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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"
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.
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).
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!
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!
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
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.
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...
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 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
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
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
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 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 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!
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.
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 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.
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
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 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
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.
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..
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.
My two horror stories:
One, talking my mother through a Sound Blaster replacement over the phone -- and then realizing after the install was complete that she never shut the machine down. Card worked, machine worked, she still uses it as a home MP3 server today.
I once worked at a hospital as technical support. At one point, I had to replace a drive in a machine that stored critical patient data. I figured the best thing to do was hook up that drive as a slave, copy everything over, and then leave it as backup just in case. Well, I didn't pay attention to the screws I used to secure the drive in the case, and they were about a millimeter too long. Needless to say, when I fired the machine up, a lot of red smoke escaped the drive, and a small fire appeared near where the screw had penetrated the circuit board. I quickly shutdown power, fanned the smoke away before anyone could notice, and backed out the offending screw. I didn't know what I was going to do, as the data hadn't been transferred, and losing the data would pretty much mean losing my job. So, I said "what the hell" and fired the machine back up. Wonder of wonders, there was no smoke and the drive booted fine. I transferred the data as quickly as I could, removed the evidence, and put the computer back the way it was before, with no one ever the wiser.
I did eventually take that drive (and the destructive screws) home and mounted it in a bare chassis just to watch it burn. Took about fifteen seconds to turn into a fireball.
-------------------------------------------------
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
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.
how's that for stability?
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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
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 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.
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.
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Bring over your laptop and your car and we'd demo it. heh
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.
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.
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
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.
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 personally don't think this is right. I think you ought to be able to do whatever you want to someone who robs you (again, I wouldn't advise taking the risk, but if you choose to take the risk I think you should be given a free hand). However, the law sees it differently. I suppose the police don't want any competition...
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I'm a believer in anti-static kits. (ground straps) I zapped my Motherboard by (didn't know it was possible) plugging in my Palm VII to its cradle. I was about half an inch from dropping my Palm in the cradle when nice blue arc traveled from the case of the Palm to the copper contact of the cradle. All of the fans in my case went dead and there was a burning smell and some minor lightning inside the case.
I eventually got the courage to power my case back on to see if my data was still there, and it was! Turns out only the serial port is dead, so I disabled it in the BIOS and made sure I had an up-to-date backup.
My new MB should be in Monday. When I replace it, I'll see if I can post the picture of the transistor that exploded. I'm just amazed the board still works.
Still mocking static kits? Static kit - $5 Motherboard - $70. Which would you rather spend money on?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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!
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!!!
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 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