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How Not To Install Computer Hardware
ssassen writes "Most computer hardware websites tell you how to get your computer hardware up and running properly and not RMA it after the first boot. Hardware Analysis takes a different approach and tells us exactly how NOT to install computer hardware. They document many of the pitfalls that'll sound familiar to many enthusiasts and have some great pictures of what could go horribly wrong during an upgrade. Very funny, and guaranteed to put a smile on your face!"
See this article Much improved, though, with pictures to boot!
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
if you replace "they" with "we"
bite my glorious golden ass.
...as long as nobody's looking!
See, you didn't need to read that article at all. Let's keep up the slashdot tradition!
I used to work in a retail computer store specializing in Amiga computers. The A1200 was notorious for being difficult to install expansion boards into the trapdoor slot.
I had one accelerator try to be returned after the customer tried to install it themselves.
I looked at the unit and the pins connecting the card connector to the board were bent and there were chips out of the motherboard.
I told the customer that it looked like they took a screwdriver to the edge and used a hammer to try and pound the card into the slot.
I kid you not, the reply was "I did. So what? The manual didn't say *NOT* to hit it with a hammer and screwdriver".
We didn't accept the return. I explained that my supplier would laugh me out of business if I tried to return it with chisel marks.
$200 down the drain because the cheap bastard didn't want to spend the extra $10 to have us install it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The scariest part of upgrading I've found is the daunting process of mounting the heatsink on the processor. Most newer heatsinks have a little latch that helps with ease of installation, but there're always those renegade heatsinks without latches that just give me the jibblies to install.
It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the heatsinks didn't require so much force to fit over the nubs on the processor housing that you have to press on them with a screwdriver, risking the integrity of the printed circuitry around the processor and your sanity as you press down on them in hope that they'll fit. But no... they still make you press like there's no tomorrow.
Step 8a...
After your webserver is configured, create a page that has technical information that geeks are interested in, and have a friend submit a story to slashdot about it.
Step 8b...
Sit back, and watch the blinking lights turn solid with activity, as your 14 registered users get dogpiled with 6099 anonymous slashdotters. Admire the wonderful smell of melting IC chips while looking for your warranty paperwork.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Thigs that can go wrong: when your new box gets slashdotted!
There are 13 registered and 7025 anonymous users currently online. Current bandwidth usage: 1949.91 kbit/s
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Just make sure you have done a full (or preferably 2) full backups first - then it doesnt matter what you do to your PC, nothing will go wrong. Hell, juggle the ram chips, play football with the hard disk, drop bits onto passing pedestrians... whatever the hell you feel like. It'll all work just fine.
This state of affairs can obviously be implied from the case where you attempt to upgrade without backing up and it takes 0.0000001 seconds for something fatal to happen to your hard disk.
Beep beep.
Fortunately, I had nothing that was irreplacable on the drive -- I was just plugging it in because it was faster than using a floppy -- but still, it taught me a valuable lesson, and is fortunately, the only piece of hardware I've ever broken on install. Course, since that time, I've developed the habit of double checking power cable connections; I don't like the smell of smoldering silicon in the morning.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
You wouldn't believe how many people don't realize you can fry a motherboard that way...
I have to pleed ignorance here, never knew you COULD fry a motherboard this way. In fact... I can't think of a hell of alot you can do to the ps/2 ports that would fry a motherboard. I'll tell ya why, cause the 5volt line has a fuse on it. I can't remember the rating, something like 2amp @ 120v or some such, a pretty damn massive fuse considering the typical load on those ports.
I can believe that you can do harm with a straight short, but i've seen motherboards survive coffee in the keyboard and my self i've shorted out a keyboard or two being foolish, and the motherboards in question only needed a replacement fuse.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Dan's Data: Step by Step 3: How to destroy your computer
:)
It's a much funnier article - and still relevant, despite the fact that it's been there for ~5 years now.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
The one that really kills me is when someone plugs in a PS2 mouse while the system is running
The one that really kills me is that there are people who design a system that can be destroyed by reattaching a mouse.
Yes, and they reproduced it from Australian Personal Computer Magazine, January 1998... of which I have copy.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
that these enthusiasts are a retailer's nightmare; the constant flow of hardware back and forth puts a considerable amount of stress on the retailer and his service personnel.
