the ram stick and juggle it for a while until it cools down. I make catch my breath and clean off the ashes. A good portion of my ram slot was completely incinerated and part of the connection strip on the ram chip was completely black. Luckily, the metallic contacts were still intact on my motherboard. I took a set of pliers and adjusted them to the proper position. I cleaned the ram. I tried sticking it in. I boot up. Tada, it works. Phew, that was a close one.
A few days later, I come home from school and turn my computer on as I always do. While it boots, I go off to wash my hands and change. I come back under two minutes later, my entire room is engulfed in smoke. I dive to turn it off. I vent off the room. I couldn't figure out what burnt. The ram stick was still fine, but I took it out just incase. I run it again, it runs okay for a couple of minutes. Suddenly, smoke again. Then I notice the wires that connect the ATX case to the motherboard are melting. Horrible smell. I unplug them immediately. Turns out that one of my wires was plugged in upside down. I think it was the PC internal speaker wire. I tore off the wire, I don't need it.
I turn on the computer, all is fine for a while. It struggles to boot and then, again, smoke! Ahh. I turn it off, I sniff around. The entire room smelled awful. I couldn't tell what burnt this time. I try to turn it on again, wont go. I unplug all non-essential hardware, wont go. I take out all the hardware, piece by piece, analyzing it, sniffing it. I get to the PSU. My god. It smelled like a skunk crawled up another skunk's urethra, set itself on fire and gave birth to another skunk.
So my PSU burned down. I get another one.
Yay, my computer works again. But wait, my hard drive is dead. The PSU must have been kind enough to overload before keeling over and dying.
I got the hard drive replaced. I stuck the burnt ram stick back into the burnt ram slot. I stuck the burnt wire back into the burnt connector. I brushed off the ashes from various parts. I even overclocked it a bit. It all works fine now.
As good as new. Just a few tints of black here and there.
- shazow
We used these machines in Chemistry lessons about 15 years ago... I'd have been around 14 years old. They used a 1MHz 6502 processor, and had 16k of RAM as standard. It had a disk-drive, too. God, it was a modern piece of kit.
I knocked about 0.5 litres of 2-molar Sodium Hydroxide into the keyboard. Turned the machine off quick, drained out the liquid and took the machine apart completely. Everything was washed in warm, soapy water, left to dry and re-assembled.
Worked fine afterwards. The motherboard was forever sticky, and a couple of the keyboard buttons failed occasionally... but otherwise it was perfect.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
That would have to be my steel hammer....
Man, if I could put a computer through what I put that through.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A few years ago, I had just installed a Hercules GeForce256 DDR, right when it hit market. I wanted to see how big it was in comparison to the Voodoo3 it replaced, so while the computer was running (very stupid) I stuck the V3 in next to the GF256 and there was this loud crackle and spark, yet somehow the computer didn't even lock up and everything still worked, I have no idea how I didn't kill the entire computer and both video cards.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
I have an old Motorola PPC board (Atlas, AT form factor). It worked great, but wouldn't boot from an IDE disk (SCI or floppy worked fine though). Later it stopped autobooting altogether, requiring me to type the boot command each time. What did I expect from a board found in a garbage can.
Once while tinkering with it I got the AT power connectors backwards. Thankfully the power supply was high enough quality to shut itself down really quick so there was no smoke.
I thought I had toasted the board. After correcting the wiring I found that it did work. It just lost its entire NVRAM configuration. After re-entering the settings I found that it was now autobooting again, and would boot from the IDE disk.
That was my first experience with a screw-up improving the system
BTW This whole machine is a kludge. The heatsink was missing, so I added a Pentium cooler to it, but the mounting is totally different so it is tied on with bits of wire.
Man, I was working on this old computer and trying to put the processor back in when my screwdriver slipped off of the processor latch and scraped a line about 5 inches long across several lanes of bus. The worst part was the owners secretary was watching and gasped when it happened. I was like, "hehe, I hate it when that happens." But inside I was like, "shit, that's never happened before." I turned er on and was met pretty quickly with a friendly blue screen. But one more magic reboot and the system was up and running. I called the owner later and told him that he should replace his system because it's old and that everything his secretary said was a lie.
Nothing compares to an IBM thinkpad, or at least old school IBM thinkpads. Thoose things are fucking tough motherfuckers.
I have had two(360?,701c) one as a replacement for the otherone failed on an unrelated note.
when I was in middle school I used carry a laptop to school. This was in the early ninties when computers where not yet acceptable to mainstream kids, and I got picked on for it. Not only that, it got knocked out of my hands, took a tumble down a flight of steps, kicked, swatted, punched, coffee spilled on it, and NOT ONE error due to physical violence. The thing is a tank I tell you, a motherfucking tank. Eventually the kids left me alone, and to this day, I still have that computer, although I forgot the bios password around y2k, and I can't get in without it. But as far as I can tell, it still works(thing was built in 1992).
I had to help a friend out once with a computer he has just built. He said it would only sometimes got to POST and then would go black and reboot occasionally. I had to see this for myself, so upon arrival at his house, I found that he had used wire wraps to secure the motherboard to the case (without ANY spacers) and was shorting every soldered contact on the motherboard to each other through the mounting bracket. I couldnt see how he ever even got to POST, but after properly installing the MB his system has run without issue since. He did say that he thought it was odd that the cards wouldn't line up with the case slots after the fact. On my own note... I did once attach a 5V power line to a hard drive controller activity light and friend half the components and melted all the shielding off of every wire from the power supply. But I guess that doesnt count as a survival story. Maybe... the hard drive survived!
I interned for a government agency when I was finishing university. I remember talking to some of the other IT people at coffee break one day about hardware disasters (the subject came up because some bonehead tested the fire alarm system by setting it off - which automatically cut power to the server room).
Anyway, they told me that when they had first moved into the building, the fact that there were water pipes running over top of the server racks had gone unnoticed, until one of the them, started leaking. This of course happened at night, so nobody found out until morning. When they came in, the Alpha (which the water was leaking directly onto) was still working properly. After they shut it down and opened it up, they found two cm of water in the bottom of the case.
When I was installing a new mobo for a friend of mine, it was my first time installing a mobo. It was a brand new Asus P4PE. I connected the power button connector the wrong way, one pin off. Powered it up, fans spun up, there was a small ZAP, then the fans spun down again. After many tries, I found the problem. It booted up just fine.
That mobo is pretty fscked up, tho. It's missing a few of the connectors it's supposed to have. There's one space where it looks like an IDE connector (onboard RAID, probably) used to be.
The scariest thing I've ever seen, was when I had been swapping things around on my computers one morning. At the moment, I was working on my wife's computer when I heard mine shut down by itself. I was annoyed, but didn't think much of it until a couple seconds later it started coming back on. I looked back and saw smoke billowing out the side of the case (which was open at the time).
I ran over to the case and looked inside, I saw these red glowing wires, and just freaked out. I powered off the computer, opened the windows (it stank so bad) and just prayed for about 15 minutes before daring to go look at the damage.
It turned out, all the damaged was done to a single power cable, one of those little ones for case fans with two prongs sticking up. All I can think that happened was when I was moving things around, the cable got bumped and touched a piece of metal that connected both prongs creating a short, which caused massive power drain and fried the wires. I cut the wires off, turned back on the computer and it worked like a charm.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
how's that for stability?
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Back when I was a teenager, my friends and I got Commodore 128's. Those machines had these incredibly tiny "reset" buttons, which required a pencil or something to press, that way you couldn't accidentally hit 'reset.' Anyway a friend of mine was playing a video game and became very angry and wanted to reset the computer right then, but his finger wouldn't fit into the hole of the reset button. Out of anger, he took this modem card and jammed it into the port on the back of the machine (the "user bus"). This caused the machine to reset. Thereafter, this was his preferred method of resetting the machine. It never damaged the machine.
I used to work in store where we assembled PCs. Plug in the power supply connector off by one, mixing up the 5v, 12v and ground, and a capacitor or two on the motherboard would burst into flames. It was fun!
The store also sold assemble-yourself PC kits, with an empty case and loose boards. Now and then, a customer would come back with a "defective" systems, we'd see that capacitor was burnt, and we know what really happened.
A friend of mine interned at an IBM facility for the summer or at least some place they were processing IBM RAM. He's a big apple freak and after a couple of days of handling these RAM sticks he notices that the pin configuration is very close to what he had in his apple except it had an extra pin. Since it was "free" he just took a screw driver, broke off the extra pin, plugged it in and off she went. He had it in there for a long time until he upgraded and everything worked perfect, allowing him to run programs that necessitated the "extra" RAM he installed.
Broke a pin off of a p3 cpu. socket-370 i think. Plugged back, had no problem since.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I was tinkering with an old machine used as a webserver a while back and converted its power button to a key start (just soldered a cheapie $2 momentary key switch to the leads)
:P
I had just moved into a new place which had radiators for heating, so static electricity became a problem during the winter months (as I found out).
about a week after I had installed the switch I went to go power on the webserver after a black out, and got the key within about 3 inches of the lock. At which point a bolt of Static electricity jumped from my finger/and key to the lock and the machine powered up with out even putting the key in the switch.
It became a bit of a game at that point, because we weren't concerned with the old hardware dying, as to how far away we could turn the pc on by scuffing our socks on the carpet first
brightloudnoise.com
I dropped my cell phone in a bathtub once about two years ago.
It continued to work for about a minute after the incident, and then worked the next day after drying out overnight. It was acting flakey for about a week until it would just not turn on anymore. I decided I would try more drastic action.
I preheated my oven to about 150F, shut the oven off, removed the faceplate and battery, wrapped it in a towel, and left it in for 45 minutes.
It has worked ever since.
We had a WD disk last year (7 years old) that crashed, and of course there was very important data on there. The thing was making a ticking sound like the heads baching into everything. So we changed the pcb with that from a disk we knew worked, no change. So our technician said : " why don't I take out the heads from this good disk and place them in the bad disk" After declaring him mad several times, he started working on it about an hour later he called me to connect the drive I connected the thing, booted from another disk, copied all files we needed from the bad disk to the other one, and picked up my jaw from the floor. That technician has my total respect since that moment. I ran the WD for 2 more weeks after that before it collapsed completely
We had nerf basketball hoops in the office. One of the guys tried to peg a coworker with it and knocked over a 20 oz Diet Pepsi off the top of the desk which drained into the back of my brand new 19" monitor. (It was pretty expensive at the time.)
I thought it was going to fry the whole thing and my CPU but it just poured out the bottom. The monitor is around 18" inches from to back and luckily it must have missed the tube and other electronics. Needless to say there was soon a "policy" on fucking around.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
But...
It might soon. I'm not even going to get out of my comfy computer chair. All you have to do is click this link. That link is a link to the webserver running of my RH Linux machine at home. Did I mention it's running purely off a 56K modem?
(yikes, am I gonna take a pounding from this)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
My poor PS2 has been dropped 3 times, once it fell about 4 feet from atop a tv, another time it was jerked to the floor from about 1 foot height, and another time it fell from the same distance and landed atop my lord of the rings fellowship extended edition cd totally cracking the cd up. But alas it still works...!! =)
got fed up with my old 133MHz laptop... started playing an MP3 then violently threw it down a flight of stairs... cracked the LCD but it kept playing...
I think it "died" when I backed my car over it.
rest in pieces you canon piece of crap.
I remember a couple of years back when my friend got a brand new mobo. Well, he decides to install it after smoking a ton of weed and getting stoned out of his mind. Next thing he knows, he has a shorted-out, cracked-in-half motherboard. Very clever.
I was building a computer using an ASUS CUL2C (i think thats the number, im too lazy to check,, its the black pearl limited board, very nice by the way)
I wanted to run it on my desk prior to mounting just to check all the parts,,
but the board kept shorting out,, i tried for 20 mins, before i looked under the motherboard and say my screw driver.
It had been making contact and shorting the board, so i removed it while there was power running to the board, and the largest spark ive ever seen from a computer came out the top, and it shut down.
20 minutes later, everything worked fine, and the computer still runs today (2 years and counting)
I got one of the Sony PCG-NVR23s, and three days after I got it, it slid off of the roof of my car and hit the pavement. Some of the plastic flew off, but everything works fine, and I haven't had any problems (or dropped it again) since.
You did say hardware, didn't you?
Once I was going to put a splice in some household wiring, and I thought I had deactivated the right circuit. Despite the little nip along the blade, those wire cutters worked fine for years afterwards.
Then there was the time I thought my Triumph TR-7 was an SUV, and tried to drive up my driveway through 8" of snow. (Note 1: they don't call Joseph Lucas the Prince of Darkness for nothing.) (Note 2: Pulled the Triumph back off the slope with my tractor, and onto the driveway the next morning, no harm, no foul.)
Thrilled to be running near the front, in 1979 I drove my Spitfire deep into the lefthander before the carousel at Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia. I didn't realize that my brake line had worn through , and so instead of making the turn, I went straight ahead. Motor, tranny, and diff worked fine... in the new chassis/body.
Probably the most dramatic hardware failure was when I went for a couple of years without firing up my 1500W HF ham radio amplifier (Ten-Tec Titan II). The one with the 2.5 KV power supply? Let me assure you that all that voltage hitting dried out electrolytic caps makes for a spectacular light and smoke display. Maybe this doesn't count though... while the RF deck was OK (fail-safe resistor immolated), the PS itself needed a lot of work.
Back in the day of 5.25" floppies, a buddy of mine left his in the back seat of my car with his school report saved on it. This is during summer time. So we come back and I open the door a wave of hot air blasts in my face wreaking of burned plastic. We look in the back to see the floppy is literally bubbling. My buddy obviously flips. After it had cooled down, just for kicks I slit open the mass of burned plastic and the plastic disc inside was perfectly fine! So I grab a new 5.24" floppy, slice it open swap it's disc with my buddies. Sealed the slit with electrical tape and all was fine. Needless to say I got a free lunch for the remaining of the semester :)
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Had a 14" monitor where the "push-on, push-off" power button had become stuck in the off position. Opened the case, tried to get it unstuck, no dice. So I decided to wire around it and use the power strip it plugged into as my on/off switch (I was going to buy a new system soon anyway). Naturally, I wired it wrong. When I turned it on, POP went the monitor, and trip went the breaker. Opened it back up, re-wired it (correctly this time) and it worked fine ever after.
I am a man of const int sorrows
and I used to leave my case off of my computer, which sat on the floor just to the left of my desk. And I chainsmoked while I was unwinding playing video games after work.
One night four or five years ago, while I was drinking a rum and Crystal Light and smoking, I reached to grab my drink which was sitting to the left of my keyboard (this was not my first drink of the night) and I knocked the entire drink (probably 20 ounces at least) into my computer. While I was trying to catch the cup, I hit my hand on my ashtray and flipped that over too.
I fully expected the computer to just stop working, but, with the exception of the CD-ROM opening and closing on its own several times that night, the computer worked fine and still continues to work fine.
I cannot say I have had the same luck with keyboards. I have unknowingly spilled drinks into keyboards multiple times and not realized it, until the next morning when I would realize that, no I was NOT so drunk that I could not type, it was just that the keys were sticking together...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I just bought my new computer in parts from PC-Club about two weeks ago. On the drive home I wasn't watching the road and had to suddenly hit the break peddle. This caused all the internals for my computer(Motherboard, CPU, Ram, Cd-rom, floppy, and Hard Drive) to fly off the passanger seat and take a tumble in my truck. I got home, put it together and I am working on it today.
needless to say, I use western digital drives now
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Back in 1981, I had an Oric 1 and was fiddling with the internals, motherboard upside down. Then I plugged the power in to test it, forgetting that it was upside down and put the power plug inside the video out... A huge spark came out, my hair briefly caught fire and I was scared I'd just busted my first computer in which two years of savings had just gone. Plugged it properly and it works fine.
2nd story in Antarctica, 1997. I had two rugged military laptops for data acquisition and an HP Vectra desktop for use inside. One of the laptops video fried when a snow machine started a few feet from it and the other didn't have the right connectors. I had to program an eprom on some equipment outside and just put the Vectra+Monitor on a box. For 4 hours at -45C and it worked fine. I even have a picture.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
One time I bought a new power supply and hooked everything up. It all worked until it started smoking and the wiring burst into flame. It turned out I put the floppy power on wrong. After some cutting and taping I saved enough power plugs to get my comp running. - It runs fine.
5i9|\|3d, 5|\|ip3ri|\|di59ui53
back in 95, has a couple of dec alpha workstations working as web/dns servers. we were located in an old loft type building and over the weekend the tenants on the floor above us has a leak in their toilets, which just happened to be placed pretty much above our server racks. when i came back on monday i could not believe it, there was a puddle at least 30 feet across and water was still dripping at a steady pace...right on top on of one of the alpha's!!! I thought that was it, after going nuclear on the upstairs neighbor, i came back down figuring we were pretty much out, and as unbeleivable as it sounds, not only was the workstation still running, the monitor even turned on after we tried it. the workstation had all its ventilation outlets on the side, and somehow absolutely no water got in...i still can't believe it, but i kept on using that server for another couple of years after that.
My computer survived an assassination attempt. Shortly after I moved out on my own, I adopted a kitten. He was cute for the first week, then he turned obnoxious. He'd do things like wake me up at the crack of down by biting my nose, or jumping on my back just to see if he could stick, etc.
Boy he loved wires. He loved them a LOT. He learned a lesson about that one day, though, when he bit into the cord on my cell phone charger. I didn't actually witness this, but I did notice chew marks on the connector along with a sudden drop in the number of damage reports. I have a good feeling he learned what electricity is.
Even though he was taught not to bite cables, he still loved them! As a matter of fact, he found my mouse cable far too irresistable. This one was on my laptop. I had a little velcro tie to keep the cable wound up. I also had my laptop on a pair of TV tray tables (hey! I was a bachelor!) the cable dangled between them with this furry looking velco strap. Oh he loved that. I'll never forget one day he jumped up, caught the tie, and learned a physics lesson. Once his weight was on the cable, the path of least resistance (my mouse) started sliding off the table. Moments later *Whap* he was hit in the face with an optical mouse. The look on his face was hilarious! I imagine all he saw was a blinding flash of light quickly followed by a smack to the forehead!
But that's not why I'm writing. You see, I was a bit careless back in those days. More efficient in some ways, I never put the screws in my PCI/AGP cards on my computer. Never needed to! Call me lazy if you like, but if you ever tilted this comuter you'd hear the scrape of sliding screws that fell all the way to the bottom where I cannot reach them. Never bothered me, though. Everything was cool. Until I got this damn cat... You see, I came home one day and noticed that my monitor didn't come back on upon moving the mouse. This was odd. I assumed that the computer had frozen or something and pressed the reset button. Only, nothing really happend other than the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beep beep message you get from your bios that basically says "Somethin just ain't right." I was a little worried. I hadn't done anything to the computer, had no reason to think something was up. I thought about it for a sec and realized that the monitor hadn't come on, fortunately this observation lead me towards the video card. And what'd I find?
I found an unseated AGP card. After examining it for a bit, I realized what probably happened. My cat attempted to assassinate it. I'd seen him do this type of stunt before. He did a Tarzan stunt where he jumped off a shelf and grabbed the cable. The leverage caused the card to turn and unseat itself completely. From there, I assume he landed on the ground and found something else to do. I don't think that would have worked on the PCI cards, the AGP one was the loosest. Grr, I wanted to kill that little shit over that. I was worried he might have blown the video card or the mobo. Either would have been bad financially. After that happened, I decided a new directive would be issued that required ALL cables and cards to be securely fastend down. And I did.
My cat helped me with the operation. He must have either loved or really hated my computer. I brought it out on the floor under my apartment's only light. (Hey! I was a bachelor!) I then got the screws I needed and started the operation, only to find that moments later my cat was INSIDE the case sniffin around. Grr. I had no idea what kitten fur would do to this computer, fortunately I never learned either.
My computer survived the assassination and malpractice attempts. It didn't survive, however, the upgrade to a 3x faster Athlon.
It was a shitty little SB compatible kind. But i bought new speakers (still got em!) and revered some plugs and fried the fucker! It was funny cuz a friend was in the room and said what's that smell? I'm like uh-oh...thought my comp was fried! Luckily just the sound card was fried. Then I got a Vortex 2. I was in heaven!
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
...are supposed to be able to handle stuff like that. Maybe not a 20-foot drop, but the casing was supposedly quite shock resistant. They were made for field work and were one of the first to have screens readable in very high-light, high-glare conditions. Heavy as can be, though.
One of the profs I quasi-admin for swears by the things, though I believe she was having trouble finding one lately for an affordable price.
yep... so my Lat. CPx (500Mhz) has been thru (2) motherboards due to a row keys failing...
According to two different techs the cause is corrosion? at the motherboard connector... the solution is to replace the keyboard cable and motherboard, then put non conductive grease on the connector...
Dell's are a 50-50 shot w/ laptops... sometimes they're great, other times they have constant problems.
Working in helpdesk for a mid-sized software company... The VP of Consulting Operations let a cab back over his Dell Latitude CPi. The LCD was cracked, the keyboard did not work, but hook it up to external monitor, keyboard and mouse and there was NO PROBLEM!
I pulled out the HDD and stuck it in an identical machine for him. He was on his way in ten minutes.
I was dumfounded.
My cousin was spending the night at my house one summer, and we were playing Street Fighter II from maybe 12 AM until 4 AM.
Anyway, I had been totally kicking his ass every round for at least two hours straight. All of a sudden, like three hours into things, he just started killing me every match, with any fighter.
I got so mad that I ripped the SNES off the table, then tossed it up against the wall on the other side of the room. It still worked fine, except I broke the RF connector and it had a chip on the side where the plastic broke off.
Also, I took all his things and threw them out of the room, down the stairs, along with him. Adolescence rocks.
I can't speak for Dell Labtops, but the Dell Computer in my home-office sits on the floor next to my feet (my desk is not a computer desk, the cables wouldn't reach any other way) and I have kicked it over many times (at least 50), while it was on. One time I kicked it over with such force that it jerked the monitor cable out and broke nearly all of the pins on them (it was the shortest one). Plugged it back in without restarting and still worked. :)
A friend of mine had an old parallel port Iomega ZIP drive (the 100 meg models) in his van when he was driving on the highway. Well, he got into an accident. Someone rear ended him, crushing the back end of his van. His Computer was back there, and got scrunched, and the zip drive flew out the window at highway speeds. The computer managed to survive because the side of the case facing the wreck was the open side (the motherboard almost got crunched by the other side though)
The zip drive he gave to me in like 5 pieces. The bottom shell and top shell of plastic, and the circuit board wit the drive rails. The rails were bent, but after some coaxing I managed to bend them back in shape (they are plastic) and fit the case back together. It is missing the front panel (with the little spring loaded door and the LED light pipes and the bush button eject), but other than that it works fine. The Iomega drives use a soft eject system anyway, and the circuit board is undamaged. Missing some springs though, but it still manages to eject.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I was working inside my PC, banging my fingers around and enduring the usual nicks and scrapes. While putting a HD in the case, I noticed that one of the cuts on my hand had been bleeding pretty profusely into the CPU socket. Let it dry, chipped off what I could, plugged in the CPU...and it worked. That was two years ago, and still chugging away. Tyan mobo fan for life.
I was asleep in bed, as most college students are at 6am.
:-(
I was awoken by a loud pop, and the worst electrical burning i ever did smell. I thought humm, shit, this can't be good. I have 2 computers, a Linux and a Win.. and a UPS and misc accessors. The Linux one was the only one running so i thought i'd better shut it down as it just blew up. so i did "halt" and it went down fine.
The smell was _really_ bad, i couldn't stay in the room, so i opened the windows, and switched stuff off and went to sleep in another bed. Only i couldn't sleep, i was thinking what might it be. It suddenly crossed my mind, what else could it be? i checked everything.. and discovered nothing, until the only thing left was the machine that was switched off. I carried it downstairs and something was rattling insde.
An inductor had _BLOWN UP_ and _DISINTEGRATED_ inside the power supply.. i was baffled, the machine was switched off. It took with it a sound card and a SCSI card. I replaced the powersupply, and thought "i know, i'll run a backup".
I inserted tape into drive... "media not found", and i'll be, if the drive didn't chew the tape up and get it stuck inside!
oh what a day
See This old thread
A friend of mine had a brand new P120. He was bringing it over to my place, and as we were walking out the door, he dropped it down 3 concrete steps.
When we got it to my place, we opened it up, and the processor had been ripped out of the socket, and was hanging attached to the fan. We tried popping the processor back in, but couldn't, as half the pins had been bent pretty bad. I spent about 2 hours with the smallest blade on my pocket knife, straightening pins, trying to fit it back into the socket, straightening more pins, and finally getting it back in. We popped the fan back on, booted it up, and it worked.
The best part however, was that the hard drive had a whole bunch of bad sectors (I have no idea why...), so he took it back to the store, and since he'd bought it only a week before, they replaced the drive under warrantee. I don't think they even noticed that the frame of the case was all bent and scratched...
That was about 8 years ago, and that box is still in use as a BSD server. Not at all bad.
i spilled my bong on my laptop.
i called dell two days later after it dried out. When i talked to them i just played dumb, i was like um it doesn't turn on. the tech support guy asked me all the usual stupid questions. then they sent out a tech to my place. he looked at it, said i spilled something on it.
I was like who me?
He's like i don't care, i don't work for dell. he had them do a full system replacement.
a week later dell techs call me and are like it appears there is residue from some liquid inside your laptop.
Me: Did one of your techs spill something on my computer.
Them: uh, ok, we'll have your laptop back to you in about a week. moral of the story with proper social engineering you can get almost anything fixed on a computer in warranty, the key is just playing dumb because the tech support guy wants to keep your call time low and doesn't want to spend 30 mins just to find out he's going to replace your system. this is because tech/customer support is managed by their stats. i know this because i worked for palm a while back.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
One of the guys at work had lent me a dell computer while i was on workterm as a student. There was a small hard drive in it, so it soon proved to be insuffient. He gave me another from his desk saying "this has been kicking around for a whole so it may not work" I brought it home plugged it in and it worked fine. However since i was warned it may not work, i simply layed the drive on top of the open dell (desktop) case and did not mount it in a drive cage. It sat there for a few days working perfectally, one day i got up and accidentally bumped the leg of the table pretty hard. The drive slid and shorted out and smoked. After i unhooked the drive however the system worked perfectally.
Secondly i had a yamaha scsi burner.. a 6x burner. For some reason the yamaha would have a firmware lock on certain ocasions. The cd would complete its burn but the red light would continue to blink and the drive would refuse to eject te cd. Moaning about it on IRC one day, someone suggested that i disable the drive in win2k, unplug it, plug it back in, and then renable the drive in w2k. It was a work computer so i gave it a shot, and it worked.
I have an old C-64 (as opposed to a new one) that has withstood just about everything I could put it through. When new, my old cat subjected it to a nice bath, knocking over a full glass of water onto the back of it. Dried it off, and it worked fine. Then I dropped it off of the desk, smacked onto a hardwood floor, shattering one corner of the base.
Then it went to the attic, replaced by an 8086, with its shoe box of games (mostly pirated). It sat in an attic for five years. I live in Phoenix, so my attic can reach 250degrees, easily. Got the nostalgia bug, pulled it out, the case was EXTREMELY warped, in parts the top half was a full inch from the bottom half, thus letting the PCB inside fget covered with an cenimeter of dust.
Booted it up, let the dust fry off, it still worked. I was playing Qix and Space Taxi in no time. Yes, all of the warped 5 1/4's worked as well, even when they were dusty and discolored.
To add to all of this, I managed to mess up the AC adapter on it, causeing it to blow out copious amounts of ozone, while making a pleasant little zapping sound. I attached an different adapter and the whole thing STILL worked.
Damn tank!
The only peice of hardware more resilient is an old Atari2600, which could live through a direct nuclear attack and still run Centapede.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Comment removed based on user account deletion
well, i caused a short circuit on one my LCD displays because it was pissing me off ..
it started to smoke, and stuff.. and still worked after a few more beatings heh
I once dropped this thing down 2 flights of stairs (I was holding it by the bezel, part of which broke off in my hand). Of course, this was a long time ago. I certainly don't buy premade systems anymore. Anyway, the thing was in perfect working order. Amazing.
Of the time when my friend's sister jammed 2 tapes into the tape deck in their car.. She was 19 at the time!
Too bad I'm so late, so nobody will read this, but yesterday I was adding a server to a rack by myself. The two ServerIrons we use are on top, but only take up 1/2 depth, so I pulled them out from the back of the rack as far as I could without them falling, then from the front I balanced the IBM Netfinity 4500R 3U server.
:)
The plan was to lift the ServerIrons from the back of the rack and slide the IBM underneath. It was an attempted time saving measure. Oh, and everything still had to be plugged in and working while I did this so our web sites didn't go down -- only the new IBM 4500R was not yet running.
To make a long story short, the IBM didn't remain balanced once I moved the ServerIrons and it fell front-first 5 feet onto a tiled floor. The plastic face is smashed in a bit, the tabs that hold it on are gone and the case cover had its tabs bent so it wouldn't fit back on.
I bent the case tabs back so the case would fit back together and put on the face as best I could, booted up and it worked.
In fact, it's running our web site right now!
Oh, and don't tell my boss
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Wow, I've had my dell in a few times stemming from an unfortunate incident involving a foot, the power cord, and a 2 or 3 foot drop (broke one tab that held the keyboard in and I had to send it in twice after that for new keyboards...)
In any case, every time I had it sent in, the phone support told me to absolutely take the hard drive out (and they usually told me to take out the RAM, modem, and any minipci in it as well). I think they just didn't want the liability issues of accidently wiping out someone's files...
I had an old computer (Pentium 200MMX, IIRC) that had a bizarre failure in the power supply. It seems that one of the filtering caps or maybe an inductor in the switching portion of the power supply failed and caused a short circuit. I've never seen either of those components fail to a short, and the results aren't pretty.
I awakened to the smell of burning silicon -- not very pleasant -- and I quickly attempted to unplug the computer. Somehow, the failure had caused the ground to float and the case was sitting at a 120 volt potential; a very nasty suprise when I put my hand on the case to yank the cord.
Once I managed to get the cord out of the machine, I opened it up to survey the damage. Both hard drives had nice scorch marks on the cables, but the cables still read as good with a continuity check. Most of the other components in the machine were visibly fried; melting lacquer over the motherboard, exploded caps and the like.
I purchased almost a complete new system and threw the hard drives into the box. From the appearance of the cables, I'd guessed that each of them had a blast of 120V AC power into the connectors. Both still worked perfectly and are part of an IDE RAID stripe-set in my audio creation computer.
The drives were IBM DeskStar 10GB models.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
The most drastic case I've ever come across was a motherboard that I installed without grounding. Turned it on, nothing happened for a few seconds, then "POP!" Smoked the thing. The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think)
I'd expect that you had a capacitor fail. I don't know what that would have had to do with forgetting to "ground the motherboard".
The black leads in your AT/ATX power supply connector are the power supply grounds. The RF grounds are provided when you screw the motherboard down into the case - the little pads around the screw-holes are connected to the motherboard's ground plane and serve to take care of that requirement (although, as most of us know, a motherboard will run outside of a case - it's not recommended for RFI reasons).
If it was a new motherboard, probably it was defective. There are generally lots of capacitors on motherboards, to provide RF bypassing and power supply filtration. If an electrolytic capacitor (aluminum or tantalum) is installed backwards - or has too low a voltage rating - then it will fail. Aluminum (ordinary) electrolytics tend to fail leaky - which means that the capacitor will dissipate energy and heat up, sometimes exploding, but often just remaining there. If they pop, they often remain shorted, and cause your power supply to shut down, or damage other parts of the circuit.
On the other hand, tantalum electrolytic capacitors (generally small yellow-orange rectangular surface mount) will tend to fail shorted. They eat up a lot of current, generate a lot of heat, and pop. Once they've actually exploded, they tend to be open circuited, so they're effectively no longer there.
If this was something like a bypass or a filter capacitor, your motherboard almost certainly will no longer work as well as it was designed (ie. RF emissions, susceptibility to RF noise or power supply ripple, etc.) but if it still works well enough for you, that's good.
All the same, I'd be taking a look at what failed and replacing it. You need a very steady hand and a good iron with a clean tip, but you can replace the defective capacitor.
As for the likelihood of a motherboard leaving the factory with a badly placed or wrongly-rated capacitor, well, sh*t happens. In the late 1980s, Toyota shipped over 10,000 Corollas with missing passenger side front speakers. That's a little easier to spot than a shipment of mislabelled capacitors, or accidentally putting a spool of caps into the pick and place machine the wrong way around.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The Sony VAIO I have has been treated nicely and sucks. The display on it has alot of ghosts and only goes up to 800 x 600, the battery doesn't last any time at all, the screen used to flicker, then I find the ribbon cable to the monitor was torn (no telling how). I hate VAIO's and don't see what the rant and rave is about. Oh yeah, about the whole abused hardware. Trying to fix the VAIO's flickery screen I took it apart and had a dumbass friend of mine help me. My dumbass friend always breaks things just by looking at them, and he never washes his hair, so that would be abuse to my computer. It starts, but since the LCD cable is torn, I dunno if it still works.
Back in early 2001 I once got a solar panel that supposedly output 16 volts DC at 3 amps which was exactly what my Sony Picturebook C1VN needed. I thought it was cool to be able to power my laptop from the sun so just in case World War III broke out and the national power grid were knocked out, I'd still be able to play Diablo II.
:)
So once the panel arrived, I put it out on my roof under the hot sun and connected it the laptop. I held my breath, pressed the laptop power on button, and... bzzt! pop! The thing shut off. Dangit! And stayed off...
Perplexed, I decided to measure the output voltage of the solar panel with my volt meter. It turned out the panel was outputing 60Volts! Sheesh was there like no ozone over my city that day? Pissed that my laptop wouldn't turn on, I put it aside and tried to figure out a way that I could send it back to the manufacterer so I could get it replaced. Well, three days later the thing resurrected itself! It just mysteriously started working again and its worked ever since.
Now here's another story. The Hitachi 12 gig hard disks they put into those Sony Picturebooks were failing for picturebook users all over the place. Mine was still cranking along but one day it failed in the same manner that everyone else's Picturebook drives were failing. So I upgraded the drive with a 30 gig IBM drive.
The warranty on the Picturebook has long expired so a month ago I decided to examine the drive closer to figure out what could be wrong with it since I had nothing to lose and I needed a drive to put into an old 200mhz desktop linux box. So, I aggresivly pealed off those "If you remove this sticker, you'll void your warranty" stickers that were all over the drive, unscrewed the lid, and looked inside. I saw all these nice, clean, disk platters and heads that swept over them. I smacked the drive a few times, bonked it on my desk surface, tapped the heads with a screwdriver, and finally blew all the dust I got on the platters in the process off with my dirty, moist breath. I put the thing back together, plugged it into my 2.5" to 3.5" disk converted, hooked it up to that old 200mhz desktop, and it WORKED!
Pretty cool eh?
Hi there, A few years ago, I was relocating my home office into the basement. I had an old early 80s vintage IBM XT that I used for basic text processing tasks. As I reached the top of the stairs down to the basement, I tripped over my cat. The XT flew out of my hands, down the stairs and landed on the cement floor. The noise it made was not nice. With some trepidation, I hooked the XT back up to see if it would still work. It did -- without a hitch! The only damage from the incident was a dent in the stairs and a mark on the wall. I guess that is why old IBM machines used to be known as 'Blue Metal'. I still have the XT today and it still fires up no problem!
My primary Windows server spent quite a while outside exposed to the elements. It's an old Dell Dimension XPS-T800 with an SB Live 5.1 and WDC Caviar hard drive. It was outside in the Boston summer heat, the rain in the fall, and then the beginning of the winter snow. I brought it in and the exposed metal parts of the case like the back were a little corroded but not rusty. Everything in the computer functions fine still months later. The surprising thing is it continued to work during torrential downpours. Why did I do it? I wanted a Logitech QuickCam to watch my neighbor's yard...
Several years ago I had a GF with a 3 year old daughter. One day the daughter came into the office and wanted to play one of her Freddie Fish games. She found the cross cut office shreader with had a little 4 inch slot (you had to fold a full sheet of paper into thirds to make it fit) which looked just like the slot on her computer's front load CDRom drive. Anyway the shreader ate about 1/3 of the CD before it jammed. Hmmm. Maybe this story is off topic as the CD did not work anymore. Talk about one PO'd little kid and one funny looking CD.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
Here's something that happened about seven years ago which still amazes me to this day. I had just gotten a shiney new P116 in which I was adding an old harddrive to move my files over to the new one. This required using a Y-adaptor to power the old harddrive. Before I could plugin the Y-adaptor I had to unplug the power connector from the new harddrive which had a small pair of wires going to the processor fan.
As most people probably know, the power adaptors have a tenedency to get stuck. This was the case with the new harddrive's power cable and so when I finally managed to get it out my hand flew back jerking the little power cables running down to the processor fan. I didn't think anything of it so I finished hooking the old harddrive up and powered up my machine. At this point a bright blue spark flashed inside the chasis and the machine instantly powered down.
What had happened? The tension due to the sticky power connector had caused the processor fan's power cable to loosen and expose copper on top of the processor's heat sink. Naturally this is what cause the bright blue spark and what I thought would have fried the processor. However, upon removing the processor fan and powering the up the machine there wasn't a single problem. In fact I am still using that very same P166 today.
I had a floppy disk somewhere-- It has been dubbed many things in its time, but the most common is the Floppy of Impending Doom.
/Ex
Okay, so here's the story of the floppy of Impending Doom.
When I was 11ish, I met the first guy that programmed-- he programmed basic among other things, and I thought he was the coolest guy-- We kinda played around a bit, and eventually, he gave me a floppy full of dumb little games written in basic-- Not well written, mind you, but when you're not supposed to touch the computer, any game is cool.
Anyways, he gave me a floppy full of games. Fast forward a couple years, I had moved, and didn't have contact with this guy. I had met another guy who was into computers, and I ended up giving him a bunch of stuff on disk-- hex editors, game trainers and their ilk. Having no other disk accessible, I ended up giving him the disk of impending doom.
Fast forward, another year and a half, said friend had passed that disk around, and I ended up getting it from a friend who got it from a friend, who got it from some guy I don't know, who got it from another guy, who got it from my friend. I realized there was something special about this disk (it went through like 7 people that time. It had my original label on it, which is how I know it's the same disk.
The disk was used for a couple years a couple times a week, I didn't have a printer, so I would bring it to school/a friends house to print stuff. Eventually, I left it in the computer lab.
It made it's way around back to me, after more than 2 years, right before I graduated high school. This disk is now so old, and has so many writes on it, that I didn't trust anything I ever wrote on it-- Yet somehow it still worked fine. I brought it up to college, and, because my computer didn't have a floppy drive, I didn't use it... I ended up giving it to someone who needed it in the computer lab (I worked in the labs). Three years later, about a month and a half before I drop out of school, the disk turns up yet again. Someone left it in the computer lab, and so I grabbed it again.
At the time I was working on a search engine for a small non profit organization, which had me moving all around, so I used this disk to port my writings from place to place. I ended up leaving it with my non-profit supervisor (I was volunteer, I was having a bad time at the time, so I gave up the stuff, I didn't get paid anyway).
I'm sure that in a few years, I'll be living on the streets of some large city, and I'll find it stuck to gum in a trash container. It'll still not have a bad sector.
My cousin was coming home from Southwest Texas State University for Christmas. He fell asleep at the wheel due to lack of sleep from finals that day and rolled his car 5 times over (at 75 mph on 290 going to Houston). As this happened the computer fell out of a broken window at some point. The cd drives, case cover, and other various parts flew everywhichway. The car was totalled, but he made it out with just a few scratches, and surprisingly enough, his computer, once reassembled worked fine! Everything, the cd drive, pci cards, everything except the monitor which was shattered to pieces. He still uses it to this day.
Of course it's the current that kills you, but since I=V/R and your body's resistance is the same in Australia or the US, 240 Volts would generate a larger current.
Granted, fuses are rated in Amps and in theory you would be as safe as in a 110 V country. Still I'm more cautios where I live now than when I lived in a 110 country.
Also, here the circuit breakers have an anti-electrocution fuse. I think it trips when it senses a leakage to ground even if it isn't as large a current but i'm not sure.
My incident with a set of stairs isn't quite so bad, but it's a story of bravery and luck...
My mother used to work for a lawyer in a big office, and one day they decided to relocate to a smaller one. My mom brought home a few of their computers (amongst other stuff) to store for a few weeks until the move was complete, so I helped her carry everything in. They were nothing special, just a bunch of old p133's and such (but they got the job done since this was a few years ago), but I couldn't wait to take pictures of a huge stack of computers in my house! In our garage there's a set of 3 steps to get into the house, and I lost my balance going up them with one of the desktop cases (yes I said i fell UP the stairs, you know you've done it too)... UH OH. I plugged her in just to make sure everything was functional, but the hard drive just clicked around and wouldnt boot. I tried it in a different tower just to make sure it wasnt a loose ISA (remember ISA???) card or something, and it wasn't. Needless to say my mom was pissed because there was alot of info on there she needed, so I decided to test my luck since I was already screwed... I get out my toolset and crack open the HDD and then booted it, and noticed that the arm that the magnetic heads are on wasnt moving. I gave the arm a little push and she began going back and forth like normal (if you've never seen this you should find an old HDD and try, because its an amazing sight... almost too fast for the eye to see), so I put the cover back on and she still works today. (just on an informational note, it was a 500mb Maxtor drive). I can not tell you what a relief this was, and my mother was pretty happy too.
I do NOT recommend EVER trying this with an important drive except as a last resort, but I have done it on several occasions with the same luck.
I worked at a steel place that uses crappy computers to control the machines. Win 95/98 usually.
But the machine is just dos usually. I'd get calls that there computer was not working and come see if I could fix it. Well since there sitting so close to these huge cutting machines and they have fans they would fill up with metal shavings and die. I'd blow them out with compressed air and 9 times out of 10 I could get them to run again. I never realised how much abuse a computer could take till I worked there. Like pounds of metal inside. Years of conductive dirt and dust. Sure they eventually died but it would take 1000 years at home to get the same abuse these things got in about 6 months at the plant. Amazing. Like sitting next to a 20,000 volt plasma cutter. Like you would not think these machines would take it. Impressive. The most brutal enviroment I ever seen a computer operate in and survive. Nothing special just regular everyday pentium II usually with no filters added. Nothing. Missings cards would have holes in the case. No blanks. You could pour two pounds of dirt out of the keyboards alone. And everything conducts cause it's all metal based dirt. Life expentancy averaged about 2 years and would need to be fixed on average 4 times during that time. Even when it complety died most things inside would still work and we used the parts to build a new box.
On my 1.33GHz AMD Athlon T-Bird, I had the CPU fan die (actually, the power for the fan from the EPoX mobo died) while I was away from the comp. When I came back my temp readout was 93C so I immediately powered down. Plugged the fan into a different plug, waited a while, and powered back on. Still runs fine and stable over a year later.
On my PII-400 Linux box (and DHCP server for my network), I accidentally pulled the PCI NIC while moving the box around. After realizing that's why half my network was no longer working, I shoved it back in (comp still powered on), and everything worked. Never had to power down any machine on the network the whole time. God I love Linux.
my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell... CPU was dead, motherboard was dead, ram was dead, and harddrive had corrupted partitioin tables (But the harddrives do still work)
Heh... The morals of the story...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
my original gameboy. When i was a kid, i treated stuff like crap. I dropped that thing more times than i could remember and it never broke.
I admined an AlphaStation (I think thats the name of it), some blue box with a 300MHz cpu in it. Anyway, something went wrong on the motherboard and the machine quit working. We took it apart, and looked at it, and let it sit for a while. Later, we tried it again and it worked! We then took it apart again, and we could see one of the ICs had melted and aparently fused itself back together.
I still hate alphas though.
My other piece of durable tech is the Samsung SCH-8500 cellular phone (purchased December 2000) and I still use it. It's survived countless drops onto concrete and pavement, drops into puddles (and a toilet), being slept on, and a bad battery. I have yet to find another phone that even looks as durable yet, so I'm not replacing it anytime soon.
You are one sick son of a bitch, sir.
This is especially amusing considering that as of the era of the PSX sony couldn't make a laser unit that laster more than a few weeks to save their bottom line. Then again, they didn't have to, people bought their #### anyway. You'd nudge your discman wrong, and it would never work again. The first revision of the PSX suffered from this problem; mine died of it. But the PSOne will generally take repeated abusive beatings, being dropped on its head from four feet up or so (head meaning the lid side) and still work. Sometimes the case pops open and you lose your place in the game, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I used to work for a company who flew small planes for FedEx, I was the computer guy who made sure all the pcs worked in the main office as well as all the maintenance stations littered along the west side of the U.S.
We just bought a box of video cards from someplace, they were pretty cheap, and came like 20 to a box or somethin, no driver disks or books or anything. I was installing one of these cards in one of the computers, and when I turned it on, *smoke*.
I pulled the video card out, and for some reason every memory chip on the card had burnt up, and left a whole thru the pcb. Never seen that before, I hope to never see it again (of course it'll happen when I go buy a new radeon 9700 or somethin).
I used to also ship the computers I built to these maintenance stations, at first we used just cardboard boxes and some sort of padding, but when they got down there, it was just a big jumbled mess. They would then send it back up here, and it would be in even worse condition, but I was able to get most of them fixed. A few times we even had the cpu fall out of the socket some how, and I had to go thru and straighten every pin to get it to work again. We finally had to buy these aluminum boxes (looked like some of the cases that people who play music store their instruments in when touring or whatnot). They seemed to work pretty great but added quite a lot to the shipping price (which incidentally was with UPS, even though we were contracted by FedEx, it was still cheaper to ship stuff UPS).
I was working on my PC (one that I no longer have) a few years ago and went into the BIOS setup for something. Then I turned the tower case on its side, removed the PCI-based modem, and turned it back up. I reached for the power switch and I saw the BIOS setup was still on the screen. I hadn't exited or even shut it off. Surprisingly, there were no sparks and the modem still worked later.
A while ago my computer was having problems with my video card. I took out my gforce and started testing it with my old spare tnt2. Turns out the agp slot had a chunk missing outta the back of the slot, i kept trying to get it to work anyways. So i but the tnt2 in, turn it on, and the video card starts spewing smoke. I turn it off and find out that the card slid back in the slot and shorted all the contacts. The card melted completely, but the mother board worked fine using onboard video until i got a replacement.
Actually, their all the same. We are a Junior College and a large company just donated a ton of equipment to us over the last 2 years (the good stuff was all the 2500 and 2600 Cisco Routers along with an Adtrans and some access servers). There were nearly 2-300 Compaq Deskpros. Mostly 200-266Mhz systems. A couple Sparcs, some SGIs, an HP700 series Plotter, and more HP LaserJet IVs than I can shake a stick at.
Well, we had no place to put them. Or rather, no safe place to put them. We grabbed some space from the Welding department and put them in their cage outside. Covered roof, open front. Lucky for us, this is California, and the weather is pretty mild. But still, they've survived two winters and summers out there. Most of them work just fine. I'm using one of the Toshiba Tecra 520CDTs right now. Got win2k on it (darned video chip doesn't work with LINUX darnit). Got a few of the desktops at home I have various OSes on for playin around.
I forgot about the monitors. We had tons of NEC 15 inch monitors too.
A lot of the stuff didn't fit in the cage. So it got left outside rapped in plastic wrap. Rained on, sun dried at 100+F. Pulled into the classroom and given to A+ students to fix. And fix them they did!
I really dislike compaq stuff when I have to work on it, but this old stuff was pretty durable, if the cases were poorly layed out (giant case, can't put anything in it but what it came with, really stupid)
This also included a ton of giant rack mount servers that are heavy enough to make you beleive they were made of armor plating with the intention of surviving a war.
Oh well, thats it. Tons of mistreated equipment here. Most of it still working.
On this same note, I would like to ask if anyone else has had a similar situation? As I mentioned in the above article, I have opened old, dead hard drives on several occasions and gotten them working again, without touching anything inside.
The excuse I give to anyone who asks what I did, and to myself for explaining such a phenomenon, is that HDDs just need a little fresh air once in a while. I have to wonder if there's some truth to this poor excuse of mine. Has anyone else had similar experiences where they open a drive and it begins working again, or do we all just get extremely lucky once in a while???
Well, this happened to a friend of mine.
He had his little half-brother over for the weekend, and I suppose that he wanted to play gameboy. So what did he do? He took a gameboy game, crammed it into the CD drive of the PC, and closed the lid. (Yes, this was back in the old days. The whole drive sort of slid out of the PC on rails, and the lid popped up clamshell style).
We had to take the whole PC apart to get at the CD Drive to get the game out.
With my first PC I brought, back in 1996 it came with a Realtech 10 mbit combo network card. We tried for a couple of days to get it working in DOS and just could not get it going.
So we decided to try and fry the card and return it and get a different model. So, we put it in the oven for a cpl of minutes, got it nice and warm, then we took turns at dragging our feet over the carpet and touching the components. And then, to finish off we had a game of soccer with it (don't do this with bare feet).
So now, I take this card back to the shop to say that it doesn't work and I want a new one. They promptly throw it in a machine to test it and it works perfectly.
Anyway, a couple of days later we found the correct DOS drivers for the card, and I used the card until the end of 2001 when I moved to a 10/100 card. Also at some point in the cards life it was removed from my machine with the machine on, and still works perfectly. I still have the card now in case I ever need a reliable combo network card.
I was 16 when I built my 486DX (right when they came out). I was getting the finishing touches on it and I hadn't put the top of the case on yet. It was sitting on the floor next to my desk and I spilled a full can of sprite right through the top of the case. Luckily I only fried the $20 IO card. I was happy I didn't fry my 1MB video card, my Sound Blaster 16 or my 4MB worth of memory modules. :-) Oh how times have changed.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
One time I accidentally dropped a floppy from about 2 inches above the desk, and yet it still worked! (although I did have to completely reformat, losing the data already on it)
You just reminded me of something that happened to a friend in the late 1980s.
We were die-hard members of one of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user's groups. He had his PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) at a meeting, and was carrying it on a cart up a set of stairs. He was at the top of the stairs when it feel off the cart.
Before I continue, a word on the TI-99/4A. If there's a nuclear holocaust, I have every faith that the only survivors will be the Jews, Dodge Darts, McDonalds uniforms, and the TI PEB. You see, Texas Instruments built them out of stamped steel, with each card housed in a cast aluminum case. They were overbuilt for military use, let alone as a "home computer".
So, the PEB went end for end down the terazzo stairs. Bang, bang, bang. Little chips of terazzo breaking off the corner of each step, and a few small dents in the PEB.
He picked it up and shook it. Nothing sounded loose inside, so he hooked it up, and it still worked. Until he tried to save to a diskette.
The old full-height Shugart 5.25" double-sided single-density diskette drive now had a new feature. He could format a diskette, flip it over, and format it again. One of the heads was now halfway between tracks, so the net effect was that he had a four-sided diskette. 360k to a 5.25" diskette, while the rest of us were only getting 180k.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I freind once gave me 3 386 boxes that been through a flood, under 6 ft. of water at his warehouse. All were covered with fine layer of silt from the river,I pulled them apart,hosed them of with warm water,dish soap and compressed air,rinsed them in clear water and set them on the heater vent overnite.All but one HD survive to this day!
but won't leave the kitchen either.
/home/movies) still works fine, the IBM has already had to have been replaced after 2 months and as of a couple of weeks ago Bad Noises (tm) have started coming out of the iBM drive again.
I had this 40GB Maxtor drive that was way too noisy with a high frequency (around 12 khz) tone that drove me crazy. Short of throwing it away, I decided to muffle the sound by putting sound absorbing rubber foam around it. Temperature inside rose by 20 C and I expected it to die within 2 days, so I bought an IDM DTLA for the system.
While the totally overheated Maxtor (only used for
Oh, and that's in the computer my friend unknowingly had one of the power suppy cables stuck in the processor fan. Compiling a kernel stopped with a bad Ooops after 3 Minutes. We did this 4 or 5 times, thinking it was the video card, only then noticing the lack of processor fan noise. The Athlon 1 Ghz today still works like a charm.
I also have this cheap notebook (Gericom) that sometimes refuses to start at all. Frustrated with it, I gave it a friendly kick, dropping the front from 15 cm on a flat table. I found out that in 60 to 70% of the cases it then decided to start up. Thank god the new Dell is of another class qualitywise.
Although I wasn't personally there, some friends of mine have a great story about an NEC NEAX PBX. It's probably about the size of 5 refrigerators. We're talking a huge system, supporting thousands of phones, tons of trunks, and a sh*tload of power supplies.
Anyway, the basement of a hospital flooded with this thing in it. The PBX was under several feet of water for a while. Oh, did I mention they hadn't done a backup in months?
After removing the water, they carefully dried everything out. The reconnected power and were
able to fire it up (probably just the CPU module) just long enough to get a full backup. From there it was "simply" a matter of installing a new switch and restoring from backup.
----- obSig
The old hard drives that came with the mac SE's had the same problem.
The solution?
Take off the back cover of the SE, and power it on. If the drive didn't spin up, remove the drive screws, but leave it attached to the MB by the cable. Hold the drive horizontally, and quickly jerk it clockwise 180 degrees.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. The last ditch solution was to take the drive cover off and spin it up yourself. That usually killed the drive after a few times, though.
Last summer, we were experiencing a particularly violent storm. At one point, lightning struck a powerline going into the house, and it traveled in causing incredible damage to all the electronics in our house. Altogether, it destroyed a TV, a router, a hub, a scanner, two phones, an XBox and all four controllers, and three PCs. The insides of all the electronics were totally fried. The sole machine that survived the strike: my (at the time) new flat panel iMac. It didn't even crash! Every other machine on the network was destroyed, massive internal damage to the hardware, stuff melted together and everything, and my iMac didn't crash. The only damage to it was that the network card was fried. A quick trip to the nearest Apple repair shop, and I was back up and running while we were all still waiting for new PCs in the mail.
If you want to see something really amazing, read about the "Baked Apple." http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/06/ 1447229&mode=thread&tid=133&tid=180
My husband left the back of our truck open on I80 in south dakota and at some point my laptop bag fell out. Some nice people picked it up and shipped it to me (isn't the midwest grand?). The bag had clearly met it's match with the highway, and I feared the worst, but aside from a couple of dents it works as well as ever.
In my early adolescent years, if I got killed at a really irritating point in any of my ZX Spectrum 128K +2 games I would put the computer on the floor and jump up and down on the keyboard until I'd vented my frustration. Don't forget that the CPU and Mobo was sitting directly under the keyboard, so this was not particularly bright behaviour. Of course, the keyboard became exceptionally bent, but even to this day, the machine still works fine. How's that for build quality?
When I was about 12 yrs old I had a 16k Sinclair Spectrum. I saved up my pocket money and bought another whopping 16k of memory. Quickly casting aside the instructions, I pulled open the case and shoved the chips in where there was space (bending legs as I went). On powering up the thing I was presented with a screen full of flashing purple and green ASCII characters and no amount of leg straightening and chip repositioning made any difference. Defeated, I pulled the chips and sent them back to the manufacturer with a note saying that they must be damaged and could I have my money back (which I would need to pay someone less clueless to fix my now dead Speccie). I got a package back from them with a nice note attached telling me how to insert the chips and also where I should put the other chips I had sent back to them - CPU, IO controller, etc. Basically the guts of my Spectrum had survived two encounters with the Royal Mail. Unfortunately the Speccie had a sad end - it melted due to overheating of the memory :(
I learnt my lesson and no longer immediately throw the instructions away.
We had an HP Vectra in our shop that would lock up frequently and the IT department wouldn't replace it.
We also had hand held tesla coils that would throw a continuous spark at 2 ".
We zapped the motherboard, CPU and just about everything else for about 10 minutes.
The darned Vectra WOULD NOT DIE!!!
A few months later IT finally gave us an new computer.
BOFH = Bastard Operator From Hell.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I was in college and having a beer while cleaning my room. I popped the top of my Apple ][e to wipe the dust out, and stupidly rested the bottle on a stack of books nearby. Next thing I knew, I bumped into the desk, the bottle fell into the computer, and dark, sticky beer poured over the 80 column card, the Super Serial card, the super-sexy 1 meg RamWorks card -- everything!
I yanked out the power cord, pulled every card, and stuffed a towel in there. I wiped off every surface on the inside I could reach with a warm, damp cloth and let it dry for a few days with the top open. I washed off the cards and set them aside to dry for a few days.
At the end of the week, I put it all back together and everything worked without a hitch.
... that an apple pie fell smack in the middle of my case, which was open at the time, splattering part of the motherboard with sugary goo.
I remember seeing the pie fall as if I were in bullet time, tumbling down towards the CPU. I still didn't quite manage to catch it before it fell though (I guess that proves that I'm not The One...)
Anyways, it probably took me 1/10th of a second to turn it off and pray that nothing was damaged. To my surprise, after cleaning it all up and waiting for it to dry, it still worked perfectly!
I am not sure if this is true, but around 1998 I was looking into Laptops and I came accross a story of a Toshiba which had been blown up by a bomb squad.
/. Sand_Pillar I would really like to have my name back. I can be reached at
As the story went, a guy who worked in a government building had loast his laptop. He had forgotten all about it because much time had passed and it had not been returned. Some time later a package arived for him and when it went through the scanner to come into the building it looked quite suspicious with wires and batteries and such. The security people asked if he was expecting anything, and when he said no they called the bomb squad. They arived, looked at the package and figured, "well he is not expecting anything, we will dispose of it as a bomb." So they stuck it in the canister and blew it up!
Anyway, after it was blown up, they removed the parts and dicovered it was a laptop. Aparently the process of destroying bombs does not require a great amount of explosives, just enough to detinate the suspected bomb. So, this guy had a Toshiba in pieces parts. The monitor was destroyed and the case all messed up, but he took it up to his office, plugged in an external, and a keybord and it booted right up.
Now, I do not know if this is true, because I only read it on the web, which is like lying and saying you heard it on NPR, but it sounded feasable and the stroy had lots of details that made me belive it.
I have used Toshiba's ever since.
Also, while I am at it... I am not an Anonymous Coward, I am Sand_Pillar, but it seems my name has been hijacked. Go figure. If you are, or know, the
floortom53@hotmail.com
Also, if you do get the guy, you're likely to be pissed and may hurt him more than the law allows. A "lucky" blow could cripple the thief and land you in jail yourself. A $200 palm pilot simply isn't worth it. Try to get a good description of the guy for the police, and check with your credit card company as to whether your purchases are insured.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
My friend had an Amiga 600 back in the day it was new and his sister was having a party while we were chilling out and sneaking beers (we were like 13 or 14 at the time). Totally drunk off his ass, my friend pours a 3/4 full can of beer on his running Amiga, saves all his open files WITH THE BEER INSIDE, turns it off, pours the beer out, and boots it up perfectly. He also used to hot-swap hard drives with that thing, but the file system he used was so sturdy (he claims) that he could unplug a hard drive in the middle of a file transfer and it would not only still run, but it would pick up where it left off. I never saw this feat myself though, so I don't know if he was bullshitting me or not.
The Abstruse One
The ABSTRUSE One
Jason Byrons
"You all laugh at me because I'm different
I laugh at you because you're a
I had a customer bring in a Packard Bell 486 that got hit by a surge (Lightning strike through the modem and power cables). We replaced the modem/sound card combo and the PS, and the unit came up. The HDD didn't spin up, so we also replaced it. I looked at the board on the bottom of the drive, and the only damage I could see was to 2 surface-mount caps to the 12v and 5v lines. I removed the caps, put it in my test machine, and it powered up fine. This was a Seagate 720mb drive, which was huge at the time. It stayed in my test machine for the next year and a half and worked like a charm.
"put a gun to my head, paint the walls with my brains." -Jack
One Monday at work we found a water tank in the attic of the admin building had flooded the room below. The carpet was soaked along with a half dozen PCs. I picked one up and water scooshed out from the case. We stacked everthing in a dry room for three days, then plugged it all in again and switched on the power using a long pole. Would you believe it, only a couple of keyboards had died.
On another occasion a collegue managed to plug in a stick of RAM the wrong way around. When removed, it burnt my fingers it was so hot. Feeling certain it would now be dead, I stuck it back in the right way around, but sure enough it worked just fine.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Had a box start going wiggy...a local "guru" told me the CPU was toasted. I took him at his word and pulled the CPU, bought a replacement, then took the bad one to the sink and proceeded to vigorously scrub the thermal grease off with hand brush and dish soap (was going to show it to some neighborhood kids).
Rejumpered and dropped my spiffy new P200 in and...you guessed it, the board had toasted. Swore, bought new board, mounted it and in a fit of perversion threw the old CPU...now dry...in it.
Fired right up. In fact it powered another box for about 3 years, before I upgraded again.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I should clarify what caused the fire. An LED is essentially just a short circuit, but only when it is hooked up in the right direction. Had I reversed that connector, the thing just wouldn't have turned on.
LEDs don't need much power, so the wires were tiny. But by connecting them to wear the switch should go, they were hooked straight to the power supply! The tiny wires heated up just like an electric stove under the full force of the 250W power supply.
Amd Cpus are tough, who needs a thermal protection like a p4 if you can burn them up and they still work, the first amd cpu I got was a 900 and thought that you could test it without the heatsink for a minite or two with out any harm(I was used to pentium cpus for crying out loud), the thing shot smoke, but after i learned that you need a heat sink i plugged it back in and it works fine to this very day...
I don't get it.
...There was a POS Cyrix based machine (200mhz cyrix processor, 16mb ram, 2.1 gig HD, Cirrus Logic based gfx card, and OPL based soundcard). I decided that I wanted to up the video card - So I bought a Diamond Stealth II s220 (With good ole' Rendition support) and slapped the sucker in. Worked fine... For about 3 months. Then the sucker ignited for a few seconds, burned the hard-drive, and the motherboard. Swapped the thing out and put in a new card, worked for a few weeks. Swapped the mobo out and used on-board video, worked great for another year. Then, for some odd reason, the hard drive gave up :)
The machine worked for a total of 2 years.
I've actually heard that often times American current can be more dangerous because it runs at 60 hz. This causes your muscles to clench up more tightly than they do at 50 hz, so if you've grabbed something you didn't know was live, you've got a harder time letting go.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
In the mid 90's, hurricane Andrews drown and 'blew away' Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and it was closed permanently.
I was at another base at the time, and my base's IT requirements were growing rapidly, so we had set the 'we want hardware' flag.
Lo and behold a bunch of 3B2 servers arrived, running an antiquated UNIX, AT&T system V release 3, right from the ex Homestead AFB. Most of them were in primo condition, but a couple of them had mouldy, green-stained horizontal lines a few inches above the bottom of the unit. We found out later these servers had been standing in that much hurricane Andrews water for a good while.
Being young, well employed and stupid at the time, I plugged one of the drown ones in and fired it up! To my amazement, the thing seemed to work perfectly!
At least one of those servers was still in production use several years later when I left.
I have to give AT&T credit, at least back then: they built some seriously resistent enterprise class hardware. Years later, I communicated with one of my ex-co-workers, who decommisioned one of those boxes. He said they found some tiny, desiccated minows in the server case after they took it apart.
Absolutely amazing!
I had my old Pioneer PD-S501 CD player in the checked-in luggage on a domestic flight a few years ago - in a soft bag with some clothes and stuff.
I arrive and lo, the top of the CD player's case has become severly deformed. As if someone jumped on it. No problem, I thought, and took off the cover and bent it back. But something was ratteling inside the case. Huh, I thought, some plastic crap must have broken off, so I turned the chassi upside down, and out fell...
the laser lens.
The thing is dead, I thought. But not known for giving up easily, I ofcourse had to try and glue it back on.
This CD player is still my main CD player - for 11 years now.
there is no spoon
I once droped my Sony Vaio (running at the time) onto the asphalt. Hit square on a corner. Not only did the screen work fine, there was no damage to any of the other hardware. The worst of the damage was just a little scratching to the case (which now, it has considerably more of), and still ticking like the day I got it.
-Atrox
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
1) Found a Mac SE in a skip at the local University. I think it had been there for several days, sitting at the bottom of the skip in a pool of water, completely waterlogged. Took it home, dried it out in a warm place for a couple of days and it worked fine. Shouts of joy when it went 'Dong' the very first time it was turned on!
It was then sprayed blue with car paint, stencilled with yellow cheese motifs, named 'The Cheese Machine' and used for comedy sounds efects at gigs, but that's another story.
2) In my innocent youth, tried cooling the CPU in my 6502 BBC micro by putting a plastic bag of ice on the overheating-prone ULA. Bag wasn't watertight and water spread over the PCB. Micro kept going, amazingly.
3) Within 20 minutes of receiving a new Thinkpad laptop at work, somehow had managed to get the power cable caught in my swivel chair and when I spun round to talk to someone, swept the (running) machine off the desk and onto the floor. It never missed a beat and no probs reported on the disk.
4) There must be more... I can't remember now!
I accidentally dropped my Sony Vaio XG18 down a flight of stairs (about 13 steps) onto an uncarpeted tile/cement floor. Except for the DVD ROM, which broke when its tray shot out during the fall and just about disintegrated, the laptop booted fine afterward and is still going strong more than a year later.
I also once popped a resistor off of an Abit motherboard while trying to remove the CPU fan with a screwdriver (I know, I know, you don't even have to say it). However, it turned out that all the particular resistor did was monitor the motherboard temperature. Thank the gods for Abits ridiculous number of Mbd features.
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
After letting the computer cool off and dry off, he cleaned off the chemical residue from the fire extinguisher. He put in a backup floppy, turned it on, and it ran! (Note 5110 booted from ROS, but applications resided on floppies.)
They don't make 'em like they used to.
Few years ago I had a fall off the motorcycle with a Dell CPI laptop in the backpack. No real padding, just wrapped in a sweater. It still worked fine, but the rear bezel was smashed in. It was an $8 part so no big deal. Bought a new bezel. Later that year, the hard drive crashed and got it replaced under warranty. Gee Dell, I have *no* idea how that could've happened. :-)
The lesson is, don't leave home without your padded case. Mobilecomputing had a good review of them here, drop tests and all.
Still, those Dell CP cases had some pretty flimsy LCD hinges. Always feel creaky and wobbly, and I always try to treat them delicately.
When I buy something, I'm lucky it works and I'm even more lucky it works beyond the end of the warranty period. For the stuff that fails inside of the warranty period, I'm lucky to get repairs or replacements.
Very little to brag about for me. I once had a Conner hard drive that never had a single problem. The keyboard I'm using hasn't failed yet, but it's still fairly new.
How about connecting it up to a rather large 5KV capacitor bank (near bottom of page)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i just took the battery off and let it dry overnight, next day hooked it all up and it was fine. Ran fine for a few more years until my wife dropped it onto concrete from a great height :/
---- Put Sig here:
We designed a SCSI controller for a motherboard. A board munufacture found some failures at higher temperatures, so while trying to replicate the failure we put a PC (well, all the components, but no case) in our temp-forcer and let the testbench run overnight. We belive it was the power supply that blew first, but somehow the inside of the oven reached over 700F before security shut it down. It reflowed the solder on the board, and the P3 simply melted. The die was totally exposed and about 2 inched from were it should have been.
:(
-There is no sign the oven failed.
-The mainborad doesn't work, as all the caps exploded,
-the hard drive worked for a few weeks, but failed. The platters seem be warped, but
-The RAM and video card (ATI I believe) are still in use!!.
New rule, no more unsupervised temperature tests
Many years ago, in a town far far away (Melbourne)...
I purchased an ISA sound card with an attached ATAPI CD drive (1x, pull out tray, when CD is in - busy light is always on). The guys as the computer shop put it in and installed the software. I heard noises coming from the speakers, sounding like interference from the hard drive.
I opened the manual and it said move it to move the card to a different slot. So I opened my 486 DX2 66 MHz, and pulled out the ISA sound card and put it in the bottom-most slot (I think it was a VESA slot for display adapters). Turned on computer, BEEP BEEP BEEP, smell of burning electronics, no screen display. (Adrenaline pumping, had I ruined my first non family (ie my own) computer?)
Put card back into original slot.
Took it back to shop, paid $75 and got a double speed CD/sound card put in. Everything still worked although the faint smell still lingered.
Now I'm patching firmware, adding cards & RAM, changing jumpers, over clocking, cleaning the fans/heatsinks on the display card, the processor and the power supply. I make sure there is no power going to the computer now...
The hammer has been repeatedly and forcefully beaten with rocks, nails and many other hard, tough things. While it may be susceptible to damage by fire, an inexpensice upgrade to an aluminium shaft should all but eliminate this possible weak point in an otherwise invincible product.
The palmtop (A Handspring Visor Edge, circa 2002) has been through almost as much; it's been dropped off of tables onto carpeted floors, dropped from chest-hight onto supermarket tiled floors and thrown onto thinly carpeted concrete floors during a poorly conceived Captain Kirk-style wrist-flip at school. It was even dropped and stepped on once (its most recent misfortune), but escaped having sustained only minor cosmetic damage and a slightly dabaged hinge. Some superglue engineering fixed that though.
I won't bore you with the story of how my brother securely held onto an iMac motherboard by placing his unearthed sweaty palms across the contacts on the underside of the PCB, but I will mention that the computer worked perfectly afterwards...
I had just built a sweet new system (dual AthlonMP 1600s), and was doing something inside it (putting in another disk, I think.)
:)
I put the case back on, powered it up, and started messing around in Linux. About 10 minutes later, it locked up... I hit the reboot switch, muttering something about how horribly instable Linux seemed all of a sudden.
It wouldn't boot. It wouldn't POST. It took me a while to think it might be a hardware issue. I eventually went into the BIOS's system monitor... CPU0 was at about 45 degrees C (normal), okay, so what gives? If I recall correctly, CPU1 was at like 150 C!! (It sounds absurdly high, so I might be wrong.)
I powered it down REAL fast, realizing that my precious new system was probably toasted. (No pun intended.) I ripped the side off (it's a removable side, I'm not a total spaz *grin*), to find... An extra hard drive connector lodged in the CPU fan. Whoops!
Anyway, after opening it up and having a huge fan blow on it for a few hours, I booted it up and it worked fine. (Although I ended up replacing the fan and heatsink, since it didn't give readings to the BIOS, although it did work fine otherwise.)
The wires are run meticulously now.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I got a little hot tempered while installing linux on my 486 a while back and plugged a 36x CDROM in while it was running. The CDROM doesn't work any longer and it burnt a weird little stain into the CDR that was in the drive. I had to redownload that disk.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
same keyboard since 1998..
Once I spilled a large container of water on a running IBM Thinkpad. The screen almost immediately went black and shut down. Before I could turn it off, it was dead. It was totally waterlogged. I blew off as much water as I could with some compressed air, then placed it in the oven on extra-low for about 15 minutes carefully monitoring the temperature. (seriously) [In retrospect I probably should have done this.] Anyway, I gave it the night off and in the morning it booted with no problem. That was about 6 months ago. It is still running fine. Go ThinkPad!
I was installing more memory into a computer but it was so dark that I could not see what I was doing. I managed to get the memory stick in completly backwards and it cliped so I thought it's got to be right cause it fits. like both clips locked.
Not ! It didn't like that. It got ill trying to post and smelled funny. I took it out turned it around and now it works just fine. I'm using right now, same machine.
I once had a Canon BJ-200e that one of my cats spilled hot chocolate right into the hopper for the paper. Into the tub it went for a good soak and rinse. A week of dry time, a new cartridge and it was printing again. The guy that clued me in to this told me they did this to monitors. I don't know about that but it worked for the printer.
At the college where I'm a Systems Tech, one of the instructors watered her dead, dry plant which was sitting atop her gateway tower. Needless to say, I pick the box up, i'm walking through the hallways with this computer dripping a trail behind me. I get back to the tech bench, dissassemble everything (even took the case off the powersupply) and let it dry with fans on it over the weekend. Monday morning, the box was reassembled, and booya it worked. My guess is the water tripped the psu's short circuit protection, and everything else just got wet, but was turned off...
Once, after programming and installing a replacement EPROM, I noticed that it seemed to have come equipped with an internal lightbulb. Hm, I thought, interesting. Why did they....holy shit, it's in BACKWARDS! Powerdown, wait to cool, turn it around--Presto!
I decided not to use it on general principles, but it did work.
In the wrong hands, sanity is a dangerous weapon.
I've gone through one event with my PS2 that quite amazed me. It was the end of the semester, so I've got everything packed up to move out of my dorm. I have my PS2 sitting on my bed until I get around to putting it in my car. I also have my window open, because I'm in Texas, and I'm on the third floor of a building without terribly good airconditioning. My bed, by the way, is right next to the window. Then, I leave to go get some dinner.
While I'm at dinner, it starts lightly raining. I hardly pay any attention to this fact, since my umbrella had already been packed into my car. It starts raining a little harder, then harder, and by the time I get back to my dorm, there's a full fledged thunderstorm raging. The parking lot of my campus hasn't got very good drainage, so on the way back I'm walking through like 3 or 4 inches of water at some parts. Just as I get up to my dorm building, I begin wondering if I ever closed the window...and then I think about all the stuff under the window...
