Slashdot Mirror
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"
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.
.
this one time.. at band camp
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...
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...
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.
Roarkk Computer's -- Home of the 30 second burn-in!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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.
3 hits with a sledgehammer and you couldn't bust the cartridge?
Spent too much time playing with video games, I guess. Have your muscles _completely_ atrophed or are you just _that_ big of a wuss?
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.
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.
my schlong. it's been consistently beaten for years, but always starts up when i need it to.
. . . 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....
<:
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
Years ago I knew a commissioning engineer who used to test hand-wired circuit boards that way. Didn't check it for shorts between the power planes first, just plugged in a good meaty power supply - if he saw smoke, he knew they used to be shorted together. This approach actually worked fine, until he got one on which a novice wireman had gridded the power planes together throughout, at about half inch intervals ...
freedom, n. Allowing people you don't like to do things you disapprove of.
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.
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.
SIG News report:- Hell's security has been penetrated, and a hacker known as Mo Ney has admin rights on all their systems
Of all the places you'd expect to have a good firewall...
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
That is definitely interesting. Someone else told me a story very similar recently, but when they said "lappies", I punched them in the face and cut their balls off.
Yet another example of how Explorer can ruin your computing experience!
My laptop has survived years of slashdot.
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
That reminds me of what happened to the Windows laptop of a friend of mine. He had a knack of using it in the tub... Of course, one day he accidentally let it go, and with a big bzzzzt, fizzzzz, the screen went black.
We turned it upside down, the used the hairdryer on it, and after an hour, it worked again. And the amazing part is that Windows hasn't crashed on it since then!
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.
I call bullshit. No company would ever put it in writing that its ok to cut their hardware in half with a hacksaw.
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
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
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 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.
I can relate in a way. About four years ago, I was waiting for the school bus. A friend of mine drove over my schoolbooks two times. I was lucky not to pay any fines.
Support the Chagossians
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".
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
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.
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.
'cept a hacksaw company?
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.
Odd that. A friend of mine backed his Explorer over his laptop bag full of stuff, including a laptop, Palm, Zip, etc. The LCD screen of the laptop was shot, a couple of keys were broke off (easily glued back on) but the CPU and drives were still fine, he still uses it as a portable desktop, he just ripped off the panel and plugs a monitor in. The laptop started off as an HP and ended up very Compaq, imagine that.
Digitac
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!
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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!
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Bring over your laptop and your car and we'd demo it. heh
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.
When I was 11ish, I met the first guy that programmed--
You weren't a very mature 11 year old, it seems. The first 'guy' that programmed was Ada Lovelace. Any boy even partway into puberty wouldn't mistake her for a 'guy' judging from the pictures in the historical record....
Same story but it was an entire pot of coffee. No zzzzt though as we managed to shut it off fast enough. Let it drain and dry for 4 days, plugged it back in and it works like a champ.
As a special bonus you get a nice coffee aroma when after it's first turned on.
BFL
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
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!
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.
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!!!
Unfortunately, the Explorer was totalled as a result of the rollover.
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My God. I did this too... (Coincidently, I was also in Australia).
I'm not so sure it's a coincidence....