The rate at which "enthusiasts" return stuff can't possibly compete with the rate at which regular, frustrated users return stuff for perfectly valid reasons. I suspect more than half of all new computer products don't work as advertised, have serious defects, are incompatible with systems they claim to be copatible with, or don't work at all. That's part of the business, but if companies put out so much defective stuff, the least they can do is take back the stuff that really doesn't work right without complaining. A lot of companies just seem to be outsourcing user testing to paying end users.
Coffee? I managed to spill a glass of wine on my keyboard. It seemed OK so I saw no reason to change my habbit of keeing in drink next to my keyboard in the evening. Not even when a second glass of wine got spilt on the keyboard (actually my wife might have been responsible for that one).
The third glass of wine did not damage any hardware but Windows BSODed and my hard drive was corrupted badly enough to stop me rebooting. I had to reinstall Windows (for the coincidentally for the last time).
The PS/2 Aux (mouse) protocol is designed for hotpluging. It just happend that older Windows version didnt support it (neither did XFree864.0).
It you've fried your motherboard, it was something else you did.
(D.A.U is short for "Duemmster Anzunehmender User" - dumbest hypothetical user. By the way, their D.A.U. of the month galleries are also something to behold.)
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Well, I suppose this definitively proves that /. readers actually do RTFA. When they can.
On a more serious note, now that the webserver has lost touch with reality... yeah. Some of the dumb things I see being done on these sites really scares me whenever I think I might want to save money and build my next machine myself... I've been doing a lot of searching for components and suchlike, and I managed to scavenge a PC Gamer feature on building it yourself from about a year ago, but I'm still apprehensive. Money is tight for me, and I really wouldn't appreciate watching a $300 component become an amusing anecdote for a "how-not-to" article. So, are there any sites out there that actually show, step-by-step, what one SHOULD do?
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
We're actually on a 100Mbit connection right on the AMS-IX, one of the fastest internet gateways in Europe. We're doing just fine actually, we just needed to reconfigure Apache to allow for more simultaneous users, the server is not even close to being taxed. In case you're wondering what we're running, I've listed the configuration below.
- 2 x Intel 2.8GHz Xeon with HT
- Tyan Tiger i7501 motherboard
- 2GB of PC2100/DDR266 Registered DDR memory
- 4 x Seagate Cheetah 15K3 HDs, 37GB, U320 SCSI
- Adaptec 2200S U320 SCSI RAID controller
- Disks are run in a RAID10 configuration
Sander Sassen
ssassen@hardwareanalysis.com
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com
Hmm, let me test that out.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Unplug, plug, ok, no problem works fine.
Well my PC is still working, I cant see any pr
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The thing I never understood about this particular joke is - how did the poster submit the comment?
I think my problem with hot-swapping AGP cards was the compact design of the connector. The traces are designed with two levels of contacts on each side of the card, but as the card is inserted or removed the outer set of traces is wiped past the upper set of contacts in the socket where they short out adjacent pins.
I definitely fried the mobo (which was an IWill that sucked anyway) and a 256MB DDR stick. The rest of the components including the CPU survived the experiment. But, after buying a new mobo, I just had to upgrade the CPU of course ... and heatsink and fan ... which drew more current from the power supply ... and why upgrade the CPU without adding more memory ... and what good was all that memory without faster video ... and a hard disk for the new games ... and since the new CPU, heatsink and fan didn't fit in the old case ...
John
Maybe he was dictating?
Not on a boatse, not with a goatse.
I won't mod the box, and I won't overclox.
I will not hot swap it here or there.
I will not hot swap it anywhere!
I do not hot plug CPUs, Sam. I will not do it, Sam-I-Am.
John
Not quite;
From the last page of the article:
in case you're wondering we did not use any part of a similar article from Dan at Dan's Data, but we both covered all of the requirements to utterly destroy your computer with little effort.
Try again...
"Last time I went around to a computer store and askedif they had any [grounding strap] I was laughed out of the store.."
I think that was the time when you were wearing a "Chicks dig Linux" T-Shirt.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty