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What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?
Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."
I'd have to say one of the worst computer accidents I had was ruining my Slashdot ID by attempting a first post.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
mkswap /dev/hda1 /dev/hda3
instead of swapon
hda1 = data
mda3 = swap
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
December 23, 1998 - Before leaving work I tried connect to my home web server to transfer some files. The connection timed out. That seemed odd. I was just on a couple of hours ago.
Got home. The screen's frozen on the computer. Ctl-alt-Del...Nothing. Reboot... the monitor doesn't even come on! Ok, take the cover off, get out the canned air, blow dust off the components, see if anything is loose.
Holy shit! I see a mouse wandering around inside the computer!
I think about getting something to kill it, but don't want to mess up the hardware, so I shake it out. It drops out and neither the cat or dog see it as it scurries under the couch.
After about 30 minutes of sleuthing I find that the Ethernet card is blown. It's got a nice little burn mark on one of the chips where the mouse apparently PEED on it!
Well a quick trip down to Compu USA and everything is back in order. The cat's still sleeping on the couch -- but it's only a matter of time before one of us frag's that mouse!
Lesson: Don't leave any of your slot covers off the back of your computer.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Hiding cookies in my power suppy never turned out good...
Matt
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$100 to replace the *melted* keyboard. note to self: never remove nail polish near a computer.
I did a
on my friend's machine, in order to change permission on all of the hidden directories and files. I didn't think that ".." and all of its subdirectories would also be traversed, which coupled with the "-R" changed ownership on every file on her computer.I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Oh, I guess I have punched a couple keyboards when I was pissed off. I've broke about 4 keyboards that way. I've also punched a few monitors but never damaged those. Apparently a CRT is stronger than a car windshield.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
Once, during the 70s, I accidentally spilled Pepsi on the control panel at the Two Mile Island nuclear power plant, and Jimmy Carter came to fix it, and he was irradiated and grew to over 50 feet...
Boy that was embarassing.
I'm fairly clumsy, and in my computing career, I've spilled drinks on a half-dozen keyboards and at least two motherboards. But all of them worked just fine after drying out.
The secret? Drink only water. I can do my computing without dependency on mind-altering drugs like caffeine and alcohol. And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?
I learned the hard way that backing your data up to another hard drive does no good when the power supply freaks out and fries *everything*...including BOTH hard drives.
Luckily, I had bought matching drives for use in another computer (a total of 4 HDs). By removing the controllers from the good drives and carfully placing them on the fried drives, I was able to get everything back.
Word to the wise, backup and keep off box and off site!
A friend of mine stuck a screwdriver in his computers power supply because the fan was "making too much noise"... He used it with the screwdriver blocking the fan for maybe 6 months before the entire thing blew up and fried every single component in the computer...
Then he asked if I could fix it...
The worst 'accident' I had was letting people know I had a kick ass computer. There is absolutely no data recovery when you computer is stolen and it's not physically there anymore.
--- to swing on the spiral...
Purchasing Windows 98.
After more than 15 years in Unix-land, why did I make *that* move? What was I thinking? I'm so glad that it was about that time that Linux made Unix accessible "for the rest of us".
In highschool I did a project on animal behaviour for a biology class, which entailed imprinting a duckling on myself, and carrying it around everywhere for the duration of the project, and observing. I was working on my computer, with the duckling on the desk in front of me, and it started doing its 'I'm gonna dump walk'...stepping backwards, wings outstreched and ass up. Next thing I knew, the keyboard was hit around the F keys with a wet one, and it gave out almost instantly. I wonder if anyone else has lost hardware to a duck?
My phone rang at 3am.
/osrc, where else would it be?
/osrc and I don't see it.
/osrc .` /backup
Boss: Sorry to wake you, but where's the source code?
Me: Uh, what, oh,
Boss: I'm in
Me: Do an ls and tell me what you see.
Boss: Dot and dot-dot.
--------------------
I had removed a mount point (/backup) for a failed disk where we mirrored the code. The dumb backup script did something like this:
cd
size=`du -s
cd
rm -rf this that the_other_thing
Fortunately, the tape backup had finished before the stuff was deleted.
Debian, especially back then, was not a good newby distro. After installing it, I was left at a blank terminal thinking, "Okay, now what."
In my frustration trying to set up X, I decided "to hell with it, I'll install Slackware," and I hastily did a "rm -rf /"
As I listened to my noisy hard drive chug a long, I remembered that I had mounted my Windows partition.
"But surely Linux will know I only wanted to rm the Linux part."
Yeah, I was wrong.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
Way back in the day, when a 486dx/66 was *hot stuff*, I had an interesting day. I started by inserting the CPU backwards. It emitted a large puff of smoke and a horrible squealing sound. Surprizingly enough after correcting the CPU orientation it still worked. Later in the day while fiddling with it, I bumped the tower and it fell out the second story window on to a concrete pad. Since it was not screwed together properly, it took the fall rather well, the only casualty being the case (Bent to hell), and the massive-for-the-day 2gig harddrive, which still worked, albeit at less-than-floppy speeds with a horrible click-clack sound every 10 seconds. Recovering my data took 10 days, with the computer living in a cardboard box. I had this bad habit of heating cans of spaghetti-O's on the CPU, but nothing ever came of it (thankfully).
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL, you'd say the following to delete only certain rows from a table:
...that will delete all rows from that table. (Actually, I did type the WHERE clause, but I had only part of the statement highlighted, so that's the only part that got executed.)
...Right? :P I've continued to work with SQL databases for the past 7 years, and I literally NEVER execute a DELETE statement without thinking about that fateful day. Never ever, even if it's data that doesn't matter.
"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"
However, if simply you type:
"Delete From SomeTable"
What a nightmare. Obviously it was my own stupid fault, but to make matters worse, the IT dudes weren't performing nightly backups as they'd promised, compounding the problem. Recovery of the table from the transaction logs proved impossible for several reasons. It cost our company a few thousand dollars to re-conduct our client's survey and we had to endure a lot of screaming.
I consider myself lucky to have done this early in my career, on a small job that amounted to thousands of dollars instead of 5-, 6-, or 7-figure dollar amounts. I figure it's the sort of thing that everybody does once and never does again.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
The next morning, I wake up, somewhat hung over, and decide that this directoy was a /stupid/ idea. So, I execute the obvious command:
I then wander off in search of some tylenol, and come back with two term papers irretrievably lost.The obvious moral of this story is, "don't root under the influence." (From my more mature perspective, I would like to suggest that drinking less might also be a good plan.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Worst accident has to be accidentally dropping a (still running) webserver powered off a UPS (which I was also carrying). The hardware damage and data loss caused wasn't worth the uptime I was trying to keep :-/
-K
10. breaking off the contact part of a PCI card while trying to extract it. The PCI slot is still unusable to this day. Not that I use that old computer anymore though. /" trick /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins
8. Not getting a UPS/surge strip/voltage regulator. Over time, the voltage irregularities caused my power supply to literally catch on fire.
7. Installing Windows.
6. Falling for the "hey, try rm -rf
5. Dropping a monitor down the stairs
4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC
3. Leaving a P4 laptop running inside a closed, insulated laptop case. Literally everything overheated.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I left the room to fetch lunch, and I heard a loud CRACK! I ran back in, and was confronted with the following:
The computer was off. The air smelt of ozone. There was a little stream of smoke rising from the Quantum. There was a large chunk missing from the main controller chip on the Quantum's board. 15 minutes of searching revealed that the chunk had flown 12 feet and landed behind another desk.
I was lucky enough to have a duplicate Quantum on hand whose controlled board I could use, so I swapped it out long enough to finish the transfer. Luckily, the CHS specs were the same, so nothing was lost.
You are not the customer.
I cannot overstate this: get computer insurance. It's cheap and will more than pay for itself if you have a hardware loss. I use Safeware.com, paying about $120 a year for $11,000 of hardware insurance - this covers loss by fire, theft, water, accidental damage, pretty much everything except earthquake and theft from an unattended vehicle. (I could have opted for a more expensive policy to cover those possibilities, too.) Just last week I dropped my digital camera, killing it. That model (Canon Powershot S30) is no longer available, so the insurance company is paying for a new model (Powershot S50) that costs more than what I originally paid for my digital camera two years ago.
Back in 1983 or 1984 when I was in my last year of high school, we used to carry around our 5 1/4" floppies in plastic boxes. Those of us that were quite proficient on the Apple II were assigned as teachers' assistants and had our assignments plus pirated games on these disks.
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted:
"Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Yup.
.
I, and about a million other people, crushed the core of a Duron procerssor while clipping the fan on. Not content to be included in such a broad statistic, I crushed the second one too. So then I loosened up the fan clip by bending it, and didn't put any thermal goop on the back of the fan. This time I actually got to the bios screen before the third processor burned up...
word.
A friend of mine did something similar in VB.
He was in his VB class making a program and at the end it would print it's contents. He decided it would be cool to have it ask how many copies you wanted. So he coded it.
It turns out he forgot to define the variable he used, so instead of printing 1 copy, it got stuck in a loop of printing.
As mentioned above this was during a class, which had a laser printer that printed at least 5 sheets a second.
My work "accident" comes from a day where we were having a slow afternoon, and I started work on the list of "things we'll eventually get around to." Apparently this list was pretty old, as the first item on it was a 486 that needed to be picked up from an office, and decommissioned(this was a government office).
Anyhow, I picked it up, noting that for a 486 in storage, the case was relatively clean. I then took it down to our workbench, and after spending half an hour trying to scrounge up an old DOS disk to boot it and reformat it with(we were a Mac shop, this was no easy task), I finally got ready to service it.
So, I plugged a cord in to a power strip, then move to plug the other end in to the power supply, when all of a sudden you hear that familiar zap sound. Sparks started flying from the power supply, and I did the whole "life flashes before my eyes" thing before I managed to pull the cable away, to quite a gruesome sight.
The total list of causalities included the power supply, who's prongs were all charred black, the power cord, the prongs on the cord(also charred black), and a totally fried power strip. Thankfully, my hand came out unscathed, although I don't know why.
Later examination of the now dead 486 showed that it had a power supply from 1982(this ordeal took place in 2002, BTW), so the fact that it was 20 years old probably had something to do with it. How such an old power supply ended up in a machine that couldn't be more than 13 years old I'll never figure out, but there it was.
I then proceeded to rip the hard drive out, and take a hammer to it. It was unorthodox, but I sure felt better afterwords.
Well, SIMM memory math is strange.
I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I bought myself a nice new 486 DX4/100 chip and went to insert it in the motherboard. Annoyingly, upon insertion I bent one of the pins and it wouldn't work.
I reached out for the nearest pointy thing with which to ever-so-carefully bend the prong back into shape.
It turns out a pencil was not the best thing to use - I rendered to entire motherboard useless via graphite shavings.
All the same, with a new motherboard the chip itself worked fine...
When a co-worker spilled my large cup of coffee into my own Panasonic CF-35 Toughbook laptop, he actually said, "think of it as installing Java." I was not amused. The laptop survived! Of course, I spent much of the following weekend washing each removable piece of the keyboard.
I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with my dad's SUV about a year ago. Believe it or not, other than a crumpled corner (under the hard drive) and a 10 pixel high band of funky colors on the LCD, it survived intact.
So I kept using it.
Then this Spring, I fell down the stairs with it, and that gave me a bunch of funky colors on the screen, rendering the LCD useless (I'm guessing it's just a pinched cable). But I'm still using it, to type this post actually, with an external monitor and keyboard.
---
Open Source Shirts
About 7 months ago, I was backing up and reformatting my girlfriends computer. We're both in college, so you can imagine how important all our files are.
I backed up all her files onto a cd, and just to be sure I burned 2 extra copies of the cd. I reformat the computer and reinstall windows. I install the programs she needs, and I get one of the cd's to copy her work back on.
Nothing. I freak out. The system does not recognize the cd in the drive. I try another one. Same thing. Another. Same. I get really f'in worried, so I start searching online for data recovery. Meanwhile she doesn't know yet.
I put the cd into my linux box, thinking maybe that'll help. Nothing. Something had to have gone wrong during the burn process, and I stupidly didn't check to make sure they burned correctly.
After finding a program I could buy right there on the spot, I ordered it (you don't want to know the price) and started getting as much as I could, which wasn't much.
I ended up telling her, and she was very upset. Pretty much all her work that she didn't have on Zip disks was gone, which included 3d Work she'd done that took her months. I felt really horrible.
To this day she still jokes about it and I still feel bad. She had some awesome work that took her a whole lot of time. She's made a lot back up, and frankly the new stuff is even better.
I still felt like shit though. Now I make sure that all her files are backed up onto my desktop and my server. On top of that, I make a new cd for each quarter of both our work.
And yes, I check and make sure it burns correctly.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
The laptop landed on the PCMCIA WLAN card, this became a embedded wireless card.
The good news is the home insurance paid out.
when i got my first computer, (a dell pentium p60) I accidently installed a demo version of OS2 warp cause it came with a magazine and i thought it was a game, completely wiped out my dos/win 3.11 setup.
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...
:-)
"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"
then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:
/somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"
/somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm /" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.
While typing "rm -rf
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm
when i got my first computer, (a dell pentium p60) I accidently installed a demo version of OS2 warp cause it came with a magazine and i thought it was a game, completely wiped out my dos/win 3.11 setup.
;-)
That was a *mistake*?
We had a rack in our network room that had recently been moved so that new cable could be run behind it. No one had informed me that when it was put back into position it hadn't been attached to the floor, wall, ceiling, nothing, and the entire rack was BARELY balanced and standing.
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
That was a *mistake*? ;-)
I was 11 at the time, and when my dad found out he wasn't very happy...
Being a lazy bastard I usually jsut leave my case open for cooling and so I can swap out cards and drives without having to remove a side panel. I came home from college a few years ago and stuffed in some new drive I got for xmas and left the case open. I thought nothing of doing what I've always done but sadly I had forgotten one minor detail. A six foot, scaily detail. My iguana is about 15 years old and pretty much senile and does whatever he wants without reason or cause. Somtimes he wonders about the house and gets lost in closets. He also can climb anything known to man so the fact that it was on a desk didn't even come into it. I neglected to concider all this when I left it open. Sure enough I came home one day to find the computer utterly obliterated on the floor with the cards strewn around and mobo and cpu shattered. I have no idea how he didn't get electructed but I even found one of his claws stuck in the cpu heatsink fins. The only thing I can figure is that he thoguht a handy souce of hot air was fucking badass so he wanted to cuddle up close to it and probally got shocked by one of the cards. It sucked but live and learn.
The Million Dollar Mistake
...as it lay on the carpet... ..and me with no shoes on..
Having worked in the financial industry for a long time, I recall not-so-fondly some of my mistakes. The largest and most painful was probably the million dollar mistake. This occurred around the first year or so of working at a bank.
One of my tasks was to check out 'federal funds' balance at the federal reserve. We have to transfer money into the federal reserve account to keep it at a certain figure.
Well, reading the figures I thought it said we had over a million dollars of excess. This isn't unbelievable depending on the day or time of month, and I was told that since this balance was so high to transfer it to another institution. Off the money went.
Around 4:30PM or so we got a call from the Federal Reserve. "Do you know what your balance is?" They asked the CFO. Then they told him. Over 1.5 million in the negative. If we didn't have the money there by 5PM, we'd get charged $25,000.
This is about the time I get that oh-shit-I'm-gonna-be-sick feeling that happens each time I make a huge mistake.
We had to call another bank and beg them to reopen their wire transfer department so we could get the funds in there. I think they arrived at the fed somewhere in the 4:55PM range. Free screaming/chewing out for me that day!
The Car Accident
Not exactly computer related, but I did wreck the company car once. Ouch.
Oh, and did I mention I was probably the worst courier ever? I would burn through a set of tires, brand new Michelins, in about two months. They stopped asking me to courier after that.
Not after some more free screaming/chewing however.
The Video Card Zap
I once bought a Riva TNT 16MB back when they first came out. Around $300+ dollars so I could run Unreal with all the goodies on. And it was hot stuff. I was so proud of that damn video card.
So when I transferred it to a different PC just a few days after showing off, I bent over to pick it up...
And I saw the small blue spark jumt from my finger just as I was a half inch away. "Zzzt!" came the popping noise.
Can you say "Fuh-ried?" I know I could. Oh, the tears I wept for that one.
Permissions? What Permissions?
I once tried to implement a group-based permissions scheme on a little Win2k Server box. So when I right clicked on the C: drive, telling it to remove all permissions (as I thought I would simply assign them later), I thought it was odd to see the little pop-up box showing me each file as it removed all the permissions before it.
This is about the time that oh-so-sick feeling came over me. This was a box that the company relied on for big transactions and loans.
I tried to stop it, but it disappeared just as I realized what I had done. The permissions were gone for every user, and I mean everyone. I couldn't even SEE the permissions any longer. I didn't have permission to open any programs. IE. Explorer. I couldn't even see anything on the Start Button but "Shut Down".
Then the calls started coming in from users.
The boss said I looked like Casper.
Thank god for backups.
I always got a kick out of Dell's advertising about dropping stuff a few feet to test durability, etc
We got a brand new Dell 1750 Dual Xeon 1U server which was going to be our Novell R/W Replica & Login box. I put the versa rails in the rack, about 5ft off the ground. Now anybody who works with Dell's knows the new servers have these nubs on the sides which sit into slots on the extended rails - in other words instead of sliding the server INTO the rails like most servers, you have the rails already extended and set the server down ONTO the rails, into those slots. Then you slide everything into place.
Well, it was late - everybody was gone. But it was a 1U box - not TOO heavy (but heavy enough) So I hoisted it up and gently set the nubs into the slots - or so I thought. The right rear nub was not seated and it slipped out. The unit pivoted and our brand new 1750 went crashing into the floor below corner first!!!!! I can still picture it in slow motion as it hit the ground corner first, banged off the rack, and then slammed onto the floor.
Man talk about getting a sinking feeling in your stomach. The right rear corner was totally crumpled. In a panick I opened the case expecting to see a motherboard is a shattered corner.
Nope - the motherboard was fine. The power supplies had come out of their connectors - and slid right back in. The drives had come unseated due to the shock and had to be reseated. A couple hours later with pliers, ballpeen hammer, and other assorted tools, I managed to get the case corner bent back into what was close to normal. All the internals looked ok.
I booted up the system - nada. The 'Processor mismatch' LED was lit on the board. Ugh. Figured I'd cracked a CPU or worse. Then I noticed one of the heatsinks was ever so slightly higher than the other. I unhooked the retainers and found one of the processors had come OUT of the ZIF socket and was being held on top of the socket by the retaining clip. I could only imagine what the CPU had done to itself with its pins making intermittent contact with the socket below while power was on.
Well, after gently getting the CPU off the heatsink without cracking it (it was stuck to it by the heat paste), I reinserted the CPU, applied new paste, and reinstalled the heatsink.
Damn thing booted right up and has run without issue ever since - going on 6 months now. All diags, hard drives included, passed with flying colors.
Talk about dodging a bullet! Built Dell Tough!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I used to have a giant CRT monitor that generated losts of heat. My cat loved to lie on top of it because it was so nice and toasty. One day when I was out of the room, she vomited up a hairball into it and destroyed it. Luckily it was in power-save mode at the time, so she didn't get fried herself. Six or seven hundred bucks down the tubes. Nowadays I have a great LCD monitor, and she still goes up to it with the obvious intent of jumping on top, only to realize that there's no room. I now know what disappointment looks like in a cat.
If by reliable components you mean reliable powersupplies, there are a few brands which are well known to be high quality and reliable.
Antec is considered to be the top end for reliability and performance. They contain seperate transformers for the different voltage rails. I have 3 Antec powersupplies in my computers. All have worked great.
Enermax is another maker of very beefy powersupplies. I've got one and haven't had a problem with it.
There's bad news, though. 50% premium? No. Try 200%, if you're used to those shitty $30 powersupplies. A 380W Antec will set you back somewhere in the region of $90. It's worth it, though. Cooler powersupply, cooler system, increased stability due to lower temperature and solid voltage.
Some reviews at Tech-report and AnandTech should give you some baselines to look at.
Random and weird software I've written.
That reminds me, I often had the side of my computer case off and leaning against a wall.
I extended my desk by propping up a desk sized piece of wood on piles of computer magazine and got my wife to hold it, she lost her balance and fell on the section of casing (some of them are really sharp!) and cut her lip and foot open quite badly.
That would have to count as my worst computer accident.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
You know, while reading the stories here, I realize that I have been quite fortunate over the-
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Oops. oooh. Oh yeah. . . That.
Whew. I'd actually blocked that one from memory. .
Okay. .
So way back when a 486 was something special, I was young and didn't have a cool computer of my own. Upstairs where the adults lived, (I slept in the basement, would you believe?), my father had just such a gleaming-cool 486 with many bells and whistles, the most significant being a sweeeeet laser printer he'd just wrangled out of his job.
We're talking a top-of-the-line Hewlet Packard beast. This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today. It was a very nice machine and my father was pink with pride about it.
I was working on an art-project at the time, which involved animation cell-painting onto clear sheets of acetate. I'd been running heat-resistant acetate sheets through printers and photo-copiers for a while, outputting line-work for painting on later, so I was all knowledgeable about this. Cocky, even.