Although it's clearly too late to do anything now, I bolt up the stairs and to my dorm, with the sinking realization of what I'm going to find behind the door. I walk in, my bed is soaked, and the PS2 is dripping wet. I take it over to the sink, and turn it on the side, and water just pours out of the thing. I was sure I no longer had a working PS2.
However, I wait several days with the thing turned on it's side to get all the water out, then I plugged it in and turned it on, expecting nothing at all to happen. Lo and behold, the thing works beautifully. You'd never know it had been so exposed to the elements.
This same PS2, just a few months before, I had taken a good 5 foot drop down to the (non-carpetted) floor, and kept on working fine...I don't know what it's going to take to destroy this thing (should the day ever come that I want to)
However, the funniest part about this story is, I have a friend who owns a PS2 and takes excellent care of it. Keeps it in a place where there's very little dust, keeps it on a flat surface which isn't carpetted so the fans can work adequately, etc. Yet his won't even read CDs anymore, and he's had to send it in to Sony to let them take a month to replace the dvd-rom drive so he can play Contra, as well as some PS1 games. Clearly, during the year between the first batch of PS2's being released and the time I purchased mine, Sony learned how to make things indestructable.
This happened about six months ago at my workplace. I finally got a new computer to replace my old one. The new machine was smoking. Brand-new top of the line Athlon, powerful graphics card, the works. So I put that baby on my desk next to the old machine and start transferring some video capture cards.
I'm prying loose the slot covers for two of the PCI slots on the new box, and my screwdriver slips. The lowest cover bends at an odd angle, and it takes me a while to pry it loose and fit the board.
I turn the PC on... Nothing. With horror, I remember the scraping noise the slot cover made when the screwdriver slipped. Surely enough, I notice a scrape on the motherboard that's sliced cleanly through one (yes, ONE) channel. Shit. It's very near the edge, and I'm pretty sure it's just cut one channel, unless there are other layers beneath.
After a lot of cursing, I take the box home and I carefully drop a dollop of solder with the ole iron exactly on the cut, hoping to bridge the severed connection. It worked. I'm still running that PC at work, and I've never had any problems with it.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Not really computer stuff, but I once peed on my vcr and dvd player. The vcr (Toshiba) no longer powers on and the dvd player (JVC) works fine, but sometimes the disc tray does not want to close. I don't do this kind of thing anymore.
A buddy of mine, after getting severly aggrivated when he was blue-screened during a competition Quake match, carefully ripped out all the cables in the back of his case, picked the entire PC up by the his two Voodoo 2 SLI pass thru cables, carried it out to the yard, spun twice and lanched the entire rig 25 feet into my backyard (he's my neighbour too).
The entire case was bent, cards popped out, I could have sworn he cracked the mobo. After about 5 minutes of picking grass out of the drive bays and popping the cards back in the slots... it worked, perfectly!
A coworker and I picked up a couple of 21" SGI moitors for $10. The catch - they had taken a tumble down a flight of stairs. If you have ever moved an old unix monitor, you know they are _extremely_ heavy.
.
:) I'll post a link to a picture of it if I get a chance.
The cases on both monitors are completely destroyed, and both partially work. We managed to make one almost perfectly working monitor from the two.
Hillarity insued when I tried to diagnose a heat soak problem, with one while talking on a cell phone. I had touched the CRT's coil wire with my hand (it is covered in dielectric grease ), I watch sparks envelope my hand and I managed to through my cell phone across the office (it still works as well)
Battered and beaten we still have one SGI monitor working
A few years ago, my roommate left his laptop (I believe it was a NEC) on the living room floor overnight. When he woke up the next morning, he found that my other roommates's dog had pissed all over the keyboard.
After a cleaning and drying it worked fine.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
While cannibalizing some old P-133's and combining parts into some newer machines, I noticed that the motherboards each had 2 SRAM video chips soldered to the board and 2 empty sockets the same size to "upgrade".
Since they were goners anyway and I didn't fell like messing around too much I took a chip puller and YANKED the chips out cold. Ripped 'em out of the motherboards with much ugliness.
Straightened the legs out, cleaned them up a bit, popped 'em into the boards that were staying around and 4 out of five chips worked fine. I got high res on these old clunkers!
Well OK, a 6th chip broke in half before I learned the "technique".
I have an inspiron 7000 that I use at the office all the time for checking e-mail and surfing the web, and it goes on trips with me for the same purposes. At the time when it was still shiney and new, and the only laptop in the office with a DVD-ROM, I hadn't been getting much sleep and so I was chugging down Coke Slurpies like crazy. So one time I turn around and my elbow knocks a 3/4 full 32 oz Coke Slurpy right onto the keyboard of my laptop. One small zZzzt and it powered off.
Needless to say, not too happy about this. So I removed the DVD-ROM drive, the hard drive, and the battery, and took it into the bathroom. I proceeded to pour a few gallons of water through the keyboard, and then I stuck it in a corner for a few days. After I thought it had enough time to dry, I put the drives and battery back in and plugged it in. Came right back with no problems. To this day (this happened about 2 years ago) the laptop works great, although the DVD drive is still just a little sticky.
A friend of mine bought a 486 33Mhz at a time when they were the ultimate bleeding edge, all tricked out with the best video and sound he could buy. He wasn't rich at the time either--he got it on a two year installment plan, but he loved it, and named it Betty. Six months after he bought it, there was fire in his building, a small three story walkup with a pizza place on the main floor. He had to leave everything inside, and he watched in horror as smoke and sparks poured out of the room with the computer in it--and fire hoses poured water in. When he was able to get back in the next day, all the disks in the shelf above the computer were partially melted, and the computer and monitor had icicles on them (yes, it was winter.) He brought it over to a friend's place, took it apart and let it dry for three days, and then put it in the bathtub and turned it on, just in case it caught fire when the power hit it. The only thing that was wrong was that the hard disk needed reformatting. For 12 years he had this scorched, smoke stained PC (it went from light beige to dark brown in the fire) that ran like a swiss watch. Eventually it was relegated to a Red Hat Firewall, and he just retired it last year and passed it on, still working.
My boss (being too cheap to spring for professional movers) tasked a co-worker and myself with moving a brand-new $11,000 HP8550 printer to a building across town. I'm sure everyone has seen this printer or one similar to it. It's stands around 4 feet tall while sitting precariously atop its optional bulk paper tray on aluminum wheels. I imagine the assembled unit weighs over 200lbs as it's delivered on a pallett.
There was trouble when we got to the building lobby. The building manager refused to let us roll the printer safely out the lobby doors. We decided to use the service ramp behind the building instead. We backed the U-Haul van up close to the ramp and opened the rear doors.
What happened after this is still the subject of much debate in our office but my version of the story is this:
My partner figures he can roll the printer down the ramp from behind, but he quickly loses his grip and the thing starts rolling and picking up speed. Thinking he can stop it by jamming up the wheels, he sticks his foot under the front end. Unfortunately, all this does is set a spin on the printers motion. After 4-5 bounces off the steel railing along the service ramp, the printer is met by the rear bumper of the van and is essentially cut in half. One piece, the printer (and top 3 paper trays) is laying slanted against a wheel well in the back of the van. Piece #2 (the bulk paper loader) is on its side under the van.
Damage Assessment:
* The top and bottom halves of the unit are held together by steel(?) cotter pins inside the chassis that mate to receptacles on either side. 2 of the pin/receptacle joints were busted off completly. The other 2 were just ripped out of place and could be re-inserted.
* Minor scratching where the spinning printer bounced off the steel railing and where it hit the van's bumper. It functions normally, but I can never collect my print jobs without being reminded of what happened.
I've got a water-cooled dual-P3 system that was running IDE hardware RAID in striped mode. Two arrays, four drives. Then I bought new desks. When finalizing placement of the radiator, a nipple broke off, and because I was almost done, the pump was already running. Spew, spew, spew. Very little actually got inside my system. I checked, checked again, mopped up a tiny bit. Turned it on. "Pop". Nasty noise from a hard drive. No boot. Shut down, diagnosed. Hard drive failure. Was sitting in a puddle. Actually, two of them were. One from each array.
Well, one came back once it dried off. The other one wouldn't spin up. Swapped boards, drive still dead. Got annoyed. Whacked it. It spun up. Clearly stiction.
I actually was able to recover the data from both arrays before the stictioned drive died, a month later. I'm still running on one of the arrays while the other drive is being sent to IBM for RMA.
Yes, it was a Deskstar. Yes, it was one of those 75GXPs that are notorious for dying. Still, it deserved to die after that. Its twin works great still.
"Oh no... he found the
My current laptop, the day I got it, a piece of rubber under the keyboard was hanging out, then somehow, it tore completely. The spacebar stopped working, and maybe the 'B' key. I was able to wedge the rubber back under, and it still works today (1+ year later).
One time I left the window open near the computer and it rained...not realizing, I sat down at the keyboard, but the keyboard did not work. It was soaked. I turned off the PC, let the keyboard dry out, and it came back.
One time, while building a series of PC's for a customer, I wired the power switch backwards (this was awhile ago). When I plugged it in, it made a big spark and noise, destroying not only the mis-wired power supply, but the power supplies of 5 other systems that were running burn-in that were attached to the same power supply. After replacing all the power supplies, the compters were fine.
Another time I moved a RAID array from one cabinet to another; this particular RAID array had a switching power supply, and not an auto-switching power supply. It had come from a 220V cabinet, and went to a 110V cabinet. it ran for a few minutes before beginning to smoke. That one, too, needed a new power supply.
Another time, a guy I know was playing with a brand-new HP N4000 (they had just come out) with hot-pluggable PCI cards. So had tried to hot-unplug a $5000+ Gig Ether card. It made an ENORMOUS arc, he was dazed for a minute, the mainboard was fried, and the whole circuit blew out.
If I can remember any more, I'll post em here.
From one of the Mac news sites a couple of months ago, can't remember which one:
A woman brings her Titanium PowerBook into a Mac repair shop. For some inexplicable reason she had put it in the oven for 20 minutes.
All the keys had popped off, the casing was scorched and the screen was cracked, but it still booted. External ports were fine -- a monitor and keyboard were attached and everything worked.
Pictures are here. They have no idea why she did it.
The first place I interned had a real simple set-up for calibrating pressure sensors. It consisted of a column of water which was adjusted using an R.C. fuel pump connected to a large D.C. bench top power supply. Idea was that the operator would pump the water column up to a known height and compare that to the reading from the sensor. Well, one day the pump failed, and the water column drained back into the gallon milk jug that acted as a resevour for the water column. Unfortunitly, the water colum contaied more than a gallon of water. The milk jug ended up overflowing into the power supply which was strategically placed under the gallon jug.
My thought when I saw this happening was "oh shit!", especially considering the supply was turned on at the time. Fortunitly, the water drained straight out through the bottom of the supply and never touched the electronics. All I did was use shop air to blow out the water and it worked fine.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
I used this graphic calculator for 7 years....still have it buried in a closet somewhere...I would intentionally drop it to show people how durable it was....had broken pens leak on it repeatedly....and never had a problem.....except for the time it returned 3 when I entered 1+1 (j/k)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I have two PC's that were stolen from my Father's school and dumped in a ditch in a park for around 4 months (they were Cyrix 586's - I guess the theifs realised. :).
The police somehow got a hold of them and gave them back (They were engraved with the schools name). It had been raining heavily since they were stolen so there was dirt and grass all through them.
I dried them out in the sun for a few days and fired them up. Power Suppy - Worked. Motherboard - Worked. Speed64 graphics card - Worked. Keyboard - Worked. In fact, everything worked on one of the two machines. The floppy, CDROM, Hard Drive, Sound card, the works! On the other one, corrosion had set in around the CMOS battery and a spider had set up a nest of eggs there (maybe it was warm?) so I couldn't get any CMOS settings to stick. But even so, all of the components worked as I tested them in the other PC!
I couldn't believe it!
I have dropped this thing at least a dozen times and it's been soaked in the rain a couple times... Still no problems!
[o]_O
Ack! It's Negative Acceleration, not Deceleration. My Physics 30 teacher used to get really ticked off when people said deceleration. He was great.
So I do amateur astronomy when I get the time, and about two years or so ago I built a digital camera for my telescope. So I was out in my yard with the laptop hooked up to the digital camera which was hooked up to the telescope and I set it to do a nice 10-minute exposure. I turned it on and went in the house to scarf whatever I could in 10 minutes.
:( It had shorted and was now off, and so I brought it in the house and took it completely apart when I found it wouldnt boot. After FOUR DAYS of letting it dry out, it finally booted successfully!!!! I was sooooo happy! The digital camera also took no damage, as it was housed very well (homebuilt!).
On my way back out I looked in the yard and I was scared to death at what was happening. My sprinkler system was on full boar, and my laptop and my telescope with Go-To mount, and my digital camera were all SOAKED.
I imediately ran out, and turned off the sprinkler system, and went to check the damages. The telescope was fairly water-proof and housed pretty well, and it worked fine with no problems. The laptop was a different story.
I still hate automatically sprinkler systems.
Bill
-Bill
I had mine opened for repairs once. During this period I had become ill and puked all on the inside of the system. After some shoddy cleaning it worked again. (no better than before, however)
It's January. It's Minnesota. It's fucking cold, snowy, and icy. I'm walking across campus to my campus job, with my Powerbook 520c in my backpack.
I am 6'2" and 185 lbs. I slip on the ice, go completely horizontal and land flat on my back with a teeth-rattling thud.
With a sick feeling in my stomach, I get up and walk the rest of the way to work, sit down in my cube, pull the thing out of my bag, expecting the worst.
It boots. Not only does it boot, there's nary a blown pixel, the floppy drive checks out okay, the hard drive works. The only damage is a cosmetic chip in the monitor frame.
You knew Apple made slick laptops, but tough? This thing also got knocked off my desk twice (once during some great sex), and had a Mt. Dew spilled into the keyboard.
I sold the thing on eBay in late 1998 and got $600 for it. I still miss that little bastard.
blog |
I once plugged a wire from the motherboard of a friends computer into a spot on his hard drive. I honestly don't know what the wire was for, or WHY it fit on the drive.. but he turned it on and black smoke just started pouring out of the case.. he's like "TURN IT OFF!! TURN IT OFF!!".. ;)
he wasn't too happy - but nothing was hurt. The wires were molten, of coruse.. but we didn't know what they were for anyway. The drive was fine.. lasted a few more years - until i dropped i on the floor
-Ra
I was urinated on an old pc. Should have unplugged it first and then turned it on wet, because it sure gave a shock to my willy.
There was an HP Chimunk system at the MIT Lab for Computer Science which was running, along with its stacks of external SCSI hard drives, on a clearly over-loaded card table. The table collapsed while the disks were spinning (yes, while the disks were spinning) and the system came literaly crashing literaly to the ground.
Power off, clean up the mess, fix the table, reconnect all the wires, and power it on. Worked fine.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Carefully flipping through the motherboard's instruction book page by page, I read how to insert the CPU into the ZIF socket with the little dot-corner next to the IDE socket side....
(later)
Turned it on, looked at the monitor...
blank.
blank.
blank.
smell smoke...
Holy crap! the mobo is burning!
Cut the power, swish away the smoke with my hands, and I watched the CPU settling down in a nice soft bed of bubbly melted plastic from the ZIF socket.
After it had cooled, I pried the whole thing apart, and the CPU had gotten hot enough to crack the ceramic brick it was embedded in.
I looked again at the mobo instructions and by golly, the little dot corner was supposed to go on the other side of the socket! What the...
(turn page back)
This diagram shows it the way I put it in...
(turn page forward)
This diagram shows it a different way...
Damn manual. Even the pictures were in Engrish.
Oh, but this was supposed to be about hardware that still worked.... Well, the memory was OK.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Back when the first P-II systems came out I was working at Fry's in the service dept. I was building a system for a customer. ATX was still pretty new and I was unaware of the intricacies of the power button. I thought I powered it off, but merely put it to sleep. I pulled the sound card and powered it back on well it went back to the dos prompt where it was and still worked without locking up!
The second thing was when I was working at a small computer store and I was bored. I was talking to another guy that was teting a computer and he had the cover off. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a quarter. I aimed just right (so I thought) to land it right in the middle of a 430TX chip. I missed by a few mm and the quarter hit the leads on the chip, made a spark and shut down the computer. The guy was furious. I simply reached down and hit the power button and it came right back up. Amazing.
I drove it through a speed limit sign at
60 miles per hour and it still worked. I drive
it over a 3 foot high barrier of dirt blocking
access to a back road and it still worked. I
drove it 110 miles per hour once and I survived. Tough as nails. No computer in it though.
I remember buying an "as is" stick of cache for an old 586 mobo once. I got home, got all excited to have a whopping 512k of cache in the sucker, popped it in, turned on the power switch, and.....WOW!!!
I've never seen that big of a ball of lightning jump from a computer in my life. The entire room was illuminated and smoked filled the room.
The next day, fully expecting the computer not to work, I removed the cache and flipped the switch. It worked for 2 seconds and died again. Later, I replaced the power supply and everything worked perfect. Wow, I still can't believe it survived that!
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
My friend's dad works for the British Antarctic Survey. Apparently they once had some data analysis that needed doing and a really crappy computer to do it on, so they found a spare room on the outside of the building, stripped out the insulation, put the computer in it and something like doubled the clock speed.
My neighbours had a 3y old kid and a weird dog. Well this kid jammed a 1kg (2.2pounds) piece of cheese through the door of the VCR into the actual machine. The thing actually worked after they managed to de-dairy food the thing.
I have put several unworkable floppy drives into my dishwasher and ran them through a cycle or two - they all worked 100% better afterwards =p
My wife picked my $7500 Toaster/Amiga up over her head and threw it to the floor. Still works.
I should add that a Vectrex can't survive the same treatment.
Amigas and 64s were the only computers that survived Desert Storm. The $10,000 Army PCs didn't last a week.
--
Crapdot.org, BeDoper, Death Metal Music Association
How on earth it is humanly possible to drive over your own laptop?
A few months after I bought my (original) 6 GB Nomad Jukebox, I dropped it on the ground. I was on my way to work, and I had thought I'd slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket. Then I let go of it, and it dropped a good 3 or 4 feet (turns it I had missed the opening of my jacket). The battery slot opened on impact, and the four AA batteries fell out and rolled all over the place. I gathered them up, put them back in, closed the compartment, and the damn thing worked. Still works to this day, and I use it on a daily basis.
My last company had hundreds of these things, the TI-810 it is an old serial dot matrix line printer. I have dropped these 40lb creatures more then 3 feet off their wobbly stand and they still work great. Sometimes they need the cards reseated but they will eventually print again. I've seen some completely filled with dirt, staples, pens, and paper clips still chugging along. Blow them out with air and they are good as new. I've even seen a few with bad power supplies that people have fixed by replacing the fuse with a paper clip. We used to keep spares and parts in the "graveyard", it was a semi covered outdoor equivelent to the area under a mobile trailer. We were replacing some with Oki320's, although they looked better, they we not as durable as the old TI's!
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
A friend of mine went on a canoe camping trip in Algonquin Park (northern Ontario). Since his grandmother lived up that way and needed more RAM for her PC, he stuck a stick in his pocket to bring to her on the way to the provincial park. During the visit, he forgot to give it to her so the RAM went camping in the wilds of Algonquin Park. =)
:) I wish my hardware was that resilient.
Anyway, in some rapids their canoe capsized and the RAM got bashed around into rocks and soaking wet of course. Amazingly, it still worked after that.
A couple of years ago my roomate was working at a jobsite for 14 hours straight. He finished up and loaded his stuff in his van and went home. The next morning he goes to get his laptop but it was not in the van so he figures it's at the office he worked at the night before. So he heads back to the office to get his laptop but it wasn't there either. He then heads home trying to remember what he did with it. On the way home driving on the interstate doing about 60 MPH he happens to see his laptop on the side of the road. He then remembers what he had done with the laptop last night. As he was loading the van he set the laptop open and running on the top of the van. The laptop flew off the van going 60 MPH open and running skidded on the pavement then into the ditch and it still booted up after he charged the battery. the only problem was a few bad sectors on the hard drive and a little plastic port cover that broke off. Oh and some deep scratches in the bottom. Thank goodness his company spent the extra money on the Panasonic Toughbooks.
..between the SIMM sockets and the AGP slot. just a little red LED, but it does help a LOT if you aren't sure if the machine's on.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Let's see...
I pulled an ISA card out of a still-running computer. Powered up a computer with one RAM stick only halfway plugged in. Turned on a computer with the voltage switch set to 220v, and shut it back off after it started smoking. Dropped the hard drive onto the exposed CPU. Funny thing... That was all on the same P166-in-a-286-case. The computer and all of those parts still worked afterwards. It's in my closet on a shelf now, but I bet that sonofabitch still runs.
Also, I found an old Apple IIe ontop of a pile of washing machines at a city-wide recycling event that I worked at. There was a dual-floppy DuoDisk hanging from its cable, and the old tilt-screen monitor nearby, face down in the mud. I couldn't pass it up, so I took it home. I couldn't be arsed to open it up to make sure it was all in order on the inside, so I plugged it in and turned it on. Booted right into the Galaxian disk that was in one of the drives. I later opened it up to find the entire insides full of cobwebs, black widow spiders, caked-on mud, and some kind of wierd water damage. Yet it works like it did the day it rolled off the assembly line.
SIGFEH
My Data General Nova 2 took some fairly solid abuse as well.
You can throw Timex Sinclairs around a fair bit too.
I chatted with a guy on a flight whose company built printers for M1A1 Abrams tanks. $60K or something ridiculous like that but tough as nails.
somewhat unrelated, but interesting anyway: it has been my experience that if you ever need a laptop part from Dell under warrantee ('cause dell makes the shitties laptops, and pieces are always falling off or breaking), wait until really late at night so you get the Indian phone support people. They don't make you reinstall windows before they will even speak with you like the american phone support people do. The indians sometimes will just send you the part, while the americans ALWAYS send over a technician, or try to get you to send in the whole machine.
Well i had my fare share, almost killed hardware.
The first one was my first computer, a old 286-16. Well i had installed a SB pro 2.0, but the internal setup of the whole thing was kinda wonky. So i had to disconnect the mobo power cables to put something in the slot. Well after putting the whole setup back together. The mobo power cables where attached wrong, well After i switched it on the computer would just flick on and off. Then i saw what happened, and i was like "NOOO!" it was my first computer that i bought for about 350NFL (175 dollar) at the day, thats a fortune for a 11 yearold. After correcting the problem it worked, but i did notice that in windows 3.1 the computer just randomly gave a GPF. Just out of the blue, even when just sitting there, or my dad playing patience.
The company where i worked my first internship i had to do the first job every intern there has to do. that is to clean the attick, well it was filled with busted UPS's but i also found some brown bricks. Well i asked the lead programmer what they where. "oh those are harddisks from an old Tandon computer" he then proceeded to show pictures of the computer coming in, it was totally black, fryed etc etc. The harddisks in those tandon computer where packed in so called "rampacks" (the plastic had bubbled making the brown brick appearance). Well the programmer told that they backupped all the data on those things, they just had to sand some of the brown bubbly stuff off.
The best stuff is unknown stuff from old computers. Like a friend of mine and me, gotten 2 arcnet cards. But when inserted they did not work, probably wrong settings, so we examined the cards. on the side was a block of more then 20 jumper positions, with 12 filled. So we started to randomly replace the jumpers. We found out where the I/O block was as we saw that shifting. But we wanted to change the IRQ as the card was going to be put in an XT and IRQ was set to 11 or something, so we thought we changed the irq. And we booted it up, well the computer did nothing and a puff of magic smoke was emitted from the card. After looking what we did wrong (shorting one of the IO pins with the IRQ pins) we put the jumper in the correct position. It worked. Later on we checked how well those cards worked, well they worked still but saw like 40 percent packetloss, not that we noticed back then, we could play doom via IPX!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a stick of ram (in my linux box as I write this) That when i first bought it I put it into my bosses machine (which it was purchase for) its pc 133, so keyed so i didnt think anything of it when it snapped right in, well the machine wouldnt start up and after a minute of playing with it i tried to remove the RAM sim, just about burt myself, so after letting it cool off i figured out somehow, it had half slid in and the clips and cliped which had made me think it was in right, but it was backwards. Well crap can't return it its my own stupid fault, so I threw the sim i had bought for my linux box in his machine and took this one home. Sat on a shelf for awhile, till i was cleaning and was gonna throw it out. Well I threw it in an old dos box I use ued for testing hardware, machined booted up and counted half the sim 128 (of 256) so i ran simtester, ran perfectally, and ive been using that sim in my linux box since, with 0 problems
Jesus saves, everyone else takes full damage from the fireball.
We were coming back to LA from Canada, with a bottle of (very expensive) icewine. Clever lad that I am , I suggested that my wife carry it in her laptop bag with her Thinkpad. Got out of the cab in Irvine, looked away, and the driver pulled her bag out of the trunk and set it on top of the suitcase. It dropped upside down on the pavement, shattering the wine, and like an idiot, I then picked the bag up by the handle. Draining all the icewine to the bottom of the bag. Where all the ports on the laptop were. There was syrupy wine all over the inside of the case.. screen, in the ports, inside on the MB, everywhere. I disassembled it down to the last component, and..
Took two days of soaking with deionized water, cleaning with cue-tips, careful air drying, but I got it back together with everything working but the floppy. And who uses that?
We never told her company, but she used it for six months, no problem, before an opportunity came up to swap it for another one.
I think it was Inniskillin, IIRC. Terrible waste of time, energy and wine.
While unloading my PC from the back of my car for a lan party, I accidently dumped quite a bit of snow directly into the inside of the case, there was snow on the trunk, and no sides on my case.. opened the trunk and it slid right down onto the rear window, then directly into the trunk. I dumped out the snow, powered it up and --- nothing. After completely disassembling the system, drying it, and putting it all back together it came right up. I'm still using that system now (more than a year later) with no problems.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
Because I trust UPS's so much, we had a bypass switch wired in and it switched the power to the computer room between the UPS and the phase we use to charge the UPS abttery bank. The problem is that the guys who did the job also decied it would a good idea to switch the neutral as well. There is an airconditioner on the other phase. When the switch was turned, the netral went away so it was sort of floating between the three phases. Since this is in an area of Australia where the 240 Volts comes out of the wall a bit closer to 260V, that means that there should have been about 470 V accross some of our older sparc stations. At the end of the day we lost several pc power supplies, a varsistor in an A/C and none of the sparc power supplies. The sparcs are still running a few years latter.
How about the '77 Datsun pickup I totalled and kept driving for six years? Now that sucker could take a beating!
(I T-boned a Honda that ran a red light in front of me. It went out on a flatbed, but I just tossed my front bumper in the bed, pried the fender off the front tire, saw that all my lights still worked, and drove it for another fifty thousand miles.)
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
A couple years ago I pulled open an office computer (that was fully operational) to scarf some parts, I think the hard drive and video card. Much to my surprise, I found a ribbon-style serial jumper cable from the motherboard to the back panel had the ground wire completely melted off - as far as I could tell the cable had been installed backwards at the motherboard end, and the power line had shorted to case ground. The entire edge of the cable looked like someone had held a match along its edge and was blackened, curled and melted.
As I said, amazingly enough, the computer was operational when I opened the case.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Except that it was the 'f' key, and also the star (*).
It's a safety measure to keep you from accidentally typing rm -rf *
So I built my own PC in August of 2001 (http://www.theblight.net/nightshade/photos/linuxb ox). I originally had a watercooling system built, and a brand-spankin' new Asus V8200 Deluxe GeForce3 in there. The copper water block I installed was a little bit off-center, so it snapped the top motherboard heatsink tab and fell six inches, right onto my GF3. The thing weighed 1-2 pounds with all the pipe fittings and such. Ohhh, the horror. But the graphics card works great today, no damage whatsoever...
lucky me. That thing cost me four weeks pay at the time : D (yay minimum wage)
My personal favorite has to be the time my primary personal hard drive failed. From the smell I suspect the problem was a capacitor in the spindle drive circuitry.
Data recovery services were much too expensive, and I had nothing more to loose, so I opened it up. I could tell when it powered up the platter didn't seem to know which way to spin.
A deft flick of the finger at power-up in the right direction, and I was able to recover my data. It was kind of fun to see a hard-drive operate with no cover on!
Here's an article I published awhile back for Artificial Cheese. It's titled "PowerBook Drop Test". Pretty abused hardware, but still entirely functional.
This story can only be paralleled by the lady who put her PowerBook in the oven.
This isn't really a 'horror story' or an example of extreme risk, but it's interesting.
The way to circumvent the NVRAM password on a SparcStation is:
1. Power up the machine to the first firmware prompt.
2. Unplug the NVRAM chip.
3. Enter the firmware's config menu (normally the NVRAM password would jump in at this point and prevent this).
4. Hotplug the NVRAM chip back in. (don't do this one to your company's $30,000 server, tho)
5. In the config menu turn off the password protection or change the password to something you know.
I have used this procedure to get into SparcStations that I've bought used on eBay.
The NVRAM in question is a 28 pin 'built in battery' CMOS RAM/Clock chip similar to that on a lot of PC Motherboards.
A friend sold me a cheap 200Mb scsi disk (he had been installing some diskless Sun workstns) and it worked fine. One day tho, while connecting it up to a system all spread out on a table, applying power it went BANG! just like someone had set off a firecracker, w/ puff of smoke. Naturally I though "Well, THAT one's toast" but tried it again and it came right up like nothing happened! Did a little tracing and it turned out to be a reverse biased surface mount diode right at the power connector - must have been some protective device against reversed power leads I guess and it just blew dramatically, but wasn't essential.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
my hda is currently hanging by its ide cable and happily reading and writing away
Hey Barry, when did you start posting to Slashdot?
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
If you're a physicist you just call it acceleration. The acceleration/deceleration paradigm is SO one dimensional.
-- HG Pennypacker, wealthy industrialist and philanthropist
Short story: Chasing Cats Manage to dump a full glass of wine into a laptop, killing both the screen and the keyboard. With the installed 802.11b card and PcAnywhere I managed to get all its files off it and it's still a functional machine.
Now realize that this was, essentially, six months in a car, during which time it baked in the summer sun, froze on winter nights, experienced various jolts from speed bumps and potholes (one of which broke a rather sturdy piece of dishware) due to my rear shocks badly needing replacing, got liberally dusted with old-car grit, and just generally got neglected and left to fend for itself.
After time to warm to room temp, the Linux box booted right up. The monitor still works fine except the occasional jitter and sudden increase or decrease in vertical scan, and the fact that the vertical offset control no longer works. The DVD player works better -- before, it often would fail to recognize a disc until you inserted and ejected it several times, now it's just fine. I still haven't booted the Performa or the HP, but even if they lose their magic smoke, I have all the important stuff working.
-- Old Man Kensey
Admittedly this is half off topic as this didn't entirely keep working but my bizarrely recurring bad luck with this deserves mentioning.
I bought a second hand P120 laptop a few years ago which worked great until I dropped it once - this bust the floppy drive. I eventually found a firm in the US that could sell me a replacement drive - after shipping to the UK it cost almost as much as I paid for the laptop. Plus the staff at the bank had never heard of a wire transfer before and accidentally paid the firm for it twice!
It gets worse as upon picking up the new drive from Goods In at work, it slipped out of my fingers and fell to the ground. Next the tiny unique ribbon connector that was used to connect up the drive wore out due to the amount of fiddling I'd had to do, and to this day I never found a replacement.
What I did find at one point was an external laptop floppy drive which had a plug that matched an undocumented port on the side of the laptop. No sooner had I tried that out than the laptop started smoking and the plastic casing above the port melted slightly and dipped down. Obviously not compatible then. The laptop still works ok - though there are some bad sectors on the hard drive and I can never reinstall the OS as it won't boot off a floppy. Not that I need it anymore, my latest mobile phone does more than that piece of crap!
Your ad here.
True story
Has a set of three Sony Floppy disks that I kept all my College programming code and assignments on.
One day I came home to find that mom had put one of my 10" Sub Woofers (huge magnet) directly on top of my Floppys. Thankfully they all still had the data on them.
A few months later I found them on the kitchen table drying after they had fallen out of my napsack on a friday after I got out of the car, got snowed on all weekend then gone through the snow blower. The metal slider was ripped off all three one was badly bent, yet when I (carefully unbent them) and placed them in my floppy drive all the data on them was still there and 100%.
at band camp.....
My body?
:-). Over the years, I've electrocuted myself various times (by camera, electric flyswatter, power lines, et cetera), exposed myself to chlorine gas (don't worry, I stopped coughing after 7 hours), and spilling 11 M HCl on my toes. Not to mention other stuff like the pogo stick accident...the body is the ultimate machine; it's like running a Sun server.
We know how much the nerd wants to experiment
Two months ago, I forgot my USB SmartDrive in my pocket. My wife took all the clothes and threw them in the washer. To make things worse, the washer had a problem at that day, so we just left it full of water for two days. At some point, I wanted to copy some pictures from the USB drive. I started looking for the USB drive, and then I remembered that it was in my pocket. When I asked her, her face turned red and told me that it's in the washer. After we turned the washer on, and it took some good 30 minutes to lose all the water inside, I took the SmartDrive out, left it for 15 minutes upside down (the USB connector facing downside) and then I plugged it in my PC, mounted it and it worked like a charm.
A girl on my floor spilled a glass of some sort of instant coffee-like drink (with a japanese glutinous rice thing in it)on her Dell Inspirion 8000 laptop a few weeks ago. 2 guys on our floor spent a few fun-filled hours taking the thing apart and drying all the parts (which were not only wet, but sticky and sugary) and putting it back together, but couldn't get it to turn on again. The attempts to power it up produced a "burning sugar" smell which was scary.
Several hours later the girl got bored and tried to turn it on for the heck of it and it booted just fine!
One time I was messing around with the connections from the mother board to the case, and I went to plug in the LED lights for the hard drive, and the mother board had a little fire going on where I plugged it in. I guess even though it was off, since I had the computer still turned on it got some juice and lit up a capacitor or something. The mother board worked fine after that just the LED light never lit up again...
Damn... /.'ed :)
jeriqo@vixen$ ping 212.229.115.84
PING 212.229.115.84 (212.229.115.84): 56 data bytes
36 bytes from tele-access-1-165.router.demon.net (194.159.36.145): Destination Host Unreachable
(I didn't even flood him)
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
Someone burned down the middle school I went to - and if you don't believe me go to the school (its in Coos Bay Oregon) and look it up in the year book - I think it was in the early 90's
Anyhow - we had a lab that was about half Apple 2 gs's and half C64's (the place was mostly for learning how to use logo) - I can remember scrubbing cases, - stuff like that. Most of the Apple 2's powered up just fine - all the C64's powered up. Now these computers had black specs all over them until the day they were replaced, most of the Apple 2's lasted for about a year and died, but those C64's all worked until the day they were replaced with dos pc's.
Its interesting how well some electronic devices hold up to being subjected to massive amounts of heat, then massive amounts of water all within in a couple of hours.
a toaster mac once got sloten from my old high school. it was chucked out of a moving car on the freeway. the next week it was back in the classroom hooked up and humming away, it just had a large crack down the side.
Gee, that's not the Geek Way. I would recommend carefully disassembling it and trying some mild alcohol cleaning. Never, ever just replace it. Certainly not before completely disassembling it and checking the whole thing out.
But then, I am the guy who probably digs 'prefectly good' parts out of office wastebasket after the 'tool' IT drones roll on through. On desktop keyboards there's usually a perfectly good microcontroller and a crystal or ceramic resonator, plus the LEDs, etc. in need of a good home.
Hardware Rescue, maaaan.
So a friend of mine discovered his PS wasnt working. He bought himself a new one, and i needed one really quickly. So i went over to test to see if it functioned, i plugged it in (without a mainboard) to see if it worked, well it did.
The second i plugged the thing in, a bolt of electricitry shot out from the fan area, almost killing my hand. So surprized, i jump back and it makes a charging up noise, then suddenly.. *POP*. And it starts to smoke.
So i yell to him, who is now laughing, to kill the power.
Yep.
I have a car audio amp that survived a drive-by shooting. It's a crappy no-name knock off amp too. The amp has 2 nickel sized bullet dents, but has run fine for the 4 or so years since. My friends car was wrecked and he got hit twice, but is fine now.
My office is on Pico blvd in LA (a very busy street). On a smoke break i noticed something orange and toilet-seat shaped being run over by numerous cars in the middle of pico. I ran out to find an Apple iBook (clamshell tangerine). The LCD was hosed as was most of the upper housing of the case. Everything in the lower half was perfect. Mobo, CPU, and hard drive all work fine. I work in a Mac store and waited till someone came in with a liquid spill on another clamshell. Found a nice blueberry one with a fried logic board and cpu, but pristine case. Now I have frankenbook. You cant see it there but the apple glows, the keyboard is half black/half white (powerbook g3 keys and ibook keys) and i have glow-wire around the keyboard and trackpad.
BlackFly
CapsGetPeeled fo Life
This is what saved me.
ELD i think they're called. Earth leakage detector.
--- I hate my sig
I was in circuits lab one day, and i hooked up my laptop (dell latitude cpxj) to my homemade amp to play some mp3s and for some reason this loose wire that just happened to he connected to the powersupply touched the output cable for my laptop sound card. needless to say the current shot up and pow there went the first of three capaciters inside of my laptop. since then my laptop still plays music, but the left channel getts a little hot, and due to other reasons my battery doesn't work, but overall i would say that for what i have put the little dell thorough it has been a trooper. but just because of those camercials i will NOT buy another dell!!!
In 1999-2000, I had this computer that I used as a web server in college for a school group. It was a 486 with 16MB RAM running FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, etc. I got a friend to let me leave it in the corner of a building on campus. One cord to the power outlet, and one cord to the ethernet jack.
Well, one day I get an email that the server is dead. Web pages don't show up, but it responds to pings. I telnet in, but any command locks up the telnet session. So I run reboot, and it never comes back. Final diagnosis: hard drive failure.
Replaced the hard drive, and restored the web site. All is well until I get another email that the server is dead. No pings this time. Turns out that the water main in the floor above it had broken, and it had been thrown into a pile of computers that were behind a makeshift "dam". Once students were allowed back into the area, I searched around, found my computer, plugged it in, and found that it was once again working as expected.
Besides those two events, this old Gateway 486/66 never had to be rebooted or repaired. Ran without a hitch until I unplugged it on the last day of finals.
Just goes to show that BSD will never die...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
At my home server farm there are a few machines (that thankfully don't do anything important) that need to be "jump started" (power cycled repeatedly, hitting lightly, etc) whenever they get turned off or they don't spin up.....
Oh and I remember one time I had switched a cpu fan out because a bearing in it had died, and the fan I stuck in it's place didn't have any nice molex power connector, so I just stripped off insultation and twisted the wires to the 5v supply....(of course the machine was powered up this whole time) I spread the bare spots apart so they wouldn't touch while I grabbed something to tape them up with, well they had a bit more spring in them than I anticipated and I had a small, short fire inside my case... unfortunately that meant I had to reboot, but that was it, no problems...
Yeah I've done a lot of hotswaps on non-hotswappable stuff too, but I've been lucky... seems like all this kind of stuff just happens because we get lazy... Everyone knows better than to install new hardware while the power is on and the O/S is running, but sometimes you just don't have time/reason to do everything by the book...
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
Ok, see these old disk drives used to be big, i mean real big, about the size of a small washing machine. The same as a small IDE really, but big.
Well, these were not sealed as well as todays hard drives and they would fail; especially the removable types.
We actually -replaced the heads manually-, then realigned them while they were -flying-. Amazing thing, they often worked afterwards for quite awhile, but for many reasons they would crash again with massive noise and destrucxtion of the new heads and platters.
My freshman year of college, a friend down the hall from me was buying all kinds of strange stuff on ebay. At one point he bought this case of miscellaneous scsi cards and cables. It turned out it was all 50pin cables and scsi cards from old Apple machines, in other words absolutely useless. Now, being engineers, and being freshmen, and being dumb, we decided it would be a good idea to break a few of them. Specifically, we wanted my roommate (who had, I believe, a red belt in Tai Kwon Doe at the time. He's got a blackbelt now.) to punch one in half they way he breaks wood at tests. Somehow we convinced him to do this.
The first time he tried to break the card, the kid who was holding it didn't have a tight enough grip, so it went flying and hit him in the face. The second time, he held on, but the card didn't break or even crack, and he cut his hand on the solder on the bottom of the board. Undeterred, we got two people to hold the card, while my roommate tried a third time. This time, the board went flying again, cut one of the guys hands, hit me in the forehead, and my roommate cut a big gash in his hand. This was no longer amusing.
My roommate was pretty pissed, and he tried to break the card over his knee, but with no success. We stomped on it, we threw it. Eventually we had to have one person step on one end while another pulled up the other. It finally broke, but only after leaving scores of wounded combatants. That day I developed a new respect for the durability of printed circuit boards.
I guess thats a little off topic, since the card obviously didn't work again. To save this post, I should mention that the same ebaying friend bought a full-height 2GB scsi drive, which we used to run around the floor hitting people with. It was known lovingly as the "People-Hitting SCSI Drive". It continued to work, and he eventually sold it to some other poor sap on ebay, as I recall.
I have a college buddy that had a Pentium II stop working due to excessive dust/dirt/grime. He removed the motherboard and took it into the dorm shower where he adquately washed the thing off. After waiting for it to dry, he put the battery back and reconected everything. Worked quite well after that.
My kid was running through the room, tripped on the network cable, and yanked the entire desktop unit off the table. It bent the heck out of the case, but the computer still works. It's just a bit lopsided now and the outer cover won't go n correctly.
Inside every complex program is a simple solution trying to get out.
about 6 years ago, my dad's computer got zapped by lightning. Everything in the computer was fried, except for the 500MB western digital hard drive. All the data was messed, but i reformatted it and it's good as new. I used it my own junk box for several years afterwards too. It's been western digital all the way since then.
Just a short time ago a co-worker and I were servicing a computer. I was over trying to block dreaded spam on the mail server, and he was putting a new 40x cdrw in a computer. later, after he had booted the computer and was installing Norton, there was an very loud pop. After we were throughly satisfied that no on had been shot and that there were no broken bones or exploded computer parts, we begin to look at the cdrom. Lo and behold the Norton CD had exploded in the drive into about 10 billion peices. To fix it we took the cdrom apart and blew it out with a leaf blower. Still works to this day. Stupid "explode your antivirus cd" virus.....
-=You might be a geek if your computer is worth more than your car=-
For some reason, as soon as I put things into my bag, I forget that there's delicate equipment in there... My Compaq Armada 7400 and Palm VIIx have servived being casually dumped on the floor, thrown into the back of the car way too hard, etc, numerous times... although this might a testament to buying good bags (Crumpler).
One of my first computers was a used 386 laptop... after cleaning the screen one day, I noticed a strange smell. I picked up the laptop to check it out and my fingers began to go through the bottom of the case, which had gotten so hot it was melting the plastic. I quickly powered it down and let it cool off, it worked fine for several weeks... I eventually sold it to a FOAF who was a keyboardist and wanted to use it in his MIDI setup (I told him what had happened and sold it 100% as-is). I heard later that it caught fire on stage in the middle of one of his performances...
May not be a PC, but a few years ago, I was using my Game Gear in my parent's van with the little cigarette adapter so I could play to my heart's content. Well I get out of the car to see what they're doing, and unknowingly dropped the Game Gear outside of the van, right behind the left front wheel. So after we all get back into the van, we pull away and hear a resounding crack. My parents, being the quick-thinkers they are, back up. Crack again. My step-dad gets out to see what we hit, and there it was--my game gear. Aside from deep asphalt scratches and I think one crack, it was fine. And then, much to my surprise, I plug it back in, and wala--I'm using Rayden to kick Goro's ass. Oh ya. I still use it to this day.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
One time I took my Visor out of my backpack to check something, and I dropped it from standing height onto a concrete floor. It bounced, and spun around valiantly, tossing the screen protector, the stylus, the batteries, and the HandSpring slot cover 15 feet in all directions (seriously - I'm not joking). I picked up the Visor to find it hadn't a scratch on it. I was amazed. One month later, it suffered a similar fall but this time onto carpet. It did not survive.
One of those "you had to be there" stories: some 15 years ago, an uber-geek friend of mine plugged multiple processors into his TRS80 mptherboard - and suffered a meltdown that scorched his kitchen table. I still chuckle at the mental picture :)
If you however, check his posting history, you'll find out that the problem must be of a psychological nature.
On my AMD mobo, i Had a blue ORB fan attached to the southbridge. Anyhow, one of the IDE cables hit the blades, snapped it off, and the blade got lodged in the cooling fins. It jammed the remaining fins, which jammed the motor, so it actually created heat, rather than dissappating it. Needless to say, the southbridge burnt out soon enough after that.
I once worked for a computer store (which will remain nameless), but we had this K6II system that was around for ages and we just could NOT sell it. So we needed a valid reason to return it to the distributor (eg, damage). So we cracked that open, grabbed some powerful magnets, slammed them onto the hard drive... no corruption. Took the hard drive out, purposely raised it about 6 feet in the air and whipped it at the floor (several times), put it back in, powered it up. Worked perfectly. The next step was to take the processor into the back room. We [I] proceeded to roast it with a heat gun for a good 15 or 20 minutes, it melted into the veneer on the shelf it was being heated on. Pried it off with a knife, ran it under some cold water, it sizzled, it popped, but it became cool enough to handle. It had terrible scorch marks all over it. We stuck it back in the socket on the motherboard, turned it on... it worked perfectly. We snapped a voltage regulator off, no effect. Connected solder points. No effect. We eventually had to resort to simply bending down cpu pins, 10 or more, and finally, it refused to boot up.
I guess you're not stupid, so R(ead)T(he)F(uckin')P(arent)P(ost).
Pioneer 10 Made it almost 30 Years without a reboot, in completely unchartedand unknown circumstances.
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Bold text above was obviously missing.
Always preview before posting a comment.
Several years back I had a machine on with the cover off. I had a large cup of sprite completely full with the lid off.. anyway, I somehow dumped the entire soda right into the case. I reacted right away and unplugged the computer but there was already soda puddles on top of the ram, video card, and all over the motherboard. I thought it was done.
I ripped everything out and shook off the soda then put it under a fan for a week (I happened to be leaving for Hawaii the next day). When I came back, I put everything back together and it has been working great to this day.
The computer was a Pentium 133 and has only been down for a few hours since putting it back together over 4 years ago.
You are so lucky... ever heard of the "Peeing on an Electric Fence" phenomenon? How bout the Darwin Awards?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Anyway, it still worked fine; probably still works.
Also, I get tired of these freaks who wear those anti-static wrist straps when they work on computers. I have NEVER seen a component get fried from static. If you shuffled the carpetting and intentially zapped the CPU, I could see there being a *chance* of it not working. But that stuff isnt made of paper mache, thats for sure.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I keep an old Cyrix 166 in my wiring closet that runs Slackware Linux. It has been dubbed the "closet monster." It holds my MP3 collection and functions as an ftp occassionally. I treat the thing like absolute sh**. Whenever I need parts for another computer I tear stuff out of it without shutting it down so as to maintain its uptime. Right now, it only has a NIC and a sound card, I had to swipe its video card. At one point I wandered by the closet and it was making a horrible noise, I thought the fan was going, but, so what? Later that day, I walk by, no noise. Turns out the CPU fan had eaten through a power cable and shorted the thing out. I pulled the cable out, threw in some electrical tape and it continues to be the most reliable POS I have.
I had a crappy 13" monitor that died on me recently. We decided we would test its resistance to... a sledge hammer. You can view the results here:)
I have a friend that stress tests computers for a living. The lab gets test models from Dell and HP, and drops them off roofs, sets them on fire and simulates earthquakes. They also drop the things in water. He tells me that its kinda hard to drop a $2000 machine off the roof of a building, when you have a 5 year old POS computer at home...
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
One of our salespeople drove over her laptop. She said, "What was that" and drove over it again. The laptop still worked. The LCD panel was unusable but she plugged the laptop in a projector and was able to give a sales presentation. (She got the deal 2.1 mil)
Boards from every spin of the product that my team designs are given to the power supply engineers. These boards are never expected to be returned. They always find a way to fat probe power and ground traces and fry the components. I've even seen 1/2 oz. copper traces physically blown from the board.
One time they got a board in from some OEM and it didn't have overcurrent protection (but the OEM said it did). So they pulled so much current from it that it heated up. The parts were floaing on liquid solder when the PCB delaminated. I'd never seen anything like that. Oh, and a word of warning (from experience), don't touch.
Things are better with them around, though. They can design a regulated power supply that doesn't go up in flames when run overnight.
the atari st had a pretty dumb sound chip - it would only play something resembling square waves at 16 different volumes, noise and every channel could be modulated with some predefined envelope functions. how do you make something like this play digitized samples? well, a friend of mine and me had seen it work (e.g. in awesome programs like oxyd). being the geeks we were we had to figure it out (we were 13 years old at the time). so we set the frequency of the sound chip to 0 which makes it output a dc voltage and start playing with the volume control registers (of course that was in assembly language, all interrupts masked off, everything else would have been waaay too slow). sounds awful. well, the volume control was obviously far from being linear. so we decide to make a lookup table to linearize it. unfortunately there was no accessible sound output. so solder wires to the audio and ground pin on the monitor output and take my father's percussion drill and drill a hole right through the case to mount a headphone jack. well, i suppose we could have taken out the board first but we didn't. next thing you know, i hit the roms containing the os (tos) when the drill finally goes through the plastic case. a pretty big piece chips off. gee, my adrenalin level was way up there! well, the computer still worked and with an oscilloscope hooked up to the output we finally managed to linearize the output (using all three channels we actually made it up to 32 steps - i.e. 5 bit samples...).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I somehow nudged my gefore 2 card partially out of line with the agp slot, and it resulted in a copper lead melting off. It didn't work when I reseated it. Being in a dorm room at the time, I had no supplies on hand to properly fix it (and I was too lazy to raid a lab somewhere), so I drew the connection back in with a pencil. Don't laugh, graphite is conductive. It worked.
Uhm, _these_ are the most dangerous creatures for your computer!
:) But when performance is not first priority, an average geek would go for anything to has his fresh slashdot portion delivered in the morning!
Just a little while ago my girlfriend stumbled upon my machine which was turned on and working. "The machine" was actually what was left of a computer after pulling out the mainboard out of the chassis and laying it on the floor. I then plugged everything in and turned it on. It worked just fine. Needless to ask why I've done that, but at least it looked kinda hype...
So back to the horror story... One day, my GF stepped on the poor thingie, and as the wires were not all put together very well, she heard a quiet boom and I saw a spark come out of somewhere near my hard drives. I told her to get her feet out of the computer because as I thought it was going to burn and hurt my beloved one's foot. She obeyed me fine, and started to pull the foot out of the trap which was caused by other boards. Obviously, my GF was stuck... which she of course did not believe, and being a rather strong girl was pulling the foot harder and harder.... as a result, I had my machine completely ruined. The AGP slot was completely broken, the graphics board was cracked and the RAM slots were all moved off their usual places. The mainboard was also cracked, and the CPU fan has been broken, but after a bit of tackling it went on fine.
After examining the foot we came to a conclusion that it was doing much better than the electornics, so I went on and powered the whole thing on. It started booting up, and after putting all components back into their places the whole thing was up'n'running. The only bad news was that I had no graphics output whatsoever, but the network card was working okay, and I managed to log into the box and use it for a while to find out that the hard drives were okay.
After that I swapped a second box out of my closet, an old Compaq 486 DX/2, turned it on and brought a crossover cable to connect the two boxes. The old Compaq has been acting as an X display for the other (Debian) box ever since.
So why pay so much for fancy new video boards when you can always use such an oldie as a very decent X display? It's running KDE 3.1 fine, and I've even managed to watch movies on it, despite the fact they've been looking more like slide shows...
left my gameboy out in the rain for like a week when i was little... took it apart, dried it off, worked good as new. those things are invinicble, man. my friend still has one of the original ones, dropped it many a time, been in the rain, still works fine.
I have a friend that had a 500 or 700 Meg HD. And one day decided to install linux, to see what it was all about. So he formats the HD and suddenly he has a full Gig. The label on the HD says 500MB (or 700, i can't remember exactly). When it was formatted for fat32 it was 500 megs. But formatted for ext2, bam, a full gig. We've never seen this happen on any oher HD before or since.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
My dear brother and I were busy trying to get our ancient logitech scanner card (ISA) to work (you know the scan man pro that came with dos 3.0 instructions :-) ) :-) ) while the power was still running. :-) ) we found that apart from the frelled motherboard everything else worked just fine and peachy.
and we were trying to swap cards about and while in the middle of our third round of swapping my brother absent mindedly and rather over energetically yanked out our pride and joy a 16 meg Voodoo 2 card (yes the vooooo doooooo twoooo
he managed to cause sparking, smoke and to actually shatter our motherboard into two complete peieces.
When we recovered from the shock and got around to upgrading (to a spanking new 500 Mhz celeron
From then on I've had to constantly mutter gently gently to my brother when ever he approches actual electronic equipment.
Ah those were the days
-Raistlin
I dropped one of my 10 megabyte seagate harddrives 3 feet onto cement. It still worked. This darn thing is 20 years old!
now if that's not bomb proof, i don't know what is!
My mother has a Dell inspiron (I told her to buy an Apple like mine, but she wanted compatability), everything on ithas been replaced...and i mean everything, down to the case and the clips that hold the battery in. New LCD, KB, CPU, MB, RAM, HD, even the PSU. Did I mention some of them multiple times?
This might set off a BS-o-meter or two but this IS true. Several years ago, my friend got a hurried knock on the door, it was the land lord warning that they broke a water pipe while remodeling the unit next door. He went into his room which borders on the next unit's bathroom to find several inches of water coming from his closet where he kept his old 486/100 as a server. He said the water didn't last long before flooding most of his entire unit causing a lot of damage, but he did confirm it was half way up his desktop case (laying flat in his closet while his 14" monitor was elevated on the shelf). I asked him if there was anything on the screen, to which he explained that he was too panicked to turn the monitor on, only to rip the surge strip's cord from the wall socket. His system was on at the time and apparantly the water never reached the power supply. He took apart the case and found the motherboard had been completely submerged. It must have been so for at least two minutes, perhaps more as the water had not yet reached his living room when the landlord knocked. He called me that evening asking what he should do. I told him the board/cards were most likely shot and not even to try it, as he might cause a fire or damage the components that weren't submerged. As this was an old system he didn't care and wanted to try out of curiosity. He removed the HD (data was important to him) which wasn't submerged (or "barely wet"). After allowing a full day of motherboard and cards lying on his table to dry(and the contractors cutting out his drywall and carpet), we used a blow dryer on low to make sure the moisture was gone. Since the system was powered up when the disaster (Noah's second flood) happened, I didn't even think the thing would boot... and if it did, I thought smoke would surely soon follow. Strangely the sytem worked fine. It is still working as a Linux box many years later. I still can't believe it. Don't try this at home.
A few years ago I was sitting on the roof of my building, on top of a bay window, playing a game of chess with my boss. His cell phone fell out of his pocket, and we both heard it hit the sidewalk below. He said he was going down to get it, and I said it wasn't worth the trouble -- it would be in a million pieces. He went anyway, and a few minutes later I got a call on my cell -- from his. Damn thing had only one small dent in it. Don't know the model, but it was one of the older Sprint PCS phones.
I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town.
Once in college I spilled bong water on my keyboard. Fortunatly I was in a state of mind where taking apart a keyboard would be a good time. After drying it with a dirty towel it worked fine.
Once, not paying attention I hooked a fan power wire to a hd led on a mobo. Can we say SMOKED? Literally melted.
...in a smoke-filled dorm room (heavy tobacco smokers, stoners, both resident and transient) knows that dust won't hurt a PC as long as you get it cleaned out. Mine took two cans of air, and I had to strip it down to the parts, but after taking it outside and removing the sludge from it (seriously - the gunk was so builtup on the mobo and fan that it was more sludgy mung than dust), blasting the lens one last time, it worked great. still takes a can every couple of months, but nothing like that first time..
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Several years ago I had a 386 with a 10 Meg hard drive. Yup 10 Megs. This was the computers only hard drive, and the problem with it was that the head would always "rest" on the platter. Well when it was "resting", it wouldn't spin. So I ended having to keep the case open, remove the screws holding it in place, and then with my index finger, give the hard drive a 1/2 inch drop at the same time I hit the power. This bounced the head off the platter long enough for the disk to spin and get everything going. I got good enough at this little trick that I very rarely had to try twice. It finally died after about a year and a half of this treatment.
I'm the acting engineer for a badass little college radio station (shameless plug). I'm also a DJ there.
So, I'm on the air doing a show, CD player going and all that. I decide that the mic cable needs more slack, so I give it a good tug. Unfortunately, the removable back panel of the desk was tugged along with the cable, causing the panel to fall away from the desk. Also unfortunately, the power cables for our two $350 CD players were behind the back panel.
The CD players flew to the floor, and slammed on the ground, making a hollow metallic noise. I was too afraid to look right away. Coincidentally, a friend had walked in just in time to see this happen, and we just stood in frozen amazement for a minute.
Amazingly, the CD player had been playing, slammed on the ground, paused for a second, and continued playing the CD without any problems.
I wish I could say they still work, but with Marantz's POS equipment, that is not the case. After fixing each of them upwards of 6 times (broken eject buttons, broken power switch, tray off-gear) one of them finally bit it with a broken tray, that, upon attempting to fix it again, started burning.
For all of you who are surprised (as I was) by the amazing performance of such cheap hardware: Lite-ON drives are manufactured by the same people who manufacture Plextor drives. Same factories, same parts, same everything sans the expensive advertising for a "name brand". Amazing features, amazing performace, and completely "coaster" free!
Burn on!
Two words:
Panasonic Toughbook
Yeah, I know... Really bad pun. I couldn'd resist.
Anyway... Worst thing I've done in recent times was trust a used disk drive, that I later realized I'd dropped some months ago, to run my web server (it initially tested OK).
What happened is that my wife and I went to Tucson to visit some friends over a long weekend. Not more than 30 hours after we left, the hard drive failed. HOWEVER -- and this is a real testament to the resiliency of a NetBSD and Apache combo -- the server continued to operate normally, except for being unable to write to the hard drive, for the next three days until I came back to rebuild it.
The moral of the story: Used hardware is OK for the most part, but make DARN sure that it has at least been well-treated, physically and electrically.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Had the same thing happen to my IIgs. Never got it completely clean from the smoke damage, but it did manage to evade the heat. I recall needing to clean the heads in the 3.5" floppy drive, but after that it worked as well as ever. Smelled like soot for a year or so.
I keep my laptop crammed in a bookbag I take with me everywhere, and it's starting to show. First off, I have an old nic and the plastic casing on the outside has been comming off for quite a while now. Well, I knew it would happen and it did... the jack (black thing, cord plugs into it, nothing else) came off. I placed it back on the PCB, crammed it down, and it works great. Copied some programs over the network, and I'm happy!
I used to work as an engineer in a manufacturing plant for one of the larger computer companies. We would be assembling PC's from components, which would be the first time the boards would be powered up for any length of time. If a cap was going to pop, it would generally do it in the first 10 minutes or so of testing. Sometime's because they were installed backwards, sometimes because they were fractured and a bit of moisture had leaked in, and sometimes just because. When they pop, they do so with a fair bit of force for their size.
This is why you should wear eye protection when you peer over an open computer, especially a newish one!
Anyway, I haven't tried putting all the little fragments back into a Socket7 board, mainly because I do not have one. But if I ever do this, and it works, I'll let everyone know. ;)
I also plugged a printer into one of my old machines while both the printer and the system were on. ZAAP! My smoke alarm went off, and the monitor went blank. I shut the system off, and opened it up real quick. It smelled like burnt rubber on the inside, but I couldn't see any damage. I turned the thing back on, both the printer and system worked fine.
Lastly, I had an old 500 MB Maxtor that I used to use to swap files with other people. This thing was dropped many times, and even thrown across a room in a fit of rage, and still worked great, with maybe 2K of bad sectors to show for it. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The original Sega was so fragile since any slight amount of dust on a cartridge would make it unplayable (until you blew on it and hit on top of the unit)... I never had a console until much more recently, but I can recall seeing friends get frustrated with it.
Then in high school one of my friends decided that his Sega should be upgraded to... whatever it was that he was upgrading it to. He either couldn't find anyone that would buy it, or was just too lazy/apathetic to look (this was pre '95, so pre EBay and popular net time).
He and his brother took turns smashing on the console and its cartridges with a hammer, dunking it in a sink full of dishwater, microwaving it, and even (once the plastic had been suffficiently deteriorated so that the innards were exposed) - using needle nosed pliers to yank off random parts of the board.
They would do some act to it, like some oven time, and then wait for it to recover from that (cool off or dry off) and then would try playing games on it. Then repeat.
It was really amazing how long that thing would still play games.
From what I recall, the games stood up to a lot of physical abuse, but once you started taking the pliers to them, it was obviously going to not take long.
The console itself on the other hand was amazing - it was like magic how much you could take out of that thing and it would still work.
I think what finally killed it was a severed wire that got data or power - we figured it would die far before that.
I'm also surprised that nobody was hurt during these experiments.
(this was the same friend that had a really old, really large TV that had a capacitor underneath it that would charge up, and then if you didn't discharge it periodically, it would arc out and hit things in teh room - which made it interesting to watch in that room. my friend that owned it seemed to think it totally normal to have to take a screwdriver and reach under the TV, waving it around until there was a loud *POP* sound of it discharging and the fait smell of something bad having just happened.)
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Oh. That reminds me. Another time, about 5 years ago, I went to an after school homework center thing sometimes. Well, there were two people on the two computers when someone cut the power to the power switch. What happens when they turn it back on? Both computers (same model) stick out their CD ROM drives and refuse to shut them. So, I'm called over to help... I power down the first machine, remove the CD ROM drive, open it up, and lift up the drive tray disengaging it with the gears. I move it from it's open possision to the closed possision, and close it back up. Wonderfully, it works great. Opens, closes, reads CD's as if it were new. At about this time the person working on the second computer smells smoke. I turn around, see smoke from the CD ROM drive and instantly dash over there, unplugging the power supply. I then try the same little trick on that drive with no luck. It would not open nor close to this day. I'm sure the motor just burned up. Oh well, I tried. And was shocked I got ANYTHING to work.
When we (GO Corp.) released the PenPoint! operating system we had a big shindig for the public (in San Francisco, IIRC). We had some TechTV (or somesuch) filming, lots of reporters, venture capitalists, etc.
Robert Carr, my boss, took my IBM ThinkPad* tablet from my hands and tossed it across the room into a concrete wall. I got it, hit the power switch, and it was back running. Amazing.
*The name "ThinkPad" had just been thought up, and brand new labels with the name were overnighted to us to be slapped on each of our tablets.
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. -- Richard Feynman
Well... Back in the good`ol`days of the Amiga a game was played like crazy: Kick Off 2. Maybe a lot of you remember the way it was played, the instant moves of the joystick requiered to do lot of the tricks and so on... No joystick could survive for more than 100 games...
Except Pac-Man.
"Pac-Man" was a greek (yes, I`m greek) creation of a company called "Aneroussis Control" (If I`m not mistaken). The same company created arcade cabinets and stuff like that. This joystick looked and felt just like an arcade stick: the usual metalic rod with a red ball on top and a single button for fire. This, put in a plastic case that looked quite solid. It sure survived all the Kick-Offs we`ve thrown at it.
But...
The company that created it almost fell out of business. The beast was so rock-solid that everyone that bought one never had to buy another joystick. I still have got two of those. I`ve thrown`em out of the window from the fourth floor. I`ve thrown`em to a wall. I`ve hit people with them (!), I punched and kicked them... Nothing can damage them!
The only thing that shows the age of one of the two is that I rotated it at full speed over my had and threw it to a friend (hey, I was 14 and crazy) and so part of the outter cable has come off it. The "inside" cables are still connected and it still works!
The worse I`ve seen`em take was when a friend of mine managed to bend the metal rod. Ah... They sure don`t make`em like they used to!
Okay, i definitely expected you to say they had missing passenger side front doors. Boy would that have been interesting...
up at the top it should be "original Nintendo" - the Sega was the one that was a tank.
I'm retarded.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I had an old MFM 20Meg HD that I'd formatted as RLL to 30 or so megs. Nothing uncommon about that, and it ran in an old 386sx/16 for about a year storing downloads for the BBS I ran. One day, it quit working, so I got a screwdriver out, opened it up and tried to manually turn the platter. It was stuck for some reason, so i gave it a good twist and *pop* it started spinning, but it sounded like it was scraping a bit. So I played around with the head adjustment screw until it seemed to be fairly smooth, closed it back up, popped it in the computer, and voila! It worked again. In fact it continued to work for about another 8 Months before it died for good.
I dont think I'd do that to any of the drives in my machine now.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Turns out, a thief had broken into their home at night, and her husband, who was apprently a gun nut, went Rambo-Style with a 12 gauge shotgun. In the process of chasing the thief out of the house(He didn't even wing him), he destroyed the TV, stereo, vcr, a large section of the wall, and had put an entire round through the tower. Literally, the case looked like swiss cheese, from where a round of buckshot had blasted right through it.
Basically, they assumed it was dead, and wanted to see if the hard drive was still in working order. So, we take it in the back, and unscrew the side panel on the case. Lo and behold about 20-30 buckshot pellets are lying in the bottom of the case, and the motherboard had an equivalent number of holes in it.
So, just for shits and giggles, after we unplugged the harddrive, which survived, we stuck an old 1 gig in to see what would happen. Much to our absolute astonishment it started right up! In looking closer at the motherboard, it turns out that most of the wounds had missed majot components. The only problem was that no sound card would work in it anymore.
To this day, that case sits on the shelf at that ISP, and gets a doubletake and a question everytime someone sees it. I'm told that nowadays they just tell the person that one of their techs got pissed off at a customer and.....
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
I had an old Compaq Deskpro XT with a 20 meg hard drive. I spent so much time on that thing that one day while I was out my wife was so ticked off that she threw it out the front door down the steps and it skidded 20 feet into the driveway. The monitor did not survive but the computer booted up and ran perfectly after I replaced the monitor.
I've hotplugged hard drives (WD and Maxtor) and a Promise IDE controller in an old 430HX-based board. They seem quite sturdy. Although I did have a WD drive die on me recently, it was second-hand free and wasn't being used anyways.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
After a long night of gaming, I was going to quit a good ol' game of Myth:TFL. As the CD drive started spinning up, the CD exploded in the drive. It sounded like a gunshot and a little puff of film came out -- no one in the house was very happy about being woken up. At least the drive still works to this day (after a while of shaking out little plastic pieces and film), but I'm never using generic CDRs to burn backups of stuff!
Put one hand in pocket.
Touch supposed live/dead wire with back of finger.
When muscle clenches, you break the circuit.
If you're lucky, you'll have time to bat out your hair with your working arm.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I also have a Lite-on CDRW drive, though a 32x12x40 one. I was moving my drives around when I removed my DVD drive for repairs, and the thing just wouldn't separate from the IDE cable. A tug later, it detached and ended up on the other end of the room. Still works perfectly. They really do make tough drives!
My Samsung cell phone had an intermittent mic, and Best Buy wouldn't replace it immediately unless it didn't work at all -- they wanted to keep my damn phone for a week to try fixing it! It's my damn telephone, and I need it! So, I set about making it completely inoperable by grounding the antenna connector and drawing large hot arcs from every other contact on the phone using my handy 4kW solid state Tesla coil. Not only did it survive, but the mic works fine now!
What it may have been is extra space on the board for another meg or two of memory. I have an old STB/ET6000 board like this, and it looks like you could hack a good chunk of the board off with it still working.
Wasn't there an article a while back on Slashdot about a Powerbook Titanium being baked and still working (although the screen and keys were beyond repair, it still booted). That truly is amazing.
My little old Vaio Z505 has taken something of a hammering in it's time and is still going strong...
:)
About two years ago, I was in a hosting centre setting up some new racks... We'd got all the front and back doors of the racks stacked up at the side... and my laptop was sitting on the floor next to them with the lid open...
Someone caught one of the doors with their foot, and the whole lot fell... straight onto my poor little Vaio... When we picked up the quarter-tonne of rackmount doors from on-top of my laptop, it appeared the laptop had made it through unscathed... All that had happened was that the screen opened to it's fullest extent... Not a scratch.. not a mark.
12 months later I was returning to the office from a different hosting centre with my laptop in it's carry case. I walked out of the rain into Canary Wharf station, took one step on the escalators and slipped... Since my laptop was behind me in it's carry bag, I fell onto that... and then slid down about 8 steps on it.
It didn't come out of that unscathed... a 3x3mm little it of plastic broke from one of the decorative purple plates which cover the speakers... That's all
Laptop still works fine
I by accident had a power supply set to 230 in a 115 plug, it just killed the entire motherboard and most of the other stuff on the board. Another thing I have done is reversed the order of the motherboard power cables on a AT MB
One time I was working with different hardware (changing things here and there) and put in a new floppy drive. figuring i would get to it later, i didn't bother to screw in the new drive. got to the point where i needed to use the drive, stuck in a disk, and out blew a whole lot of smoke. apperently i shoved the drive back while putting in the disk and the bottom circutry came into contack with the case. yet somehow, despite the amount of smoke i observed, the disk drive still works to this day.
when I first started playing with computers I was always so carefull with them, always treating them like they were verry delicate things... you know, the way people tell you you're SUPPOSED to handle computers, but experience has made me beleive that maybe theya re a little more durable than you might think... a few fun examples:
A magnetic personality:
had a "friend" walk up to me while I was working on a machine and put a speaker magnet down on a stack of floppies containing the program I was in the middle of installing, I thought they were toast for sure, after all these are a MAGNETIC medium, and few magnets are more powerfull than speaker magnets, however for some reason they don't appear to have been affected at all.
The Interuptible Power Supply:
we had a UPS that died on us at work, company didn't want to hear "I think I can fix it" they just wanted to replace it and ordered me to toss it, so as I did with much of the "tossed" hardware I tossed it in to my bag to take home (that was a HEAVY backpack!!!) when I opened it up I noticed a LARGE dent in the metal top of the UPS, I also noticed that the control circuitry in the UPS was mounted on a circuit board under this top cover with the components on the under side, in other words the dented case was shorting out the board, I hammered the case out and used the UPS for another 4 years before it finally died, (and I couldn't revive it this time)
Hot swapping:
I'm not sure there is any part of a machine I haven't hot-swapped out of either laziness or sheer curiosity (I wonder if I can get away with "this")
The sick computer:
I came home one day after being gone camping for a weekend (yes some of us techie types do get outside on occasion) and when I walked in to the kitchen I noticed the keyboard in the dish-drainer, in pieces... I wasn't sure if I wanted to know... but I asked anyway... apparently my brother had thrown up on it, my mother had taken it appart and washed it out and it was drying in the dish drainer, once it dried out we put it back together, hooked it up and no problems, worked for another 3 years untill we sold the computer, and probably many more after that.
Flying Floppies:
I had a floppy I used to carry with me pretty much everywhere with "all" my computer utilities on it for rescuing damaged systems (ok, it was a while ago, when 1.44Mb was still a reasonable amount of data), had someone throw me the disk at one point, from accross the room (a computer lab with 40 machines in it, so not a small room) it hit a birkc wall and the door flew off the floppy, the disk flew open, and the media was lying on the, verry dirty, floor, I picked it up, blew the dirt off, put the disk back together, put some tape around the disk to hold it together, and continued using the disk (minus the door) for another couple years, and a couple months ago I found the disk in a pile of old hardware and it still works,
CD drives:
this is not quite on topic, but it is interesting none the less. I worked for a while doing R&D work on high speed CD-ROM drives (we were playing with drives with the amazingly high speeds of 24-40x (yeah... I know... this was a few years ago, when you couldn't yet get those drieves on teh shelves here) we would test these drives with the cases removed, so basically you had the chasis, the read head and circuitry, and the motor, and a disc spinning at amazing speeds while you do tests on data-transfer rates on un-ballanced discs (weights glued to the edge of the disc to make it "wobble" as it spins) needless to say these things would on occasion (about 2-3 times a day) come off the test rig... this was an amazing thing to watch the first time it happened (after that we were a little more used to it and had less stuff in the way)... the disc started hovering up off the spindle, then slid sideways and landed on the table, it proceeded to knock everything lighter than our osciliscope off the table and onto the floor (note-pads, bottles of glue, pens, screwdrivers, etc), then it floated down to the floor, skitted around the floor a bit, out the door and most of the way down the hall before stopping. the part that looked so weird was that spinning at those speeds it doesn't LOOK to be moving that much, and the horrizontal or vertical movement was actually pretty slow, (until it hit the floor!) but the rotational speed gave it great stability, and a lot of strength!
Back in the paleolithic 70's, the toughest hardware was built by HP. Their stuff was built like a battleship. They tested their keyboards to make sure they would not be damage if you spilled coffee in them.
But that was along time ago. At a previous job, my boss foolishly bought several Vectra PC's and it was so disappointing to see how far their standards have eroded.
best regards,
buck
i would tell you bout the time i removd a metal cover stuck in the floppy drive using only a pair of scssors and a mchanicl pencil but i splled milk on my keybrd this mrning and am typing this with my mouse and some copy-paste skills -- i kid you not...
Dropped my Apple PB165c down a flight of concrete stairs and watched in stunned silence as it bounced/rolled to a stop. The case was shattered but the computer still booted.
At least you got the +5, Funny moderation on /.
Most abused hardware I know of
was an ITT AVIONICS box one foot by one foot by three feet filled with electronics and onboard a military aircraft that crashed. One corner was crushed, but when all power and data cables were connected it worked perfectly. Someone put a sign on it that proudly read "Takes a licking, keeps on ticking," and set it out for display.
Hardware that is MILITARIZED will take more abuse than seems possible.
I once broke my cup holder, however, I always thought it was not quite tough....never figured out what the 24X stood for....
I once saw a 2-door Cadillac in the showroom with front seats from a 4-door.
Long ago I soldered together a Sinclair 1000 ripoff, the ACE, once it was complete and running with its onboard 2K of memory, I decided to obtain and solder a 16K addon board, I purchased this and soldered the sockets, caps, resistors etc, then proceeded to put the various logic and memory chips on this board. Once I powered it up nothing worked, so I used my index finger to "feel" the temperature of each memory chip, all but one were cold, the one that was not cold was VERY EXTREMELY ULTIMATELY HOT!, It literally burned the memory chip's model type and production date into my finger, I got a second degree burn. I had to toss the burned the chip but once the replacement was installed correctly (not backwards) the addon memory board worked fine, I now had a whole 16K of memory and a very sore finger!!!
A couple years ago I ran an emulation website and used the following system to get floppy and ROM images to post them on the site and burn them to CDs that I would hand out. The system included the following:
1 - midtower case and atx p/s with no sides
1 - minitower case and atx p/s with no sides, duct taped to the top of the midtower and modified to fit 6 CD drives and 1 5.25" floppy
1 - unknown socket 7 motherboard
1 - Pentium MMX 233 CPU
40mb PC66 SDRAM
1 - S3 Virge VX 4mb PCI graphics card
1 - Ensoniq sound card
2 - Promise UltraDMA IDE controllers
1 - Seagate Bigfoot 4gb IDE hard drive (data)
1 - Maxtor 2gb IDE hard drive (windows boot)
1 - Maxtor 1.2gb IDE hard drive (linux boot)
2 - 48x CD-ROMs
4 - 2x/2x/24x CDRWs
1 - 3.5" Floppy drive
1 - 5.25" Floppy drive
A lot of modified IDE and floppy drive cable...
powered on as follows: 1. power on minitower (6 CD drives and a 5.25" floppy) 2. power on midtower (motherboard, 3 hard drives, 3.5" floppy) 3. choose o/s (Windows 98 SE or Redhat Linux 5.2) Used this system this way for about 3 years before I took it apart, assembled the midtower correctly and sold it. On the abused hardware note I did smash a keyboard to pieces over the monitor after it quit working while i was in the middle of work on the website... i also put a chip in the monitor glass by throwing a handful of dice at it...
Some time ago I accidentally plugged the telephone line into my Realtek NIC instead of my internal ISDN adaptor.
I was still trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to the 'net when I noticed the smell of something burning. I looked at the back of my case, and--surprise, surprise--there was a substantial amount of smoke coming from my NIC's cable jack.
I quickly unplugged the phone cable and, just out of curiosity, hooked my NIC up to the LAN to see if it would still work. It did, and still does.
Once upon a time I had a manual typewriter that I'd literally worn out a critical part of, and replacement parts were not available. This little pointy thing that the whole machine depended on would fall out of its socket, a ball bearing above the point would fall down, and it would jam. To get it back together required taking most of it aprt, holding the whole mess overhead to get at the loose part to reseat it (since it fell out again if the machine was held upsidedown), and screwing it all back together while still holding it overhead. And oft as not it would fall apart again anyway, and with much cursing I'd do the whole routine again.
:)
One day this happened Once Too Often. At which point I took the offending typewriter outside and hacked it up with an axe, then hung it on the fence as a warning to others.
Let this be a lesson to all you hackers... Do not keep an axe near the computer. You may be tempted to use it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Samsung is the worst hardware ever. I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 950p monitor, it had a gash on the screen. So I exchanged it, it was defective, exchanged, defective, up to the ninth monitor (which is still defective). Samsung only replaces defective hardware with refurbished hardware, which in this case means "broken crap we never fixed." Samsung doesn't care about the customer, and will happily sell crap and commit warranty fraud because people are still buying the flimsy stuff.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I once had a harddrive go kaput, brought it to work for my boss and I to have a look see. He slammed it on the desk 3 times, incredibly hard, we hooked it back up and it still works to this day. Beat that.
I used to work in a warehouse that got quite cold at night. But the insides of PC's stay nice and warm, if you leave them on.
So my co-worker's PC was starting to get very noisy. We pulled the case off it to see what the matter was. The whole motherboard was covered in little bits of mouse poo,pee and fur. The back of the case had a hole where some accessory used to live, and now a live mouse had moved in.
Strangely the warehouse office had lots of ratsack, but the rats and mice never seemed interested in eating it.
Ran over my HP calculator once (circa 1982), and it's still fine. And found out that laptop tft screens do not like being compressed under airline seats (1998) but it came back to life on its own.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I was working on a CDC disk drive that moved the heads by hydraulics (1970). Part of the preventive maintenance was to clean each head and platter with a swab stetched over a piece of bakelite.
The routine was to unload the heads and then wet the swab with alcohol and then clean the platter. Making the platter turn was done by a maintenance switch on the back of the drive.
I carelessly forgot to unload the heads one time and saw that the platter was spinning (thinking that I must of had hit the maintence switch already) so began cleaning it... then I realized that the heads were leaving paths in the alcohol on the platters. I quickly unloaded the heads, cleaned them, cleaned the platters correctly this time, prayed real hard because there was critical data on the platters and then restarted the drive. Fortunately no harm was done and the drive continued to work.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I was given a very high quality stereo receiver (Denon AVR-3000) a number of years ago that had been damaged by lightning. The receiver was off at the time, and after some checking I determined only the microcontroller sections were fried.
The problem was that replacing the uC was difficult and ultimately a failure. So instead, I decided to use it as just a main amplifier. Although it no longer has any "features" it's been a great amplifier for the past five years. Take a look at the amplifier (JPEG - 60.5KB). All the empty space is from the six removed controller and switching boards. All the control functions are bypassed and hardwired in now.
I was the original Tech Support department at Jasmine Technologies, a Mac hard disk (and other peripherals) manufacturer. We had some good data recovery stories, and in fact my staff from Jasmine became the original DriveSavers gang!
One that comes to mind from Jasmine was Joe Cocker. He was on tour in Italy and his keyboard player had all their sounds stored on a 160mb drive. (HUGE drive for the time.) It died.
So over the phone I took the guy through some board-level repairs to the controller card of the hard disk so it would work long enough to get the data off. And they gave me free tickets when Joe Cocker came to SF!
The other one was when I was supporting the original PowerBooks (100/140/170) at Apple. An Indian man called with a laundry list of problems with the computer. After listing 25 or 30 things, I asked him what the heck happened to it!
He explained that he had been using the PowerBook too much in bed, and his wife had hit him over the head with it!
Then Steve Wozniak called with some problems, and I got to go to his house and fix his computer. Not often does one get to say they fixed Woz's computer!
Also the famous PowerBook at the bottom of the Amazon was my call. Customer called and explained the situation to me, and I got them in touch with DriveSavers (who had just opened their doors a few weeks earlier). I knew there was nothing I could do for them at Apple, but the DriveSavers gang were top-shelf techs.
I got hundreds of those kinds of stories. Maybe I should write them all down. Mail them to posterity, or something....
- Christian
Budapest, Hungary
"What's that watermelon doing there?" - Jersey
I once put a Pentium 33 in the socket rotated 90 degrees. The current running through one of the pins melted it off and it stayed with the mobo when the chip was removed. After replacing the mobo (IIRC it didn't survive) and soldering a new pin on the Pentium, it ran just fine.
;-)
I'm glad you can only put them in one way now
I got a black box ethernet hub for christmas.
the sucker is robust. survived a few 10 foot drops onto tile, and extreme heat and cold. is still working AS WE SPEAK! 4 years later under heavy use. industrial strength.
While moving out of my old house (in rather a hurry) I dropped my then P3 733 onto the concrete kerb. The case was dented horribly, paint taken off, etc. I was in too much of a hurry to check it there and then, but when I got to my new place, I promptly plugged it in to test (right in the front doorway) and it was fine. Course, about six months down the track the hard drive didn't sound too healthy....
I hot plugged a SCSI CD-ROM drive into my PowerComputing machine once, with interesting consequences. When I plugged in the data cable first. I then proceeded to plug the power cable into the drive. Now this next part surprised the hell out of me because I hot plugged that CD-ROM drive in that computer several times that day and nothing happened. But *this* time a big blue spark jumped about a three quarter inch gap from the power cable to the drive. I *immediately* dropped the cable and jumped back. The computer's circuit breaker tripped and the computer automatically shut off. Anyway, to make a long story not so boringly long, I connected everything up, turned the computer back on, and voila! Nothing was broken! I was completely amazed.
-Jeff
About ten months ago, I was working on a DEC Celebris 5400 series (they make great beater boxes for the kids - the case is likely to withstand being run over by a tank). Anyhow, I left work for the evening, and returned the next day to find the entire case filled with concrete dust and rubble!
:(
I looked up, and saw to my great displeasure that the inbred lurch-clones who were installing a sprinkler system had drilled a four-inch hole through the cinder block wall directly above the computer laying open directly below! With the worker's bootprints in the dust on the table right next to the box
I snapped a couple of photos, shook the dust out of the box, and the thing continues to work today (FYI - it has a Pentium I overdrive 200 proc and runs win2k, like a very sick dog, but more reliably than most of our windoze boxes).
If that weren't enough hassle from a sprinkler contractor whose name I really wish I could mention online as a word of warning, last month, I went in to figure out why I wasn't connecting to a certain printer, and found it unplugged, grease-stained, shoved into a corner, and with an out tray filled with metal shavings. I look up, and guess what? A new pipe is installed in the room, and I can see rubbish from where they cut the pipe and then cut threads on it. Out came the camera again, and a very pointed letter was sent to the project manager. Friggin' brand-new thousand dollar laser printer with metal shavings into it, and then grease stains when the moron realized he might possibly damage the printer.
Not that they haven't done enough, but they did install a sprinkler head right over our primary switch stack, with a t-junction directly beneath the fluoro fixture so we can't relamp it. I suppose it didn't occur to them that switches, routers, and rack servers generate heat, or that light bulbs expire and need to be replaced.
Some people should be expressly forbidden from doing remodel work. Why a network guy should have any trouble from sprinkler installation
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I have heard of a student in a first year uni course walking into the lab, pulling a 5 1/4" floppy disk from his packet UNFOLDING it and putting it in a drive. Needless to say, the rest of the room was howling with laughter. The laughter was short lived when the floppy disk worked!
i managed to drop an old 21 inch monitor over a metre off a desk onto a stone floor a few years back... i was quite surprised to see that not only was it not cracked but it still worked perfectly, for some reason it turned on a bit faster too... smile make shit monitors but they seem to last
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
We had some Juniper M40 routers that had the A/C dripping on them for quite some time. Nobody knew for a long time... the routers were working fine even while taking on water!
Back when I was at school we had some really shitty spec PCs (this was over 10 years ago), and I used to help maintain them from time to time.
:)
One day one of the machines didn't work, so I diagnosed and diagnosed and couldn't fix it.
My totally computer illiterate friend came on, and after hearing my story, he said, 'Well I might as well try'. He picked the computer about a foot into the air and just let go of it, which chipped off a bit of the desk and a major bang.
Turned the computer on, it worked. I had to humbly accept that my hard-headed friend had saved the day
I also remember when the first CD-ROM machines came in, and people at school would play tug of war with them. The bloody things still worked.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I had a psycho ex-friend who took a piss in his SNES. It still worked, and he even sold it on.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The worst I've ever done was two years ago when I upgraded a 486 machine to a P166. Put in the motherboard, new ram, new hard drives etcetra. I was stuck with a 486DX2/66 motherboard that already had some intermittent troubles with freezing.
:D so I basically threw it around in our empty garage, smashed what little ram was on the board, yanked out the cpu and tossed that around some more too.
:P
For some reason I can't explain it but I fought the urge to smash this motherboard up
Then theres the worst things I have seen people do to computers at my previous work 3 years ago. Merchandising Manager at Computer City. I'm walking to the staff room when all of a sudden I hear a big crash at Tech Support. I go over and look, only to find the new tech guy having dropped a brand new Pentium 3 machine on the floor.
Im guessing his hands were slippery or he was plain nervous. The machine had a sizeable dent on the bottom and had troubles booting up. Needless to say the customer was pale as a ghost and swearing up and down at the technician before his manager came and offered to fix or replace it free of charge. I didn't see that guy working at tech anymore a month later.
And please don't ask about a older IBM white tower machine that had turned yellow from being in a heavy smokers room, being used as a ashtray holder, and having about 5 pounds of grape jam stains *ALL* over the machine.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
In the middle of winter, Wisconsin, machine running , hit the button to open the CD drive. ZZAP, made me jump! Using same machine to make this reply.
I have a problrm with my Dell where the delete key doesn't always work. A real pain for logging in.
But by picking up the laptop, holding by the ends where the speakers are, and gently bending it up in the centre (just a little) it starts working again.
Yup, they day before a big presentation and my wife gets up from bed to get a drink...
She kicks the iBook charging on the floor next to the bookshelf and loses it. She then picks up the iBook and flings it across the room.
Knowing better than to say anything, I waited until morning to survey the damage. The lid was slightly out of alignment and the latch lock was busted all to hell. I hit the power switch and the lil' bugger booted right up.
I then got the integrated trackpad/wristrest/latch on the 'net and it's now as good as new.
Too bad, if it was busted, I have a backup of my presentation on my Powermac, and I always wanted a TiBook.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
A few years ago, I was working in a dinky little Mac repair shop. I was diagnosing a Power Mac 7600 and determined that it needed a power supply. Customer approved it, we ordered it, I installed it. Pushed power, nothing happened.
Note: Most power supplies in desktop Macs are switchable between 115 and 230 volts. For some unknown reason, Apple *always* shipped out power supplies preset to 230.
So to make a long story short, I forgot to switch it to 115 before trying to power it on. You'd think that it would just not work, and after switching it to 115 the machine would work fine, but not the case. It was hosed, and needed a new logic board.
At the time, everyone at my work was really into Myth 2. Anyone who has played Myth 2 knows about the journeymen, and how they always have long, odd names. From that day forth, my name was no longer Adam. It was "Six Board Logic Frying."
I once had a really old PC XT with an equally old hard drive. It was 5 1/4 inches, double height, cast bronze case, and held an impresssive 12 MB. The day I finally dumped the XT, I needed to transplant the disk into my new AT, so I unscrewed a few screws and lifted. Oops, there are the platters! I stared in horror for a few seconds before replacing the cover in a hurry.
The HD still worked flawlessly when it went to the tip six years later.
After I got my new Duron 800MHz system I only had a pentium 133MHz computer. I begun to overclock it and and tried to do that pencil trick so that I could unlock the multiplier. After I had taken the cpu cooler off several times the cpu was ruined and all the edges weren`t sharp anymore. Then I tried to see if it worked and pressed the cooler with a screwdriver. It went there in place but I destroyed one component on motherboard. After that I took the motherboard to a local electronics shop for soldering. It worked fine after that.
I destroyed my Spectrum in one hit.
;)
While playing Barbarian 2, I spent many lives trying to jump over this one hole. It was one of those times when you had to be pixel perfect to make the jump.
I finally made the jump on my last life -- and got eaten by a dinosaur straight away.
I picked up my Spectrum in both hands and headbutted it.
The case came off. Cables, keyboard membrane, and shards of plastic went everwhere.
Amazingly, after I taped it back together, it worked for a few more years before it finally gave up for good. Needless to say, I never played Barbarian 2 again
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
As teenagers we build tasers out of some scrap electronics. I accidentially hit my CBM64 and fried it, some years later it turned out my VIC-Videochip was crisp.
Also I killed a Quantum-LPS240 - I just punched twice my Amiga3000 which got a lose wire at that time and needed this to "wake up" - I didnt hit it hard and the also installed Seagate-ST1239N runs fine until today. You bet that was my last Quantum drive.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I bought a Japanese 110V Dreamcast which I plugged into the 240V Hong Kong mains in my eager anticipation of playing Sega Rally on it's launch.
All was well for a couple of minutes until a power regulating capacitor finally popped with jet of dialectic vapour being comically ejected via the cooling fan.
After replacing the capacitor and buying a new stepdown transformer it still worked!
So we had an XT. It was old, and the good, family computer was a spiffy 486. The XT was used for things like a modem, and my brother had it hooked up as a HAM radio packet station. So naturally, there was a handheld 2-meter radio sitting next to the computer, hooked to an antenna on the roof.
Then lightning struck the antenna. Zap. Through the radio, arc'd an inch or so to the outside of the computer case. Left a big 1/2" black mark which looked like a blow torch. Traveled into the computer. Fried the modem, the surge got into the phone line, fried a phone, the modem in the 486's computer, and erased the 486's hard drive. The XT? Well, if I remember, the power light came on, but nothing else happened.
So I scrapped it for parts. The PS and motherboard were propriatary, and didn't work. But the CGA card, I/O card, MFM controller and 20MB hard drive, and 5.25" disk drives all worked fine. The monitor was good too, though it emitted a high pitched whine after that incident. $45 later I had a new motherboard, case, and power supply, and I had that baby up and running. Ran for years after that. Oh, and the data on the 20MB hard drive was fine too.
Working for a data-recovery company, we regularly have to send drives back to customers. We'd rather not have them damaged in transit. So we now have boxes that we use to send the drives to customers.
As a test, I put a working drive in one of our boxes, and dropped it from 250m from a paraglider.
The drive survived.
Roger.
I've done all of this to it -
Taken the thing apart plenty of times (while running and not) to clean dust or a bit of spilled pop or coffee. No anti-static stuff.
Taken the LCD screen out while it is on. LCD works fine.
Changed a BIOS battery sitting on my kitchen floor without any kind of anti-static stuff.
Accidentally taken the HD out while the laptop was on (HD continues to work to this day)
Accidently took out the 16MB RAM expansion card while the laptop was on (still works)
Installed several different operating systems in a single day to see if I could get XFree86 to run on it (still haven't figured that out), and it gets really warm after about 8 hours of this.
Taken out the floppy drive (thinking laptop was off) while a diskette was in it and spinning no less, and they both still work.
Dropped it on a concrete floor from about 6 feet up putting it up on a shelf, it bounced. Just a small scratch.
Plugged it into an outlet in my home that doesn't have a ground on it (old house from 1940). The lights in the room all went out and the power in my room went out as well. It still works.
I've only had to replace the main battery that finally ran out of juice, and the BIOS battery that was in it originally.
One moring I woke up and discovered my computer was not responding to my quite rude mouse movement to wake it up from the screenblank.
;)
hooked on my server, ssh'd into it, nothing, just nothing, no ping or whatsoever.
Looked in the always open case, saw a thingie on the bottom, wierd i thought.
It fell off the motherboard, the solder melted...
put it back on, holding it in place with my hand, it was booting! whohoo! AUTCH! hot....
I solderd it back on its place. It worked, booted etc, and after 15 seconds or so it had melted its solder and fell of again. But it was workin, for a few secs
I used to not only mess around with the inside of my computer when its on, but I would actually plug/unplug the power cable/IDE cable from drives when the system is running. I am still amazed the only thing I ever destroyed was a cheap floppy drive (up in smoke). I also used to take out PCI cards while the system was on and very rarely screwed them in. my first motherboard was only screwed down to the case with 2 screws, so whenever I would bump the case the motherboard would short out (which happened allot!). At times with my first machine, the system would not post so my solution was to kick it repeatedly until it worked (and it did). Although I never figured out exactly why my computer did this I suspect it may be from the frequent "short outs"! I also learned to always use ESD because have fried countless sticks of generic ram due to fat fingering and not using ESD.
The funniest thing I have done though is when I was at a LAN party, a friend of mine left his computer unlocked so I quickly edited a copy of explorer.exe and replaced his Explorer with the edited out. When he came back and sat down at his computer, his start menu greeted him by calling him a "Fucking Jew"(I replaced the word "start", and Jew was the kids nickname), then when he opened the start menu he saw nothing but fat black cocks lining the left side of his start menu!
But to get back to hardware, in high school I had a friend who used to rip his old hardware apart and LITERALLY eat parts of them (he ate the memory off his geforce2 pro). This kid also once took a baseball bat and put it through an old monitor he had, and to this day it is still stuck in there...
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
in a galaxy far far away and many years ago...
there was a bored computer operator in a room full of pdp-11's, kept cool by some evaporative airconditioners.
It happened that one of the coolers needed filling up at around the same time the operator needed to empty his bladder.
the evaporative cooler continued to work fine after the unfortunate maltreatment
but nobody could remain in the same room with it
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
6.4 GB WD Caviar.
Stumbled and dropped it. There it went, from 4th floor on a concrete walkway. To my surprise it still works. The metal casing has one blunted corner and there's a little dent in the concrete as well.
And it isn't usually the bath tub.
And I know of at least 3 that have survived, and a couple more that the owners couldn't bear to touch given the timing of the phone's swan dive. Blech.
Nokia service centres always check for water damage before they do any work, even when you're just asking them to fix the known faulty fading display problem.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
1. :)
My old Siemens pc, a pentium 133, which i use as a firewall, mail server etc stops working one day.
I open the case and to my astonishment i find a pool of water on one corner of the motherboard. I figure it was from condensation, as I keep that pc in a remote corner of the room and there's no way i'd get a glass of water there.
Well, I let it dry for a couple of hours and turn it back on. Surprise, it works perfectly - except that there is no video signal coming out. I touch the video chip on the motherboard - it's extremely hot, probably fried. The vga connector stings me if i touch it. Same with the first serial port, which was in the same area.
That was 1 year ago. Needless to say, the machine still works up to this day, and thanks to Debian, i don't need a monitor on it anyway. And a big thanks to Siemens for making a pc that can work with 15% of the motherboard fried
2.
Friend of mine, artist type, buys a new sound card for his computer. I was busy that day and he didn't want to wait for me to install it, so he puts it in himself. All goes ok, drivers installed, games work, but then he decides to connect the audio cable from the cd-rom to the sound card.
I don't know how he did it, but he connected a floppy power connector to the internal audio connector of the card. Of course, sparks and smoke come out of the pc, he's to frightened to turn it on again, waits for me.
I come later, try the pc back on, it works. Try sound, it works. Only the cd audio input on the sound card is fried. Card was as no name as it can get, I had never heard of the chip before, but it still works.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
During deployment to an sunny third world country I learned that Sun SPARC systems will begin failing at 130 degrees fahrenheit ambient. Unfortunately my soldiers began failing at a somewhat lower temperature. Once evening arrived and the temperature fell, the machines worked again. Wish I could say the same for my soldiers. Seven heat casualties that week.
well... it fall... down the stairs... from second to first floor... the whole way... you can imagine, this comic-style, taking every single step... DUMPDUMPDUMPDUMPDUMPDUMP... then it slided about 3 meters into the kitchen and stopped under the table. funny thing: it still works, HD's are fine, everything absolutly normal. Just some... ditches in the casing :D
bravest thing I ever had. Still using it... would be kinda, dirty to get rid of it. won't it?
I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed and using my laptop while half-asleep, and I just nodded off. The laptop slid off to the side and fell all the way to the ground (~6 feet). The noise was very loud but the laptop worked perfectly -- the only thing that broke was a little plastic thing that keeps the CD disk-thingie closed; I had to use tape to keep it closed after that. But it worked perfectly fine. This was in 1997 and the laptop was a Fujitsu.
~CGameProgrammer( );
1500kg of slightly rusty Swedish steel, which had 80,000 miles on it about nine months ago when I got it, and now has 120,000. Most of that was done at rather more than 90mph, and with minimal servicing. It's due a big service, though. Next weekend I think.
Some hardware can handle things better than other, and in some situations a little hardware abuse is sometimes the solution.
For a customer there was a service engineer that did 'vibration monitoring' with some dedicated hardware. Measuremtnes were stored on a laptop (toshiba satelite). But in ome cases the vibrations were so large, the hardware just gave up (harddrive especially).
One solution for it is a little more robust hardware, something like this helps quite a bit.
But.. Sometimes it is even needed to 'abuse' hardware to get it back to work. When people have a crashed disk, and want I sometimes resort to rude methods to get it going again for a while. A big rubber hammer for hitting the disk has temporarily revived some of the disked that refused to go for a while just long enough to get most of the important data off. And some more 'abuse' that has helped many times is putting the drive in a zip-lock bag, and placing it in the refrigorator for an hour or so to completely coll off before the next attempt to get a few extra files off the disk.
I've done that (refridgerator/rubber hammer) with somthing like 6 crashed disks, with Novell formatteds disks, ext 2 disks and FAT-32 disks. From 5 of those I could get all data back.
Sometimes a little abuse can help !
.....and later you became famous with the jackass series.....
A friend of mine dropped a DEC Personal Workstation 600/au down a regular flight of 13 stairs in his house... The front door came off, but these machines used to lose the doors all the time... and the plastic front panel that held the door in place got smashed.. And it made a hole in the wall at the bottom of the stairs, But the machine still works perfectly and is now sitting with an uptime of over 80 days of daily use.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I had an old old monster 3D card from aboot 1996... my cat really took a liking to it and took a piss on it while the computer was on and I was at school. When I came home, the computer was still running but the display was fubar - all the card needed was a little cleaning, and a resolder on one of the chips. I think I still have the card, running in my firewall right now.
My ATI graphics cards have been absolutely reliable, outlasting several computers even though moving and storage and lots of handling.
The 'puter landed on the top surface, hitting nearly flat. About 9 keys, including the spacebar, popped off. But the LCD was undamaged, and after replacing the keys (that spacebar was a bitch to get back on!), it booted up and ran fine for another year.
I changed jobs, but heard from a friend that they finally retired that 'Pad in 1998.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Those are some nice cases; I know a guy who owns a Trager 745B to carry his powerbook. I'm much cheaper though, and don't have $150 to spend on a backpack; after a few drops, I decided that I shouldn't press my luck any more. I ripped the rings out of an old trapper-keeper-style notebook made out of thick fabric that had a zipper around the outside. It is the perfect size for my 14" laptop. It even has little zipper pouches for carrying wireless card, cds, etc. Certainly not the best solution, but the cheapest.
Hot plugged hard drives and tape drives, all worked (after initial sudden power loss...)
static discharge when plugging in speakers to sound card, also switched it off....
and setting an external zip drive internally, and getting the + and - the wtrong way round, white hot cable in less than a second, PSU billowing out black smoke.
It all still works to this day....
(this is not a
"When the need arises - and it does - you must be able to shoot your own dog."
A System 7.x Powerbook 1xx to do a mission critical sales presentation? It SHOULD have been put out of its misery.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I have a an AMD k6-2 cpu. I put an orb heatsink on it one time, not noticing the little ridge that went around the bottom. Well, that ridge was the only thing contacting the cpu, leaving a nice pocket of air right above the core. I managed to scrape most of the black off, but it is scarred for good. Funny thing is, it has never once been unstable...
And they tried to steal my CD player. The theif obviously had no idea what he was doing because he attacked the CD player with a screw driver. They managed to pry the whole front of the CD player off, which set off the alarm in it (it is an old Pioneer with their DFS alarm built in, for those who know what that means). The dumbshit fled, leaving the CD player and everything else in the car like my CDs, sub, change in the change tray, etc. When I came back to my car I found the door open in the CD player in a couple of peices. I carefully put everything back together, and by god it still works! And if I ever find that dumbshit I'm going to rearrange his face.
So in summary: Dumbass car theif: 0. 5 year old low end Pioneer CD player: 1.
I once took a completely dead Packard Bell VGA
:]
monitor, and dropped it on the floor in a fit of rage.
I heard a hissing sound from it, and thought "great,
the CRT is now going to im/explode and I'll have to
clean up the glass from the carpet". Oddly, the screen
didn't shater at all, and the rest of the CRT
seemed to be intact. When I drug it out to the dumpster
by the video cable, with the front of the screen scraping
against the pavement, and bits and peices of the case
being ripped off the front, the screen was scratched up
but didn't break. When I loaded it into the dumpster
and rammed boards up against the screen (not very hard though)
and hurled rocks that were about half the size of my
fist at the glass, it didn't break. I didn't bother
to find a brick, or something heavier to hurl at it,
so I didn't get the satisfaction of smashing the
screen in entirely, or get to experience mercury
poisoning or any of that fun stuff, but I did manage to
put some nice pock parks into the glass.
This is one of those times where I wish I owned a gun,
or had enough guts to light the thing on fire, even with
the consequences, but I have plenty of other damaged
or dead TVs/monitors that I need to throw away,
so all is not lost.
... Never break SCSI cards made out of Apples !
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
you are EXACTLY right - I loved that card until that little fucking tab broke off, and then it just wouldn't work anymore. I tried to glue it back on, make a new one, etc etc... nothing.
I went through two of them, and finally I gave up. those were expensive cards, too.
EOM
I got really pissed one day at my computer for being so stupid so I took a fairly heavy magnet and ran it back and forth over the top of my MFM (or was it RLL) hard drive. I showed THAT stupid computer who's stupid. From that point forward I had to boot from floppy, but everything else was fine...
My pet rat pissed on my keyboard. You don't ever want to have to crack open a rubber-membrane keyboard and wash rat-piss off the rubber. It's nasty!
Rum-n-coke...right down on the motherboard. The cpu fan sputtered and spat that shit all over the room. The video card flaked out for a second, but DOOM ][ kept right on runnig...I got blasted by a cyber-demon.
Once in college, one of the idiots in the CS program - we called him "The Gimp" - was putting together his computer. He had it all running with the win98 install cooking on the thing.... But it was in pieces on his workbench. When we walked in the room, he picked up the hard drive - which was plugged in and writing at the time - shook it at us very vigorously (making it go "CLANK CLANK GRRRRRRR CLANKCLANK!") and shouted "Look guys! I got a 40GB hard drive! and it's a Western Digital just like you said to order!" (This was back when 40gb was HUGE and western digital made good ide drives)
My uncle got a pentium 166 so hot, the solder that held the socket in place got squishy. He touched the plastic socket, because he could smell something burning, and it burnt his finger...AND the socket slit around in the melted solder just a little. He quickly powered down the machine and let it cool. He replaced the fans and heat sink compound and when he booted it back up, the bios said he had a 47Mhz pentium cpu. It was slow as hell, but it still worked.
Story 1: My first IBM-compatible PC had a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar hard drive... This drive went through everything. I used to ride my bike places with the hard drive on my lap, just to share files with people. No problems. The machine with the WD drive eventually ended up at a friend's house. A year or two later, lightning struck the house... Destroyed their TV, stereo, the computer I gave him, etc. etc., but the Western Digital drive survived! I think it might still work to this day (but then again, it might be in a dumpster by now).
Story 2 (posted earlier): I had a 730 MB Western Digital drive on the primary IDE channel, and a 2.1 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drive on the secondary channel. While taking a nap, I heard a loud clack sound -- enough to wake me up. I quickly turned on the monitor and noticed that Linux was still working fine on the 730 MB drive, while the 2.1 GB drive was toast. The system ran fine until I went to shut down and Linux tried unmounting the 2.1 GB drive -- it couldn't, and refused to shut down at that point. Although the drive was toast, Linux held up nicely!
Story 3: A couple friends and I were building a computer for a friend, when we noticed that the CPU fan didn't fit because of large capacitors right next to the CPU. The only way we could get the fan to fit was to saw down the edge of the fan's casing with a Leatherman. Worked like a charm!
Story 4: A friend's cat spilled a glass of milk into her iBook. The hard drive was toast, but the rest of the system booted up fine. She shipped it to Apple, and got it back with a new hard drive for free.
Story 5: Just a couple months ago, I dropped my Powerbook G4 from about a 1m height onto hard ground (not intentionally, of course). It survived with a tiny dent on one of its corners, but everything still works on it perfectly.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I especially dig the part about the dolphins retreiving the cameras. That would almost make me want to drop my camera into the pool.
Miko O'Sullivan
I tried these half-melted and by now somewhat battered chips out in another circuit I had which used these kinds of RAM chips, and found that 4 of them would not work at all, 2 others worked perfectly well, and the last 2 seemed to work, but some of the bytes within would not read back correctly.
I threw them all out; I'd rather not have to worry about bugs in the hardware as well as the software!
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
I managed to place enough computer equipment in a friend's car that it shifted while he was driving and my 15" monitor fell out when he opened the back. It took a 3 foot drop and landed on solid concrete.
Now, the monitor has a few war wounds, but it works perfectly. I tell ya... that thing was built like a tank.
Hard drives came without keyed power connectors.
THAT was asking for trouble... Toasted a hard drive that way.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
A buddy of mine, when packing to move across the country, dug his iBook out of the densely packed back of his Mustang to use it for the night and in the morning, set it against the wheel of the car and forgot to put it back in. He drove on to the iBook, realised what he had done, pulled forward, grabbed the computer and pulled it out of sleep - it had a dead pixel pattern exactly like a tire tread, but otherwise worked perfectly.
One call to 1-800-my-apple and one week later, he had a new lcd on the computer he's still using 2 years later.
I have an old 486 thinkpad, 75 mhz thingie, can't remember the model. Mostly a piece of trash, but I had some fun with it. :-)
Anyway, my sister had been fooling around with it, and managed to set a password on the harddrive. Not a bios password as in a normal pc, but stil set through the bios. On the old thinkpad you had 3 passwords that could be set. Two of them can be reset by removing batteries and stuff, but the one on harddrive access is a no go. And replacing the drive didn't help. So, what to do, what to do...? Not willing to give up on it, I stuffed in an older drive I had, set it to slave by accident(this was one of the old 2,5" drives with a separate switch for it), and when it started up the machine gave me an errormessage. I looked at it, flicked the switch(the power was still on), and did a ctrl-alt-del reboot. Tadaa, it booted. It didn't remedy my problem with the password, but I was actually able to use as long as I went through that little ritual every time.
So much for IBM's servicemanual(not user manual, you could find the service manual on their pages back then) saying very clear that it was not possible to bypass this password...
I once saw a 2-door Cadillac in the showroom with front seats from a 4-door.
Strictly a pedestrian hack; anyone with a wrench could do that one.
It takes a seriously disturbed mind to come up with this one, and yet I've seen it done. (Even got to help build it, did some of the wiring.)
So, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine had this absolutely perfect four door 1985 Dodge Aries. Nearly mint condition, low mileage. It was almost a shame that he was using it as a winter beater. He was turning left one day and a guy ran a red light to plow into the side of him. Bang! No more passenger side. He drove it like that until spring.
However, he had a parts car kicking around the driveway, a 1987 Plymouth Reliant which had been written off when it got sideswiped on the driver's side. Otherwise, it too was in pretty good shape, but it was a two door car.
Most people would content themselves with picking up another K-Car - they're great little beaters, cheap, easy to maintain, and pretty reliable. But no...
So, in the summer time and driving his summer car (a gorgeous '71 Chevelle), he embarked on a neat project.
You see, a two door K-Car and a four door K-Car have exactly the same length. He's also half Irish, so he's too cheap to buy parts when he doesn't need to. And he's half Polish, so he makes do with whatever he has on hand. So out came the Sawzall and the MIG welder.
With some careful measuring and even more careful jigging, he was able to weld the passenger's side of the two door Plymouth Reliant onto the four-door Dodge Aries. With a coat of paint and a little bit of Bondo to hide the seam on the roof skin, he had a three-door Dodge Aries. Unless you take a close look at the weld marks un the underside of the floor, you'd think Chrysler actually built it like that. He even went to a couple of wrecking yards until he found all the interior trim pieces to make the interior of the two door car match the four door car.
Try taking that to the DMV to get it registered... they had fun with it. (Actually, the majority of it is still a four door 1985 Dodge Aries, so it's still titled as that.)
He didn't drive the car the next winter, because he wanted to save it from rust damage. Instead, he started taking it to car shows. The beauty of it, of course, is that from any one vantage point, it's either a two or four door K-Car - not something you'd expect to see at a car show. When they notice it, people seem to get a good laugh out of the car.
Watch out for the silver '85 Aries driving around eastern Toronto (Danforth) on nice summer days.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
One question: WHY?!? Do you normally open things up and think "hey, I think I'll pee in this."?
First account: A few years ago I stepped on my Casio SF-M10. (This was an organizer whose Neat Feature(TM) was a small version of Lucid 3D's spreadhseet.) Naturally, this cracked teh LCD screen, requiring a repair job. Miraculously, the data was not wiped, and worked great up until late last year when the heat seals on the screen needed replacement. Instead I replaced it with a Hadnspring Visor Deluxe.
Second account: while rooting around on my box here at home, I accidentally touched a screwdriver to the internal connector of an AHA-1542 SCSI adaptor. There was a "Zzzt!", a bit of smoke, and the power supply breaker tripped. Strangely, the machine powered back up just fine after I unplugged and replugged the power cord from the surge strip.
Third account: a friend of mine had witnessed a particular compact 286 computer whose selling point was that you could abuse the hell out of this thing and it would still work. During demos, the rep would pick the unit up and hurl it across the room against a wall completely at random. He'd pick it up and it would still be cranking along as fast as a 286 possibly could. That was until one day it stopped functioning. A support call could make nothing of it, but later on, to shorten the story, they had remembered that inducing shock to a battery powered unit could cause the batteries to discharge a significant amount of energy. They accordingly replaced the batteries.
In short, I'm *still* amazed that computer hardware can take such abuses.
This sig no verb.
that a good clue-by-four is hard to damage.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
GeForce 2MX card + warped Blue Orb heatsink + EverQuest left on in trader mode overnight = one very, very burnt core. /mourn /cry
Amigas are incredibly resilient. Ask anyone who ever opened one up without any idea what they were doing ;)
;)
I was once moving my A1200 motherboard into an AT miditower case. I soldered wires from an old AT motherboard connector to the motherboard, where the power jack was. I clearly made a mistake with my multimeter when working out the connections, since the 0V and 5V connections were OK but the +12V and -12V connections were reversed.
You would think that this kind of problem would cause horrendous damage, but in fact I didn't notice for a little while. It booted and all, just wouldn't output any sound and there were faint ripples on the display. I didn't do anything about that though, thinking I had left off the audio leads. It's only when it stank that I felt around the board with my finger. Some discrete semiconductor was painfully hot, so I checked everything I'd done. I swapped the wires to the correct spots, and everything's been fine ever since!
A related story is for the most resilient chip in history. Now they aren't very clever in their design or performance, but one thing Microchip PIC16F84 microcontrollers have going for them is their ability to be set on fire and still work. I've accidentally reversed the 5V supply and burned my fingerprint onto the top of the chip once, and then fixed the problem to have it work perfectly. In fact it only died when I made a similar mistake on the programming pin, there must be a lack of protection due to the normally higher voltage than Vcc. But the chip mostly worked, just couldn't reprogramme!
I've also witnessed a friend standing at an engineering honours project expo, suit and tie, ready to present his design to the judges. With the PIC16F84 on fire. With said friend shitting himself. Just as the judges arrived, he tried again and it worked. Must have removed the short and let it cool off in time!
My pet theory is that these chips have more silicon area devoted to the protection diodes than to the rest of the logic. So whether that's true, you can safely assume that they can take what you can dish out. Maybe I'll try on my half-dead PIC something that I know doesn't work for LEDs: hooking up to my pulse discharge equipment and pumping around 50 J of energy in at around 20 kV, in a few microseconds (yes, that's several MW peak output power). LEDs give a dim flash but plastic shards hit the walls and bounce around, with the remnants of the device containing no silicon die anymore. I tried that one last week
i ssssmsssshëd my KëyBOrD with hmmër fëw timëssss, bUT It ssssTiLl wORkssss grët! No nëëd for nëw onë luCKY më111
I used to work for a company that made x-ray film digitizers (basically scanners for big photographic negatives) and we had one hospital site that was repeatedly blowing the fuses on the scanner mainboard. Strangely enough, the blown fuses always occured between 4:30 and 5:00 pm on Friday afternoons...
We later discovered the hospital tested its emergency diesel generators on Friday afternoons - they just forgot to take the damn things off the grid. I wonder what those voltage spikes did to the MRI....
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I do remember while working at Nortel, I turned up to training course and got into a conversation with the trainer. It went something like this.
Trainer: "Which company do you work for?"
Me: "Nortel."
Trainer: "Oh yeah, I know them. They build the DMS switches right. Pretty good hardware."
Me: "They're ok, getting a bit old."
Trainer: "True, and they don't work so well under water"
Me: "Kee!!!"
Apparently at a switching station had a leaky air conditioning unit above the DMS and water had dripped inside of the DMS's case over a period of time it had filled several inches of the case with water (submerging several components). The operators noticed some strange alarms and eventually sent out an engineer. They got it working again. Great way to treat hundreds of thousands of dollars of teleco hardware.
I have an old AMD 133 chip that got stood on and had about five pins snapped off. I resoldered 4 of them back on to the chip and left the 5th off because I could not find it. And after the heat of the soldering and all the abuse that comes with my bad soldering I ran it and It works sweet even to this day. It just looks worse than new thats all. Way to go AMD!!!
-M@imer
Back in the days of my family's first 286, we weren't allowed to play any games. Dad had seen the beatings that keyboards took in frantic moments of Tetris or Rampage (anybody played Rampage?), and decided that his pride and joy would be ruined by such vicious behaviour. My brother and I pooled our savings, and went out and bought ourselves a no-name keyboard from the local computer shop (and yes, it did take both of our savings -- we were both pretty young, and I think the keyboard probably cost us about $30, a fortune when I was 8). That keyboard was the best hardware investment I ever made. It still works, although the plastic casing got broken after a nasty late night Doom-ing session, but I pulled out the internals and it's now attached to my PVR/home-entertainment system as the main controller.
There's some very old,
slightly damaged hardware,
which still works perfectly
here
I once left my laptop in the rain all day and then let it dry and it worked fine.
A friend of mine had his PC connected to the phone line during a thunderstorm and lightning struck it. The result:
... for fun we even tested CPU and RAM and to our great astonishment THEY WORKED! Everything in his PC was dead and exhibiting physical signs of burning, melting or explosions ... except what I consider the 2 most 'electricity sensitive' parts of a PC which worked perfectly (and were promptly integrated into the replacement system we scrounged up from spare parts).
- black phone jack on the wall
- melted soundcard and internal modem
- a hole in one of the Winbond ICs on the mainboard
- all SCSI drives (CD-ROM, Writer): dead
- all IDE drives (HDDs): dead
- Cannon BJC Color Printer: dead
- external SCSI scanner: dead
- PSU: dead
Not wanting to throw away anything still working we went through rigorous testing of ALL the components
many years ago, I had a credit card sized calculator that I accidentally left in my pants pocket. Well, those pants went through the washer and dryer, but surprisingly, the calc still worked. The whle thing had warped in the heat of the dryer, so it was now a shallow bowl shapped, but it work just fine. Eventually, I think I stepped on it and cracked the circuit board, because it stopped working.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
My brother, many years ago, had a digital watch that went through the washer-dryer cycle, and heat-fried the circuit board. For some reason, the watch still worked, but would display strange characters instead of numbers. The really strange bit was that the characters were consistent for about 12 hours, then would change to something completely different. My brother would watch the seconds display until he could de-code the display, and then was able to use it until the next "change". It was actually funny when people would ask him what time it was, and he'd just show them his watch... :)
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
It was in my pants, still on, when my girlfriend put it in the washing machine. It went through a full program, I found it, dried it overnight, and turned it on. Worked flawlessly (well until the screen broke down three months later...stupid Nokia), and it never smelt better.
True story. Wonder if my T68i would have survived the same process?
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Me and my buddy used to take our failed HDD's, motherboards, etc.. you name it.. out to his field in back of his house with a wooden baseball bat and smack the $hit out of it. The motherboards, cards, cdroms would almost always never work afterwards... but what were seemingly broken hdd's would spring to life once batted 80-150feet into the dirt. As I recall, we still have a box running an old WD 850 that was a victim of "the beating".
"I know this... this is a unix system" -- Jurrasic Park
I've got a good one. I used to work in a computer shop. One day someone brought in a PC that had been flooded. It was completely submerged for several days, and when the water went down it was full of silt. There was about 2 inches of fine silt covering the motherboard.
Did I mention the PC was still running when the water came up?
We let it dry out, blew out all the silt with compressed air, and switched it on. The only components we lost were the CDROM, the Power Supply, and the HD! The fans were also a little thrashed, but they still worked reasonably well.
An older dual proc board I used to have was the Abit BP6. Dual celerons were cool! Anyhow, it was a large board in a small case, and while installing a very long CDROM drive, The back of the drive popped 3 or 4 capicators off the mobo (they were mounted on the front edge of the board for whatever reason). It worked fine and I used it for another two years without incident!
Another one is a 386DX25 I used to have. It had 8 megs of ram - but this was before 30 pin SIMMS came out... It was 8 megs of individual socketed ram chips on the mobo. Anyhow, It was attached to a monster AT power supply and was sitting on a table (no case). One day, the power supply went with sparks and smoke, as did some of the capicators on the mobo. I put a new PS on, and the board booted just fine! Amazing!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
You have to be careful doing this, though. I relied on that trick to get my keyboard (and monitor) to work for several years, but as the keyboard got dodgier, so did the rest of the circuitry. Now, simply nudging that computer will shut it off. It's completely worthless as a laptop.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
The 2100's were so choice. You could pratically use them as a sheild in the Rodney King riots and still modify your Word Documents on the go in all it's 16 gray scale glory. Too bad the periphials couldn't have caught up sooner, you could had your own sound track via MP3 with plenty of the 162 MHZ Strong Arm to spare.
We had a military radio made by Magnavox in the AF back in the day that had a steel / led case about 1/4" thick, made in slices with 4 long bolts holding them all together.
Those things were nearly indestructable. Pilots would step on them getting in and out. They would get dropped three or four feet. The air conditioning in some planes would dump a gallon of water in them when the evaporators went out. We'd just open it up, shake the water out, and sit it on top of a warm piece of test equipment to dry, and they'd always work. I always thought they must have been designed by somebody who was stuck in the real life "A Bridge Too Far" with shitty radios and wanted to make sure that the very last thing working on the plane was the radio when everything else had given out.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Luckily, the insurance from a house fire the week of graduation managed to send me to college with fully functioning 486. Never did replace that copy of the Wing Commander though...
P. S. Bonus Safety Tip -> Throw away old (10+ yrs) extension cords. Seriously they can be dangerous to families, pets, letter jackets, and comic book collections:(
Part of my job at a former employer was to decommission old equipment. During one network revamp project we learned exactly how sturdy some Ethernet equipment really is. For example, while removing the ThinWire Ethernet segment servicing half of B Building we found why the segment had been behaving flakey for a couple years.
Apparently a couple years before when the Facilities group had been putting in a doorway, they had literally taken a chainsaw to the wall to make the door cutout. The ThinWire segment just happened to run through this newly made doorway. Whoever was running the saw must have realized that cutting the wire was probably a Bad Thing, so he got one of the electricians to fix the wire for him. It appears that the electrician neatly spliced the co-ax cable back together and braided the co-ax wiring meshing together. The only problem was that the splice caused signal quality issues and collisions that noone in the networking group could ever figure out. The only way we figured it out was when we removed the wall containing the doorway. A co-worker still has the splice as a keepsake.
To this day at that company there is still a DEC100 terminal server somewhere on that network that no one has ever been able to find. During the remodelling of F Building it got relocated to another part of the building, then later encased in a wall somewhere. Tracking that sucker down had become one of my hobbies from 1997 to 2000. Even though no one knows where it is at, you can still connect into it using MCR NCP or see its network broadcasts with an Ethernet monitor. It has a truly impressive uptime since wherever it is, it is still connected to the site-wide UPS.
Back in the mid 80's, when I was getting into computers, it seemed that every magazine had a few programs for you to type into your computer. Eventually becoming bored with the programs , that would run with my VIC 20, I noticed one day that the keyboard was really tough. So I decided, like any little maniac, to type in my next program, with a HAMMER. The moral iof the story... the program worked. Now being older and wiser ... I miss my old VIC 20 keyboard, because it would make it so much easier to settle arguments with computer users making ID-10-T errors.
My job is to just stand there and smile
(This is my first comment on anything here, amazingly)
I put ice in a bag and balanced it on top of the heatsink of my Athlon Thunderbird 1.2Ghz machine. Water condensed on the outside of the bag, the ice melted, and the bag rolled off and shorted the motherboard.
It's still fine, though!
Also, one time the dog pissed on my brother's dreamcast and it started smoking and making funny noises. It still works, too! (besides the awful smell when you turn it on, leading me to dub it the ShizzCast.)
--Bdragon