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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"
I installed Windows.
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!
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
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.
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?
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
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.
My friend did this, and the amount of smoke from just one wire on the ribbon was amazing (to me anyway, he didn't seem to take it the right way).
It was like someone took a knife and sliced the ribbon all the way down, making two parallel ribbons. You ask: was everything OK afterwards? Yes! The scsi card and all devices were fine. Did his scsi card have a fuse on the terminator power wire? Obviously not. The event was locally named the "Lonergan SCSI terminator power-wire-fire". Boy I can't believe how tough some of this hardware is. The only HD I've every blown was because I let the onboard controller touch the case chassis. Spark! I've got cables the wrong way round, forgotten to plug fans in, hotplugged stuff I shouldn't... I can't kill anything!!
There is a reason not to do it, but it's trivial. The grounding wire on the power plug is a whole lot better than the grounding wire on the 40pin ribbon. By taking out the power first, there is still some electricity in it that then goes thru the ribbon.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
But...
It might soon. I'm not even going to get out of my comfy computer chair. All you have to do is click this link. That link is a link to the webserver running of my RH Linux machine at home. Did I mention it's running purely off a 56K modem?
(yikes, am I gonna take a pounding from this)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
My 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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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 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!