But that evening, I'd just used up my last sheet of acetate right in the middle of a job I was really enthusiastic about. I didn't want to wait a whole night just to go out and buy more, so I dug around and actually found a stray sheet. Only problem was, I didn't know where I'd gotten it from, and I didn't know if it was treated for high temperatures or not. .
Can you see where this is going?
Erg. My palms are sweating at the memory. .
So there I was, with this rogue sheet of clear plastic poised over the paper intake of that HP thinking, "Come on! I'm sure it's heat treated. Why would it not be? And anyway, even if it isn't, how bad could things get? Probably at worst, it'd just go a bit warped, right? Just put it through and quit worrying so much, you dork!" So I put it in.
It didn't come out again.
In its place issued a series of interesting sounds and smells. Panic.
My father was in the next room half an hour into watching some hour-long television drama. I remember, clearly, because I can still see in my mind the clock dial telling me that I had exactly 32 minutes to smuggle tools up from the basement, casually walk past the television and into the back room where I was silently, desperately dis-assembling a damned printer.
Have you ever tried to take apart a thirty pound computer appliance on a hardwood floor in total silence as fast as you can? It's difficult! I mean, you drop a single screw and it will bounce off that hardwood with the loudest, "TACK!" you ever heard. And my dad is the suspicious sort who perks his ears up to any unexpected noise. --He spent most of my childhood convinced that his son was a dangerous klutz who could burn down the backyard fence playing with fireworks if given half the chance. (That was a LONG time ago!)
Anyway, my point is that nothing, nothing adds stress to a situation in quite the same way a father does.
While in the process of cutting free a mess of baked-on crusty plastic from the innards of that HP beast, I managed to gouge out big wads of pink rubber stuff from one of the rollers which was certainly not designed to be gouged. That's what you get for rushing. Take the job slowly; you'll only regret it later if you don't. It doesn't matter that you're going to DIE in. . . 14 minutes and counting.
"How's it going in there, Son?"
"Hmm. . ?" Panic. Fear. Adrenaline. Please, please, please, don't come in! Just keep your gnarly head turned toward that flickering TV screen, old man, because I have your fucking printer in pieces all over the floor and crumbs of pink rubber stuff on my guilty fingers. "Oh, just doing some work in Corel Draw, Dad."
"Oh, Corel Draw? Do you need a hand with that? I upgraded to
I dropped my cell phone into a glass of beer next to my laptop, and the beer glass (full) tipped onto the laptop keyboard. I immediately flipped the laptop keyboard down on a carpet, removed everything that could be removed from the back and towelled it out, then flipped it over to vacuum any remaining beer from under the keys. The vacuum sucked the keys right off into a full dust bag. Sliced open the dustbag and spread it all out. Found all but one key, never to be seen again. But.... The laptop lived, and amazingly, so did the cell phone! Now getting the keys back on was not a picnic.
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TI 990. Installing a new drive, the old got wiped. No problem, we had a backup. Tape broke. Now I always make two. (the old backup was scotch taped back together, used a special hacked up program to skip the bad block on the tape. After 40 continuous hours due to the poor performance of the hack, all data restored, only skipped some system files easily restored from distribution media.)
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Installing a new process controler for an assembly line, the driver dropped it off the back of the truck when it got away from him on the four wheeled dolly. Completely trashed, as it dropped into the loading dock well, which was 3' deep in rainwater at the time...
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Working in the oil patch, a new computer was sent to an off shore drilling rig. The crane operator thought it would be funny to drop the pansy a$$ed techie types into the ocean. Loss of 1 techie type (quit), a $150,000 computer system, and one crane operator (fired). I think they were more upset about the guy quitting than the ruined computer.
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Put in new UPSs. Site was told to change the wiring for power to them, but they had not done so. No one checked. End result was 105 volts floating on the 5 volt buss. No major damage, since the 100 volts was floating, but it did act rather strange.... (The computer was a redundant hand built system in 5 7' relay racks.) It did cause a production hour outage, which made the customer really, really mad...
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AIX has a volume manager for the disks. When you add a bit of space here, and a bit there, after a while you can get an improvement in performance if you do a sysback, blow away all the disks, and do a restore - booting from tape. During a weekend of doing that, a tape got all balled up in the drive and broke. After obtaining a replacement tape drive (all hail 24x7 4 hour response hardware support contracts!) used the second tape (always made because of the first story from 23 years ago) to complete the process.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
It's not just Windows. It's the Windows 9x line, also known as the longest batch file in the world.
I love C++
You understand the ways of economics and bussiness. So allow me to enlighten you:
Insurance is a for profit bussiness, at least in the US. The make more money than they pay out. That means, on average, insurance will NOT pay for itself. You will pay them more than they give you back. They set their premiums as such, otherwise, it just could not work.
So why have insurance? Well you have it for things you can't afford to replace, or those required by law. Like health insurance. I pay in $25, and my employer $260, to give me comprehensive health insurance. It covers everything that might go wrong with me, at almost no additonal cost.
Well, if you do the math, that's $3400 per year paid for it. I have never, not even when I got in a car accident and went to the hospital, spent that much on healthcare in a year. I would be much better off financially if I took that money and put it in an intrest bearing account, and used it only for health care needs.
So why don't I do that (pretending for this example that my employer would give me their portion of the payin)? Well because my health is important to me, and repairs to my body could easily exceed my financial means. If I got seriously hurt, or a chronic disease or something, the cost could shoot above $100,000, well over anything I could pay even if I saved the $3400/year for a number fo years.
In all likelyhood, the insurance company will make money on me. However I am willing to allow them to do that for the promise that, if something should go severly wrong, they will loose money on me to try and keep me alive and healthy.
Well, my computer isn't the same. Supposing the whole thing blew up, I'd need to spend about $2000 to replace it. A financial difficulty for sure, but something I could afford. What's more, it's not critical like my health. If I were without a computer for some time I'd be sad (and end up hanging out in my office to play on the Internet at night) but it wouldn't harm me at all.
Insurance like this is only worth it if:
1) The hardware is critical to you for some reason. If, for example, your bussiness relies on it then yes, you want to be covered since the money you loose due to it being gone could be ruinous.
2) It would be financially extremely difficult or impossible to replace the hardware yourself.
If you don't meet those two conditions, you should probably not waste your money on insurance. Instead put that $120/year away, and you'll find that you probably can pay for any failures AND have enough left over to get better hardware.
As many of you can probably sympathize with, when I was younger and more naive I liked to think that I was more talented with computers than I was. Common arrogant tendency of any of us that work with computers, of course - but with disastrous results.
So I was 19, with my first higher-powered desktop. Brand-spanking-new, only about a month old. It had been crashing a lot (courtesy of Windows ME - Thanks, Gateway!), so I was exploring options on how I could fix it on my own. I had already sent the tower back to Gateway multiple times and was just sick of them not actually getting it fixed. So, I thought maybe I'd buy some more memory and see if that helped.
Well, to this day I don't know what exactly went wrong. It might have been that I purchased the wrong size/shape/brand of memory, or it might be that I put it into the slot incorrectly. But as I booted up my system and saw the Windows ME splash screen come up, I heard a loud, thin whining sound. Then I smelled smoke. In a panic I whipped off the outer door of my casing only to see that the memory cards were smoking.
What's more, the pentium III chip was white hot. It was literally too bright to look at. The only reason it soon became okay to look at was because it caught fire. Yes, my motherboard caught fire. Then, as further evidence of my dumbass-ity, I realized that the system was still plugged in and making things worse. So I yanked the cord and watched as my memory and processor simmered down like a dead match.
Needless to say, the delusion I had held about myself being a computer genius was thoroughly shot. If there's ever a way to knock down a techie's ego, it's to have something catch fire and it be his fault entirely.
A friend of mine had a more dramatic but overall better experience with an IBM mainframe. There were two devices (I forget if these were washing-machine size or refrigerator size), and the machines arrived on a Saturday so she went in to have it delivered and signed for. They opened the truck ramp onto the loading dock, and she escorted one of the drivers to the lab with one of the computers. They got back and found that the other driver had moved the truck, in spite of the fact that the ramp had had the other computer sitting on it, so it had fallen three feet down onto concrete. Needless to say, she was concerned, and when the truckers wanted her to sign for the equipment, she refused, and she ended up talking to a sales VP at IBM, which is not a bad trick for a Saturday. He told her to accept it and mark it as damaged, and they'd take care of it (which, being IBM, they did.) The driver indicated "damaged in shipment" on the forms - she crossed it out and wrote "Dropped off loading dock".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
my worst accident was:
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda
when I meant to type
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0
And of course I was logged in as root because only root had raw access to the floppy.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hint: Don't try this at home, it could cost you a computer :P
:D
Back at my parent's house, we were juste done painting so the plastic plaques over the electric outlets were removed. Wanting to print something, I realized that the printer was unplugged. Not really looking at what I was doing, I aimed the printer's plug in the general direction of the outlet... and touched both little screws with the ground pin.
The end result was an inch-wide hole in the printer board, paper that caught fire, a sound very much like pop-corn coming from the computer case, and a completely ruined 486. When I opened it, There weren't many chips still welded to the motherboard. The CPU was stuck somewhere between the hard drive and the floppy, RAM was loose, some cards were welded in place. The last thing to blow was the power supply's fuse, though I can't say I would expect designers to think some wacko would send 120 volts through the parallel port
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
I found out the hard way when I -- *ahem* -- managed to jerk off on the keyboard of my newest laptop. The keyboard died instantly (although fortunately, no other components were damaged). I even blogged about it at the time (with some other blogs adding to the discussion).
I still haven't gotten it repaired. I'm currently typing on an external keyboard.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
MS Software isn't that bad.... Especially when you 'use a friend's disks'.
As Windows XP Pro prices approach those of Linux it's quality and usability increase dramatically. I still only use it on one PC, and run Linux for real work, but as a game machine 'Open-XP', as I like to call it, isn't a bad OS.
Argh, I better go feed my parrot.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Yes, and "Open-XP" costs only a third compared to average linux distributions - one burned cd versus three burned cds!
I was moving from Sacramento, CA to Walnut Creek, CA (About 80 miles) so I took the Sparc 5 out of the rack, very carefully untangled the UPS, put them both in the truck and drove like hell to the new location.
I made it to my location and up several flights of stairs.. plugging the UPS in with very little time left.
Later that night, some drunk asshole creamed a power pole and cut out power to the entire neighborhood for 5 hours.
The UPS just didn't last...
Boy, was I in trouble :(
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I went out of town for 3 weeks on vacation, some field mice got into our house while we were out. They found a nice warm place to set up a nest.... in my Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner, which was pretty new and damn expensive at the time.
The SS4000 has a nice opening on the back where you can get in and out, and a nice warm area for building a small rodent residence... above the hole for the optical lens...
The SS4000 was thoroughly screwed up by this, and was filled with mouse poop to boot.
I use a single floppy disk to install Debain. What kind of weird distro are you using?
Small children and computers go together like water and... well, computers.
One of my instructors in a networking course had a five year old son (We'll call him Sammy, even though I don't know his real name). The instructor had been playing around with a Linux distro, and left the CD in the drive when he powered it down. The next person to boot up was Sammy. Something unfamiliar appears on the screen, and he asks his mom what to do. Mom, not paying attention, says, "Just click OK!"
Whoops.
The kid ended up installing a new OS and wiping out all my instructor's data.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
A 5 year old installed Linux? Man, I REALLY suck then... I'm 22 and still having trouble with it. ;)
I don't know what you guys do to your Windows machines, honestly. I work on WinXP all day, weeks long with no crashes. The last crash I had was a faulthy update of some critical software. The PC I'm using now currently has a uptime of 17 days (I am asked to reboot now and then for automated software updates, which happen during boot-up). We make and support Windows Software, so that explains the undisputed use of this OS for our machines. In previous work-experiences, I've had uptime of 90 days on W2K, with a power failure wrecking my record-attempt ... (Construction workers cut the cable in the street - they didn't know it was there)
Shut up, Bill.
let a drunken room mate use your computer to get on irc... we did.. and woke up from our drunkewn stupors to find
a. mIRC open to FIVE cybersex channels
b. 7 different cyber PM sessions
c. odd streaks on teh monitor
d. puke all over the keyboard that had eaten away the plastic membrane (puke is ACID)
e. roomie lying face down on the keyboard in a puddle of puke with his dick in his hand
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
gads i remember when i was in uni (96).. we had this absolutely GORGEOUS full colour laser printer in one of the comp labs.. one day we're in the lab, and a REALLY bad burning smell starts flowing.. run around sniffing for the burning plastic.. finally traced it to the printer which was making moribund sounds.. opened it up to find strings of melted plastic EVERYWHERE..
turned out that someone had decided to print some plastic bags in it..
plastic.
bags.
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad