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Abused, But Working Hardware Stories?
RPI Geek writes "Everyone's heard the stories about people who, knowingly or unknowingly, abuse their computers. Personally, I've had a faulty power supply literally burn a hole through the motherboard, with the only ill effects being a dead PCI slot and USB ports. I'm curious as to what kind of abuse fellow /.ers have done or seen done to electronics while the hardware still worked afterwards. Soldered a broken keyboard PCB back together so that it worked fine? Taken sticks of RAM out of a running computer to see when it would notice? Overclocked a 386... to 386MHz? I'm interested in hearing any stories about abused-but-working hardware."
My keyboard has taken years of one-hand typing and bad aim.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
But the rest of the box seems to be OK.
"Nothing is impossible for the man who refuses to listen to reason"
So far I've done the following while my PC was running:
- Removed RAM. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Inserted PCI cards. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Removed PCI cards. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped hard drives. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped CD/DVD drives. Windows survived.
My power supply and mobo must be very fault-tolerant, I suppose, because other systems have not taken a liking to this behavior. I have an Enermax 350W and an Asus P4C800-E. Currently I own two SATA hard drives. According to the standards group, SATA is "hot-swappable." Given my previous activities, I can verify their claims.
Obviously, the system did not enjoy having its RAM removed. And while it did not mind the removal of a PCI card, it froze up solid when I inserted a new one. A quick reboot took care of that.
I've also dropped my iPod about 5-6 times, and it still keeps on ticking!
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
I put windows XP and my computer and it still runs ;)
I've connected something running off an ac outlet that wasn't isolated to a programming board. It blew a pretty big hole in the cpu. And it stopped working....
Back in 1996 I built a dual Pentium Pro computer in an SKB music case (for rackmounted music gear) as a luggable computer. After a few years the thing was pretty antiquated, so when I had to move from Europe back to the US I decided to doom the thing to the fates and have it travel back with me with my luggage, facing the perils of baggage handling. It just wasn't worth taking any extra precautions. I knew the thing wouldn't survive the trip, but I didn't want to throw it out. It had no shock protection at all, and I didn't place any fragile stickers on it or anything. After the trip I opened the case up to find the CPUs and memory sticks had unseated themselves and been knocking around inside the case, many of the CPU pins were bent this way and that. The memory seemed scratched but otherwise ok. some of the chips mounted on the motherboards seem to have suffered the impacts of the CPUs flying about (some bent wires going to the chips). Just to see what would happen I straightened the wires, pins, re-seated the memory, and turned it on. The damn thing worked fine. And went on to live an unexpected few years as a file server. I'm not sure what lesson I learned, I suppose that computers can be far more robust than I expect (but only when I don't expect it).
Don't vote for Eugene Papansanovich for Congress!
Well, this was unintentional, but I had a 60 Mhz Pentium and after a couple of years decided to replace it. I bought some new components and opened up the case to pull the memory and found the heat sink lying at the bottom of the case. It had completely fallen off at some point in the past. Strangely, there were never any symptoms and it worked fine the whole time.
Can't say I've ever abused hardware like this, but I must say, reading this article is really making me want to try. Is that wrong?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
A while ago, I needed some cheap 1U servers... I decided to use some cheap motherboards with "onboard everything"... There was just one problem. The sound port did not fit in a 1U rack cabinet. The solution was to fetch the soldering iron and remove it. It worked!
thomasdamgaard.dk.
I wonder if this processor ran again after thermal paste was lightly applied.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
was molested when it was young. It's been a long and hard fight, but with therapy he's slowly allowing other people to get close to him again.
every piece of hardware not attached to the motherboard (hard drives, cd drives etc) without a case, on wire all hung on one coat hanger. I was trying to minimize the noise cause by vibrations between the hardware and the case. My CPU fan must of sucked some wire up and tangled up the entire setup. It all crashed onto the table, yuck. Needless to say, I scrapped that hanging setup. I put the hardware back together in its case, and it worked!
How about that! Got a guy who took a trashed P4, solder some 24 guage wire on to create a pin and is using the CPU now. I am quite amazed at the man's skill. I for one can't do crap with a soldering iron except ruin things.
I'm pretty sure this isn't anything new, but while building a computer for my girlfriend, I reseated an Athlon XP heat sink with some high quality thermal paste, and forgot to plug the fan back in.
When I booted it into Window, I let it run long enough to get to ~70C before realizing what I did and yanking out the power cord. It worked fine after plugging the fan back in. Just no one tell her, okay? ^_^
I once saw a guy install an ISA-card in a computer that was turned on. A standard AT-machine (don't remember the exact details).
I casually remarked that "perhaps you should turn the computer off before installing the card?", to which he replied "Ohh, you have to do that?"
BTW, this was in a computer oriented "high-school" education. He should really have known better. :-)
I plugged an 18 volt AC adapter into 6 volt computer speakers. They made a really high pitched sound before they popped and spewed lots and lots of acidy smoke.
We later found the correct AC adapter, plugged them back in, and to our surprise, both speakers worked just fine. It makes you wonder what useless part broke in the speakers, and why that part was in there to begin with.
Cooked an egg on the CPU of a P-200mhz, it lasted until some of the egg found its way into a plug from the PSU and snap fried killing the psu, I couldnt be bothered checking if the board worked with another PSU.
I was finishing up a new video card plus NIC upgrade and had them attached to the motherboard while I booted the PC. I thought I was being smart and saving time by not screwing the brackets to the case until this point. I was just getting started with the video card bracket, when the screwdriver slipped and the screw landed on the NIC. There was a big spark and a pop, and the whole system instantly shut down. I powered it back on, and everything was fine. I've also removed RAM from a running 386. It froze, but both system and RAM were fine afterward.
I took a metal bat to an old computer (and monitor) that got infected with CIH a handful of years ago ... after running tiramisu and many other "recovery" programs I figured why not just fucking ruin the stupid thing and get a little enjoyment out of that? Anyways, despite terribly denting the case and power supply case, and cracking a cheap pci video card in half, the box booted fine. That's when I ripped the hard drive out while it was powered up and threw it down my driveway. A simple reboot fixed the problem, prompting me with the typical "Invalid System Disk" error. I replaced the hard drive and kept the dented behemoth in my closet for a few years afterwards.
-Rylfaeth
I once got a 1x cd-rom to work without a caddy.
Open Source Sushi
I had an hp-48g in 8th grade. I used to play basketball before school with the 48 in my pocket (without the soft-cover, no less) and it would usually fall out of my pocket during play (onto hard asphault) about twice a week. In addition, I once dropped it into a puddle about 6 inches deep when I was getting out of the car (again, without the soft cover).Yet, the calculator still works perfectly, even if it has a few nicks (no majorly visible dents or anything though).
I guess this is a true testament to the quality of pre-Carly HP hardware.
I often soap up and hose off old gear and it all works fine. You need to let it dry for a couple of days, though. Never lost a PC that way.
Hey, I just thought of something! You know how toaster ovens say DO NOT IMMERSE? Well, if you DO immerse them, water gets into the heating tubes, which are filled with compressed poweder magnesium oxide. It takes a very long time to dry, more than a few days. If you decide to plug the thing in because it LOOKS dry, the water in the tubes turns to steam, which cannot escape fast enough, and the tubes RIIIPPP open from end to end, blasting powdered MgO all over the place.
That would be a funny prank, huh?
Several years ago I had my PC's setup in a shed. The shed was well setup with power and lights, and one day I was doing a motherboard transplant (swapping a 386dx40 with a 486dx2/66 from memory).
I didnt get it finished so i left both my desktop PC's with the covers off and went to bed.
That night there was rain (as usual) but it was also severely windy - enough to blow the rain at enough of an angle so it went under the eave section and straight onto my desk.
I got up in the morning and found both PCs and motherboards completely soaked and water pooled everywhere. Turned them upside down, dried them as best I could and left them (inside the house this time) for 2 days. When I powered them up they both worked, without a hitch and continued to work for years afterwards.
(one mouse was dead though - a small price to pay)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
I was trying to hook up a fan to my new mobo. I wouldn't reach from where I wanted it mounted to where it needed to plug into the boardso I was playing with rewiring it AND testing my wiring while the machine was running. I accidentally crossed some wires and it shutdown the machine...and threw a breaker. The machine booted fine afterwards though, after I reset the breaker.
I was so scared in that time since it was a brand new board.
superman runs linux
I crossed my eyes at one of my machines (which was running NT), and it immediately gave a BSOD.
I de-solder the legs off of sipps to use the chip in a simm
I solder a simm to get it to work in as a sip.
Replaced the gridge chip.
My forst computer I own had to be put together from scratch. By scratch, I mean soldering compnent to a PCB board.
Replace the board on several hard drives
Used laplink and wrote the data onto the disk I was getting data off of.(instead of the new drive). Deleted everything. Microsoft said the files couldn't be recovered. I recovered them.
I've used gallon milk caps as a mother board stand.
replced several capacitors on motherboards.
Soldered a pin back onto a cpu
and much more.
And yes, everything worked when I was done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1. Lost a cup of coffee in my Amiga 1200 while running. Quickly turned it off, hung up the parts to dry. Worked fine. however, i was getting blue flashes in the bootup sequence after a while (indicates HW failure iirc) and it died eventually.
2. Inserted an AWE32 card into my box while it was on (DUH), burned the AWE32 and the PCI slot, otherwise it worked fine.
3. used my C64 as a fotball. it *STILL* works. (they made good shit in the old days)
Can I light a sig ?
Back when memory was around $100/megabyte the school I was attending received some donated hardware that included one non-functioning 1 MB SIMM. Rather than toss $100 in the trash, I examined the SIMM and found a broken pin on the side of one of the chips. Using a battered soldering iron and a length of cold solder to replace the pin, I managed to get a good enough connection to restore the SIMM to operation. It functioned perfectly in a 486SX machine for several years afterward. I also managed to upgrade that same machine to a DX (MMU and FPU added) by salvaging a 486DX chip off another dead motherboard installing it in a cleverly included socket on the SX motherboard and disabling the onboard chip via jumper settings. This was before the ZIF socket, so the amount of force and screw driver based prying required to first remove and then install that 486DX chip could easily have killed it.
Luck was definitely required in the days of expensive parts, and $0 technology budgets.
I'd like to say we later installed Linux on that machine and used it to run our first web server, but alas, we used it for playing deathmatch Doom after the computer lab was closed. That's why we needed 4MB of memory and a FPU.
Yes. But did it still work afterwards?
thomasdamgaard.dk.
We had two laptops with us in our vehicle traveling in an unnamed country. Hostile fire ensued from the side of the road and penetrated our vehicle in places (not uparmored), missed everyone inside. After the rather quick return to the safehouse, we discovered rounds had hit our water bottles and our laptops. Panasonic toughbook was dead, dead, dead while the Powerbook had a hole right through the top of the case destroying the LCD and penetrating into the optical drive where the round came to rest, but.....I plugged the trusty Powerbook in, hooked up an external monitor and it fired right up whereupon I was able to file my reports.
Thats semi-valid. I dual boot my laptop:
;)
In windows, the fan turns on quite a lot (indicating that it gets hotish).
In linux (gentoo), I can do the same activities and the fan will stay off most of the time.
Of course, as soon as I do any CPU intensive stuff in either OS, the fan goes on full. These are only my results though and it could be an anomoly
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
Launching into space, then crashing on Mars with just some air bags for cushions. THAT IS ABUSE! And yet they made it work!
On a 486 I pulled the cpu, then I was very curious as to why the screen went blank. Then, somehow uncomprehending the situation, I realized I was holding the chip and thought "Well that's silly of me, I just pulled the CPU" and I just placed it back in the socket.
This is why drugs and hardware support do not mix.
The machine continued to work fine and works to this day.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
. . . but there's a guy I know who regularly picks his Sony laptop up with one hand, open, and gripping the front of the display.
It seems to survive this abuse.
One time I stripped the plug off some cheap headphones, then put the two wires into an electrical socket. The sparks were amusing; so were the small holes they burnt into my carpet afterward. I think I was 12 or 13 at the time.
As for hot swapping ISA/PCI cards, hard drives, other stuff -- I think everyone's tried that at least once.
Also, everyone's probably removed a cartridge from a c64/Atari/Genesis with it powered on at least once, possibly by accident. It can produce some cool looking screen garbage.
I stuck a ram stick into my pc, a stick that was not supported. it started to catch on fire. Burned a big red hole threw it.
A while later because i had bent the plug to the power supply in the back of my computer. while fiddling with it, i was showered with sparks from my power supply.
this is all after i had my computer trained to turn off if i hit it anywhere on the case otherwise it would have to take on the abuse of my baseball bat or remote or any other blunt object i could find to beat it with till it did die.
After i replaced the power supply i never put the case back together because if i didnt have a fan blowing into it, the pc would overheat... i loved my pc.
ra...
for months I had a failing HD and refused to replace it with the usual "I'll wait till it dies" stuff (was getting a new PC.. or so I planned then..).
So months go by, everything runs fine... then folders start crashing the PC, so I go "meh under warranty I'll get it replaced, why not?" so they say "yea we'll be out in a week" and I'm like "..thats fine, see you then."
So I ran it for a week where I couldn't access anything but Mozilla, AIM and winamp... so it was running pretty well considering the HD was so crippled by the damage it was impossible to ghost a clone over when tech support tried (I sat there laughing, I didn't want to go "Oh BTW I know that already" ).
I like muppets.
I had a toshiba laptop that met some stairs once... Worked fine after bouncing down a flight of stairs and sliding across the floor. Continued to work fine until I sold it a year and a half later.
That I first started putting together in 1990, was picked up over my wife's head and thrown to the ground.
It still works. Try that with your PC.
Is Bush A Shape-Shifting Reptilian Alien?
A friend of mine two years ago, with his roommate, took a liking to dicking around with electricity in their room (with all the hillarious and not-so consequences). Anyway, they rectified the AC from the outlet using a bridge rectifier, and plugged-in various equipment in to see what would happen.
One of the things to be plugged-in was my friend's iMac - it worked, amazingly enough - the colors were screwy on the screen, but it worked. How the hell did it work, might you ask, if the computer obviously used transformers to step-down (for computer-parts) or step-up (for the CRT) voltage? Iono - but obviously their "DC" wasn't clean.
Another thing that he did, that his iMac survived, was connecting the iMac to the mains via a "Power-via-Ethernet" cable. Amazingly, no damage. How the hell? No clue, again.
My old Blueberry iBook (G3 300MHz) is getting old. Her case is fractured in several places, missing in others, (notably the CD drive) her USB port is breaking, her Ethernet port is broken, her speakers blew out, her trackpad was disconnected from her motherboard, her video card is damaged, her screen has 4,000+ void/stuck pixels, her keyboard is falling apart... but strangely enough, though all the years of abuse, no vital components ceased to function. She's still happily running Yellow Dog Linux 2.3.
Oh, and I gave up trying to repair her ages ago. She bit the last repairman.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
I spilled beer on my keyboard... twice. Nothing a run through the dishwasher and a week drying out didn't solve though. Aside from a squeaky space bar, which went away after a few months.
I was about 12 and we had a 386sx. I had a small computer store around the corner with an incredibly smart pc tech who showed me some things. My friend and I decided we were going to try to overclock the pc by crystal replacement as we had been told by our friendly tech. Sadly we were inexperienced with working with electronics at that point and upon turning the machine on watched in horror as a bright flash emanated from the box. He next moment of horror was when my dad got home to find his pc as a pile of useless silicon and metal.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Where I work, we have these little (ok they're about the size of a hardcover book) scanner/barcode reader things. One day, someone was upstairs with theirs, "talking to the boss". Couple minutes later, he came out of the office PISSED, and threw the scanner down a full flight of stairs (which we all heard from the floor). Next thing I see, the guy flings open the door from the stairwell, picks up his scanner, and walks over to a steel post/roof support. Two hands on the scanner, he SLAMS the thing into the post, busting the case right open. So now he's got half a scanner in his hand, with the other half dangling by some of its guts. The guy walks out into the parking lot and hurls the thing into the street (which, lucky for it, isn't very busy). It skids for about 30 feet before it hits the curb and comes to rest in a shallow puddle. The dude then got in his truck and peeled out of the lot.
:)
And you know what? The damn thing still worked after it dried off. The LED display was cracked but functional (was replaced later), and it needed a new plastic handle (that, oddly enough, holds the top of the case together). But the fucking thing could still read a bar code. We were all so freaking amazed that everyone burst out laughing.
But the funniest part? The guy who smashed the shit out of the scanner? He still works for us.
I had a dual Pentium 3 motherboard on my desk, all wired up to the power suppy which was still in the (full tower) case, which in turn, was on the floor (this case has wheels on it - think of it like a server case). While I was tinkering with the motherboard, I accidentally triped over the case, and caused it to tilt and eventually fall onto the floor. I closed my eyes as I watched the PSU cable (which was connected to the motherboard) pulling the motherboard down. To my surprise, when I opened my eyes, the motherboard was still on the desk, while the case was down
Why?
Because ALL the power pins of the power connector were stripped from the motherboard and left inside the connector of the PSU cable. Ouch.
So I pulled a dead mobo from the recycle closet, carefully de-soldered the required pins, and even more carefully soldered them back to the dual p3 motherboard. With a little twist and turn it worked, so long as you don't push or bend the PSU cable.
I took a spill off my bike last week, landed on my back and rolled several times on a concrete sidewalk. The initial impact was directly to the Powerbook in my backpack - I was sure it was a goner. When I got into work, it had a few dents, and part of the casing was slightly deformed.
I fixed the latter with a few gentle taps from a claw hammer. The dents in the back of the screen remain, and give it charachter. The monitor's fine; I'm typing this on it right now.
I love my Powerbook...not sure the 15" or 17" would hold up as well, though.
One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I took Computer Repair in high school just for laughs. We broke more things than we fixed, but made cool discoveries. I personally pulled the processors out of three different machines while they were running, all of which froze (although not instantly). We also built flashlights out of old LEDs and CMOS batteries.
Our greatest achievement was of course making cannons. We removed the plastic off of paper clips to expose the bare metal. Then, we placed one end of the clip into the 5V plug on a power cable, the other end into the 12V plug. Turned on the power. Nothing at first, but after touching the paper clip to a metal object, the paper clip sparked and then fired across the room. Teacher never noticed, and we learned so much.
NEVER put a pen down in the space above a Laptop's Keyboard !
I did it...
It was dark...
I closed the Lid...
rather forcefully...
I can still hear the *CRACK*
ooohh t3h p4!n !!!
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
While working for a michigan employment agency's IT department a server which had been closed into a cemented in segment of the basement was recovered. It had been enclosed for well over 2 years handleing print jobs and about 500mb of office document storage. Nobody at the branch ever knew it had been missing. Our biggest mistake was powering down the pc, as it never booted up again. I think I can I think I can I think I can....
One time I was screwing a case fan in (with the computer on of course) and stabbed out one of the fins. No problem, I can blu-tack it back on. I soon found out that heat + centrifugal force can severly compromise the adhesive performance of blu-tack.
Oh and, in total, I've fried 2 1/2 graphics cards. I fried a GeForce 3, because I didn't have sufficient case ventilation (case fans are noisy, but necessary). I fried it's replacement GeForce 4 as well, but after that a put some case fans in so the next GF4 was fine... Until I decided it was too loud and put Zalman HeatSink on it. I'm not really an expert on the application of thermal paste, so that 1/2 fried. I took the heatsink apart and did it again properly, it's mostly fine now. There can be a bit of texture corruption, sometimes it crashes a game. One time I was playing UT2K3 and there were spears of colour coming out of the centre of the screen. It was like a bad music visualisation.
In this case while connecting the sound cable from the CDROM to the sound card (which I had forgotten to do when I installed the drive) the metal d-ring on my plastic watch band shorted a +5v pin on the sound card to ground resulting in a burnt a trace on the motherboard. I soldered a wire across the burn (after it was OFF) and all was well again. The machine had a long well used life, and is now retired to the position of household fileserver.
I have since gone to using VELCRO watch straps.
A couple of years ago, my CPU overheated to about 250 degrees farenheit as I was writing a paper. I was almost done, and I needed to finish the paper (it was due the next day).
I quickly had to find something to cool down my processor and keep it cold long enough to finish the paper. Luckily, it was winter and the snow was falling outside. I took an exension cord, and placed my computer outside in a pile of snow. However, I had forgotten that the side of my case was off, so I unknowingly finished the paper with snow *inside* my computer. And with snow on my motherboard!
I'm not exactly sure how the computer worked without short circuiting, but at least I ended up getting an A on the paper.
I used to work at at a major electronics retailer - we'll just call it Speaker City - and we had training computers in the back (*old* IBM's or something. They ran Windows 95 or some crap.) Anyways, I got bored and decided to show out - I poured water into the floppy drive while it was running. Funny thing is, that's about the only thing that *didn't* make it blue screen!
My left speaker sometimes cuts out. Kicking the subwoofer seems to fix it. If it doesn't, kick harder.
I'm currently using a GeForce4 Ti 4600 from Asus with no heat sink (it died a couple of months ago, so much for longevity, eh?). Granted, I have to be a little careful about graphics-intensive gaming, since too much playtime (about 5 minutes) will cause a hardware freeze. Other than that, it works like a charm.
We shut it down, let it dry out for a few days, and it ran no worse for the wear save for some rust on the inside. It gave me quite a scare, but helped to spark my computer career.
1) I had an original 3DFX card in a machine and, little known to me, the ground lead in the monitor cable was broken. When I opened up the case, one of the transistors on the output of the 3DFX was glowing so bright you could see it through the back of the PCB. Replaced the monitor cable and AFAIK it's still working today (donated it to a friend)
2) 2 dead harddrives; one with controller failure, one with crashed heads. Classic case of PCB swappage made it all work nice. Drives were both Seagate, but different models!?!
3) Bad grounding on PSU caused motherboard to catch fire and electricity to arc across the case. Although technically the machine still worked, I stripped it for parts and disposed of the PSU and case.
I used to work for a firm who built IBM compatible PC parts into industrialised computer units. The conditions of some of those was astounding. e.g. one had a blowtorch dropped in it - charred the graphics card a bit but it still worked. Another had a full 2 inches of black soot-like powder in it but never stopped working. They only returned it to be upgraded!
I work in hardware/firmware development - bringing up new boards and building firmware on hacked-to-all-hell prototypes. I've soldered on stuff while it's running. I've swapped cpu, memory, pcmcia, and other components while the system is running. I'll run my feet across the carpet on purpose to test ESD tolerance... shorting signals on purpose because it's easier than cutting a trace and wiring the input to ground. It is amazing how much of a beating like this a system can take for months or years on end and still run perfectly. It does not surprise me at all when people talk about systems that have caught fire but still mostly work.
Now one of my favorite stories: a friend of mine worked for AlphaSmart - they make inexpensive portable word processors - really PC keyboards with memory. He said they got a report of a woman in India who had run her alphasmart through the dishwasher to clean some gummed up keys.
If you think about it it's not surprising... the equipment they use to clean PCBs at the factory is pretty much the same as a home dishwasher - just different solvents I guess.
I helped him drag it back in and it worked. For about 5 minutes. Then it BSOD'd and never came back.
Total POS.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I carefully etched the board by hand and manually drilled all the holes, only to discover to my horror that I'd printed the board upside down. So, rather than waste time doing the board over, I bent the pins of all the chips 180 degrees and mounted them upside down! Worked like a charm!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Dog pees on laptop photo
Cat pees on laptop story and discussion Keep pets away from your laptops!
RMS probably has some good abused but working hardware stories. No longer, but at least as of a couple of years ago, this was RMS' laptop.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Some the early DDR mobos had 184-pin DIMM slots that would actually snap in a DDR DIMM backwards (ignoring the tab). It took more force than normal, but it would close just fine. When I turned it on, there was a weird sound, and the RAM wouldn't post in any system anymore. Upon inspection, there were two pins on opposite sides, equal distances from the center, that were badly scorched.
I had an Asus MediaBus card that I needed to fit into a small case. Now, MediaBus cards are mixed ISA/PCI cards - "slot saver" types. They're a normal PCI card with an extension for the ISA bits.
The one I had was a SCSI card with an ISA sound card onboard. I needed the SCSI card, but it wouldn't fit. Looking at the card, it became pretty clear that the ISA sound bits were mostly on the end of the card, and if they weren't there the card would fit. It wasn't going to be any use to me if it didn't fit, so out came the tin snips (!!).
After this butchery, it worked fine - despite the somewhat ragged, sheared line across the back of the card and the fact that I'd cut all the ISA-extension connectors off.
About 3 weeks of owning my Powerbook G4, I spilled Diet Dr. Pepper all over the keyboard. The screen went fuzzy and haywire, then black. I tilted it on its edge, and let it dry overnight. The next day, it worked fine. Has worked flawlessly ever since.
I used to work with a complete F-witt that tried to modify PC's to fit hardware into slots that would NEVER take it..
ie, hacked the PCB of a 32bit PCI card to fit it in a server 64 bit slot 0.o
or hacked the plastic nodual/seperator in the AGP slot to fit an AGP pro card into it...
scary man that guy... kinda like "Wal footrot" ( http://www.oneil.com.au/footrot/ ) meets the BOfH
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Over several years, my laptop has encountered many problems. The most interesting would've been when the lid detatched itself from the base, still connected by a single cable. I used it like that for about two weeks until the repair guy returned from holiday. Also received many comments about it, one being "Is that one of those new tablet laptops?". :-)
...though close. One of our technicians had a job to do on the top level of a 125m met tower. Comes one bad move, and the ruggedized Nokia he had is unseated, falls, dangles two times at the mast, and disappears somewhere in the high grass. Well, not much to do there, is it?
He and a colleague spend some time searching it, until the colleague asks: Did you have your mobile turned on?, rings to it, diddeli-diddeli-diddeli, go after the tone, pick it up, and all he had to do was to wipe it off!
I leave the calculation of the impact force as an exercise to the (karma-starved) reader.
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
It was an old, old one and it made a horrible screetching kind of noise any time it was set to 800x600. It was capable of 1024x768 but it only did it a couple times, usually it'd just make the screetch noise even worse and the video would go a little crazy. I was sitting there doing nothing, probably sitting on Prodigy chat, when all the sudden it started making the screetch noise bad, then sparks started flying out of the side. I reached on the side (because I'm super smart) and flicked the power off and when I did, there was a surge of sparks and a small flame, like small to the point if I wasn't standing up to see it through the vents I never would've known it was there, that quickly went out on its own. It was one of those moments where at the time I peed my pants but about ten minutes later after I hooked up a different monitor I realized it was one of the cooler things I've seen in a while. It didn't really get abused, just got old, but whatever. I dropped my old dell 75mhz laptop down a 4 or 5 stairs while running and it still works fine (as does the trackball that I haven't cleaned since I got it 5 years ago.. those things were made freakin bulletproof back then).
On a slot loading Powerbook, my 2 years old son had been inserting coins in the CD slot.
The computer was still working perfectly, but it was making pocket change noises whenever moved.
The coins stayed there until the case was opened for a HD upgrade.
Once when I was re-wiring some fans in my case, my CPU fan was left off for about 10-15 minutes. When I came back and looked in the BIOS, it was displaying a CPU temp of 99C. The thing didn't seemed bothered, its worked fine to this day. As for the 99 number, perhaps the BIOS wouldn't go over 2 characters, but its a fact I can live without knowing. I also installed P4 Xeons with 1U heatsinks (no fans) in a well ventilated tower. I kept telling my boss he ordered the wrong CPUs, but he wouldn't believe me, until the thing hit 78C in about 2 minutes.
Once I took the cpu out of a running pentium box, and the connectors sparked. There was this huge arc of electric discharge from the socket to the cpu pins. The arc traversed over 10 cm before it vanished. I powered down, thinking shit! ... turned it back on, and it still works ...
it's now my router, but i don't really trust it. Some of the circuitry must have been fried.
What version of Windows? It wasn't until 98SE that Windows would issue a HLT to the CPU when it wasn't using it.
In the dim, dark past, intel machines didn't have an FPU on die. You could buy an exernal floating point processor, which was most commonly installed by the store that sold the machine.
Well, Compaq made a system where the the main processor along with all the other chips were mounted so that the letter was right-side up when standing at the front of the machine.
However, the coprocessor socket was rotated 90 degrees. If you installed it so the lettering was the same as everything else, one of the pins melted off when power was applied. Don't ask me how I know.
great design.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
I overclocked a (AMD) 486DX2/66 to 3/150. The computer worked (sort of) until I decided to try for 4/200, at which point the hard drive controller died.
Had an old P166 I purchased from work back in 2001 for $50. I needed another computer to start getting into working with networks. Anyhow, for some reason, I pulled the power supply out and had the switch just hanging over the edge of the tower. Without thinking, I hit the power button on the front of the case, turning the machine off...Realizing what I had done, I quickly turned the power switch off. Ran just as good as when I first got it. Incidentally, it would only run Windows 2000 and XP, not 98 or ME...
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
some of my tops are, once when i was working for a .com who leased servers with proprietary software on them needed to protect them, i clipped all the pins from the external connector of a scsi card so it couldn't be used to attach external devices. worked perfectly.
another one wasn't done by me, but a friend of mine who worked at the same place was testing gig-e cards (this was about 4 years ago when gig-e was first coming around and there were only a handful of cards working in linux). one of them had a large heatsink and wouldn't fit in the 1u case with a riser card. so he got a dremel and ground down the pci slots that were blocking the heatsink. it smelled awful, but to everyone's surprise worked perfectly.
my current pc is also a horror story. it's an a7n8x-deluxe which has many great features and one annoying one. the voice-post didn't work quite right, there was probably a crossed wire in there somewhere that caused the system to repeat "system failed cpu test" over and over out the sound card during high load. so i located the voice chip jobber on the motherboard, which was luckily in a socket, and pulled it. worked fine for a few months, until i accidentally knocked a box of cheez-its against the side intake fan (which was connected in serial to the fan on the videocard) and promptly burnt both out, and hobbled the motherboard. now the bios refuses to save settings, reboots lock until i power off and reset the bios (by removing the battery), and the system won't boot at higher than 1100mhz (it's an athlon 2500+). but, it still limps along and i'm using it right now.
now who wants to buy me a new system to play doom3 on?
I set fire to my first computer, a 12mhz 286 with 1 wait memory and a tecmar graphics master (a super-duper CGI video card with a crazy 640x400x16 color mode) and a 55mb CDC MFM hard disk...
I just bought the thing, lrod knows how much it cost me, but it was a lot. I got it put together and wanted to play with it; there was no 15 pin joystick connector on the back so I just ran the joystick ribbon cable out between the back and lid of the case and fired up the microsoft flight simulator. Good thing my case had a turbo button...
I'm bobbing and weaving and trying to make good use of my 100 bullets and all of a sudden there's a loud *POP* and the monitor goes black; I look over at the brand new computer and there are *flames* coming out the back. I yanked the power cord and opened up the case and golly gee, the ribbon cable for the joystick had shorted against the case and the plastic insulation caught fire. I took out the burnt remains, held my breath and turned the computer back on (well, first I plugged it in and that by itself was a little scary). The damned thing worked fine.. That case and power supply were with me until I had one of those cyrix 386 / 486 CPUs in an EISA motherboard I got for $20...
Oh -- another computer of mine which I thought was too loud -- I took all the fans out except the CPU fan which I rewired using tape and fingernail clippers to run at 5v instead of 12. That computer lasted for about 6 years through several random upgrades; the power supply started ticking about 8 months ago forcing me into the world of the ATX cases. Oh, and in case you're wondering, I live in a desert and don't air condition my apartment and it would often get above 100f (40c?). Never actually broke anything, though.
Oh, except a 387 CPU which I put in sideways. It got really hot and didn't work. ever...
When I was working at a certain chip company they recommended that the current motherboards didn't support more than 1gb of RAM.
We were doing server tests, and we wanted to use more. Did a little research and people suggested that the only reason it didn't support more was a certain capacitor.
So we removed that, put in 4gb and fired it up. Sure enough it worked fine!
20 minutes and some small explosions later 3 capacitors were on fire. Quickly put those out, soldered back on the missing capacitor we removed, replaced the burning ones, and all was fine!
Of course, the hole was still in the roof, so the same thing happened again a few days later, except this time the machine was rained on while it was running. Of course, the machine shorted and shut off. It wouldn't boot, even after it dried off, so we celebrated the upcoming insurance money. Of course, the day the insurance guy arrives, we plug it in and it boots right up. We were left with a bunch of bad sectors on the hard drive, but other that than the darn thing still ran.
Im pretty sure it was 98SE. The swap over time would have been only about 5-10 seconds and I would have had a gap like that when I was showing him around the comp...oh well :)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
I first started experimenting with my Amiga 500.
:))
I did lots of strange stuff, and the thing i remember the best is when i too out the CPU , the excellent motorola 68000 processor,
flipped it 180 degrees and put it back in again to see if it would notice
which it did of course
I think the screen turned pinkish when i turned it on and the system beeped.
Quite amusing.
-Anders-
Second story. Typing, and I get distracted so I get out from my seat and come back, not noticing that I knocked over my almost full bottle of code red mountain dew. A while later, I come back, noticing that while typing, certin keys aren't working. I pick up the keyboard and notice that it's in a puddle of caffeine, food coloring, carbonated water and suger. I unplug it, and plug another keyboard in. I figured the keyboard was dead so I just set it aside to be tortured at a later date.
A few months later, I killed the replacement keyboard, and I start hunting for a new keyboard when I come across the SGI. "It couldn't work," I thought, but plugged it in anyway. It worked beautifully.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
My hat off to ASUS. My old K6 450 (in an ASUS mobo) was trashed by the US postal service (hats off). The case looked like a small bomb had blown all the 5.25 inch drives out of the case, and the case had clearly been dropped from 5+ feet high since the case had a +-15 parallelogram look from the side. I switched it on and bent the case back into shape long enough to boot to win98. So a new case was in order. For some reason, the new at case had the hdd and power indicator lights coming from the powersupply. Somehow I managed to get the mobo pins right since the mobo caught fire and the plastic sheath melted right off the wire (and the apartment smelled for a day). I figured that I'd give it another shot, and got it right. It spent its sunset days doing photoshop (v4.0) for my brother's self-imposed music gig promotion. Only moore's law was able to destroy that mobo.
Clocked a 166 cyrix to 550, just to see if we could (running on 2.5v w/active cooling)
Hotswapped many floppy drives
Super glued a peltier + k6 cooler to a vga card, had the glue fail, leaveing paltier only still attached. Thermal probe burnt out, card still lives.
After someone (where i work) brought me a $200 stick of ram with all the solder on one side (single side dimm) mashed together, used an exacto knife to seperate them.
Hotwired a celeron (useing loop of copper wire wrapped around pins) to force it to higher voltage (thanks go to intel developer source books for info on how to do this).
Forgot to hook up cooling fan power in a midi case with 5 HDD in it, case temp after 12hrs was around 55C(115F).
Used a 18v AC power adapter on a 12v DC network switch, released smoke.
And to think, all of these survived and ran fine afterwards, some even to this day.
...
Also, one of my housemates was fumbling around the back of his computer (PIII celeron, ATX) for the power switch on the back of the PSU. He managed to flip the input voltage switch from 240V to 110V instead.
The most incredible bang and flash resulted, and the breaker at the house switchboard went. Once we unplugged the box and restored power to the house, we decided to see what the damage was like, flipped the power back, and plugged his machine back in.
Dead, dead, dead.
We swapped the PSU, and impressively the machine POSTed - but without video. We swapped the video card (it's a geek house - spares abound) and it booted fine and ran for ages after that.
I think it was 3-4 years ago, made a ghetto water cooling system to overclock my k6-2, had the pipes running to my minifridge next to my desk, worked fine then one day my computer just died, found that I my pump had stalled and the cpu roasted in its own juices. But I was surprised that the computer even worked for that long considering when I opened the case the motherboard was completely soaked, and had rusticles everywhere (never did factor in for humid weather and condensation).
Also my friend had a laptop where he broke the power connector so he couldn't charge the thing. He just bought a new one so he gave the broken one to me. I popped it open using a swiss army knife, resoldered the broken mobo connections put some duct tape and epoxy putty on it, now the thing works like new!
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Recently I had a PC die on me that looked ready to burn up for over a year. An AMD 3200+ overclocked to 2.5 GHz and an overclocked GeForce 4600 generating a ton of heat - using the machine was like sitting in front of an oven with a supercharger.
I knew one day it would die, and I was really just curious about how spectacularly it would go. Would it explode in a giant ball of flame, or maybe shoot lightning from the floppy drive? One day it did have a massive aneurism, but it did not die in the way I had hoped - the case became extraordinarily hot, the machine restarted and displayed an error on post stating something about the corrupt 64k base memory, and, when I restarted it again, I smelt a terrible scent coming from inside the case, then nothing.
After letting the room cool down for a bit, I tried to get it going again but the thing would not start. Instead it just beeped at me, kind of painfully.
The motherboard was fried, all the other internal components survived. After investing in a new mobo, a case with 8 fans, a water cooling kit, and some cables that are supposed to cool the whole thing down, I now have the Beast operating at 2.7 GHz stable and a much cooler workspace. It's also quieter - I did not expect the water cooler to run silently.
Of course, the fish miss having that big tank to swim in and all...
M
Once upon a time, I had a 386/40 board with a bad solder point on it somewhere. When the computer would heat up, it would crash and wouldn't boot again until it cooled down.
I discovered that I could get the computer to boot again (while still warm) if I pressed in on one corner of the board. Being a little strapped for cash, I put the computer on its side, left it open, and placed a drinking glass on the corner to flex the board. As the problem worsened, I just threw more spare change into the glass to apply more pressure. Eventually, the glass filled and I bought a replacement board. Unfortunately, I'd used mostly pennies, so it didn't make for a substantial contribution to the new motherboard.
-Scott Hutton
I was given a slightly broken Sony Clie, one of the older ones. B&W 160x160 resolution.
Several rows near the bottom of the display would often not show, or would flicker on and off. It was enough to make it fairly useless. I found the fault to be the cable which runs from the display PCB to the main processor PCB. A VERY small cable which had about 60 wires in it.
There was no way I could fix it, but I had recently helped somebody (a retired engineer) set up a new desktop PC. In return, he made an attempt to fix it. He took it home and spent several hours with it under a microscope and using the smallest gauge wire he could find, manage to repair the cable.
The PDA lives in my pocket each day, but I have yet to have a single problem with the display again.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
alot of people usually think that its the hardware at fault for there computer becoming slower and less stable but its not hardware...its the windows/aol virus...thanks to me all those computers have been saved...not for too long but they have..and people know who to call to save them again and again and again :) and u microsoft/aol =]
well, i: dropped my cell phone in a fountain, shorted the battery out but i shook it a few times and it still worked, i once ran my old p3 for almost a month with a dead cpu fan, it browned a section of the mobo but it still works fine i punched my 486 for some reason(dont remember, it was long ago) so had that it dented the case and unseeted half of the ram chips(6 i think) but it didnt crash, kept running for the rest of the day. opened it up to find that a bunch of the ISA cards had fallen out, messed it up a little, one of the ISA slots never worked again, i overclocked it %50 percent to 66mhz and then, since its heatsink was so huge(it was an OLD server) i overclocked it to almost 200mhz, stable! i found out later this worked because i wasnt changing the bus that the memory was on, there was a seprate bus for the cpu! where the abuse part came in is evendently the punch loosened the heatsink, because a few days later 3 things hapened, 1.the second case fan burned out 2.the harddrive burned out 3.it literaly burst into flames! i was suprised at how long it lasted overclocked though
Thank you for your opinion, Mr. Ballmer.
M
on the cpu die - trust me, eating greasy junkfood and mounting a 600g. heatsink is just bad karma.
My (ex-)girlfriend poured her glass of red wine into my PowerBook at a party this spring. I became aware of her frantically wiping the keyboard with napkins, and when I asked her what had happened, se said, "uh, nothing!"
A month later or so she dropped the laptop a meter (3 feet) or so onto asphalt, so that there were dents in the aluminium, and the screen was displaced so much that the lid locking mechanism stopped functioning. But after reinserting the internal AirPort card, that shook loose due to the fall, the PowerBook is once again operating beautifully.
A pair of beated up speakers my ex-gf was ready to toss to the garbage. They work just fine; they only had a dust dome pushed a bit inside.
An old 400w AT PSU someone at work was using as a doorstop (literally) on his garage. I just cleaned it up a bit and now it's running along my ATX psu on my main PC.
I also had a PII-233 that ran overclocked unadvertedly for almost 4 years. It wasn't by much, but it made it ran pretty hot. Never gave me a problem.
As the subject says. Compaq M700 baked at 200 deg c for 20 minutes until I smelt burning plastic. Came out of oven smoking. Cooled off, booted up fine. LCD backlighting was a bit uneven and some of the cast plastic bits (DVD drive cover, infra-red red plastic cover etc were warped and fell out. Cost of repairs, USD1000. Why was it in the oven? Burglars do not look in the oven for stuff. Advice for future : use the microwave instead as cooking does not require pre-heating.
Tidbit of the day : there are 1.5 million union ballots executed each year in the USA.
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I have a friend who baked his Motorola Startac for 10 minutes at 375 degrees, all on a $20 dare.
The battery was left in, and it was left on.
We actually called it near the end of the bake cycle, and it rang.
After it was removed, it was carefully held, and successfully operated!
That phone was nearly indestructable.
I used to work for an OEM Builder, and one of my Regulars gave me a CompaQ DeskPro P166. This was Back in the days when a 166 cost about 2 Grand. He had brought it straight from his house, along with another machine just like it, and some new parts to upgrade. One machine was soaking wet, through and through. The owners of the machines, wife had gotten pissed that he was home, sufing Porn, and poured a bucket of water into the machine. I upgraded one machine and got the wet one in trade for the work.
After pouring alcohol into the machine and putting it under a Dehumidifier, and then to be sure I baked it in my shed, for a week, the machine ran fine.. and actually is still running fine to this day at one of my Uncle's house. I sold it to him for $900 when the PII's came out.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
My brother bough a Pentium Pro 90/mobo at a computer fair in the mid 90's when they first came out (around $900) and we were building the box. Of course beer was involved. We got it all together and powered it up everything looked good until he tried to inhale beer and proceeded to hack on the motherboard. Sparks flew across the room and he system assumed room temperature. Luckily the vendor he bought it from was local and he ws able to return it as "faulty". Let this be a lesson... Don't drink and mod.
Zoid.com
Well, we got a batch that we just couldn't get installed. Tried the cards on a few different systems, different bios settings trying to force irq's and whatnot, but not a thing. We declared them all defective (being a 17 year old kid working as a co-op student mind you), and decided to go with the tried and true Sound Blaster pci's instead. We then proceeded to take some of the Sonic Impacts and play frisbee, use them as coasters and ridiculously large keychain items.
Years later I'm assembling spare parts to make a secondary system, and realize I have no sound card to put in it. All I have are isa cards, and this motherboard is without an isa slot. So I go rummaging in my room and of course what do I find but a well worn Diamond Sonic Impact. I figure what the hell, and toss the thing into the box. On first reboot XP found the card, and proceeded to lock up while installing it's drivers.. On second reboot the drivers completed, but windows core dumped shortly after. Third time was a charm though, and I still can't believe this thing produces sound after what I did to it.
1. 90+ F summer day
2. 50 year old trailer, aka Easy bake oven
3. One window unit AC on the other end of said trailer
4. AMD K6-III 450MHz machine running in a closet
Repeat for two summers. It would freeze up frequently, but the SOB still works. And it's an AMD, imagine that.
Someone hates these cans.
as the subject says, I drilled the pc speaker out of an IBM ps2 motherboard, as I had a pinball game that drove me crazy with its music, and I couldnt find out how to turn it off. The ps2 was older by then, and not much more then 200 euros/dollars, but still it was fun.
It still worked after that ofcourse, I think in general you can throw IBM hardware from small buildings and still have it work like before..
-- signed for your pleasure --
Simple, I installed Windows XP
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Try removing/inserting an ISA card in a running machine sometime, it works flawlesly in anything w/ isapnp (win95,nt4,linux,etc) I'm sure it wasn't intentional when they layed out the ISA spec, but it works with the addidion of plug and play to the equation.
This was before Norton Speed Disk, and one of my tricks for heavily over-used and very full drives was to copy everything to my external 80 MB drive (which cost me USD600!!) format the internal, and then copy everything back. Worked like a charm.
Years later (1996) the old workhorse 80 (it was a Quantum) finally stopped. The dreaded "stiction" had set in.
I had contacts at a company with a cleanroom, and so organised to open the case to see if there was anything I could do.
There was nothing I could "clean" - but I did manage to get the drive spun up again by putting a big screwdriver into the central spindle and giving it a good old twist on power-up.
Flush with success, I organised to bring my computer in the next day. Plugged everything in, powered on, and TWIST ... and of course the screwdriver skittered out of my grip annd left a huge scratch across the top platter. Bugger!
The drive still booted the o/s, I was able to see each file, but almost all the data had "fatal errors" when I tried to copy it off.
Damn Murphy's Law!
...since it is so old. But in the mid 70's when personal computers were just coming out we experimented with a CBM PET, using it to record oceanographic data from a remote probe instead of using a paper chart recorder.
In those days, shipboard power was notoriously bad. We started having trouble with the computer and we all thought that the salt water in the air had corroded all the connections. Instead we found out that the ship's generator was only putting out about 100 volts at 50 cps!
Once back at dock the computer worked perfectly (although it did eventually corrode).
well, when i was moving my computer down to the basement, i dropped the subwoofer for my speaker system, bounced down the stairs. it still lived, until about 2 months back when the speakers started to static. got it replaced on warrenty.
right after the new speakers arrived my moniter started acting strange. it kept fading in and out of focus, smacking it in the top-center of the front brought i back into focus for bout 10 min before it went blurry again. eventually it developed a blue color cast. it still works, but it goes blurry and has that color cast still. no warrenty for this one though.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Was assembling a box at one point, and had bought everything but the case, so I kept it all precariously wired on a desk top with the power supply sitting to one side. I had a Ringed Indian parrot back then that I used to let him out of his cage, and one day I came home to find him politely sunning himself on the blast from the CPU fan (if he had stuck his head in there, I'd be in jail by now). Anyway, put him back in his cage and that was that, until I got the case about 3 weeks afterwards and started sticking everything into it. That's when I found out that the parrot had crapped his guts out onto the entire motherboard and basically plastered it all in a rich lining of filth. I hadn't known and the damn thing didn't twitch.
Don't worry: your brain will eventually work inspite of you.
yeah i dont think its that weird. the same thing happens for win xp vs freebsd on my laptop.
within seconds of turning on my computer after a bios upgrade, I realized I had set the FSB to 266 instead of 133... well, I smelled electrical fire, then realized my mistake and yanked power.
the mobo and processor still work like a charm.
I also keep an old postal sorting box full of random parts, tools, etc... for some reason, I can pull any old card, mobo, processor, etc. out of there and it works. It really makes you appreciate how tough some old hardware is.
5 years ago I was (and still am) the owner of an ASUS t2p4 (with a pentium 66/233 MMX overclocked at 83Mhz FSB, good old days).
:=)
I was in the process of creating a server running linux and I had only one keybord/screen/mouse and no KVM switch, so I had to plug/unplug all the three components quite a lot, so much than after a reboot, my T2P4 stop reconising the keyboard.
after switching keybord I quickly conclude it was a probloem of the motherboard!!!!!
I manage to identify what look like a resistor (remember real resistor not SMD device) labeled as fuse on the Motherboard. so here we go, I unsolderer the bastard and shorted the fuse.
I had to say I was a bit worried to solder a motherboard, but it all went fine and the MB is still working so far and is still my prefered linux server
happy end
PS now hot keyboard removal feature work like a charme, but I tend to avoid this on newer PCs
Since we were a hardware vendor whenever there was a server with pysical damage from shipping we got it for IT. Some of these servers were in boxes but dropped by forklifts and hit by folklifts (thank you UPS). We would take the hard drives out and then use a hammer to bang on the cases until they where somewhat square again. Pop the hard drives back in and fire them up. Most have been running for years now.
Lightning. Lots and lots of lightning.
Over the past 5 years or so, I've lost 5 NICs to lightning. More recently, I lost an 80 gig HD this year to lightning. In all cases, there were APC surge protectors between the wall and the affected PCs.
I don't fault APC: my machines are up 24/7/365 aside from power outages, and we get a shitload of lightning in this area. All but one of the losses were at the apartment, I've taken direct hits at the house (mostly to the chimney) and didn't lose anything. I think wiring issues at the apartment were to blame for the majority of the problems.
I've learned to always keep a backup fresh NIC around, though. Lightning is a bitch.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
And nothing happened :-)
The keys became kinda sticky but besides that it kept running for years and i think it still does.
(And yes I know a C64 is not *exactly* a PC)
Best Regards Søren
The customer wanted to use a C64 to control an automated probe that should be used to sample water from a lake over a longer time period. The C64 was to be driven by a car battery and had to work for at least a month - obviously this was only possible by waking it up once a while and going back to sleep after taking the sample. And, no, he did not want a micro controller solution because he knew the C64 so well...
OK, I took the job as a challenge and tried to add a battery powered SRAM module "on top" of the C64's DRAM. On system startup my additional logic would copy the complete SRAM's content to DRAM and then give control to the C64. When the system was running, all modifications were written to both SRAM and DRAM, making it possible to simply power off the system without losing any data in RAM.
The SRAM module was plugged into a zero-force socket with 27512 compatible pin-out. When the C64 was not running, it could be removed and read by e. g. an EPROM programmer. This was our way to retrieve the collected data, leaving the C64 at its place and just swapping memory once a while with a spare module.
To develop the beast I soldered a 40 PIN ribbon cable to the 6502 CPU in order to attach an oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer. Given the < 1MHz clock speed this was risky but turned out to work in my development system.
More than once I was about to give up on it and was pretty desperate, the DRAM of the C64 was refreshed by the video chip, and RAM access timing was heavily entwined between CPU and video chip. It really was an electronic mess... :-)
I was in contact with a Commodore engineer who kindly provided me with C64 schematics and some tips, but he told me what I was trying to do was impossible.
But somehow I made it, it really worked. The poor development system was turned into a spare unit for sampling data by de-soldering the ribbon cable. Both systems worked fine for more than a year, as far as I know.
I once shared a house with a guy whose amiga (500?) had been run over by a passenger jet (a 737 or something like that). It had fallen off the baggage trolley and then the plane had reversed over it.
By the time I got to see it, the thing had a new case (made of perspex) and he'd soldered links over the cracked tracks in the circuit board. Ran just like a bought one!
The airline paid for a new one too IIRC.
Turned out that there was a current in the shield of the coax. Why? Because the outlet that one of the boxes was plugged into was miswired. 110 volts running between the computers for months, maybe even a year.
When I realized what was going on, I shut both PCs down and repaired the faulty outlet. Both booted right up. The problem that I was troubleshooting never appeared again.
Fan in file server power supply died and I didn't notice... well I kinda noticed that the box was getting warm but didn't really bother until I started getting disk read errors and slow performance. Opened it up and it wasn't warm. Everything was HOT. Got another fan, replaced it, no damage.
My first ever file server had a 40Mb HDD which started playing up. Opened drive up, checked for scratches... found some dust and a smudge. Washed the platters with soapy warm water and managed to retrieve what I needed to (a couple of small files) before the drive gave up properly.
I used this technique on a floppy disk when someone spilled coffee on it. Managed to retrieve some data there also.
Accidently put a 128Mb CF card in the wash with my trousers. One small dent and it still works perfectly.
G/F had a hissy-fit and threw HDD+caddy on the ground. I was sure the drive was toast. Turned out all that had happened was that the short 80-pin IDE cable had torn. Re-crimped connecters onto another piece of 80-pin ribbon cable. Works fine.
Alright, this is kinda lame, but it involves pain so it's cool.
I was playing my newly purchased Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side (best Sega CD fighter EVER) and noticed our TV screen was extremely dusty. I start wiping it off with my hand, ignoring the static electricity as usual. About three passes later out of nowhere fucking WHAM! I get shocked to fuck and back. Idiot me was still holding the fucking controller. Mass amounts of static electricity and something that's grounded don't work together well, you know? My arm spasmed so hard that the controller flew out of my hand and dented the bookcase I was sitting in front of. I had some severe arm pain for several hours afterwards, and it was sore for days afterwards from the damn spasm.
I expected my controller to be dead, but it wasn't. I figured that much of a charge running through it would be enough to 0wn an IC or some shit, but it worked just fine.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
-Pulled a ISA modem while running, modem and mobo still work.
:)
-Smashed a Mac LC3 with a sledge while operating, mobo is still bootable, keyboard/monitor/mouse = dead
-A friend picked up an iMac 233/B Bondi Blue off the side of the road, left it in the back of his truck for 4 hours in heavy rain. Brought it inside, dried it out, plugged it in, and it worked. Replaced hard drive (bad sectors and too small) and installed Panther, still works today.
-PSU failed (cap blew) in a desktop PC, mobo and video are unknown, CPU, HD, and Zip100 are dead, CD-RW and floppy drive survived.
-Hot swapped HD from running Xbox in to running PC and back multiple times, still works fine.
-Hot swapped floppy in a server (no downtime!)
-Picked up laptop by screen repeatedly
-Rolled truck with laptop on passenger seat, missing some plastic, but it still works.
-Threw Palm m100 across room to friend. He didn't catch it. Still works fine.
I have a pile of old computer junk in front of me. A probably functioning 486/SX 25, Adaptec ISA SCSI card, HD from LC3 Mac, bad HD from iMac, laptop HD, screen, and mobo from i-Opener after failed attempt to load Win98.
All of this stuff will be dragged around my field behind a quad, lit on fire with assorted fuels, probably loaded with fireworks, and maybe shot before being trashed.
Gotta love cleaning day
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
A friend of mine plugged a Gravis Ultrasound card into his computer one day, forgetting that he hadn't turned the computer off. It ran just fine afterwards, but nonetheless we rebooted the machine as soon as we realized what had happened.
Some time after that, his monitor started smoking after lightning had struck nearby, though - guess there are *some* things that even good old sturdy '95 PC hardware can't take.
well, here are some stuff that i did to my hardware 1) Kept in on a UPS and lost all data. The HD still worked after reformatting 2) In the process of data transfer, broke 6 pins (in a span of an year), the HD was working until last month The last and the best thing that happened a week before was that i poured beer on my keyboard and it started acting drunk (pressing an A would register a Z)
I had just received my 80287 floating point coprocessor, which I had saved up for all summer. An hour after installing it and not being able to get the computer to detect it and use it, I realized I'd installed in _backwards_! After the cold sweat dissipated a bit I pried it out and - what the hell, nothing to lose at this point - plugged it in right. It still worked. I put a candle on the Murphy altar that night.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
this isn't my story, but a friend of mine absent mindedly left his cell phone in his pants when he threw them into the wash... when he discovered what he'd done... figured the only solution was to then put the phone in the dryer. he's still using the same phone today. i think it's a samsung or maybe lg. anyways... his phone's tolerence is lightyears ahead of my craptastic motorola v600...
an exgirlfriend had her ibook fall down a flight of stairs. booted up fine, no problems at all haven't yet asked carpeted or hardwood, but a flight of stairs nonetheless
My IBM Thinkpad was on the passenger seat when I had a head-on collision at 40MPH. Over all the noise and smashing as the car crumpled up, I still remember the awful plasticky rattle as it bounced off the dashboard and crashed into the footwell. It survived - and has worked perfectly to date, and I'm typing on it now! :-)
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
i once spilled pepsi on the floor behind my laptop. shortly after it started to flicker and die (at least with windows) i started using linux on it exclusively because it seemed to crash less (i had no idea what the problem was at the time). eventually i sent it in to tech support along with my complaints. they said that someone had spilled soda in it. since my keys weren't sticky and i had no recollection of ever having done so, i ran around for months complaining about laptop vendor's fraudulant claims. i eventually discovered it'd work fine in linux if i switched it to write-through rather than write-back L1 caching, albeit considerably slower.
after the warranty had expired, i decided to crack it open and see what, if anything, i could do to fix it. i discovered some brown, sticky, carmelized residue on the mobo (around and under the cpu/heatsink which happened to be directly connected to the intake fan (apparently they combine the functionality of an intake and cpu fan into one device in laptop world). i tried to clean it all up with alcohol and cotton swabs. i think i got most of it up, but it still wouldn't function at full speed afterwards. a few months after that my gf's niece spilled coke on the display and it died. it's now currently housed on a lan at my mom's house performing it's role as DNS & mysqld server (wasn't every portable anymore since it necessitated a monitor, so i promoted it to server status)
1) This was happening before heatsinks were invented. 286 16Mhz in a PLCC socket overclocked to 33 Mhz (replaced 32Mhz quartz cristal with 66Mhz). After a minute it was so hot that in shot out of the socket like a bullet and hit the ceiling. Replaced the 66Mhz quartz with an 44.5Mhz, put the cpu back and it worked for many years on.
2) After loosing some game - crazy neighbour kid pulls out brand new 4x cdrom drive out of case and steps on it on it. The cdrom case is now tilted about 30 degrees sideways. I bought the cdrom from the kid for the price of an icecream. After 2 days of soldering and gluing together small broken pieces of plasic - the cdrom works. It looked like Frankenstein but it worked for 3 years on.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
One of the thingies, maybe a capacitator, on my cousin's old Voodoo 3 came off while I was refurnishing the internals of his machine. I got this old, big and bulky soldering iron and a thick piece of solder, soldered the thingie back on and put the card back in. - It worked.
(Without the capacitator the card didn't work.)
All rites reversed 2010
My PC's power supply is making a loud buzzing noise, so I've unbolted it from the case, sat it on the floor, and smothered it with a pillow. Actually replacing the power supply can wait until the next time I'm gainfully employed, or when the damn thing bursts into flames. Whichever comes first, you know?
(The power supply has done this a couple of times before, but I was always able to "repair" it by smacking the thing with a screwdriver handle. No such luck this time.)
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
The card got shoved inside the laptop taking out all the PCMCIA slots and scratching the motherboard.
I just opened the laptop, shook out all the loose bits and turned it on again and it worked! (Except for the WiFi of course).
We simply bought an USB-WiFi and it's still working fine. (The incident happened a few years ago).
When the PS/2 286 at work started feeling a little slow running Windows 3.something, we upgraded it to a 386SX. Kingston made the "SX Now!" upgrade, which consisted of a new processor on an adapter board. Just remove the PLCC 286 cpu and plug in the board. Funny thing about those PLCC sockets though, you can be off by 90 or 180 degrees.
We were off by 90 degrees. After noting that the system wouldn't boot, we studied the instructions again, rotated the board, and booted to Windows. We used Minewsweeper as a benchmark for the new processor -- the empty areas cleared with unimaginable speed!
Just occured to me I have more to share -
1) Ran over a Cassiopeia PDA I was using back in 2000 in a Ford Explorer. Tough PDA - the only thing wrong with it was the cover for the compact flash card was irreparably smashed. I was able to install Linux on it afterwards, which made up for the massive form factor and the lack of a cover.
2) Dog pissed on an old Amstrad of mine, right in the back where there would normally be a fan. I picked up the case to clean it off, and piss ran all through the machine prompting it to turn off. Kept working, but every time I turned it on afterwards it smelled like dog urine (which is just a hair away from the smell of a dead bear).
3) Related, but SOT. Found a box of Maxtor 200 MB hard drives in a dumpster a few years back (when 200 MB was something), 12 of them in all. None of them worked, but I called Maxtor anyways to see if they were still covered under the warranty. They were, and I got 12 new drives out of the deal.
M
The joystick port of my MSX computer was no longer working, it always reported the fire button as being pressed. I opened the case, took some random resistor I had lying around and tried it at several placed on the motherboard until it worked again, soldered it, closed case, done.
Never had any problem after that. I knew nothing about electronics at that time.
Kind of an old story, but relevant. One day we were tinkering with ways to defeat bad sector based copy protection schemes. We found that you could lay out the geometry of the disk, then use markers to disturb that area of the disk to allow the copy scheme to bypass. Success rate was pretty low though. The best alternative happened to be opening the disk drive door at just the right time! It seems the copy scheme only wanted to see an error, it was not picky about the nature of it. (The Atari beeped every sector, I believe the beep was the actual bits from the disk running through one of the chips in the machine.)
That marker really is a circumvention device, don't even want to talk about the finger!
Anyway, we decided to see how robust the Atari disk system really was. Took a hole punch and just swiss cheezed the disk. By luck we missed the parts of the disk that recorded bad sectors and the file table. Must of put in 10-15 holes --nobody thought it would still work, but it did! (Though slowly)
Saved a few files and loaded them back. 90Kbyte (scary huh?) floppy worked just fine after a bit of grunting from the drive. Had about 14K or so space left!
Blogging because I can...
Would those fit in the category? I'd be scared to ask about those !
I set a full glass of water on an old Commodore 1541 disk drive. I then knocked it over and the entire glass of water poured into the drive via the top air vents. After drying for a few days it worked fine for years to come.
Spilled a glass of grape juice (real stuff, not cool aid) into the keyboard of my Commodore 128 computer. Again, after some washing and drying it worked fine. Well, except some keys would stay depressed if you were not real light with the typing.
My friend tried to overclock a his near new Amiga 3000. While trying to desolder a chip he managed to yank it off, along with a half dozen traces off the motherboard. He ripped apart some speaker wire, resoldered the lines and it booted up fine.
While working at a computer dealer, a co-worker tried to replace a hard drive on some IBM machine. Problem was it LOOKED like IDE but was really some wacky mainframe thing. When turned on, about 5 of the wires in the IDE cable turned red hot and exploded into flame. The HD was toast, but the computer was fine once the right HD was ordered from IBM.
While using my trusty old Pentium II I heard a SCSI drive inside make a PING-PING-PING and a horrid grinding noise as the platters ground to a halt. Opening up the drive case revealed a read write head had somehow come loose and gotten wedged under the arm against a platter. Carved a nice circular trench in the disk platter.
Umm, guess the last one isn't a survival story. But I did have backups...
A friend has just had a lucky escape - she rolled the car at 70mph on the M1 in England. (Long story, but in short a lorry swerved into her lane, she yanked the wheel then it all goes a little bit fuzzy...)
...it now boots quite happily.
:-)
Her Samsung x05 laptop surprisingly refused to do anything after this.
I took it apart last night, removed snapped off bits of plastic, screws and other conducting stuff from the middle...
The LCD screen shows solid white (however all works fine on an external monitor) and, from inspecting the LCD panel, I reckon that either a connector or cable is damaged, that's all.
The car (a Peugeot 206 cc - like a baby slk with a metal folding roof) is completely written off, there's not a straight bit of the car left and my friend had to be cut out of it. She did tell the rescue people that they only had to push a button to open the roof, so at least she's got a sense of humour still. She's got a broken hand and a fractured skull.
I think that the laptop surviving that is pretty good
Cheers,
Nick.
I once ran an Athlon 500 (Slot A) for ~15 minutes with NO heatsink at all.
I later overclocked it to 750 and ran it that way for ~2 years.... still in use today @ 500mhz.
It sounds odd for your machine not to go a lot above 40 degrees in such a situation. Hell, here (Perth, Western Australia) the air temperature frequently goes above 40 in summer.
I suppose if it was an early Pentium machine that's not unreasonable - some of those didn't really need fans, and would often run OK without even a heat sink. Don't try it with a modern machine though.
We sold my old Nintendo 8-Bit to a friend of my brother. I don't know why but they poured lemonade into the game slot...
It continued to work, although you had to repeatedly press restart a few times until the game started. But when it did, it worked just fine.
I enjoy every clickety-clack keypress on my '80s era IBM PS/2 keyboard. Even more so after removing the cruft which was the arrow keys and numeric keypad. Who needs them? I simply grinded them off with a Dremel power tool, through plastic cover, steel plate and plastic circuit foil. Of course, the circuits had to be re-soldered afterwards, but it was worth it. The mouse is now 15 cm closer to my right hand, and the keyboard balances so much better on my thigh.
One day I built a computer for a friend of mine. I somehow managed to mess up the polarity of the leds or put it in the wrong socket. I started the box ( a 486DX4/133 /w 32MB ) and instantly it started to run "unevenly", just like the RTC would fluctuate. Soon after bootup something smelt funny.
The Turbo-Switch was totally fried. Will never move again. Molten plastic filled out its interior. I figured a rather high current must have moved through it. That was a scary situation, but after removing all unused wiring to the frontpanel the box ran fine.
Seperate incident:
He had plugged a stoneage transistorradio into the line-in of the oh-so-good noname 16bit soundcard. I figured later that the impendance of the two devices were not compatible. The chip on the soundcard was fried and smelt rather funny too. It did not make any sound.
After I replaced the soundcard with a new one, all went fine. For about 6 years thereafter... then he sold it.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
I got my first PC-type computer in 1988. It was a Bondwell-made PC-XT computer with a 8MHz 8088-compatible processor, 360kB floppy drive and a 20MB hard disk. When I got the beast, I didn't have the guts to open the case so I could install a modem, but I did learn much.. after running my BBS on it for a couple of years and even connecting it to a UUCP network with Waffle, I had stripped it down to a motherboard with all the components and power supply on my table. Don't ask why. Anyway, somehow I managed to break the MB in half.
After a careful examination I decided it was worth a try to solder the board back together, so I went for it.. I'm so glad they hadn't invented multi-layer boards back then because the damn thing worked like nothing had happened! After this it was easy to repair my modem that had been struck by a lightning.
The secret to a successful
I remember a story some years ago on the Register where a server was left running in a closet. Everybody forgot about it and for some reason the closet was closed off behind a brick wall. A few years later, the brick wall was torn down for some other reason. They opened the closet, and there was the server - still running!
I tried googling for this story, but couldn't find it. I'm nearly positive I read it a few years ago on theregister.co.uk.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Anyway, if you had a steady hand and didn't cross the pins, you could insert or remove a disk drive card with the power still on. We used Slot 6, but I'm sure it would have worked in any slot.
Needless to say, if our local Apple dealer knew we did this, it surely would have voided any warranty. ;-)
And you know what? That Apple //e I did that in in 1988 *still* works just fine, and it used to be on 24/7 for 3 *years* for a while there. Let's see Dell top THAT!
I would expect PCs to be at least as fault-tolerant.
I regularly use an electric leaf blower to blow dust out of computers, servers, and varoius network equipment. Always works after I blast it outside my office.
I awoke in a panic, with just barely enough time to make it to pick up my Mom in time. I raced outside, jumped in the car, and tried to back out of the driveway. The car wouldn't move. I thought it was just a snowdrift, so I pressed harder on the gas. Still no good. So, I pulled forward a little and got up some speed in reverse. After a few more attempts, I finally managed to make it over this huge hill. I looked at the mass in the car's headlights. As my eyes adjusted, the horror of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Lying on the ground in front of me was my laptop's bag, with my laptop and several floppy disk cases full of floppy disks.
What I had done was so overwhelming that I did not even try to feel an emotion. I just picked up my laptop and carefully placed it in the back seat of the car.
When I had the chance, I checked out the results of the evening. The LCD screen was fractured down the middle and the case was split down the middle. As I balanced each half of my laptop on my lap, I turned on the power. To my surprise, she booted up. One thumb-sized piece of the screen revealed the DOS prompt.
I still have that laptop, though, of course, I have not used it very much since then. I was able to perform some important data transfer operations with it, though, relying entirely on memory of what the computer should be displaying in response to each of my inputs. Most of the 3.5-inch floppies came out OK, too, though a few were unusable due to their shutters being welded into the plastic. The floppy disk cases cracked a little, but I still use them, too.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I've had many fried modems, but only one survivor. After a power spike on the phone line and simultaneous power outage during a thunderstorm, this modem required you to pick up a telephone and leave it off the hook while you connected to the ISP. The phone had to remain off the hook for your entire session, and any noise on the phone would cause the connection to drop.
Remember the old 5 1/4 floppies? The cover always had a lot of warning signs on them, one of them being, that you shouldn't bend the disk. But my experience is these babies could easily survive being bent and crushed from lying between books for a whole day in a schoolbag. :)
Here is one example: http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=1341
There are a few other examples out there where they've molten the system alot more than the above example. Interestingly though, of all the Apples I've heard this story about, they all still work, with the seldom exception of the lcd screen being molten.
A spot of background: Wycliff Bible Translators is a charity that has set out to provide a translation of the Christian Bible in every language on Earth. This includes, of course, thousands of languages that have no written form, so part of their work involves volunteer linguists traveling to remote parts of the planet to create written languages for tribes and teaching them literacy in their own tongue.
... and the PDP 11/40 was still chugging along, happy as can be. Now, obviously they panicked and got the air conditioning fixed as quickly as possible. But they did prove that at least this one PDP 11 could run for at least a week at temperatures in the 160F to 180F range.
Back in the late 1970s, I did some volunteer programming for them. At the time, translation support ran on a PDP 11/40 that was installed in the cargo hold of this aging steamship that they owned; they'd sail to the port nearest to the next tribe they were working for, teams would collect dictionary words, create orthographic phonetic spellings for them, and send them back to the ship to be collated for the dictionary, then printed out and sent back out to the teachers and translators. The rest of the ship had no air conditioning, so they built a climate-controlled computer room below decks, with orders to people that they were only to enter on the rare occasions that a magnetic tape needed to be changed.
Unbeknownst to them, the air conditioning failed as soon as they left port and never actually turned on. When they went in to change a tape while docked in Rio de Janeiro, they found that the temperature in the computer room had risen to somewhere in the close vicinity of 180F
But then, what can I say about 1970s DEC hardware? The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really - that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.
Computers may have been expensive back then, and huge, and we thought that 128k of RAM was a lot, but boy could they take a beating, at least if you bought them from Digital Equipment Corporation.
I once managed to squish a HD power supply cable between the case frame and the cover, thus shorting the 12V branch of a 300W power supply. Thick black smoke appeared seconds later but the system kept booting normally! I don't think I've ever unplugged a system that hastily before. Years later the fan of the very same power supply died and the computer ran unattended for 2 days. It filled the room with quite a stink, but even though the power supply was too hot to touch, the computer kept running. I replaced the fan and the thing works to this day.
My cat was really sick and spewed on the keyboard of my laptop (old p120). Now, cat spew being nasty and acidic, it ate through the keyboard mesh underneath the keyboard - making it impossible to type with.
I had to use an external keyboard for a bit, but I eventually replaced it with a mesh from a similar laptop.
Not really critical damage there, but amusing nonetheless.
summer of 2000
..and an old floppy drive
After an upgrade to my PC, I had enough components to build an extra one.
This extra box consisted of
Celeron 300A @ 550 MHz
256mb pc133 SDRAM
Abit BX6r2
32x CD-ROM
18GB HD
SoundBlaster Live Sound Card
AGP voodoo3 (the low-end one, model slips my mind)
ATX midtower case
While in a poorly lit area, I had already set up a barebones test. The box had past post ok, so I added the sound card and hooked up the remaining drives. I was ready to finish up by installing the OS.
I boot up the box, and to my surprise someone installed bright orange neons! But what's that awful smell? SHIT! ITS MAGIC SMOKE!@#
I flipped the switch on the power strip to cut the power. I then noticed those glowy things weren't really secret neons, but were in fact the wires of the power cable for the floppy drive. Turns out, in my haste to hook everything up I inadvertently plugged in the floppy power connector wrong. The floppy drive was missing its connector piece and had its 4 pins exposed. I inserted the connector so that the first pin of the power connector was 1 or 2 pins to the left of the 4 pins of the floppy drive.
Great thing is, nothing happened! Well, the plastic melted from the floppy power wire, so I cut it and topped it with electric tape. But besides that, the whole system went on to run normally, including the PSU and floppy. A little more than a year ago the voodoo3 took a dive, but the box still operates to this day with a 32mb geforce2mx and the rest of the original components.
I once had (still do, actually) an old dual PPro board which I ran in a topless desktop case for added cooling without added fans (it ran *hot*). On one occasion, I came back from a weekend away to a hot, fried smell in my room: apparently, one of the CPU fans had died in the meantime, and the CPU was slowly cooking the motherboard (though still working). Naturally, I immediately powered the thing off and, after locating gloves, removed the CPU and inspected for damage, found none. After it had cooled off a bit, I hunted down another fan in my junkpile, attatched it to the CPU1 heatsink and powered up. Worked marvellously. A few weeks later, I was fiddling with a kernel with a can of Coke set safely on the power supply. Somehow or another, I managed to knock the can of coke over, and it spilled its contents onto the powered-up motherboard. I panicked, and 10 seconds later did a 'shutdown -rn now' because that was the first sync + power-related command that came to mind, and pulled the cord. Removed motherboard and all components, doused completely with alcohol, and allowed to dry for a few hours. Re-assembled, powered up, and it worked, again, marvellously. That computer served me well as a primary machine for about 4 years, and even lasted through my first year of college. Between the dead fan, coke, and 240MHz overclock (go TD6NF motherboard!), CPU1 finally died in about November of my freshman year, but I only actually replaced the system because *both* my hard drives were acting dodgy, and I was convinced it was the hard drive controller going out. Turns out it was just that both drives failed simultaneously. It's still sitting in my basement, and if I can get my hands on some nice 1MB PPro 200s and a half gig of EDO to populate its 8 glorious RAM slots, I'll probably find some task for it to perform eventually. Its name is 'Xenophon,' by the way, and it is officially my favourite computer of all time.
-- "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."
I have a AMD K6-2 processor and motherboard that sat in a paper grocery bag with several loose 9V batteries for an entire year. This bag was in the family room of my college apartment and I had nine roomates. Later I took the motherboard and processor and put it in a case . . . it still works. I'm currently using it as a webserver and it has been up for over 30 weeks straight. This is the truth. If you don't believe me, check out http://www.gearedsteel.com/ to see for yourself.
Came in on Monday morning after the first heavy snowfall of winter, to find the top floor full of snow. The builders had omitted the seals between the roof and the top of the walls and snow had blown in sideways, It had then melted onto the ceiling tiles, causing them to collapse. The Unix box had a pile of slush on the top. Inside, water was gently dripping down over the racks along with bits of ceiling tile. Water was trickling through the power supply, the VME rack holding the CPU and memory boards, and over the hard drives. It had missed the tape drive and the boot floppy.
Naturally, the system was still running and was still logging data from an experiment that had been running all weekend. The experimental gear was under a polycarbonate safety cover, surrounded with snow.
The only real casualty was the site engineer who had signed off the building without exploring the roof space, and who was released to allow him to explore alternative career options.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Once upon a time i had spilt a cup o joe onto my laptop. blank goes the screen. pff goes the powersupply. i began to cry. but deciding not to give up or surrender i get 99% pure alchohol (that is 198 proof for you yanks) and open the laptop case and wash everything in pure alcohol. wait some time. turn it on and it works. sound bugged me a bit, that is untill the laptop got stolen from my front desk while i was in a meeting with my boss about 5 feet away in his office 3 weeks later
I've twice had success with rescuing a CDROM drive that has had a cd explode inside it. The first time, I was a dumb high schooler with my brand new computer in my room, and nowhere to put it. I put it on the head of my bed, precariously balanced (it had shelves, so it was about 10 inches deep). I got mad during a game of descent, somehow bounced wrong on my bed, and my computer fell. The CDROM smashed in to pea-sized pieces, and went all over inside the drive. I opened it up, shook it out, and removed any other pieces that were stuck. When I reassembled it, it was better.
The second time was earlier this year, a friend's son was on the computer, and the drive recieved a sharp blow while the cd was spinning. The pieces went inside. His son didn't tell him anything, so he called me up wondering why his drive door wouldn't close half the time, and wouldn't read cds when it did. I took that apart, blew compressed air through it, and it worked.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
In one lab I worked in we had a spare Juniper M40 that had literally "fallen off the back of a truck." The shipper's insurance paid to replace the router, which had fallen about 3 feet off tailgate of the deilvery truck. We were allowed to keep the "totaled" router. One power supply was shot and it wasn't pretty, but after a little hacking, it was a proud addition to the lab.
Beyond snapping my left radius in an unusual mid bone break, the impact also busted the hinge off my Titanium Powerbook G4. My arm looked worse than the Powerbook.
Plugged in, the Powerbook worked, the screen worked, but the backlight wires were ripped loose, so you could only make out a faint image. While using the machine hooked up to a monitor, the two wires shorted together inside the case and started spraying fiery sparks out the opening.
I freed the wires and later tried to rejoin them, but no luck. I still don't know if the backlight is broken or if the backlight's transformer got fried. The Powerbook works fine otherwise however, so I use it to drive a video projector to play DVDs on the wall.
Now I just need to find out what voltage I should be getting from the two wires driving the backlight, and if they are putting that out. It'd sure be nice to have a screen that lights up again.
A father's friend had a computer with a broken CPU fan. He didn't mind the BIOS temerature alert ringing from time to time. One day we opened the computer case and the fan was so stuck that you couldn't even move the blades manually. The fan was eventually replaces, but the computer (I think it was a Celeron at 400MHz) was working like that for 2-3 years without any visible damage
I put my computer together on the kitchen table, stood nervously looking at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned on the power. There was an immediate loud POP, and half of a capacitor made an arc that took it across the kitchen. A cloud of bright pink smoke rose up from the shattered capacitor as a small flame burned from the capacitor. I quickly turned off the power and blew out the fire. After I calmed down and looked over my setup carefully, I found that I had plugged the AT power supply cable one pin over on the AT power supply plug. I adjusted the cable and turned my computer on, again. To my surprise, my computer worked! It was a beautiful sight!
I still have that computer (in fact, she is on the table behind me right now, watching me type this). She still works when I turn her on, but I have to adjust the system date to less-than 2000. She is not Y2K compliant.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The iDX4/100 CPU that was supposed to be powered by 3.3v but was configured by the vendor without the motherboard's voltage regulator module, so was running off 5.0v (I fought to have them replace it anyway).
The sound board that needed a new edge connector fitted after I slipped on some stairs whilst carrying it, landed on it and ripped the old connector off, together with some tracks.
The PCs that were under a leaking air conditioning unit at a former employer and got soaked in water and/or coolant. Once dried out, they worked (mostly) and were given the hostnames 'itchy' and 'scratchy' in order to make people suitably nervous about using them for anything important. One of them even had a failing hard disc, so I partitioned around the failed sectors.
The 17" CRT monitor that was dropped (NOT by me!) down some stairs in 1998 whilst the same employer was moving buildings. It acquired a large crack in the case, but is still working fine.
The M68000 CPU that had several pins bent and re-bent whilst I was attempting to fit it to a new socket on an Amiga accelerator card (that in turn fitted into the original CPU socket on the Amiga motherboard).
--
One thing that irritates me are all these little black power warts that the stupid manufacturers do not label. What about "This thing is for the printer" Almost the same as the idiots who did not put the harddisks sector/track counts on the disk before autodetection IDE days.
Anyways, I once had a brand new SMC SDL model-router and took it work to show to someone. When I brought it back I accidentally brought back the power wart for a printer. These tend to have higher voltages (30 instead of 12) to drive the motors.
The SMC went kaboom wth a loud bang, lots of smoke and a foul smell. The thing was a week old.
I then opened it up and saw that one electrolytic cap had blown. After washing off all the yucky electrolytic fluid scum and cutting off the cap's legs the router came up perfectly, without the cap.
These large caps are usually only used to filter line noise. Removing it may make thing somewhat unstable if you have bad power but I have not had a single problem
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I'm writing this post on a Dell Dimension 8250 that was in a basement when the watermain in the front yard blew, filling the basement to a depth of about two feet for about eight hours. Yep, completely submerged. Thing sat on the back step for a week before I got to it. Scrubbed everything down with an old toothbrush (the insides looked like they'd been spraypainted with rust-coloured paint), and blew everything out with compressed air. The HDD was shot (no real surprise there), but *everything* else works just fine, including the CDRW and the Radeon 9700.
Tune In, Turn Up, Geck Out.
My cousin had one of those 3 prong to 2 prong (ground remover) adapters for his entire computer surge protector. This was a pretty bad idea as it turns out when he accidently touched the prongs the wrong way, probably on ground and positive. His power supply made a large explosive sound and that was the end of that computer. The power supply capacitors blew and leaked, hard drive, cd burner wouldn't spin up :-P. All the fans in the system blew, and best of all his sound card had black marks on the lines and all the chips were blown... I have a picture http://home.netslayer.net/pic.jpg
Despite PCI being not a hotpluggable bus, removing devices from it while it's running (but the devices aren't used atm), doesn't really hurt.
This was usually an easy job, just boot BRUSYS of the 9-track tape and restore the backups onto the newly INIT'd partitions. [Partitioning the disk sometimes took hours, depending upon the controller].
So I booted the thing up, partitioned and INIted the new disk, and recovered the O/S partition. Did a bit of fiddling, SAV/WB to write the running system into a boot image and booted of the new O/S disk. The client was thrilled.
"So I can just log in now and start working ?" Um, not yet I have to restore your data partitions. "Didn't you just do that ?", No that's just the system, where's your backup of your data partitions ? "You just used the backup tape !".... Oh crap ! Let's be clear about this, you did a backup every week ? "Yes, onto that tape", What command did you use to do the backup ?..... Looks at the script - It's for backup in the system. Looks at the other scripts in that dir. Did you use this script ? "No, I only ever used the other one" Shit !... Shit shit shit !
Ok, Let's look at the damaged drive. I open the drive assembly, pull out the boards to get to the HDA unit (Remember these devices are a 90 centermeter deep 19" rack mount 8 RU unit. Large. Open the HDA (20 hex bolts) and peek inside.
The top two head arms are twisted, and the platters are obviously warped where the heads are jammed sideways between them. Oh goody! Look at the manual, find a copy of the partition table (fortunately stored in a text file that was backed up). Ok, the index surface is the middle platter, and the top 3 surfaces held the O/S. (bad way to partition your disk, but fortunate for us).
At this point I pulled out a hacksaw, got the client to stand by to suck up the filing, while I hacked the top head arms off, then used vice grips and a couple of lumps of wood to lever the bastard out of the platter assembly. We then reassembled the drive.
Rebooted the system off tape (BRUSYS seems to be faster), plugged the drive in, powered it up. No smoke, a good thing so far. typed the BRU command to suck the data partition off the drive, hit the drive spin-up button, waited for the ready light and hit enter.
So there's this drive spinning, minus 4 heads, BRU is frantically sucking data off it and it's screaching louder And LOUDER, both drive ready lights our out as we're frantically transferring the data, knowing that drive isn't going to last.
I get the BRU prompt back, and am just mounting the destination drive, when there's this thump from the drive, which then spins 180 degrees, topples off the table top, smashes on the floor and blows the breaker in the rack.
After unplugging the drive, and firing everything (except the old drive) up again, we discovered that we had in fact recovered the data. The client was a happy and immediately went to work finishing the CAD job that they had been working on in the morning (It's 1 AM at this point)
The sad thing is that I don't think the client fully apreciated what a miricle it was they got their data back.
The best bit of abuse I have seen was on an IBM Model 55, it was functioning as one of our Eicon X25 Gateway's so was pretty vital to our day to day operations.
It had a dodgy hard disk that would randomly crash and freeze the system, after a reboot, you would get a disk0 failure code, the solution we found was to remove the HDD (IBM had a great quick remove option with the 55 where you did not need to take the cover off it just slid out the front - ahead of it's time really!) and gently tap it on the desk/wall/co-workers head, reinsert and power up, if this did not work remove it again and tap it somewhat harder. The true elite support guys knew just how hard to hit it to get it working first time.
After about 2 years of this 'system' the old girl finally gave up the ghost and no amount of slamming it against the desk worked, so seeing as they had nothing to loose the guys cracked the disk open, breaking the vacuum seal, and spun the platters round by hand!!!, reassembled, reboot - it worked fine!! I kid you not, I still to this day do not know how it worked after such abuse, imagine it was a bit like the bumble bee!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
When I built my very first PC a couple years back, I thought I would be really hip, and get a better fan for my CPU. I bought one of those baseball sized bricks of metal from Thermaltake, which also later ended up rendering my room into what sounded like an airplane hangar.
:)
Comming home from the computer store giddy and nervous, I began putting the brand new pieces of my computer together. After I screwed in the shiny new motherboard, and dropped the fresh new CPU into its snug little home, I cracked my knuckles with conviction and unpackaged the new fan.
Now, I always heard that fans were difficult to install, requiring awkward pressure to clip into place. This specific fan was no exception, as I soon discovered. I grasped the bulk of copper and slowly and firmly began to slide it into place over the delicate and fragile chip, the plateau of harmony and precision, that would soon be the soul of my new PC.
Then, as if God reached down from the heavens and pushed it himself, my hand slipped. The several pounds of pressure I was applying sent a corner of the copper brick directly into the tiny black Mecca that was my CPU. I watched helplessly in slow motion as a chip of my CPU broke off and went flying into the abyss.
Time stood still, and I could not believe my eyes. That little piece of hardware that just cost me several hundred dollars, now had a CHUNK missing from it. Proportionally speaking, this was akin to a house getting a portion of its roof blown off.
So, wanting to burst into tears at my much anticipated evening gone horribly, horribly wrong, I did not give up. I continued putting my new computer together, damnit.
And ya know what? It worked. To my surprise, I booted it up without a single hitch. I have no idea how or why, or that something so small and delicate could survive such a detrimental blow to what seemed to be a very important piece of its construction, but it did.
I've since switched to a water cooled PC.
"The SCSI device is not responding. Please cycle power to hard-reset it".
So I pulled the power plug from my CD writer, put it back in, arrow up, enter, worked.
an old computer (and monitor) that got infected with CIH
It got the monitor too, huh? Wow... I must have missed that particular strain of CIH. Lucky for me! Sorry to hear that, though.
I had a gameboy once that got ran over by a 4x4, and suffered no ill effects afterward, save some scratches on the back.
1. I got a 256M ECC DIMM from a friend and installed it next to my 128MB DIMM. I wasn't sure if my motherboard would take 256M DIMMs, but I figured empirical research beat reading the manual any day. The system booted, checked all 384M of memory, booted fine. Except when I passed the 256M mark of used memory, I would get unexpected and unexplained seg faults and wacky corrupt characters in recently written files, and very rarely, kernel panics. Originally I thought it was my shitty overclocked celeron in the hot summer. The system ran like this for several months. Eventually I found the motherboard manual, and lo and behold, the motherboard didn't support ECC ram *or* DIMMs larger than 128m. But in all that time I never really lost any data or corrupted any critical files.
2. I was very pleased with the powerful magnets that I had just pulled out of a salvaged hard drive. Where better to put them than on the side of my case, right next to the power supply! It took a geek friend asking "are those MAGNETS on your case?" for me to realize that the power supply had been making a funny noise for a long time.
... ok got three things, only two of them survived though ...
... worked afterwards with a few marks on the case ...
... he was working on a m/f graphics product and they needed to certify one of their company's printers for it. The printer was a Japanese version so they had one shipped from an office over there ... unfortuantly when they got it they plugged it straight in without checking the power rating ... it didn't survive ...
... Me and another collegue had spent quite sometime setting up a rs6000 system for a customer and were nearing completion of the project. The system had a standalone UPS as it was not destined for a datacenter. The guy worked for the application provider and decided that he would plug in the UPS to the server ... we're not sure what he did buy both me an my collegue swear we saw 10inch large blue sparks when he tried to do this accompanied by a large crackling noise .... system was fine though and did many years of trouble free service before being retired ...
1). My father worked for a large well known computer company for many years at one of their UK sites. At one point they were doing some work which required an AS400 so they had one shipped over from the states, (it was one of the first in the UK). Unfortuantly when it was being delivered to site they managed to drop it off of the back of the lorry onto the concrete loading dock
2). Again with my father at the same company
3). Guy i used to work with was a bit of a cowboy
In the old days, drives would occasionally "stick" as they grew older. The commonly accepted practice was to "tap" the drive, to force the head to pop off the platter, and allow the drive to spin up to speed. One day, my 1gb Micropolis SCSI drive, which had served me loyally for years, refused to spin up. The lights were on, I could hear the motor laboring get the platter started, but no motion. So I hit it. It wouldn't budge. I hit it again. Then again. No dice. Figuring I had nothing to lose, and needing to get the data off, I got a 2x4 and started bashing the hell out of the drive in hopes that the platter would get unstuck (I had taken the cover off an external case.)
Finally, I came to my senses, and decided to plug it into a different case. It spun up, albeit rather noisily. Apparently, the problem wasn't the drive, but the power supply in the external case - there may have been stiction, but it wouldn't have been a problem had the other power supply been able to supply enough amps... The exterior of the drive was intact, but the drive itself was suffering hardware errors (after the beating I gave it, I'm surprised it was working at all.) I managed to get all of the data off of it, and sadly, retired the poor thing. A victim of misidentification and utter stupidity I'm afraid...
Nowadays, if a old drive starts acting up (ie, incomplete spinup, or stiction), the first thing I suspect is the power supply. Live and learn.
Then of course, there was my computer, which was shipped UPS and ended up looking like a trapezoid...
In the first days of hardware wavetable synth i had a Gravis Ultrasound Classic.
One day the faulty power cable of the amp connected to the line out short circuited to the amp ground. The amp itself was not connected to ground, so the high voltage spike made its path through the GUS line out connection. The woofers cones bumped in and out for about 3 seconds, until i reached the general power switch.
When i open the computer, the region of the soundcard surrounding the plug was black of smoke. Further investigation revealed that the ground metallic track connecting the plug was completely evaporated, leaving a gap 1 cm long.
I just soldered a short bridge cable and - voilà - the GUS was back to work.
Long live to the GUS!
Back around 94 I had a friend who ordered a motherboard and a Pentium 100mhz processor when they had just come out. We were all very impressed--a hundred mhz! On Monday morning at school, we were all waiting anxiously to hear how the setup went over the weekend, and to see if Linux installed smoothly -- I think Red Hat had just come out, and we were anxious to compare it to AIX running on our two mini-fridge-sized RS6000's.
He walks in, looking rather sheepish. We ask him what happened, and he says it was a dud motherboard. Tough luck. Later, he and I go off-campus for lunch, and he reveals the truth.
"I hooked everything up, and booted it up. It was humming perfectly. I was standing there, staring at it with the case off -- one hundred megahertz! And then... (he pauses a while here)... I drooled on it. Right onto the Pentium. Motherboard and P100 both totally fried."
It was so sad, and yet so freakin funny. He replaced the parts, and his computer was the envy of us all for about 6 months until my friend Paul got Linux running on a 486 laptop. But I'll never forget my friend who straight dr00led all over his radical P100. :)
- benFriends of mine had an atari (1024st or something like that) that didn't fit in the case they wanted it in. So they cut the board into two pieces, placed the pieces in the case at an angle of 90 degrees and resoldered all cut wiring. The atari still worked.
I used to run a computer shop several years ago. ('99)
:)
We had a customer bring in his PC that was 2 weeks out of warranty.
The Power Supply had died, and it wouldn't boot.
On closer examination, it turned out that a capacitor had blown it's head, inside the PS, surging the rest of the systems. (no surge protector could protect this!).
It took out (literally frying)
-Motherboard
-2 sticks of 32meg SDRAM
-Hard Drive
-Floppy
-CDROM
-Soundcard (the main AWE64 chip was bubbled)
-Network Card
Customer was pretty pissed off, (2 weeks out of warranty!), and we built him a whole new PC, at our cost price, to keep him happy. (and naturally, it hadn't ever backed up his data)
So after building a whole new PC, he took the box home. Calls back in 20 minutes: it still isn't working!
Turns out that it also killed the Mouse and Keyboard at home!
The ONLY part that survived, was the Pentium II - 266 CPU.. good ol' Slot1, in a big black cartridge!
That CPU later formed part of a dual-cpu server, that is running to this day! (hosting my website!
RB
--- RB
last year, my ericsson t60d mobile phone ceased to function properly. while the phone's menu system worked fine and it appeared to call and connect, i could hear nothing nor would the phone transmit my voice. i noticed the sound of something loose coming from the interior of the phone, and upon unscrewing it, i found that the connector for a handsfree unit had broken off from the phone's tiny mainboard (apparently making the phone function as though i had a handsfree unit attached, explaining why everything worked yet i could hear nothing). a little electical solder and some burnt fingers later, the phone was good as new!
When I was just starting to get into computer hardware and such, I had an old PII 350 MHz with a ATI 8MB video card in it. Little did I know, that before I upgraded the video card, the temp in the box was already hot. I took out the ATI card and put in a new GeForce2 Ultra. Well, after about 2 months... out of no where, green horizontal lines start flashing around my screen. I took a screen grab of it (while playing Counter-Strike, if memory serves me correctly) and the lines were there. So, I deduced that the video card was overheating. Since I was (and still am) poor, I couldn't afford to replace it at the time. Instead of leaving it off, I stick a box fan next to it with the case off. It didn't work out to well but, was eventually able to save enough money to repair it. I ended up replacing a hard drive, mobo, processor, video card, and a cd-rom drive. When replacing that, I strapped as many fans on the inside as I could find room for. Off the top of my head, I have 6 ~3" fans and 2 of a smaller size (and one on my GeForce4 TI 4400). Checking my temp now, I still get ~50C with no load (with a AMD Athlon T-Bird 1GHz). I only kept the video card and hard drive from all the upgrades, since even if the rest were salvagable, nobody I knew personally had lower specs than that. I put the old video card in a friends computer, and it still works to this day (even without the green lines). As for the hard drive, it works but, I only use it for back-up purposes. It was only 8gb so, I'm not missing anything.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
I'm a college student and I've dropped my thinkpad T40 well over 15 times. The only thing thats ever gone wrong was a bent usb port when I dropped it with a usb device. Computer still worked fine Ibm fixed it for free.
I returned to find the wife crying and a very alarming black and white text error message, which I had never seen before or since, on the screen. She had turned to scold my daughter, who was still goofing off near the machine, and in doing so had knocked her own cup of tea upside down on the Powerbook keyboard.
I shut it off, turned it upside down and drained at least half a cup of tea out of it, and stowed it away, thinking it was ruined. At home I opened it up and shook out some more tea. Took as many parts out as I could, let it dry overnight, and started it up without a hitch the next day.
I had to replace the keyboard eventually, as a few of the keys were sticky or ceased to function altogether. Otherwise, no permanent damage.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
one time I spilled a whole glass of water on a motherboard while it was running....windows shows the BSOD and shut down, we asumed the comp was dead for a week before we tried to start it up again, and it worked perfect.
I kept my Airport Base Station beneath a planter in my living room. One day I watered the plant and dripped some water on the base station. Fried immediately, the lovely smell of magic blue smoke - or so I thought.
I opened it and noticed the two main capacitors had bulging tops. Turns out the original Airport Base Station had poorly rated capacitors, and they were prone to dying. The bulging top is a clear sign of failure. A website explained which capacitors make appropriate replacements. For the 5 dollars it would cost I figured it was worth a try.
Turned out it was a good gamble. After soldering in the new capacitors the bloody thing worked again.
There are probably a few busted Airport Base Stations floating around out there - and well worth recovering. The older graphite model is the one with the poorly rated capacitors. Even if the base station itself can't be fixed it contains a Lucent wireless PCMCIA card which may be perfectly usable.
-- thinkyhead software and media
While working for the "Res Net" of my school (residential network), I was in the business of fixing students' PCs. I'd have to say the two most interesting cases of hardware abuse were:
* Pieces of dried spaghetti falling out of the power supply.
* A student who had used the empty space inside her PC tower to store books. Don't ask me about their size, they were removed by the time I got to see it.
I was having some configuration problems with a *BSD box at home. I had tried moving several cards to different PCI slots in hopes that it would recognize them, and so on so forth. I finally figured it all out, but left the screws for the brackets of the PCI cards out. I had planned on putting them back in before returning the box to my rack the next day.
That evening, my wife was vacuuming the floor and accidentally yanked on the LAN cable and pulled the LAN card out of it's slot (since it was unscrewed) and the metal bracket short circuited something. There was a loud "pop!" and some pretty fireworks, and the system died. It would not properly boot up either. In the end, however, I found out that a hard disk had died, but nothing else (including the mobo and LAN card) was damaged, despite a few burnt looking circuits. I removed the HDD, and voila, everything worked again.
Back in the day, I ran a 24/7 BBS on an original commodore 64. If you recall, the computer and keyboard were a single unit with essentially no concessions to cooling (no heat sinks, little passive venting). I had to take the keyboard off and extend it with a custom cable so that I could place a couple of radio-shack 6" fans to cool it.
When I got rid of it, it was still working. Unless you turned the fans off; then it locked up after about 2 minutes.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Back when I worked as a computer tech at my High School I was usually the one called on to fix the printers when they (inevitably) broke. These printers were rugged, and received repeated bashings (see below) while continuing to function.
:-P
The labs in question were fairly ugly even for that time, being a swath of 486/33 computers on a 10-base-2 (can't remember) network; kick-ass at one point, but slim-pickings when entry level machines were P166s. The printers were hefty old (Okijet?) dot-matrix printers used for printing out assignments and such. They were connected to the PCs via a 4-port LPT switch box, so one printer per 4 computers.
The typical printer complaint was "I can't print", this could usually be fixed by jiggling the switch on the switch-box, or sometimes by turning the printer on and off (sometimes in rapid succession). The majority of the printer problems were of this type, and relatively easy to fix.
Sometimes, however, a printer would get in its head the idea that it wasn't going to print and throw all manner of tantrums instead of working properly. This was a Troublesome Printer, prone to all kinds of ill-mannered behavior and outbursts.
A Troublesome Printer was usually treated with Boot Therapy, outlined below, but other methods included:
-Picking it up, then dropping it
-Taking it out back and working it over with the Reset Stick (a baseball bat)
-Screaming and cursing at it with the most foul obscenities imaginable, sometimes including a dash of voodoo magic
-Showing the printer the Reclamation Pile, an assortment of leftover parts from other failed printers (like taking a delinquent child to prison to show them where they might end up one day)
-Boot Therapy, elaborated below
Boot Therapy was the most successful treatment for delinquent printers. It was a robust yet simple method which could be quickly executed, not unlike a sudden backhand-slap across the face. Completing a Boot Therapy session required very little time, only a few seconds, and I'm proud to say it had a 100% success rate.
The actual method of Boot Therapy is very simple, simply put: kick the printer. The sudden Percussive Therapy* shocks the Troublesome Printer back into a state of readiness, allowing ink and paper to merge within its confines once more. The subtleties of Boot Therapy, which make or break it as a successful form of treatment, are contained entirely in *how* you kick it.
Boot Therapy is much too complicated to describe herein, more like PHD dissertation material, but I shall endeavor to list the kind of factors that need be considered when employing this kind of treatment:
-Force of the kick
-Approach angle
-Footwear (soft-soled runners work better then steel-toed boots, they don't leave a brui--er.. mark)
-Crash impulse duration
-Where the kick is directed
-Does the printer know you're going to kick it? (this is very important, as most will attempt to block you)
-Is the printer on?
-By far the most important: ** Are there any faculty members present in the immediate area? ** (they tend to frown on such progressive treatments as Boot Therapy using such harsh invective and "Criminal" and "Insane", if only they knew what they were up against)
-And a plethora of other second- and third-order effects.
So there you have it, a brief description of the cutting edge world of Boot Therapy. The printers in question continued to work well, despite being kicked repeatedly, except one, which needed Therapy several times a week. They always seemed to keep working well, especially on my watch, but I think they were replaced a few years later with cheap Mexican Printers
Disclaimer:
-Yes, I actually did do this for real.
-No, I never got caught.
-Yes, it does (or did, rather) actually work (though maybe not 100% of the time).
-No printer damage was ever attributed to a faulty application of Boot Therapy
-Don't do this for real, especially on those new-fangled $50 Inkjet printers, all plastic and such. The printers I treated had steel in them.
*-I'm aware of the Babylon5 reference to Percussive Therapy or some such; Boot Therapy was pioneered slightly before that, I think.
My high school roommate had an old 200mhz laptop that took some SERIOUS abuse. The battery and floppy drive were duct-taped into place and a couch had been dropped on it a few times. Eventually, it got so that the hard drive couldn't write, only read, and the screen was hideously cracked and leaking. So we actually managed to boot into DOS through the floppy drive, load a Genesis emulator off a disk, and then the comp could still read the roms off the HD, so we loaded a ROM with a cool opening sequence (I think it was Mutant League Football), and hung the laptop on the wall. With the LCD screen all busted, it made a pretty psychadelic wall-hanging. Presto, art! On the flip side, my BRAND NEW dell laptop slipped off the couch last night and fell approx. 8 inches onto shag carpeting and broke completely...it won't turn on, and somehow the power cord broke as well. Thankfully Dell is sending me a new one.
When I was first getting into taking PCs apart and installing upgrade components, I took apart a machine completely and put it back together...but...there seemed to be one little cable that was not "hooked up to anything"....hmmmm....so I did the thing that any dumbass who didn't know what he was doing would do and plugged the power supplys extra power cable directly to the jumpers on the motherboard.
Needless to say, upon hitting the power switch, the room filled with the lovely aroma of burning cable casing as smoke poured from the box.
I was devistated at the time, but luckily, the machine still booted and actually ran well for many years after that. I can't even express the sheer terror that I felt as the smoke started pouring out of the vents, though.
The extra memory and the CRTs were very nice by contrast, but in at least one major respect this was a mistake. When you turned in an assignment on paper tape, you knew it would still be there when the teacher attempted to load and run it. The same could not be said of the "tape drives" provided for the TRS-80. These were, of course, nothing more than ordinary cassette recorders. Via an "interface" i.e. monaural audio cable running from the computer to the MIC jack on the recorder, you could record "files" as a modulated audio signal. It was not unlike recording the signal coming out of a 110 baud modem. Perhaps that's exactly what it was; I never found out.
Completing an assignment became a game of Russian Roulette. Would the program actually be readable this time, or was there yet another "Incomplete" in the offing? You never knew until the teacher actually attempted to load your program. Work hell, we were happy if it was just there.
There was another plug on the cable that served to control the cassette recorder's motor, like the on/off switch on a microphone, so the computer itself could start and stop the recorder -- after the operator set it to either "Record" or "Play", write or read in computer talk.
Naturally, students in a room full of costly computer equipment (as it truly was at the time) couldn't be trusted with anything so precious as a cassette recorder, so these were kept in the library across the hall and could be checked out at need. But the detachable power cord and the cables for connecting cassette to computer were all left in place in the computer lab so the library didn't have to deal with a bunch of inconvenient wires.
So a bunch of bored geeks were messing around in the lab one fine afternoon when one of us (not me, I swear!) got the idea to jam the plugs for the cassette into the sockets at the end of the power cord. No one was too worried until I spotted smoke rising from the vents at the back of the keyboard/CPU unit.
Despite the disturbing smell of burned PVC that lingered in the lab for some hours after, the TRS-80 never suffered any apparent ill effects. It ran just as blindingly fast as it did before, and recording programs on a cassette was no slower, and no more or less reliable, than it had been. The teacher never noticed, and our unspoken code of silence concerning the event was never tested.
And the brethren went away edified.
That was a borrowed laptop. I borrowed it brand new, in perfect condition, after some 3 months of using when I was to give it back, it was still okay but a bit dirty, dusty, maybe a few scratches... So I took the bottle of smuggled 95% spirit I had bought from russians, drank some, suppressed coughing, dipped a piece of cloth and began cleaning the laptop. Inner side, pretty shiny black, screen perfect. Now the "metallic blue" outside. It looked all nice and neat when the spirit was there, but once it dried up, I looked at the cloth: Whoops! Blue! That explains all the whitish blurs on the blue surface! Gosh, the guy is gonna kill me! But... but it was looking great while it was still wet! A bit of saliva, rubbing - yes, it looks okay. So, what liquid will suffice for at least few days? Yeah, frying oil! So I went to the kitchen, dipped another corner of the cloth in the sunflower oil, then rubbed the laptop first with the cloth, then with a dry hanky... Wooow, better than new! Pretty, deep shiny blue, all the scratches, even the bigger ones, visible even before cleaning vanished, it looks great! So what that the edible oil will dry up in a week and the laptop will start looking like right after the spirit cleaning, by then the guy will be on the other side of the pond.
Back In 98' my brother and I took a brand new 1.5 megapixel camera $300, a fairly good camera back then. and desoldered the optical reciever chip and soldered a long ribbon cable to it and the camera. We fitted this optical chip to an old Canon A4 and made a digital camera with interchangable lenses. It work perfect other than the length of cable threw off the color a little bit.
Many, many years ago in Los Angeles I bought my first RGB monitor (to be used on a Radio Shack Color Computer III running OS/9).
It was a scam: the monitor did not work, and on opening it up I discovered that the main circuit board was completely cracked down the middle. Pissed off and having more time than brains, I took a solder gun and some wire, and carefully wired across each part of the board that needed it. To my surprise, the monitor worked once I did that, and I kept that monitor for about two years before selling the CoCo.
Jerry
I've used my computer to try to find a Girlfriend on the internet... and it survived!
Carlos J. Hernandez
not good. it immediately stopped responding, and wouldn't work for a week thereafter. then, magically, it started working again, though it is *very* sensitive these days (if it is moved while running, it freezes or shuts off). the sad thing is that it wasn't even my laptop, but my brother's. he now blames his computer's quirks, which i know to be the fault of XP, instead on my "getting it drunk." heh.
No seriously, that is sick... I use a keyboard cover http://www.protectcovers.com/.
:-)
I plugged my USB into my IR on the motherboard once. Went to make a pot noodle and the room was full of smoke. Or was it the other way around?
Melted onto my ide cable, but that still worked
My PC (same one) survived a TNT package delivery.
I am not used to european power outlets, I tuened off my atx, removed and added ram, then wondered why that slot didn't work, until I saw the green light on the motherboard - not on off switch at wall...
the other slot worked!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I still have yet to see anything hit that ratio.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Steve,
yeah, hi was hoping to catch you here. we need to seriously talk about that texan cattle project or whatever it is you got running.
some guy called hans, can't remember his last name, riser, eraser, something like that, wants to talk about giving us some code to help us with that winfs thing.
also, i was using excel to work out my special share payments from my stock and when I formatted the cell for money it overflowed. I think we need to look at increasing the range of this or maybe adding some special billion overflow range thingy.
as ever, billg.
ps: going to tell Connie about you swearing on slashdot.
This week when I had to reinstall my server ( cause of general abuse but mostly my cable ISP )
in a hurry. My hardware turned against me.
Nothing wanted to work properly and my iBook was at the time in use ( by my sister, and I could not have MY iBook ^%$@^#@^@).
When My burner died on me I snapped, ripped it out while in the process of detroying yet aother CD and threw it into the garden.
I ran after in and while i was running grabbed the axe, I completely smashed that thing up with the blunt side of the BIG axe.
What does this have to do with abuse and keep working ?.. Nothing.
But all my other hardware seems to operate so much nicer afterwards. Not a peep in days !.
Retep Vosnul
They popped the card in and it kept working, enabling them to finish the test that night:
"Cliff told me that he could insert a disk controller card into Burrell's Apple II with the power still on, without glitching it out, a feat that I thought was miraculous - you'd have to be incredibly quick and steady not to short-circuit any of the contacts while you were inserting it, running the risk of burning out both the Apple II and the card. But Cliff said he'd done it many times before: all that was required was the confidence that you could actually do it. So I crossed my fingers as he approached Burrell's Apple like a samurai warrior, concentrating for a few seconds before holding his breath and slamming the disk card into the slot with a quick, stacatto thrust."
In a previous slashdot<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/Personal 8.html">but it worked with external stuff.</a>
Macs are fine.
I was coding in the middle of the night w/ my new compaq nx7010 laptop... I noticed a clipped piece of nail (yuck!) underneath the space bar hindering its movements... I immediately tore off the space bar (!) to remove the obstruction.
It took a moment to figure out how to put the space bar back to its place properly. It might have been wiser to remove the piece of nail with a pen or something, because I don't think the space bar works quite as well as it did before I tore it off. But it still works.
A couple of years ago I was using a regular MS mouse with a laptop to avoid the touchpad. This was about three or four years old at the time, it was brand new with a P166 from a while back. The rollers were so encrusted with dirt and dust that they were uncleanable, I think they were actually rusted or something. In any case the mouseing experience was less than optimal. After a particularly frustrating time I finally exploded and threw the mouse at the nearest wall (it mustn't have been connected too securely because it certainly didn't remain anchored to the laptop). Needless to say it smashed into several pieces.
However, upon examination in a more sober mood I found that none of the pieces were actually broken and I slapped it all back together. But now the mouse worked even worse! Every movement would cause the pointer to go off in a random direction. It didn't last long and I ended up hurling it with as much force as I could muster at the wall again. This time it shattered into more pieces and no force upon this earth could resurrect it.
Thus I was relegated to the touch pad and all the horrors that lie therein. So every day I pray to the God of mice in thanks for the magnficent bounty wrought upon us by the Optical Mouse.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
I was working as a technician at a large NW newspaper. It was common that reporters were spill coffee onto their laptops. A fellow technician was about to trash a nice HP Omnibook because this had happened when I stopped him. I urged him not to throw it away as I believed strongly that it is a wives tale that liquids destroy electronics. I qualified that piezzo buzzers, speakers and any other mechanical parts (like the keyboard) are an exception, and that the dc-to-dc converter that runs the screen could fry since it may be as high as 300 volts, but the screen clearly worked. Anyway, he got so angry at my insistence that he started screaming at me. "I have been repairing electronics for 10 years, blah, blah, blah ..". "Water destroys Electronics, blah, blah, blah".
When he was finished screaming at me, he threw the laptop away and left. I promptly grabbed the laptop, cleaned all of the boards with alcohol and replaced the keyboard. He came in the next morning to a nice little Omni-Book running on his desk.
BTW: I know liquid causes corrosion, that was discussed as well ...
Umm... /.er translates to "Forwardslash Doter" not "Slash Dotter". That would have be something like /-s.ter. (I think it looks better too. You can credit 'the Jeffernaut' if you adopt it.)
my friend bought an Athlon 1800 CPU + motherboard kit at Fry's, and asked me to help assemble it.
we put it all togehter but no go, no beep codes.
we dinkered and poked and tried again.
still no go.
in the process of dinkering and poking, the heatsink and fan came off.
no BFD, we only need it on long enough to show some beep code. i held the heatsink on with my hand and told him to hit the power again.
still no beep codes, but it made a nice "sizzle-sizzle-POP!"
noise when it released its magic smoke.
the store replaced the cpu, and eventually we figured out that improperly inserted memory was what was keeping it from booting.
I used to have a TV that I've picked off the streets one day. Never knew why I did that. Maybe I was naive and thought I could make a change. But she worked for me all right, and whenever she didn't, I used to smack her with the back of my slippers. That used to keep her up for at least half an hour extra. Eventually, it got her into such a sorry state that all I had to do was point at her to make her try suicide.
Yes, this is a true story. I eventually killed the thing by pointing at the off button, causing a spark. It happened twice, then it was dead.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
To start with, I stepped on it, broke the screen. Sent it back to toshiba complaning about the fan in the back not working, got that fixed and got a new screen for free. Around same time was eating taco bell near laptop and opened a packet of fire sauce and it went into floppy drive. Floppy drive still works great with the fire sauce in it. Then as I wanted a new laptop and had the extended four year warrenty and it was coming to an end, I tried to fry the motherboard. I had the thing wrapped in blankets and running for a good three weeks. Also, have dropped it/kicked it off the bed several times. Sadly I still own this laptop and everything still works.
How do you take a picture of the best moment of your life?
In the early 90s I dug out my trusty TI-99/4A, whose mass storage device was a cassette tape. The computer seemed to have trouble hearing the tape. I remembered that as it aged, I had needed to turn up the volume more and more and I guess by this point, even full volume was not enough.
So I cut the sound input cable and spliced it into the speaker wires of my dad's stereo system (these were big ol' floor speakers, probably a few hundred watts). I was successfully (!) retrieving a file from the cassette when I smelled something... uh oh, there was smoke pouring out of the computer! I pulled out the wires.
The computer survived! What was burning was the paint on a resistor. While investigating the resistor, though, I smashed a diode. So I replaced both components and everything seemed fine.
I continued to use the set up, but with the volume turned down, without letting out any more magic smoke.
Once had a Cisco 4500 With 1 Ethernet 1 Token Ring and 1 HSSI card running even though the entire bottom of the case had rusted and a hole about 5 inches in diameter had fallen out. The router had never (obviously) been put in the rack and had sat in some water from when the AC Unit (big ass Leibert) had gone out about 18 months before hand. We were able to keep the thing going about 5 more months before we upgraded and killed the Token Ring segment. The damn thing would still be running if we hadn't gone to 100Mb...
I know of an electronics board from a satellite that was "launched" on one of the Ariane 5s that was self destructed 40 seconds after launch. Bits of the satelite were found in a swamp about 100 miles downrange and a month later, and returned to the makers. The electronics boards were found to respond to test signals ok, and would have still been working if the hardware they interfaced to was present.
A not so bright friend at college had a 15 inch LCD iMac... but some how he had mannaged to make it so the screen was off centre on the arm, it bent a bit to one direction... I almost cried every time I had to help him with his network connection... he was not so bright... and did not deserve such a beautiful computer... that said I dropped my iBook a good 20 times this semester... wireless networking was invented for people like me who trip over their ethernet cables.
When I was 12 I noticed that I could put two hard disks on the same cable, and plug them onto my motherboard and that I could read both harddrives. So then I thought, well what happens if I put in two motherboards and one harddrive, that would be cool right? WRONG, after powering them on, a plume of smoke arose and both systems died. A year later I had a computer that worked, but one of the RAM slots was broken, physically, so I couldn't use one of the slots. This was an IBM PS/2, the MCA kind. So I took a piece of KNEX and put it between the RAM and the riser card, and the system worked fine. Three years later, I got a laptop while in highschool. I was taking really good care of it, cleaning the screen everyday with windex, when all of a sudden a line appeared, a 1 pixel red line down the center of the screen. Later that month, I decided I didn't want it to get infected so I Took the OEM Anti-virus for my mobo and installed it, Windows instantly blew up, and then the computer wouldn't boot, a second try got it to boot however. I shut it down again and it wouldn't boot again, after a couple more tries it booted. It grew exponentially, until I gave up. It wasn't that anything was broken but it was just b0rked. A few months later I got frustarted and tried again, it booted. I became dedicated to finding a solution. I knew that if I hit ESC the system would prompt for the bios. So I decided, maybe there is a secret key. I began holding down every key, trying to turn it on, and then shutting it down. Eventually (well like 5 minutes later) F12 did the trick, and it prompted for a BIOS Disk, I found someone to reflash and it worked, sorta. A few months later it died again, and then it had to be reflashed, costing me another $20 bucks. Then another 6 months, then another year. I end up reflashing it about once every year now. One time, my friend asked me to go to a LAN party, he about 10 km away, and it was snowing. So I grabbed my laptop, put it in my bag and rode my bike over, only to find out it was cancelled, and then rode it back. My cdrom drive never closed agani after that. A year after I got it, I got home after a night of not sleeping, plugged it in, walked to my desk, and tripped over the power cord, dropping it down to the cement floor below. I FREAKED!!!! I picked it up again, plugged it back in, went to go grab my screw driver, and tripped over the cord again. The screen was cracked but still working fine, except the red line and all, and the hard drive needed to be replaced but thats all. A year later, I was looking for a floppy drive to fix the BIOS again, as it was cgosting me a good chunk of money, to flash it everytime because I didn't have a disk drive my self. This guy on a newsgroup said he thought he had one, he wasn't sure tho. I met him, and checked the connector, it looked right, I mean "if the plug fits, why not", WRONG! My sound card last all amplification, and my modem, just stopped responding. Strangley enough after all that, a replacement keyboard, hard drive, 2x battery, cdrom, floppy, the laptop still works fine. The red line is there and the crack in the screen casing from 4 years ago, requires duck tape now as the screen goes crazy until I smack it now. The sound and modem, came back one day, then went away, then came back a month later, then went away, then came back two weeks later, then went away, and came back a week later, then stayed for 6 months, then went for a day, and have been fine for the past 2 years. I also stuck an piece of SDRAM in my laptop, which is EDO (its 144 pin, both kinds) but that caused no damage. Back in highschool, I had a PCCHIPS mobo, that sucked. The Mobo was LITERALLY burning the AT mobo connectors. One day it wouldn't boot, and the connector was loose because the whole plastic, had melted. So I reattached it, and stuck a tooth pick in it to keep it in place. A while later it wouldn't boot again, so I stuck another tooth pick in. Then as I was eating an egg mcmuffin, it broke again, and so while fixing it, some grease dripped off my finger ont
I kept getting the conductive silver everywhere while trying to unlock my AthlonXP 1600+
So, I had the bright idea of putting solder across the L1 bridges.. that didn't really work either, all I achieved was black scorch marks and a CPU that wouldn't run Prime95 for more than 2 seconds, even at default clock speeds.
A week ago I fixed two broken circuit paths on my mainboard which were eaten by a screw. I simply soldered some wires across the board. Worked again.
A few months ago I was trying to track down some sudden instability in my machine. It seemed that it would always crash about the same amount of time after I booted it up, regardless of the OS or the tasks that it was doing. It took maybe 45 minutes before it would reboot itself and come back up, and crash again shortly after that unless I left it off for a while.
Thinking there was a temperature problem, I installed (I can't stand the software...) MBM and fired it up. It was reporting high temps...and a 12v rail at 18v (this was shortly after boot). Thinking it was a malfunction I pulled out my multimeter and read the voltage right off the power rails on the mobo. 19.1v. And rising.
Out of morbid curiousity I watched it for a while, as it gained about 2v/min. When it hit 40v I cut the power and went out and bought a new one.
The ATX connector on my motherboard is charred and the ground pin is nearly completely burned out. The male side on the dead PSU was melted a bit and the ground contact completely burned out.
Everything in the system still works perfectly fine. Pretty tough stuff.
... couldn't kill my Power Mac G4. I actually had my Mac and LCD, printer, etc. behind two surge suppressors - don't ask me why, I have no idea if that provides extra protection or not - and I still lost the LCD panel (which was not powered on) when lightning struck the transformer across the street). Scared me shitless how loud that was.
My neighbor lost a television, I lost a cable modem and router (on a different wall socket, different surge thingy) as well as the LCD, but the only damage to the Mac - which was in sleep mode - was dead on-board Ethernet. Grabbed a PCI nic, thing works fine. My house is more than 100 years old and presumably has garbage wiring, I suppose is why we lost some appliances. But not the Mac, which I'm using right now.
We can't forget the beauty that is The Etherkiller, can we?
In the mid 90s I had an old hard drive containing research data that got backed up occasionally, but not often enough. There was a flexible multitrack lead, basically several copper tracks on a very thin plastic strip, which ran from the control pcb to the hard drive internals through the seal between the two halves of the outer case. When it failed, I opened up the case and found that there was a tear in this lead crossing a few of the copper tracks. Sticky tape held the lead together while silver conductive paint rejoined the tracks. It worked and lasted long enough to retrieve all the data. Fortunately, all the repairs were made in a laser research lab, which was kept very clean, so while the hard drives were exposed there has very little dust around to containimate the surfaces.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
I pulled the CPU out of a 486, and the screen just froze, put it back in, and a reboot, it was fine. I was also sitting here reading this, and a spider was crawling on my neck, so I hit it, knocked a glass of water all over my cellphone. The spider and cellphone survived.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I've spilled Orange Juice, Milk, Soda (coke, mtn. dew, italian sodas (coconut, vanilla, and raspberry,)) rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and quite a lot of water onto my keyboard. (not all at once. It worked. Fine. No need to even dry the thing out (except to avoid sticky fingers.) Keys don't stick. No problems. I've also dropped a 21' CRT on the thing.
Of course, I'm using one of these. (the first one.)
Not a sentence!
I forgot to take my thrusty Palm Vx out of my pockets, and ended up running it through the waching machine. Let it sit without using it for two weeks in a dry, warm place, just to be safe. It worked perfectly after that.
Hotswapped a 3 1/4" floppy drive back and forth between two operating computers, as the place I was at had no NICs, and only the one floppy drive. Worked perfectly in both machines for about 15-20 swaps, then was plugging it back in to one of them and it fried. Computer was fine, drive was dead.
I find it great that you unscrewed the whole back at that age.
/me sniffles
Ohhh, a geek in the making. Brings a tear to me eye.
It's late, so I'm pretty sure this will get lost in the din, but....
I was at a computer repair shop, and I noticed that all the counters were covered with cheap, commercial-grade carpet. It was a dry day, and I shocked myself several times just moving about.
So, I asked the guy (the owner) at the shop about this, and problems with ESD (Electro-Static Discharge) with the carpeted counter tops.
He laughed. On the counter was a high-dollar memory tester. He grabbed a then-expensive 4 MB 30 Pin SIMM and, holding it in one hand, walked around the room, dragging his feet. He did this until (No kidding) his own hair was beginning to stick up.
Then, holding one end of the SIMM, he walked over to a doorknob, and threw a 1", bright blue spark directly thru the simm to the doorknob.
He then calmly walked over to the memory tester, and ran tests on it. It ran for 5 minutes with a hitch.
I don't worry much about ESD, and haven't for years, with no trouble. The problems I have are with stressing the parts - putting undue stress on a MB when inserting a RAM stick, for example.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I used to work in tech support at a university. I had a student come in once with a busted dell latitude. He had been travelling in europe, and while hailing a taxi, put the laptop -- out of the case -- on top of a duffel bag near the curb. The taxi didn't stop, but the laptop slid off the top of the bag and into the street, where -- you guessed it -- it was run over by said taxi.
He told me this story while handing me the laptop. I didn't think it would work, and obviously the screen was very busted, but the damn thing booted up fine with an external monitor. Score a point for Dell. I wished him luck with the service call.
Last year I was passing some cars going.. fast.. and after passing the first one I saw a cop car on the side of the road. So I hit the brakes and slowed from about 130km/h to 80 or 90. There was a guy also bassing right on my tail (Polish roads) and didn't notice the police or that I slowed down. I only heard his tires squeal and when I looked in the mirror I just saw the poor Fiat Punto punt the back of my Opel Vectra - hard. Well, I just saw the Punto start to hit me, and then my head got slammed back into the headrest. A Dell Latitude laptop was in the trunk. The trunk went in about 40cm from the impact even though there was a tow hook installed.
During the damage check, I booted up the laptop. No problems. The Punto and the Vectra had severe damage. The Vectra still runs, but I doubt the Punto was good for anything but parts.
While the laptop was in a protective laptop bag, the impact was still severe. Mind you, the braking probably sent the laptop flying right up to the back of the back seat and the impact sent it flying back, so the impact was probably not directly absorbed by the laptop against the trunk wall.
J
Back in 95 or so, I'd just taken delivery of a shiny new dual processor motherboard, posted all the way from the US (to australia). I was upgrading from a 486 33 to a dual P150 and was itching to get it all running.
So, I get it all assembled in the case, and it being around christmas (this was a present to myself), it was very hot that day (remember this is Australia), so had a glass of Coke to keep me fresh.
I rested the coke on the PC case, as I was assembling the machine. And, no prizes for guessing, I knocked the coke all over my brand new motherboard! Oh I was shattered to see Coke fizzing and spreading all over my dream motherboard, and into the pins under the RAM sockets! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
In a sorry attempt to do something about it, I quickly whipped the board out of the case, shook it dry, and used a whole roll of paper towels mopping up all that cose, as well as a very slightly damp cloth to clear it fully.
And after about half a day of drying, it went back in the case, completed the assembly, prayed like I've never prayed before, and brought the power up.
"131027Kb memory OK"
HOLY SHIT IT FUCKING WORKS!!!!!!
Still does, too.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
My roommate's dad decided to ship an athlon in a regular letter envelope. We took it out and straightened out all the smashed pins. Worked fine.
Then there was the cyrix chip in the socket 5. See, the socket 5 was perfectly symmetrically, so I plugged the cpu in backwards. My room smelled like burnt silicon for a couple days...
Back in the days of the 286, I had a nice 286-12 with an open case (I had messed with something). I didn't bother to put it back on for a few days, and then had to water a plant on a shelve above it, and naturally proceeded to spill all the water into the thing while it ran. It stopped working immediately, gave a strange buzzing sound and smelled weird. I turned it off, took it apart, waited a day or two and reassembled it. It ran fine for several years, and was not retired until it was replaced by something faster (386@40MHz).
Black holes are where God divided by zero
One time I was attempting to load my rifle, and I accidentally spilled an entire bottle of black powder INTO my case! Yeah silly me I left the case open. "Well Shit," I thought, "How do i go about cleaning all this out?" I figured the best way would be to just burn it all out. So I ran a line of black powder about 100meters back and lit it. BOOM! The computer blew sky high into 1000 pieces. WOOPS! I thought it would just burn out the powder!
The CPU was shattered, the ram was all cracked, and my drives were blown open with bent platters. Well an electron microscope and some JB Weld was all I needed to fix the CPU. I took the hard drive into the cleanroom in the back of my trailer and used the vice grips to bend it back. And the ram, I stuck together with some duct tape. Its amazing, I put it all back in the case, AND IT ALL WORKED! Damn they sure do make these things well these days! Well okay so I did lose a few pr0n pics that I had open before the computer blew, but I guess thats the price you pay for a simple mistake....
You could have been the 'hardware failure' rather than the 'Whiz Kid'.
Congrats on a successful hack.. ;)
In HighSchool we had a computer lab(Macs) and we managed to get a second hand PC one day. Our Mac zealot teacher hated PCs and tried to demonstrate that 'they were so crap that you can't even break them' (stay with me on this one folks). The RAM chips were loose inside the PC and to demonstrate he nailed the power switch and shook the case. *rattle* *rattle* He then opened it up and shoved the RAM back into their slots and then *tore* the CPU out of its socket. Amazingly no pins broke, but some did bend and I swear they spelt out 'SOS'. Shoving it back in really forcefully(there was a slight crunch sound, kinda like when you eat Frosties), he booted the PC... It worked. Unbelievably. Of course, it had issues with stability after that. In retaliation we decided to test the voltage selector on his radio the next day. The switch worked, the radio did not. Woops.
--
I once spilled a mug half-full of case screws into an open, running case. The machine didn't even crash. I just shut it down, removed the screws, and went about my business.
The only other thing I've ever had that even approaches remotely 'dangerous' or abusive to my hardware was on an athlon 550. It was summer, and I didn't have a fan or AC for my place, so it was quite hot in my room - particularly since the outdoor temperature was probably 85F or so. I imagine it was roughly 100F ambient in the room for most of the day.
The machine had been running relatively well, but then suddenly became fairly unstable - locking up once a day or so, with the occasional crashed application. Roughly what you'd expect from Windows, I guess, but I was running Linux, so it was a bit of a problem.
At first I thought it might have been buggy software (experimental kernel patches), so it took me a couple days to finally get around to determining that the problem was hardware related. I ripped the case open and found out that, lo and behold, the heatsink had come off almost entirely. It might also be appropriate to note that I'd taken the CPU's backplate off (Slot A, if you recall, had a small PCB with L2 and the core on it, with a metal and plastic case), so I could get a closer connection to the core with the heatsink - I'd overclocked to 600MHz or so.
I put the heatsink back on, booted it up, and had no further problems (until the video card started to flake out months later, but that's another story...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
After the mainboard battery of my 386 died, I soldered a new one on the board, which had a voltage about two times higher than the original battery.
It worked and additionally I even got a higher CPU speed (about 24 MHz instead of 20).
We tried hotswapping every single part of a machine. That includes, RAM, disks, CPU, BIOS, SouthBridge, NorthBridge, PCI cards, AGP cards. The box is still alive, but it's a little unstable, hummzz how would that come :)
-- Cliff Albert
I got mad, unscrewed the backing of our TV, and pissed all on the inside..
I suppose that explains why your nick is MrP-.... :-)
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
At the first company I worked, my power supply caught on fire, and blew out flames all over my office. It left a nasty black mark on the wall. I managed to get the fire out. I replaced the blown cap in the power supply, took an air gun and blew all the dust out the supply. All in all from catching on fire to being operational again was about 15 mins. It turns out the power supply had been sitting in a very dusty place before living in my pc.
I ran a full height (2 bay) 5'1/4" 5GB SCSI HD sitting outside an open case PC, on top of a couple books for six months. With no problems. Knocked it a few times. Dropped things on it. Still no problems. Ended up taking it apart and using the platters to decorate my room.
Used an old HP vectra for an afternoon outside at Dome C, High Antarctic Plateau (temperature -47C). No ill effect noticed.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Around 1992 or 1993 we built a server for a company to do long distance billing. Early days of equal access I think where they were just beginning to be able to resell someone else's LD and the only equipment they needed was enough to print invoices, no phone switch, etc...
We put together a big huge _tall_ tower case with 2 Seagate 4096's (drive model shows the age, memory faulty, could have been earlier than '92). 5.25" full height 80MB drives (yes, MB). These things weighed a ton each (you know if you're old enough to have ever worked with them). Anyway, it had a full length MFM/RLL(?) controller card, I think 386 CPU but could have been 286 and various other large cards. Ethernet or maybe it was Arcnet at the time? Suffice it to say the box was pretty packed since cards to do simple things by todays standards were huge then. The motherboard was one of those huge beasts that required a large full-size tower case.
OK, so it breaks and he's bringing it to us to get fixed pronto. Puts it in large heavily packed cardboard box and packs it on the plane as luggage. Uh oh...
Gets to our place, wheels it in on a 2-wheel dolly and asks me where to put it. I point to a spot, he rolls it there and sits it down just the few inches a dolly like that lifts something up. Rattle, metallic clanging sounds, oh no... I knew this wouldn't be good.
Open the top. Both drives are lying in the bottom of the case on top of the cards which all had been ripped violently out of their sockets via sideways shear motion from the drive impact and subsequent banging around on top of them. This case used rails only. Screw rails onto the sides of the drives, slide them in, secure on front only. The case received such a blow the sides flexed out enough for the rails to slip right on down and drop the drives down the 1.5 or more foot drop to the waiting 8-bit ISA cards below. Ripped them out of their slots, knocked the CPU chip out, sheared off the BIOS ROM chip terribly bad, knocked out some other socketed DIP support chips on the way.
I put it all back together, including spending 30 minutes straightening pins on the CPU which was fairily mangled. Scavenged another BIOS chip from a like motherboard, put all cards back in and it worked. Mostly.. One of the drives was dead, luckily NOT the one with the most critical data (never heard of mirroring in those days yet). One of the cards, network card if memory serves, also was dead. All the rest of the stuff worked! I was stunned... The whole time I was definitely expecting the worst.
Moral of the story: Those plane luggage guys can drop things further than Fedex/UPS it would appear... This thing took one heck of a hit.
I got really annoyed once while playing some shareware game (scorched earth I think it was) and my computer case was open.
:)
:)
The game kept making this really annoying sound through the internal speakers everytime I screwed up, so after I while I got so mad that I took a pair of metal scissors and cut the cable to the internal speaker.
Directly after I cut the cable, everything just stopped. With everything, I mean the game hung, my fans just stopped and the harddrive went silent.
However, after pulling the powercord and then starting the whole thing up again, I was amazed to see that it worked flawlessly
Moral of the story, use plastic scissors if you want to cut the cables to the internal speaker, or cut them one cable at a time
Installing debian on a desktop, my hard drive started freaking out. Now, we all know the debian installer is a nightmare, and I didn't want to waste an hour answering questions again. So I unplugged the hard drive and plugged it back in. It did an IDE bus reset, found the drive, and continued on as normal.
Me and a friend were disassembling an old pentium computer, and were trying to figure out exactly what cpu the machine had. However, there was a lot of really old thermal grease on the cpu, that we just couldn't remove. We tried every solvent we had, but nothing worked. So after a while we got so mad we decided to burn away the grease. We filled a small plate with gasoline, lit it on fire and let it burn for twenty minutes or so. Then we put the cpu back in the motherboard and booted up, and it worked! Weirdly enough, the machine was running an arabic version of Win95, so we couldn't really do much with it.
8 5547f9b2fd539635b02601c5a2ae&threadid=163417&highl ight=eldthis thread. It's in swedish, but there are pretty pictures....
Pictures of the event is in http://forum.sweclockers.com/showthread.php?s=e7b
One time I had my computer sitting on he floor sidways with no door on.
.. just slipped out of my hand and entire motherboard drenched.
;-( )
I dropped a bottle of water walking by
I said to myself "this is it" and started moving the mouse on my keyboard... mouse locked up... the song kept looping a certain portion of it. "Oh shit"
It just took 2 weeks of being in front of a fan on HIGH to dry out the motherboard...
That computer was my primary workstation then... now it's my linux server that hosts my website, works great to this day.
----
On my current computer I had the door taken off... and several times shit has fallen off my bed (bed is near the system) and into the system... must of hit a PCI card or something... system bluescreened (windows
This happened about 3-4 times before I finally put the door back on!
----
And it continued running and still runs fine to this day!
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http://abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi04132004laptopu
http://abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi04132004laptopp
http://abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi04132004tvpushp
http://abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi04132004tvpush.
John Kerry is a Joke!
A couple of years ago my Dad and I were cleaning up around the computers and Mom who insists that everything be tidy insisted that we shortend and ty up all of the cables with twist ties. Well my Dad used the technique of unplug everything and then plug it back in one at a time. All the cables only fit in one hole, right? Well Palm happened to use the exact same size male DC plug on their 5 volt 250 mA Palm pilot AC adapter that Agfa uses on their 12 volt 1.5 AMP scanner adapters. Everything seemed to be working fine until about 15 minutes later I noticed this strange smell like burning solder and quickly start to check everything. I noticed that tthe palm dock had a much too thick power cable inserted and quickly reached to grab the overheating Palm... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HH......BURNING FLESH!!!!!!!!
The internal battery was so hot it had started to melt the plastic case and back of the LCD. I managed to escape with a minor burn to my palm (no pun intended). The Palm, after a long cooling, was perfectly fine minus a series of bubble like marks in the screen where it had actually started to melt, and a much battery life!
My first "real" PC (as in I was the primary user, parents bought it knowing I'd likely be the only one on it) was an IBM Aptiva, the first "Windows 95" PC from IBM I believe - we bought it just after Win 95 came it, it was so new that some models still came with Windows 3.11 and came with a rebate for a free Win 95 disk. Anyone else remember how truly apallingly horrible those early releases of Windows 95 was? *Shivers*
/melted/ together. It must have been lightning they said. It wouldn't boot because the disks could not spin. Thankfully it was under warrenty, so we got a new HD. Bump up in size, from a monsterously large 1.6 gig (all my friends had under a gig, so it really was huge then) to a unbelievable 2.5 gig. Wahoo!
Anyways...a bit into a year later, after a heavy lightning and thunderstorm, the thing wouldn't turn on the next day. We had a powerstrip but not a surge protector of anysort, let alone a UPS. It simply wouldn't boot. I don't really recall the moment when lightning struck, but after a repair guy had a look it was found that the metal disks within the hard drive had
To my utter suprise everything else was fine, the CPU, RAM, you name it - fine. Not a damn thing wrong with the other components. Its dead now, hollowed out as I stole parts from it for other boxes, but I'm sure if I wanted to it would still run if I simply added back some stuff. Its amazing, as faulty and buggy as software often is, hardware - good hardware at least - can be amazingly resilent.
One time (about 6 years ago) in the network engineering department was not too busy at the ISP I work at we took a couple 540mb hard drives that were slowly growing bad sectors, installed an OS, set up a webcam and a page to view it at, pointed the webcam at the drives, removed the drive covers and let the whole contraption run in a not-particularly-dust-free area.
The whole unit ran for over a week before the web server process stopped servicing requests.
Well, my first machine was a 86 PC ( 4.77 MHz etc ;> ), two of them. One day I noticed a secound CPU slot on the motherboard ( for a math cooprocesor ? ), and since I was using only on PC, You can gues where this is going.
So, I took one CPU out, pluged it into the mobo of the secound PC and closed it up. I dont really get well with electricity so the box was unplugged. Accidently I'v switched from 220V ( standard in europe ) to 110V on the power supply. Started it up, `bzzzzz puf` and the power supply fan was on fire - literally.
After replacing some burned parts, taking the CPU out to get sure it booted quite good and went for a couple of years.
Secound thing would be my 10GB Western Digital CAVIAR disc. I'v used to cary it with me in the pocket of my jeans, so it got busted after 4 years. It would shut down itself during normal work, then boot back in 5 secounds and Windows would just freez for that time, and after that continue to work a`ok. Then one day I'v bought a new one, and been using the old one as a big `floppy disk` ( it would start to make troubles after 20 min. or so ).
is if you had delicately balanced the whole thing, so that the torque from the exposed hard drive would start the "mobile" spinning...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Hmm, let's see... Resoldering a few northbridges on early abit mobos (430 series) - I had access to writen off equipement and made pretty neat little money reselling them afterwards. Windows NT 4 doesn't mind if you hotswap pci cards - and if you restart according devices it properly operates adaptec scsi cards and sound blaster (others not tested). Ide HDD's can be easly swapped under linux (rescan ide buses). Also - always check the fans in computer you prepare for your boss. I found that fan on pentium 233MMX had somehow unconnected in transit when he started to complain about some strange crashes. I bet - the cpusocket's plastics had melted about 1" downwards.
Quite a few years ago a friend went on holiday, when they returned a big chunk of the front of their house had burned down.
Turns out my friend had a dodgy power extension below his Hi-Fi and it had started a fire.
For some reason I managed to get his Hi-Fi to see if I could pull anything useful out of it. I had already dismantled the Amp but I wondered if the tape deck would work.
Amazingly despite being partially melted and inside and out coated with carbon it did actually work - and did so for many years there after. A bit smelly though...
In another life I worked the Help Desk for a large computer consulting company. One day I got so pissed off I launched an Aeron chair across the room. Unfortunately I only broke one wheel off the chair and put a nice dent in one of the cube file drawers.
I put in my notice shortly after that....
... almost forgot about the time I soldered a modchip in an xbox, plugged it in to see it working perfectly, dropped a screw on the powersupply and the entire house went black. :)
Went to the store, bought another xbox, swapped the powersupplies and returned it
I used to keep pet rats, let them run around the front room.
:)
One night I couldn't find one of them, searched everywhere. Last place I thought to look was inside the PC on the off-chance.
The rat had got in through a hole in the back where the motherboard sockets are (I'd remove the blanking plate when upgrading the board and didn't have one the right shape for the new board) and was sat on the soundcard (tower case), happily chewing on the wires between the PSU and the motherboard.
The machine was running at the time, didn't have any problems at all except I lost the speaker where the cable had been chewed. Probably quite lucky I opened the case when I did
Called by friend of friend to help 'fix the Internet'. Come in. Windows Me machine (arggg), with 64 Mo (arggggg).
Everything so slow. I fix the connection.
Me: if you upgrade to 128M or more you will have a better experience. And it's cheap.
Them: ughh how do you do that?
Me: I can do it for you. Let's check which type of RAM do you have, to order a compatible one...
I take the RAM, note down the number and the motherboard name. I put back the RAM into its place, one side first. Push and attach the plastic 'lock'. Push the other side, attach the other lock.
Both locks are in place. OK.
Close the box. Boot. Smells of burn....
Arggg.
PC won't boot. Open box. Search for the burnt component. The RAM is burnt. The slot is melted.
Why could that be possible? I plugged it correclty!? Or so did I think. I found then out that this crappy motherboard has an interesting feature. Usually if you put your RAM upside down, it wouldn't fit because of the little RAM hole / slot appendice that prevents you from doing so. But with that mobo if you use the wrong side (e.g. because of lack of light) and push one side after the others, and attach the plastic locks, you will see that by pushing the second side of the RAM, the appendice would act as a lever and the other side of the RAM would be pulled out of its slot. This would pull out the plastic lock on the first slot while still being attached to the RAM! You don't even see it getting out of the slot. And you don't see of course that your RAM half fits in the slot.
In other words, it looks like it's plugged into the slot while the RAM is not. As there was only one used slot, and the light was not good, I couldn't see that one of the sides was up.
I felt so ashamed. I am still.
I wasn't able to find out if the motherboard was affected until I bought some replacement RAM, which thankfully revealed that the motherboard was still working.
Bad story but nice ending (even it if cost me 20$ + time). So good for me wanting to help them out.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
For a while, I was using an old PC with Debian installed as a router/fileserver combo. The thing was pretty loud, so I put it in a wooden box full of cloth to dampen the sound. Of course I put holes in the thing so it wouldn't die sudden heat death!
Anyway, after a while I'm noticing that the files take a while to serve and I have to reboot the thing every two days or so. At just about every reboot the drives fsck, but who cares about that?
After another few months I'm beginning to notice a wierd smell close to the box, so I open it up. The freaking thing was running for months with a melted PSU fan! In a box! The thing didn't even have a processor fan because that would be too loud.
After two days of cooling I could touch the hard drives again long enough to throw them away, but the motherboard and processor still worked. Just hacked a new PSU fan into it and it ran for another 6 months.
In a previous employers of mines server room there is an elderly sco box (Yes yes, boo hiss, whatever, but they do make damn fine cheap stable oracle servers for older versions of oracle) named Magneto which was once shipped between Cork (Ireland) and London (Britain), thoroughly wrapped and labelled and rewrapped and padded and rewrapped etc...
On the return journey it emerged from baggage reclaim with only a single strand of duct tape and a scrap of bubble wrap trailing from it and an exceptionally wide rubber tyre mark diagonally across one side panel, while the opposite side panel was scraped almost paintless.
This occured about 5 years ago. I last saw this server 18 months ago still cheerfully responding to all the queries we needed to fling at it (despite only having a coax ethernet card for which we kept a small elderly hub to allow communication...)
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Except this baby seems to work just fine.
I've got a Formac firewire CD burner that my flatmate and I decided to upgrade to a DVD-RW. We started taking the enclosure apart but one of the screws wouldn't budge. Since we really wanted to try out the DVD burner we were getting a bit frustrated and tried giving the screw some thwacks with a hammer and a drill bit from the other side. This (understandably) didn't work so we thought of ways to loosen the plastic housing round the screw threads. Aha! we thought, we'll just drill a hole! So I put the enclosure on its side between my knees and attacked it with our Bosch drill. It felt very very wrong and the noises were horrible but it worked; I drilled enough plastic away to loosen up the screw and a few minutes later we had our shiny new firewire DVD burner installed. It doesn't even bear much of a scar.
Also a few years ago when I got my PowerMac G4 I spilled a glass of orange juice on the keyboard about a week after it arrived. It killed the keyboard but I took it back to my local dealer (who I didn't even buy it from) and told them what a goombah I'd been. They gave me a new keyboard, free. Bonus.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
Circa 1978, when I was 11, I had a great little Z-80 box, an Exidy Sorcerer (2 mhz or so, 32K RAM, but I hacked it to 48!!!) Anyhow, it had no sound. Jealous of those Apple II owners who could make various beeps, I hooked a speaker directly to the +5 and GND contacts on the parallel port. By toggling the port, I could make all manner of sounds. I even hooked up my tape recorder and mic to a parallel port input line, and with the volume set right, recorded and played back voice and audio. Worked for years, never fried anything!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I had a 40gb IBM drive that for various reasons was sitting externally of the case, kinda on the floor as it were.. It was plugged in however by (tight) IDE & power cables and was running fine.
Once whilst masturbating at the PC watching porn I came, I usually stand up and let fly all over the carpet when I cum, however on this occasion one drop actually hit the top part of the hard drive, where the ciruitry is.
The drive made a big "click" noise, actually more like a "crack" and the hard drive motor actually comppletely spun down and turned off. I'm not sure if it was a failsafe device on it, or it just short circuited. Probably the latter.
After wiping myself on the curtain I pulled my pants up and shut the PC down (Win2000) and wiped the hard drive off, and unplugged it and left it to "dry" for 24hrs. Later on it worked perfectly, although there was what looked like a scorch mark where my semen hit it.
Later I sold the hard drive on Ebay.
Why write this on slashdot? i dunno, but hey at least I'm being honest.
I had my first pentium 75 PC running for about 2 years without a case, all elements scattered around my desk... It crashed one time when something metallic slipped my fingers to fall on the powered on MB... I used to reset it via screwdriver between RST pins...
;-)
Another time I Hotswapped a FlashBios chip on my a7v MB in order to recover the BIOS after a crashed update (power loss)...
Just my boring 2 Euros...
Well in my short computer career i've seen/done the following:
:)
;) it was plugged into 240V on it's 120V setting and happily worked ( although there was this strange buzzing noise )
Hot-Swapped Hard-Drives/Floppy-Drives/PCI Cards (doesnt everyone get curious?)
Dropped Computers from 4-5 foot onto concrete
Lately i was changing the ethernet on a HP DL-380 and the damn thing literally dropped out of it's rack,landed on the machine below it and brought that down onto the machine below that!. scary moment. first thing i did was ping them.they replied
i used to have a PSU (in an old gateway machine) that could withstand the "low power" mode
A VERY intersting story i read lately involved a death metal band, a hard drive and a chop stick! link: http://www.quovadis.qc.ca/eng/news.shtml
(scroll to June 13, 2004!)
I put on a homemade cooling solution on my Asus GeForce DDR 32MB, becuase it ran like 75-80 and crashed with the stock cooling. When I booted, the screen had visual tearing, so I turned the sucker off. The entire card was burning hot, even the huge heatsink was to hot to touch! Just after running less than a few minutes. Turns out the mounting holes weren't isolated and I had used metal screws which fitted very nicley. Needless to say, The sucker worked perfectly after I did some isolation. Truly Groovy.
heh
I had a glass of cocke on the table, between myself and my LCD display (not laptop). The weather was quite stormy, and the window behind my desk opened rapidly, hitting my monitor and sending it right on the glass. I managed to grab it right after it hit the glass, but still too late. There was a huge crack in the upper left corner of the screen, a bunch of dead pixels around it and the whole screen had the colors inverted.
It still works, but it's very hard do see anything because of the inverted colors and somewhat lower contrast and brightness.
A good few years ago I got given a new ( well only weeks old, and well worst the wear ) Toshiba gas plasma notebook, It had been the property of my brother in law, an exec. with ibm at the time, never carries his own damn bags. He had taken it on a plane journey and the handlers had played catch with it, and missed, fell all the way down from the aircraft doors, probably 30 feet. I took it apart, re-seated the screen which had fallen off, epoxied the case back together, and soldered a load of wires across the keyboard PCB which had cracked in half. Ran for 7 years. kept all our business accounts and records faultlessly. Impressed the hell out of our bank manager when we showed him projections and figures and he gave us a loan, when we needed it. (It was top of the range then, and this was years ago, UK bankmanagers had heard of new technology, but where'nt sure what to do with it lol) only gave up when a fork lift ran over it :(
about 3 years ago I was living in my parents' basement. I went out to a club one night and it rained about 3 inches an hour for 4 hours straight. When I got home, there was about 3 feet of water in the basement, and my computer was sitting on the floor. Somehow, after being completely submerged underwater (while on, mind you) the CPU and Memory still worked.
It stayed working until May of last year. I'd given the CPU & Memory to a friend shorly after. (yay insurance!) Anyhow, in May of last year the CPU & Memory melted when his apartment burned down.
I bought a Dell Latitude LS a few years ago (4???). It is a PIII 400.
It has been to quite a few trips, used daily for 3 years, drop from the bed, table, etc.
The CPU fan seems to be working quite badly, so it overheats quite a bit.
The worst thing it happened was that I left the computer running overnight, in a sofa, underneath the cushions. When I came back the morning after it was burning hot, part of the frame had melted and the screen had a completely black area. As soon as it cooled down, it started working again...
Not bad for an ultra portable.
I remember lending out an IBM ps2 keyboard and on return finding that it nolonger worked.
Noticing that some keys nolonger felt springy I decided to take it apart.
Turns out that he was trying to rewire it to work with an AT keyboard interface and in the process smashed some keys lose.
So how did he try to fix it? By melting the plastic with a lit cigerette, complete with bits of tobacco and cigerette paper mixed into the plastic.
Bastard.
And yes some of the keys had been stuck back in the wrong order.
Double bastard.
The power supply on my old Linux firewall box started making grating noises as the bearings/surfaces failed in the fan. That was 2 years ago, occasionally the fan stops completely so I just give it a quick thump or maybe spray some loob oil in through the vent (just in case it helps, it doesn't!). It's a tough little bugger.
My brother's CB radio once caught fire whilst we were driving along chatting to someone. When we got the fire out (smelly and scary) the CB was just a fused black smoking mass of plastic and stuff, but the connectors at the back and for the mike etc. were all ok. For a laugh we plugged it all in again and keyed the mike AND IT WORKED! We got a contact from someone 20 miles away who said we sounded just fine. Hate to think of the safety implications!
Had a actually hardware non geeky friend who wanted to OC his new celly. Well he suceeded, but was so stupid not to secure the fan.
Suddenly or rather finally it tipped of the CPU and a burning smell hogged the room. Shows up the the socket melted, so his CPU was quite secured to the mobo.
After some cooling and a underclock back, the thing ran perfekctly sweet, only one problem, no way to secure a fan.
My compiles used to crash frequently, and since RAM was okay i thought CPU was heating up. So i used a screwdriver to take out that darned AMD, but my hand slipped and i made a hole in the motherboard. Too scared to try anything else i powered it on and it was working. funny thing, now the compiles do not crash :)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I think the greatest abuse to a computer is writing an important school paper (like Diploma, or a homework that goes beep beep beep beep beep, or something...)
A friend of mine was working on his diploma when the PSU made a popping noise and emitted smoke. When he switched to his second PC, about 2 days later the RAM failed, causing the PC to reset every 10 Minutes or so.
When he lent an old Laptop from a friend, he accidentally spilled coffee over the keyboard. He then wrote his diploma on several PCs of the school's PC pool, without any further desasters.
My personal experience with computers and diploma? Well, I read about a hacked driver for the Audigy 1 that would allow me to use the Audigy2's driver with my card. After installing the driver, Windows XP bluescreened after every reboot. Not even Safe Mode worked. After a "quick" reinstall all was good again.
No hardwareabuse per se, but stupid anyways...
I managed to insert a SDRAM the wrong way, the PC didn't start. Since the BIOS didn't make a bip it was clearly a memory problem. So I burned badly my fingers when I checked the ram. The SDRAM smelled burned plastic, but once I put it back in the correct position, it worked !!! I also sold a hard drive power pin back to the card controller, it's still working.
one animal was hurt in the telling of this story. (don't tell PETA)
Yeah, didn't like that too much. It was a while ago but if I remember correctly the screen just hung so it initially looked as if it was still working (of course it wasn't) and then threw a complete fit when I thought I'd see what would happen if I plugged it back in.
All was well with a proper reboot...
Now all I have to do is try and remember my password for slashdot and not post as anon
at first glance, I thought your name was squirt(2), not sqrt(2) which I thought was the punchline.
Hmm, let's see what I can find in the back of my head at this hour....
;))! So we would do voltage readings with multimeters on the ISA/EISA ports and on the PSU pins with a back probe while it was on and connected to a HD/CD. So after we finished, me and my partner got curious and started tripping pins with the back probe wire we had. Eventually we found out how to trip the PSU and shut it off due to a short we found across the ISA socket. We kept doing this over and over, moved on to removing RAM while it was one and pulling the power on the IDE devices and stuff. We didn't blow anything up that time but everything seemed to work fine after.
1. Back doing some PC tech stuff in a class I took a couple years ago back in high school, we had a couple P1 and 386/486 mobos around, so the teacher would have us use those, god forbid we touch the P3(smart guy haha
2. This wasn't me but another group in my electronics class in HS. We were doing more voltage testing on PSUs in our basic electronics class this time, and 2 smart guys decided to take paper clips and metal wires and stick them inside the AT PSUs while they were on. An explosion, lotsa sparks, tripped circuit breakers, and a pissed teacher later we found that the PSU had still worked, just 2 of the IDE power plug didn't work.
3. My friend had purchased a little 1.53GHz P4 CPU, and bought a very cheap motherboard, some offbrand name. Well as he was driving around crazily like usual, the the CPU unit was in his trunk upside down so the CPU/heatsink was hanging. You all know how heavy those P4 heatsinks are! So the heatsink clip breaks off the motherboard, and goes crashing around for another 10 min till he gets to my house. When he brings it over, he notices that his computer keeps shutting down, we open it up, look inside, and the CPU was burning hot besides the fact the heatsink was off. We saw the heatsink did plenty of damage and knocked dings all over the case but didn't touch any chipsets luckily. Our solution was simple......duct tape! Yes he had that heatsink somehow strapped down tightly with duct tape. Don't ask me how he did it, but I was afraid the tape would somehow catch fire. Sure enough he gave it to me recently after he upgraded for a server. I took the heatsink off and to my suprise the CPU came out too! The thermal grease basically glued it to the heatsink, so I had to take a flat head screwdriver and pry it off. It went flying a bit, bent a pin or two, I fixed them, put it back together, and walla it worked!
4. Someone at my dad's office who worked in the field somehow dropped one of those rugged outdoor special laptops off a 2 story building. It went flying to the ground with a thud landing LCD screen open flat onto the ground. As you can imagine the guy was pretty much ghost white. They rushed down to check it out, turns out that the thing survived! Perfectly, there was no damage to any components, just the RF wireless network access antena was a flimsy aluminum strip, it bent in half, but still worked!
5. At a small buisness I had worked for a while, had a server in the back storage room that backed up their tax files (it was some tax/investment buisness). There was no AC back there so they left the side window open that just opened 6" to a tall cinder block wall. So they never go back there, and it rains a couple times. I come back and turn on the server monitor, it makes a this LOUD screeching noise as it warms up. I quickly turn it off and run out of the room(wouldn't you?). I told my boss and he just says, "Oh, we left the window open over the weekend, some of the rain musta got on the monitor, it's ok right?" I just shook my head lol. So we got a broom, and went back, we poked the monitor power switch with the end of the broomstick from outside the door, then as it turned on we flipped and hid around the other side of the wall. As it warmed up the screeching quieted, then we noticed smoke comming up from the monitor, but we realized it was water vapor when it didn't smell like it. The
-Conrad
I know a guy (now a police inspector, he he) that when drunk usually drops his mobile phone into his whisky + 7up long drink glass. Very inconsistent results: sometimes the phone survives, sometimes it does not.
This year he has gone through 4 different phones, testing different brands (always the cheapest one in the store, for obvious reasons). Will he ever find the indestructible model?
BTW, the whisky is always scotch (White Label or J&B). Maybe bourbon is more electronics-friendly, I will try to talk him into testing Jack Daniel's too.
The only thing to try is to shoot it.
I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.
In the morning two things happened
1) Security Guard was arrested
2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.
Total downtime : ZERO.
A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Long time ago... much knowledge ago. I was helping a friend install a NIC. His Windows 95 would freeze while booting with the card inserted. I don't know if I knew about safe mode... can't have, really. Or was it that it crashed then as well? I booted the computer without the card and then inserted it while in Windows. This will be hard to believe, but I'm willing to swear by anything: Windows popped up the "new hardware found" alert! After driver installation, the computer did no longer crash at boot...
When my employer retired an old sun they gave it to me. I was very fond of the thing because I, when I was a student, learned Unix and programming on that beast. It was the workstation all the (geek-) students wanted to use.
Anyway, I got home with the thing and found out I didn't have the root-password for the OS. So, install a new OS: OpenBSD. To do that, you need to be able to tell the thing to boot from floppy. You do that using a little command at bootup. And you need.... a password to enter that mode.
great.
No-one on earth was left that could tell me about those passwords, so I googled around and found the sollution:
1. Startup the sun
2. Press STOP-A (or something) to get into the OpenPROM / OpenBOOt/Whatever menu
3. When it askes for the password RIP OUT THE PROMCHIP FROM THE MOTHERBORD
4. Enter blank password. The machine will try to validate it against its non-existing memory.
5. It will accept the blank password and you can do "ALTER PASSWORD"
6. INSERT THE PROMCHIP JUST BEFORE YOU ENTER THE NEW PASSWORD
7. Enter the new password
8. It stores it in the now replaced memory-chip.
9. Install OS. Have Fun.
It really amazed me that this just worked. But it did.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
I worked at a PC storein high school. We had an hold hard drive in stock (NEC 100MB I think) that was no longer marketable as larger drivers were coming out and it was discontinued. The only way we could get any value out of it was to return it for a credit. So, we bowled the drive across the floor, and then plugged it in to make sure it was broken.
It wasn't.
So we bowled it again. And it still worked! FInally, we bowled it a third time with it stopping against the wall, and this time, it finally broke. It made a nice click-click-click noice when powered up.
I learned a lot of unscrupulous things working at that store, but also a lot of valuable skills. Not to mentioned, I turned around and spent most of my paychecks getting hardware at cost.
I once installed Windows on my computer... and it still ran! However, I didn't have much confidence in it, so after proving it was at least POSSIBLE, I wiped the drive and reinstalled Linux. :)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
(I onced shared this story with a popular computer magazine, and it got published)
Years ago, I went with a friend of mine to his boss's house to fix his computer. This guys' house wasn't a house, but a log cabin in a rustic town along a river with a winding one-lane road to get there. There was a general store and everything!
So we get there, and I sit down at this computer on a desk and start plugging away. Meanwhile, my friend gets a call from his wife. He starts pacing around, handling the various antiques and oddities one rarely sees except in a rustic environment like this.
When he picks up the revolver, his boss starts yelling "Put that down! Put that down!", but my friend was too distracted with his conversation to pay attention to the outside world. Sure enough, a loud *BANG* rang out. My friend dropped the phone and everyone checked themselves for holes.
After we were confidet we were all still alive, we noticed the HP LaserJet III printer sitting inches away from me on the desk had a hole in it. Wiping the sweat form my brow, I started laughing because the printer was still printing at the time! We later took some of the external housings off the printer and found some fragments, but the printers guts weren't damaged and it was printing fine.
(I wish HP's products were still that good)
The gun, of course, was real. My friend's boss sais he kept it on the end table to shoot the bats that inevitably found their way into his cabin. I think now he might stowe it when guests come over.
But a quite spectacular transplant rejection :)
I was given the task of upgrading a Win3.1 machine to Win95 OSR2.5, and was given a nice new CD-ROM drive to install in the machine for the purpose. The machine belonged to the MD of the company I worked for. As an apprentice.
Anyways, I backed up the ENTIRE HDD onto a spare using an (early) tomsrtbt and then booted of the floppy. FDISK and FORMAT later I'm ready for the Win95 CD. In it goes.
As it was copying it's files to the HDD, a strange plasticky burning smell arose and I noticed curls of smoke coming out of the back of the CD drive. I quickly powered down, and was treated to a lovely cross between a screech, a grind and a crunch. On powering the drive up, the door wouldn't open. I tried using a paper clip, but no joy. So, off with the power and in with the screwdriver.
What greeted me was quite... thorough. The drive electronics were burned out, the laser caddy was fused in one position, and there was (how I don't know) a 1mm deep groove all the way round the data side of the disk. I had to break the laser caddy to get the disk out to find this out. I restored the machine from the backup and returned it, citing 'compatibility issues'.
A few years ago (OK, many years!) I was working on an OEM 3350 equivalent disk drive where the card were in a swing out card cage. It was the early hours of Monday morning, and I had been out working since Friday - boy was I tired! I was changing cards for servo errors, not having any luck setting up the servo when an operator came to see if I wanted a brew (tea!). He casually mentioned that they kept on seeing 'intervention' on the other spindle in the box. Yes, I was changing the wrong cards, with power on, and it kept recovering!!
I once hot-switched an ISA NIC. Only indication I was fiddling with the wrong motherboard was that the user next to me announced "Hey, the network seems to work now!". :-)
My sophmore year of college, my roommate had a pentium 60 with an unbelieveable 16 megs of ram at the time. For some reason he used to run his computer with the case off. ("It's running as a convertable." he would say.) He would then throw all his junk at then end of the day on top of his open computer. All sorts of things fell in it. Keys. Coins. Papers. You name it. The computer worked fine until one day he started getting random kernel panics every few days. (Yeah, we were running linux back in '95.) He changed his kernel several times, but nothing helped. Eventually he started to just accept it. Then one day dropped something into his machine again and lo and behold he found the cause of the problem. A case screw had fallen off the shelf above the computer and lodged itself between two simm chips. We looked at it, and sure enough the screw was shorting data pins between the chips. He removed the screw, and the kernel panics went away. Apparently every so often the things would get loaded into memory just the right way and cause memory corruptions.
I used to work at a space company that produces the OBC (onboard computer) for the Ariane 5 (you can see where this is going already right?)
Well, I don't know if you remember (most Europeans probably do) but the first Ariane 5 blew up (due to software reasons) in spectacular style. The French foreign legion was tasked with finding any important bits in the swamps surround the launch site. Surely enough they found the OBC intact (it is built like a tank), eventually it got returned to the company I worked for, and whilst it didn't work entirely, it did return some diagnostic bits that *something* had gone terribly wrong. The original computer was sat in a cupboard by where I worked for a while, had a few dents in it but looked quite okay. if you are into these kinda things you can see a picture of it in this pdf hereBeat that for hardware abuse :)
Back in the 80s my family splurged and got a Texas Instrumets TI99-4A. Remember those? I spilled a whole glass of milk across the keyboard which was attached like a laptop's. My older brother had to remove and then drill into all of the keys with a dremel to let the milk evaporate. We used it for years afterward but it smelled bad. Munchman ruled.
I worked for five years at Epson America, home of the EPSON dot matrix printer (at the time.) There was a famous incedent where a printer being transported in a truck, was in an accident where got skewered by a piece of steel rebar. When brought in, we plugged it in, and besides the mechanical limitations of having a steel rod shoved through it... the thing still worked. That is engineering...
Another case had a printer that had been inhabited by a mouse for nearly a year, and it workd right up until Mr. Mouse had relieved himself on a high voltage component... the interesting part was upon receipt of the printer for repair, it was discovered the prior urination and defacation had rotted the electronics to the point the parts nearly fell off the board, nonetheless it had worked up to the final shocking excretion by the now defunct rodent.
Marie
...on a motherboard of someone I knew (which was in my posession) decided to give up one day. It's one of those RTC's with built-in batteries. They generally last 4-6 years before giving up, this one being no exception.
The problem, however, was that the computer wouldn't boot up without the RTC-battery in the DS1287 working. The only solution was to exchange it with a new one. This proved not to be as easy: the Dallas was soldered tight on the motherboard , and being students there was absolutely no money to get a new mainboard.
Happily I convinced the owner of the motherboard to let me fix it by desoldering the old chip, soldering a new socket, then flipping in a new chip - thus increasing the lifespan of this mainboard to virtual infinity as he could exchange the DS1287 afterwards again more easily (if required).
Optimistically, without no special tools available, I took out my Weller and started getting the darned thing of. It was however stuck tight and not one pin would move from its place. After trying for an hour, I decided to leave my Weller for what it was, and take out a more convenient 30-Watt soldering-iron. I literally smoked the IC from the mainboard, while secretly hoping that something of the thing would still be operating when I was finished.
After completing this operation and soldering the new components back up, it surprisingly still worked, proving once more that even a huge amount of heat can't kill the traces on some mainboards.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I once had an external analog modem PSU go bad...
:)
When we got round to testing it with a multimeter, it was giving out 120V dc instead of the more normal 12 - I have no idea what caused the fault, but the only ill effect on said modem was some charring of the power leads inside the case, and a nasty smell of burning which alerted us to the fault in the first place.
It was our dial-in modem at the time, and didn't even drop a call during the whole ephisode
A freind of mine had a hell of a day getting a motherboard working again and eventually gave up and just got a new one, as for the fate of the dead mb? It was time to get revenge for the hours of frustration, well out came the trusted samari sword and it was time for some Kung-Fo stylez. Needless to say the result was some very exhausted nerds and a not so damaged mb. This was a bad ass sucker. So some home made napam was called for, needless to say the capacitors popped quite nicely.
:)
Burn mutherfucker, Burn!
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
This doesn't really match up with most of the stuff I'm reading here, but I have two machines: my workhorse running Linux, and a Windows box running 98SE, which I use only for those apps that I can't do on Linux (a dwindling number, thank goodness.) Since the Windows machine doesn't have anything particularly valuable on it, I regularly shut it down by just hitting the power button. It doesn't matter which applications are running, which files are open, or anything, I just turn it off. And, of course, I skip scan disk the next time I turn it on.
It sometimes does that auto-regress thing where it recovers back to a former registry, and I've had to re-install Windows about once a year. In other words, it seems to be your standard Windows box.
Evil is the money of root.
I used to work at a computer store and we had a bunch of the old WYSE machines. They were built like a tank and we wanted to see how much damage they could take, so we went onto the roof of the 2 story building and threw them off. Lo and Behold they bounced when they hit the ground. What was even more unexpected, they only had a damaged case and still worked perfectly when plugged in!
Ouch, this is so much a troll... Read here, or here for the original...
i would have to say that hiding one of my little "toys" inside... it wound up blocking the fan so it overheated rather quickly (oooold comp) and pretty much blow the entire top off. thank god it didnt hit any important hardware. had to get a new sound card but aside from that just a couple melted wire insulation tubes.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I had a friend that took the motherboard out of his non-working machine, washed in nicely in the dorm showers, let it dry and booted it back up. Worked great.
A friend of mine was fiddling behind the desk and managed to plug the printer's power supply into an AT keyboard socket (which brainiac at HP thought, "cool, let's use an AT connector for power!". Busted the IO chip clean in half and completely fscked the mobo.
Another friend of mine bolted plates over the SCSI ports of their lab Macs as people kept hot plugging parallel devices.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
My Amiga1200 had an accelerator board with an FPU socket, to which I attached a 16MHz 68882 (or thereabouts.)
:)
I was using Lightwave3D when I noticed that all my models had suddenly become very blocky, but everything else worked fine.
I found that the FPU had become partially unseated (it was seated upside down), and I guess that a few least-significant-bit pins were unconnected - thus all fp calculation results were rounded
I've down lots of kicking and punching, even accidently poured 16 ounces of tonic into my monitor but never broke anything until..
I got a couple of Celerons a year or two ago. One of them I didn't use for a month or two. It had metal on one of the pins. Looked like part of a mold. Being too late to return it and two lazy to try and send it back to Intel, I attempted to file it off. I snapped off the pin but tried it anyway. Works fine. Just can't put the computer to sleep or it won't wake up.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
I think I have all the above stories beat. I installed Windows XP on my machine and yet it still occasionally functions. Sure the USB ports randomly stop working and viruses continue to plague my e-mail but it still generally works from time to time. :)
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
Not very thrilling but:
In 1987 i wanted to grade up my Atari 260ST to an unbelievible RAM-size of 1 MB. There was printed a guide in a german magazine, which showed step by step how to put 512 kB in 16 Chips on top of the already mounted ones.
I was a little bit anxious because of the soldering. I frightened, the heat could kill the built in RAM or other chips of my beloved Atari. So i first bent the adress and data pins of the new RAM chips, so the got (i thought) good contact to their counterparts on the board. I put double sided sticky band on the built in chips and pressed the new chips onto them. Then i soldered some (2?) signal-pins to cables and the cables to the board.
I switched on, my monitor kept black. I switched off and drew the chips from their mounts, then tried to bend it better (i thought). After switching on, the monitor still was black.
I said "shit the dog on it" (a german proverb) to myself and soldered all pins of all chips.
It worked instantly.
Oh those blessed days of indestroyable hardware!
I've got one of the motherboards with the infamous bad capacitors. The ones that were based on a stolen faulty formula. Basically they die too fast. But it works great! Heres some pics that were taken over a year ago... Pic 1 Pic 2 That might not sound *that* abusive. But consider this - those pictures are hosted on the pictured computer, and I just posted links to them on Slashdot!
Back during my stint in the US Army Signal Corps, I worked in end-user tech support in a Field Artillery brigade. That job was a wealth of computer stupidities, but my own gaffe takes the cake.
I was upgrading a 386 to a 486 at the time. It was frustratingly easy to insert the 486 the wrong way into the socket. I did exactly that. Powered up the system, staring a blank screen, my co-worker yells "dude!", then I hear the crack.
During the after-action review, he told me the processor achieved quite a lovely shade of red brefore the ceramic cracked. 486 CPU's were pricey back then and I was a little nervous, as the military tends to be very by-the-books when it comes down to breaking equipment. Didn't have to pay for it though.
Some years ago I was removing a 1 gig quantum scsi drive from my case, and in the process I managed to scratch a surface-mounted component off of the drive's exposed circuit board. Just for fun I tried to use the drive and sure enough it was non-functional. At this point, I was in a bad frame of mind, so I attempted to solder the tiny component back onto the PCB with a rather large soldering iron. Even if I had a clue how to solder things - this still would not have been a very good idea - needless to say that didn't work out too well - I only succeeded in making black burn marks on the PCB.
I finally realized the truth: the drive was dead - I killed it but it was not within my power to revive it. Or wasn't it? I cleaned up the burn marks on the PCB so they were less noticeable and sent it in for warranty repair - and received a working drive a few weeks later! Actually it had some bad blocks, but I didn't have enough balls to send it in for service again!! The bad blocks were at the end of the disk, so I used the good part of the disk as /tmp and swap.
I know that was dishonest - but getting a working drive back in the mail just felt great. I still feel good about it to this day. For those of you who want to scold me for abusing warranty -- please don't bother -- I am reformed! No really!
My friends know this story -- when they are having hardware trouble I tell them 'ok just stay calm -- I will be at your place in 20 minutes with my soldering iron' ;)
(i.e. Extreme Use of Nearly Universal Cooling Hardware)
The folks at The Temple ov Thee Lemur" took an old 486 SX/25, cooled it down using nothing but a freezer and cold booze, and were able to overclock it to 247 Mhz and play HalfLife for two minutes before it crashed and burned.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
Early 1990's, and I had just taken a job as a consultant at an agency in Minneapolis, MN. At the time IBM was trying to get their AIX systems in to businesses to replace their old System 34 and 36 machines. Because there hadn't been many sales at this point, they had an engineer in the area, but no software/admin person.
:-)
So my office gets a call from IBM looking for someone who knows Unix, and AIX experience is a plus. Which got me the assignment.
I meet the engineer in St. Paul at a company that does electrical wiring for other businesses. They have a spanking new system with an accounting package that works great for them, but every so often, without any apparent rhyme or reason, most of the terminals drop off the system.
The engineer and I spend most of the day working on the machine, and of course the terminals are rock solid whenever it's up. We go back the next morning trying to puzzle through what might be happening, and I decide to see if there might be a problem with the cabling.
I'm shown around the place, and just as one of the employees there takes me to a room in the basement to turn on the lights, the terminals go off.
I run upstairs to see if there's anything apparent, but no processes seem to be acting funny, and the console is still talking just fine to the machine. Probing the network card shows it's up, but not seeing anything.
Curious about that, I reach behind the machine to see if perhaps the cable has come loose... whereupon I get a shock similar to touching an active electric fence.
It seems that at one point in the cable run they had put unshielded cable next to a high power line, and were basically running current on the network whenever someone turned on the light in that room of the basement. That was (not surprisingly) knocking off the terminals in a burst of static.
The amazing thing (to me) was that the network card was handling a fairly high bit of power coming in on the TTY ports, and not seeming to be affected. Good ol' IBM
When I was a student, we had a Linux system called 'zen.btc.uwe.ac.uk'. It had what at the time was a massive hard disk - a 1Gbyte full height scsi drive, and a 486DX-25 CPU, and IIRC about 16MB RAM. It lived with all the Sun kit in BTC's server room - a glass fronted machine room which we could all look in at the big Sun rack from the main hallway.
Unbeknownst to us, the airconditioner failed in this room. Zen started behaving erratically (programs segfaulting randomly, kernel panics, the works) so I went in to investigate. The problem was obvious as soon as I opened the door - the heat was stifling. Before moving the machine somewhere cooler for the time being (it was a full tower PC, and therefore easy to just pick up and move), I took out the tape from the QIC tape drive. If you've not seen QIC cartridges, they have a nice slab of aluminium on the bottom side.
The metal was so hot I immediately dropped the tape! Zen recovered once it had cooled down enough.
The Sun kit kept working fine though even throughout this.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
My nintendo 64 has been through a lot at my hands:
three days after i bought it i dropped it from a second-story window. It was then sat on by my friend Kyle the next day.
after this my little brother poured juice (apple) on it, and it was then left in a car for three days in the summer.
it still works fine (thank you nintendo)!
*De gozaru!*
I've managed to be oblivious enough to wash and dry both a cellphone and a thumb drive - I still own both, and they both work.
I once made a RJ45-to-3prong AC adapter. It pretty much destroys any ethernet cards on the same switch as you. Oh and the switch gets trashed too and you end up having to find a new job.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Firstly, this is a second-hand story but the source is highly reliable. A friend of mine was piecing together an old 486 system to use as a home network server. For shits and giggles, really. It was one of those older 486's that didn't have pin orientation on the CPU - and you know where I'm going with this already. He 180'ed the CPU by mistake and fired the computer up and couldn't figure out why the computer wouldn't POST. Several minutes of head-scratching later, a billowing cloud of magic smoke comes pouring out of the case! Naturally, he turns the computer off and realizes the 486 is in wrong (and after presumably letting it cool back down) re-inserts it correctly. Surprisingly, the damn thing worked like a champ for months afterward. (Suppose it still had enough magic smoke left to run ;-)
We had a VAX in a computer room with a raised floor. The sprinkler system went off without cause and flooded the room.
One place under the floor had power cables (boas, they were called) meeting in a junction box with an aluminum cover. Even though the box was submerged, the system was still up and running. At least it was when I hit the power cut button.
Everything got wet, but the only thing we lost that day was a modem.
About 6 months ago I turned on my computer and noticed a burning smell so I quickly turned it off and opened it up. I poked through and noticed a couple of the capacitors on the motherboard looked like they had oozed and then burned their contents out their tops. Fearful that this might be the end I turned the computer on again and it ran fine, well, for another two weeks at least, long enough for me to get a replacement for it. When I finally did replace it all the capacitors had parts of them that looked like they were burned to ash. I showed the guys at work who were all amazed that it worked for as long as it did.
Taken sticks of RAM out of a running computer to see when it would notice?
Did that. Eventually it just sang "Daisy" really slow and shut down.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
But the greatest abuse I've given to my hardware has been to keep using it well after a respectible retirement age. Like a PC's Limited Turbo XT (bought from a kid named Mike Dell) that's had everything but its keyboard and power supply replaced over the past 17 years, which I still use as an emergency backup web/mail/dns server. Or a 15-year-old Mac SE, a monochrome Windows 3.1 laptop, and a 386 running Linux... all of which I'm running as web servers. (Sorry, no direct links; even a modest /.ing could be too much for them. There are links to them on my personal site under "Hobbies".)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
But I held back, since /. apparently doesn't like any of my submissions.
Anyhoo, I don't know if consumer electronics count (though it should), I recycled a couple of nifty pieces just a couple of days ago, a Sony FDL-PT22 and D-CJ506CK, Watchman and MP3 Discman. Both of which had the most ridiculously simple repairable flaws, cases on both were moderately damaged (broken hinge on the discman, and misaligned case on the watchman).
Fixed the discman hinge with a generous application of quick set epoxy, fixed the watchman by disassembling the case, snapping the circuit boards back in place, then popping the case back together (it was a screwless design, so that was a snap, literally).
Both units, new, retail for $89 and $159 respectively. Not bad, considering. It's amazing what people will throw away because they're too stupid or lazy to try fixing it.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
That's nothing.
My buddie and I had a prank on a guy in high school. I took a VCR tape and open it up placed a bunch of stapes, nails and whatever else I could find inside (stapes fit perfectly on the tape) I wrote on the lable that it was some crazy porn.
Well I forgot the tape at home. I come home and my parents are waiting for me - They were pissed and wanted to know what was on the tape. I told them it was a joke, and whated to know why they were so pissed... "Becouse our VCR is broken now"
Mind you this was one of those expencive Sony Milti-system VCR's.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I had a 486 that somehow burned half the DMA channels, no sound card, and the disk operations were painfully slow... but it worked.
My first PC was from them - it arrived with the floppy cable connected backwards, they insisted it had been thoroughly checked before despatch...
Years ago (the days of 486's) I had built myself a new PC and was in the process of installing Windows 95 when I had the thought that the PC might be overheating. Not wanting to stop the Win95 install (being as bitchin' as the PC was at the time it still took a whiel) I decided that I needed to allow for more ventilation. Instead of removeing the cover, popping open an empty drive bay or simply just using my head and NOT worrying about it, I decided to try and pop off a slot cover.
Well, instead of it coming off in my hands it fell partially into the case. So far so good but certainly not enough action for me. I decided top take a pair of needle-nose pliers and try and grab the slot cover and pull it out. I was doing good until I bumped the MoBo and "jzzzt" I lost my little game of "Operation."
I used that PC for another two years with only a blown serial port and one blown slot.
You wanna see abused PCs? Look inside my parents' PCs to see the 4 pounds of dust and ashes that have accumulated!
-----
Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
I worked for my university's IS dept in college. We inherited a laptop that a teacher had abused. She set it on top of her car, forgot it was there, and started driving away. The screen was broken when it fell to the ground and was run over. The rest of the components seemed to work just fine. We made it one of our workstations -- just plugged up an external monitor. It later became the wireless router at my house. We named it roadkill.
Back in the times, when the C64 was the dream of all schoolkids, there was a German magazine called "Happy Computer", that had among other things regular tests of joysticks (where the Competition Pro always won).
Their test routine was as follows:
First several rounds of Decathlon (fast wiggling of joystick back and forth)
Then it was held by its cord and swung around for a few minutes.
Then it got dropped on concrete several times. Then they poured lemonade over it.
If it was still funcitoning, it was good. OK, I think the ergonomic factor and Extras like AutoFire and such got tested too.
In an April(fools) issue they supposedly did that with a printer.
Now I'd like to see them swing a 200$ Thrustmaster HOTAS Stick on its cord...
At a LAN party several years ago a mate's machine needed to be fixed (can't remember why). So, here it is on the floor, the side of the case is off and my friend, Cosmo, comes over to have a look.. with a beer in his hand. He had had a few by this time and when he leant over to examine the surgury we were inflicting on someone's P1... his beer leaned with him.
Ok, yes, no power to the comp at this point.. but we mopped up the beer and turned it on 1/2hr later - worked perfectly.
This is a cautionry tale - Drunk mates should not be allowed anywhere near open computer cases
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
http://www.frankenseries.com
K.
I tried water-cooling my computer a couple of years back and after a while i got a kink on the waterhose stopping the flow of water. I was sleeping at the time and woke up smelling something burning. The damage was pretty bad. The CPU was an old Athlon Thunderbird and it seemed to have nearly melted the copper cooler mounted on it. Also the socket was badly charred. As if that wasn't enough, water was leaking everywhere and the power was still on, meaning the hard drives were running, but the screen had gone blank. After shutting down the power i removed the damaged cpu and water-cooling, and assumed that the motherboard was dead. As it turned out the motherboard was fine, except for the sensor registering the CPU temp :)
I still use my old Abit motherboard, as well as the graphicscard that was sprayed with water.
A few years ago, I had purchased a laptop for my then-girlfriend's sister to use at college. She was by all definitions of the word, a laptop abuser. A scant 3 months after she went to school, I saw her at Christmas break and the laptop was covered in scratches and stickers - decorated nicely. A few months later, I get a call from her that her laptop wasn't working. After a few minutes of cursory diagnosis over the phone led to the conclusion that the power supply was no good. It wasn't charging the battery and the "plugged-in" LED wasn't turning on. So, I had her call the manufacturer for a warranty replacement. A couple of weeks go by and she gets the new power supply. No good. The laptop still won't turn on. What she had failed to mention to me is that she had knocked the laptop off of her desk, crashing it into the floor from 3 feet.
My first words were "Ship me the laptop." Sure enough, she had broken the DC connector off of the motherboard. Now, I know most of you slashdotters can guess at how complicated it is to take apart a laptop - and by complicated I mean TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS, I WOULD RATHER HAVE MY FINGERNAILS REMOVED. After an hour of removing what seemed like 200 access screws, I dug the motherboard out of the case. Of course it was a proprietary DC connector, but at least it had a standard landing pattern.
I soldered a new DC jack onto the motherboard and replaced the plug on the power supply with the proper mate. I re-assembled the laptop (only had a few screws left over) and shipped it back to her. She called to thank me for fixing it and to say how grateful she was that she didn't lose her music collection...
About a week later, she calls again... "You're going to hate me," she said... I sighed, knowing what she was about to tell me. "What happened now?" I asked. She went off on a long-winded story that ultimately had her at Starbucks.. she had met a friend there to whom she was going to give a copy of some songs. They were leaving, and apparently she had put the laptop on the trunk of her car to quickly copy the songs to a zip disk.
Well, in the haste, she forgot to take her laptop off of the car before driving off. She made a turn and the thing flew off into the street. Amazingly enough, she retrieved it, but again, it wasn't working.
"Ship me the laptop, again." This time, the stress of hitting the street had cracked the plastic housing and broken the battery connector off of the motherboard. I didn't think the laptop had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving that kind of impact, but I reattached the battery connector anyway.
Much to my surprise, it worked! The laptop had survived. It looked a little worse for wear... in fact it looked HORRIBLE. Scratched up, stickers all over it, cracked case... but the thing worked...
The poor laptop ultimately met its final demise a couple of years ago when, on another meeting at starbucks, about half of a decaf latte found its way into the laptop, followed by about 5 gallons of tapwater (from her attempt to clean it out) and an hour in a 200-degree oven (to dry it out).. I am sure it was neither the latte nor the oven heat that killed it, but rather the tons of minerals in Upstate New York water that were deposited on the motherboard during the drying process.
Poor thing, it went through hell, for sure...
A coworker at an old job used to "repair" RA-90 disk drives which had seized by baking them in an oven for an hour or so. This actually used to work!
A friend of mine told me a story of a guy I also met once. Back in '94 he was a modem-freak and built a lot of silly things.
;)
The most silly one had quite an impact. Somehow he managed to directly connect the RS232-Port of his motherboard to 220V AC. This resulted in a loud bang and his computer shaking. After opening the case he found that his CPU exploded and left a hole in the motherboard.
I never saw it nor heard it directly from him. Perhaps he is ashamed.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Some years ago I was still using a very old computer, a 486DX2/66, and at the same time living in an old house that had a bit of a mouse problem (the rodent kind). I would leave the computer on 24x7. During the winter it would get quite cold inside due to the old wals not closing up neatly everywhere.
One morning after I woke up and turned on my monitor the screen was really funky, showing all kinds of colors and characters that I was pretty sure Windows 95 was incapable of displaying. I figured maybe the changing temperature had wedged loose my vid card, so proceeded to open up the box to have a look inside.
What I found was a mouse (again: the rodent kind) that had managed to slip in through one of the uncovered ISA slot holes in the back, most likely attracted by the decent temperature inside the box, the only thing in the room that was generating any heat. It had died there in that spot (maybe still not warm enough, it was freezing pretty badly outside and probably close to freezing inside) and when doing so its bowels had given way, leaving a few little mouse droppings and a stain left by dried out liquid in my vid card.
Now this happened to be not an ordinary ISA card, but one of the longer EISA cards. The card itself wouldn't work anymore, but fortunately I had one of exactly the same build, so I plugged it in. The computer booted alright, but I still had all of these funky colors and characters on my screen. Suspecting that my ISA bus or some other mobo component had died I was about to give up and finally buy myself a new computer (we're talking the start of the PIII age here, and I was still working on a 486), but as a last resort, and mainly just because I wanted to check my mail, I plugged in an even older ordinary ISA card.
It worked perfectly.
Afterwards I ran some more tests with different cards I had lying around the house, like IDE controllers, modems, etc. It turned out that any EISA card I would plug in would not work correctly, but all the ordinary ISA cards would work just fine.
Needless to say I had a stern talk with our local house cat afterwards, and used some tape to close up the card slits in the back to keep out future rodent infestations. I used the 486 for about a year more until I finally retired it.
Some years ago, I was running a "RTC" on an Atari 520 STF (with just a floppy and no HD, incidentally). RTC means "Réseau Téléphonique Commuté", which is equivalent to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). By extension, this is also the name which was given to the telematic servers running on this network, using the French Minitel. Roughly said, this was a kind of BBS.
... sometimes with the help of a gentle slap on the drive. :-)
The Atari was running almost 7/7, 24/24, without any cooling device. I had however to turn it off from time to time for different reasons. Progressively, the power supply began to show failure signs at startup. It was taking more and more time to get full power. There were some funny waves on the screen and, furthermore, there was not enough energy to start the floppy drive motor. But after a few seconds, the screen was almost ok and the drive was able to read the floppy again. Later, "a few seconds" became "a few minutes". But it was still working in the end
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
We were camping in a game reserve in Kenya when I was in high school. An elephant came along in the middle of the night and decided to see if there was any food in our tent -- which we were in at the time.
As the elephant pulled the tent down, we escaped through a newly formed rip in the side away from the elephant to some friends tent not far away. We then watched the tent get turned inside out, and heard some nasty crunches and bangs as things were abused.
My short-wave radio was in the tent. One of the knobs had been pushed through the case and broken the corner off the circuit board. When soldered back together, it worked!
The only thing that suffered permanent damage was the tent. We never went camping in Kenya again.
yeah, me too... the back of a TV usually has these high-voltage part... 10kV or more? I dont think peeing on that is very nice.. :)
I had a //c years and years ago, 128kb RAM and a 1mhz CPU. I later replaced the socketed CPU with a "zip chip 8" 8mhz - it looked like a little black brick with pins on it, at least 2x as tall as the 65c02 processor was. Then later I went to add a 1mb memory card - which fit between the motherboard and the CPU/MMU chips. This was right under the keyboard mind you, and the height of the processor + memory card meant the keyboard no longer fit in the case.
So, take the 2" ribbon cable off, buy a 5ft ribbon cable from radio shack, move the connector blocks to the new cable, and instant detached keyboard. (possibly a first?)
That came to a sudden stop one day when I was sitting with the keyboard on my lap, with the exposed metal frame of the keyboard touching my right hand, as I brushed the dust off that was accumulating on my new color monitor with my left hand. *snap* Hmm, what was that, static on my right hand? Looked at the screen, ooo, look at all the random characters. Reboot.
To my surprise it booted up fine. Unfortunately, for every key I typed, I got that character plus three or four bonus characters. Keyboard intercept chip: $29. Only chip on the motherboard that was soldered down, too. 28 pins and CMOS (static sensitive), that was not fun to replace. But it worked fine after it got the new chip.
That, and how many of us old Apple owners can recall attaching a three position switch to their hard drive to override the write-protect notch on the 5.25" discs? I had two... one on the external floppy and one for the internal floppy.
Tried to boot it up a few years ago, but sadly, all my ~250 discs images had degraded over time and were worthless, so I donated it to the landfill. Sad...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I had a video card that was a little unstable because some water got on it while running. It would work for about an hour at a time. After that I had to put it in a zip lock bag and freeze it in the freezer to cool it down enough to run. This was repeated for a few weeks till I got money to get another video card (at school at the time, no money)
When the 300a's first came out there was a doc up online that told you how you could modify it to go dual. The only kicker was that you had to drill part way through the chip and soder some wires on it, etc. I only had the guts to modify one of the chips and bought a single board to run with the modified chip. It still worked happily.
A few years later that board I accidently plugged in the floppy power backwards (cable with no tab to stop me). When the power came on sparks, fire galore! Where the floppy connection on the mb there was a nice black ring and the floppy drive smelled really bad. Both floppy drive and floppy controller never worked again, and for the most part the system worked, but a little unstable. I finally replaced it last year.
For several years I had a 486 running as a server who's tabs that hold in the ram were broken. To make the ram stay in place I used tape which after a year or warmth isn't sticky anymore and the ram falls over at which point things would act funny until the tape was replaced. This box is still sitting under my bed to be junked/given away after being decommissioned just a few months ago.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
This guy is one of the biggest collectors in the country, and had a lot of awesome stuff - probably 100 cabinets and pinballs in his basement, including a sit-down Star Wars, sit down Sinistar, and a 4-player Cruisn World. He actually had a working boardset that had broken in half and he soldered it back together using small wires. He did it just because he was bored, but it was cool looking.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Doubt much anyone will read this, but here we go:
I recently did my first DIY build. I waited until all the parts I needed had arrived, then one Friday afternoon (got off work at noon . . . summer hours), I went at it. First problem: dripped thermal grease on the motherboard. Wiped it up with a paper towel. Second problem, heard a horrible buzzing sound as I inserted the graphics card (this turned out not to be a problem . . . just the scraping sound of insertion). The system booted OK. Then I wanted to put my thermal probe closer to the CPU, so I started taking the HSF off, and I heard a big RIP. Pulled the CPU right out of its sockets. I had to pry the CPU off the bottom of the HSF with a knife. Then, when I was cleaning off the old thermal grease, I poured about 20 mL of isopropyl alcohol on the mobo. I blew on it a lot, reinstalled the CPU and HSF, and it still worked.
Also, at the beginning of the summer, I was trying to make use of an old Compaq (circa 1995) to use as a backup/file server for my Mom. The power outlet on the PSU was horrible plastic, and chipped. At some point it broke off entirely. I had the plug plugged into a power strip, and as I was trying to get it plugged into the PSU nice and snug, one of the wires contacted the metal of the PSU and boy were there some pretty fireworks!! A wire that was soldered had popped, and I didn't have any soldering tools. I didn't even have electrical tape. I ended up using black friction tape (used for the tape on hockey sticks) to put the two wire ends back in contact with one another, plugged it in, and the thing worked fine.
gH6NH4EQWhen I was hacking up my Shuttle XPC, I had the mobo out (still loaded with RAM). I was carrying it along with my graphics card on a board, they both decided to slide of while I was walking and crash to the ground. Surprisingly nothing at all broke! I was surprised it didn't snap a RAM module in half! I also had an unfortunate accident with my wireless keyboard. I was at a lan, and spilt some coke on it. raced outside to shake it off, and while I was shaking it I lost grip and it flew into the brick wall before slamming into the ground. This wasn't a little shake either, I was swinging it over my head so the coke would come off! Few scratches but it is working like a charm still!
One time I installed one of those amd 5x86 cpus turned 90-degrees... smoked the motherboard, but when we put the cpu the right way onto another board, it worked just fine.
I had just gotten an Apple Messagepad 200, but since I got it off of ebay, I didn't have a serial adaptor for it. So the only way I had to transfer things to it, was the old messagepad 130 I had, through infrared. Which is slower than mollasses. I found online a wire diagram for the serial connector of the messagepad, and for a 9pin serial connector for pc. Well... only thing I could find to match up to the 130's serial cable was my nice ATI All In Wonder Pro :) I got out the soldering iron, removed one of the A/V connectors, soldered it into the 2000's motherboard, and used the 130's serial cable to transfer files to my 2000 for two weeks before I could afford a serial adaptor for the 2000. Surprisingly, with my desoldering and ripping up a few of the wires off the board, the ATI All In Wonder Pro still runs as good as the day I bought it. I keep the setup I made just in case I lose the "official" adaptor I bought.
CELLPHONE:
:: presses button to start the system ::
My Ericsson cellphone was placed neatly under the front driver-side wheel after being fed-up with dropped calls. I proceded to back over it and when I felt the truck return to the ground, I hopped happily from the cab to see the phone only had a slight scratch on it and was actually ringing from an incoming call.
CYRIX 4x86 PROCESSOR:
In a sad attempt to get a system running at top notch, I exploited a "cascading" clock-multiplier on an old 486 motherboard. With my Cyrix 4x86 100Mhz CPU strapped to the board along with a cooling fan (not stock/OEM), I began the experiment. Instead of being a 3x33 clocking, we boosted it to a 3x66 clocking. It booted faster than ever, started Windows 3.1, then burned to a delicate crisp. Just add salt.
THE SEAGATE:
*Click, zip, click, zip* The Seagate harddrive just wouldn't mount. *Fling* *Crash, boom, bang* I wonder if it works now after throwing it down the stairs? *Zip, click, beep* "Starting Windows 98..." Yep.
ROOMMATE'S NEW MOBO:
After receiving a neat orange and blue box from Intel, my friend Matt quickly put his brand new system together. Except he forgot to plug in the fan for the CPU. No, no, the chip didn't burn up. You see, Intel has this cute little hardware feature that prevents the CPU from crisping itself. Instead, he tried to plug the fan in while the system was running.
*click, bzzzzz...*
"Oh shit."
*beeeeeeep, beep beep*
Congrats, first 640k of memory, toasted lightly.
THE APC UPS:
APC makes great UPS batteries, however, in this case, having a UPS meant precisely nothing. The battery was replaced in the unit by the factory, then returned to us simply because an experiment went awry. My friend, yes, Matt, has a little brother who is just as geeky as us. He repaired a power supply (old AT style) that needed a fuse and some cleaning before it was to be used on the test-bench. Once the power supply was back together, he plugged it into the UPS and turned it on. As his little brother quoted, "I saw light coming out of the UPS!" That's because it was arcing. The sparks, smoke, and hissing sound were all attributed to the "light" showing through all the plug holes.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Remember when there were 30-pin SIMMS, and their very close cousin DIP(p?)S? One package has metal contacts, the other has pins. Well, I had some really expensive "pin" type 4-meg chips. I needed SIMMS. I desoldered the pins, Re-soldered the connectors with thin strips of tin-foil, plugged them in, and it worked! That was an uber-machine back then.... A 486 DX-2 66 with 16 mb of RAM!
Lately we had problems with a few Linksys 10/100 Ethernet hubs at my school. A friend of mine did some investigation on them and found out that in both hubs two chips out of five had broken and thus prevented the whole hubs from working. His solution was a bit unorthodox; He just ripped the broken chips off and covered the ports handled by those chips with duct tape. After this most of the remaining 3/5 of the ports worked just fine...
from foo import signature
Back in the mid -90s I had a 386 with some cheap pre-3d graphics card (matrox?). For some reason I decided to buy more memory for the graphics card; the little memory modules had a small triangle mark on one side so you'd insert it the right way... I rotated it 180 degrees, plugged everything in... whereupon the screen was black and the new memory module actually _melted_ and made a nasty burnt-plastic stink in my case... but after I removed it the graphics card worked just fine again.
I'd like to believe that when the right woman comes along I'll have the courage to say, "no thanks, I'm married."
back in the day, I had a Mac SE, term paper due, and a crack develop in my ceiling. Being a diligent little student, I went to the library to do whatever it is you do in the library when it started to rain. With hours to go before the paper was due, I went back to my off campus apartment to discover the crack in the ceiling had opened up and water was drip, drip, dripping right into my Mac SE. Did I mention that I had left it on when I went to the library? Panic. human being on wet carpet pulling the plug on a running Mac SE. frantic call to tech support, and the advice, tilt it so the water can run out of the vents. Place towel under vents. Leave it alone for 24 hours, and see if it will start up. It did. Paper was a day late.
Geeks are incredibly weak, so the chances of one causing actual damage to anything vanish to zero.
The boss, being something of a skinflint, insisted that I test all the components with another motherboard - in particular the processor, which had been heated furiously during the event. I was incredulous, but he was the boss, so I installed the chip in another board (correctly this time), and fired it up to see if it would work. The bios POST screen had something rather interesting to say about the processor: Oops. I thought I'd screwed up the motherboard jumpers. There was no mistake, however. Despite whatever clock speed and doubling I configured the motherboard, the chip continued to inist that it had been bitten by a radioactive spider and turned into a super chip. WTF?
I ran diagnostic utlities, and the chip was not only working flawlessly, it was actually running at 100 mhz. I couldn't believe it.
The skinflint never let me or any of the rest of us who worked for him live it down. This event served only to catastrophically reinforce his pack rat urges. We had giant piles of bad modems, hard drives, etc., because he was convinced that the next turd-encrusted pile of garbage would contain a modem overclocked to 200Mbps due to some random circumstance such as had occurred with the super-chip.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
black powder and pornography don't go hand-in-hand.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
We were swapping out the computer the scale hooks to and the UPS tech sets the new machine down on the roller track while he's unhooking the old one. Some of you probably realize most box rollers are sloped. I'm on the other side of the isle and turned around just in time to see that brand new PC start rolling down the box rollers, hit the corner and turn into a really expensive and aerodynamically unsound frisbee. The classic waist high drop onto a concrete floor. It landed flat and the plastic cover split as various pieces went spinning off.
We put it back together as best we could, including taping the power switch back in place, and to our mutual surprise when we powered it up it worked fine. In fact, it hasn't had a down day.
Sometimes you just have to show them who's boss.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I was putting a HD (52 MB --yes MB) onto my A500 and I ended up cracking the mobo ... still works. All 7.14 mHz of it.
This
http://tux.iiivx.net/uptime_story.txt
About 10 years back we had a DEC field service rep working on one of our systems and the talk turned to the copious amount of dust in the fans and air filters (yeah, screw clean DP rooms, it's the paper dust more than anything!) and he brought up a service call to GM's Central Foundry in Saginaw, Michigan.
Seems some system stopped functioning and everyone started scratching their heads, trying to figure out what ran it. Finally an electician was brought in with wiring diagrams and found there was actually a DEC PDP 8 (yeah, one of those things) which controlled the system. They found it had been build around and buried behind HVAC ducts, pipes and conduits. Once they cut their way in to it, the field service rep cleaned out solid packed dust and grime, having to replace an 8" floppy, and reboot it from a backup disk.
After they got another boot disk and told how ancient their system was, they responded something along the lines of, "Well if it ran for 15 years and we didn't even know it was there, why replace it?" Indeed.
This may sound like an urban legend. I heard from a audio electronic store crew in S. Congress in Austin TX. ;)
The boy left a Hershey bar on top of the daddy's Macintosh amp. The thing melted through the top heat vent into the circuit board. The amp stopped working.
The father took it inn. The repair dude opened it, isolated the circuit board...looking like a smore...connected the amp again with the speaker output plug to a resistor. Then he cranked up full blast and left it like that for 2 days. They say the could hear the resistor chirping tunes!
The circuitboard heated so, it melted the chocolate away leaving the amp fulling functional again!!!
It could happen!!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
I was sitting with a friend at his computer, and his mouse was responding rather badly because of the accumulated dirt. He happened to have a bottle of 96% cleaning alcohol on his desk, so I proposed to clean the mouse with it. My friend took this proposal rather strongly, so he took out the ball, and poured the alcohol in. The stuff started running out, and we decided the best way to get rid of the surplus alcohol was to set in on fire. So there we were, looking at a burning mouse, enable to blow the fire out, because we were laughing so much.
And yes, the mouse still works.
A good little computer, but a slight issue arose when the owner/user purchased a usb hub. This was one of those cheap things from target. Flat, kind of like a stacked credit card. Powered only, I believe. (At least on the older imacs.)
Anyway, plugged it in, and try and use it and all is well. shut down the computer and WHAMO! (or let it sleep.)
Wont power up. Unplug everything and shake the crt arount and there's something rattling inside. Take it ALL apart (to find out later it's just one panel that I needed to tear off) and I find a power final laying on the ground. Soldering iorn from my truck, a few minutes and it's in. Powers up. Plug in USB, leav. All is well.
He shuts off the mac a few days later and WHAMO. NO booty. Pop the lower panel and, suprise, my wonderous soildering job is undone. FInal is rattling around again. Resoilder two more times before noting that the USB hub was NEW the DAY it first died. I hadn't known before then.
PLug in the power adapter to the USB hub, check it with my multimeter, and viola! 12 V raw on the input line. Yeah, the one you plug into the computer. Then I remember early macs usb ports had poor shielding/buffering.
Anyway, It's like a year later and the g3 is still working fine, after blowing a final off the freaking mobo like 5 times.
I gave him a belkin powered/unpowered 4 port and have the culprit 4pt set aside for a practilce joke one day.
-=fshalor
pr0n related.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
On a trip home from Ontario, my brother fell alseep at the wheel and ended up rolling his car. His computer and monitor were flung from the car and he picked them up about 50 yards from where the car ended up. The case of the computer has a large dent in the bottom of it where it hit a rock, the case was all scratched up and had mud caked on it. The monitor was scratched, everywhere but the screen. He brought them to me to see what would need to be replaced in them to get them working again, and all I did was plug it in, and it is still working fine. The only problem was his ps2 port for his mouse was dead so now he uses a usb mouse.
..on my Amiga 1000 that developed a case of the "smacksies" - you had to smack it to get it it work. Apparently this was caused by a bad path on the circuitboard inside or something.
When the smacking failed to do the job, I had to get a little more creative. I found that if you bent the circuitboard on the back of the monitor at just such an angle you could get a display. This worked for a while and I just modded the case a little to push the board to that angle.
Eventually that failed as well, so I went for more extreme measures. After experimenting, I discovered that a piece of rope would hold the board at a better angle and allow the monitor to function. So I just tied a piece of rope from the top of the tube to the circuitboard and set the tension so that you could get a display.
By this time it was 1995, and my Amiga 1000 had seen better days. I sold the whole kit to a friend of mine for $30 or something (he just wanted dial-up BBS access). He finally got tired of the funky monitor and gave it the 20-gauge treatment.
SYS 64738
I did the ultimate overcock hack to my old 386 16MHz. I auctually unsoldered the crystal oscillator from the motherboard and put in a socket so I could easily interchange oscillators for overclocking.
I managed to get it runing stably up to 25MHz w/o a heatsink (didn't need serious cooling back in the day). My max was 30Mhz, but that required a passive heatsink.
That's double clocks! I'd like to see someone do that with a modern processor! Too bad I never tried this till I had a P120, and my 386 was uber obselete.
I used to smoke a lot (cut out cigarettes 2+ years ago!), and of course smoke doesn't mix well w/electronics.
So off and on I'd have CPU and exhaust fans slowly fill up with dust and crap from the smoke, in addition to normal household dust and such (was also a bachelor, so cleaning wasn't as important as it currently is with a live in GF), and eventually, I'd have meltdown city wherein a fan wouldn't be sufficient to cool the components down. And let me tell you, waking up to a CPU overheat alarm going off can be annoying!
My solutions were usually quick fixes, in that I always intended to go back and correctly repair the problem, but never seemed to get around to it.
My boss still laughs about how I had him over to demo a CMS I developed, and the box it was running off was leaning against my desk, with its case off, and a 12" floor fan blowing directly into it at high speed to keep everything cool enough to run.
Smoke's not good for a lot of things electronic, but I have to say I was always impressed with how much crap the components would take without too many problems. After awhile it was more an experiment to see how far I could push it, more than just me being lazy about cleaning.
Arguably, my CD burners and as of late, my DVD burners should have gone down first, but they always tended to outlast everything else, including the cheap CD-Roms I tend to use (Whatever's cheapest and over 36x is good enough for a Rom as far as I'm concerned).
Video cards with fans on seem to be one of the first things to go with a smoky/dusty environment. Also, you have to watch all fans to see how much their airflow is if they're starting to collect dust and crap. They might still spin freely with no noticable problems, but their air flow is greatly reduced once stuff starts to accumulate on their fins.
And CPU fans MUST be removed for cleaning regularly. CPU fans bearings seem to be one of the weakest links, as far as smoke/dust damage goes (they'll start squeaking and rattling, and eventually their bearings will be so gunked up you'll have to physically tap them to make them spin up), but the real problem is the dust and crap that accumulates below and around them in the heat sinks. It's just nasty!
Same goes for Power Supplies... They'll keep working fine, but they collect so much crap inside of them that vacumng won't even work. they have to be dissasembled to be thoroughly cleaned. If you don't, they'll eventually overheat, and you don't want a power supply exploding into sparks in a dust filled environment!
I was helping a farmer install a modem on his older hp computer. For some reason the modem wouldn't fit into PCI slot. The farmer, after inspecting the piece, decided to take it to his shop and grind down part of the board to get it to fit. It was so long ago that I don't remember if it worked, But it was really funny seeing someone take an angle grinder to a pci card.
Hello,
I know about a HP12C financial calcualtor that a zoo attendant forgot in the hipopotamus pen, got eaten, and after a couple of days and "proper" cleaning went back to it's owner in perfect working conditions!
cyrille
My friend and I stopped by the local pub for about two pints of Guinness. The bartender there happened to be the roomate and best friend of my ex-girlfriend (didn't part on good terms). She was pleasent, we had our two beers, and went home.
The next morning I woke up to find my monitor covered in water spots, the table a bit wet, and the keyboard... FULL OF PISS. My best guess is while sleepwalking, I must have confused the reflection on the screen with the reflection of the water in the toilet bowl.
Later I mentioned called up my friend, and after exchanging greetings, he said something like this:
...it was later determined that it wasn't water, it too was piss... and I think we were both drugged.
The result? The keyboard was shot, except for the "f" and "g" keys. The DVD player (Sony) dried out and continues to work years later
One time back in college I had an 80 MB SyQuest drive disk in my car. It was quite cold out (well below freezing), and I retrieved the disk from the car and brought it in to warm up before class started.
Of course about 5 minutes later I forgot I needed to let the disk warm up and slapped it into the drive. I heard a nasty scraping sound and immediately turned the drive off, and popped out the disk. Pulling back the shutter I could see a thin layer of ice on the platter, and a spiral carved into the ice from the drive head.
I let the disk properly warm up, and neither it nor the drive suffered any damage.
Then there was the time that someone I know was having trouble with his hard drive, so he took it apart. He didn't see anything wrong, but he had left some fingerprints on the shiny platters so he cleaned them off with Windex and sealed it shut again. Sadly, it did not survive the dissection.
A few years back (1998~1999), a friend of mine was building a new pc out of old components. We had gutted a Packard Bell for its floppy drive. When we first booted up the new pc, we had the drive sitting outside on the top of the pc where is was bare metal. It ended up bridging all the contacts on the bottom of the drive. Blue smoke started billowing out of the drive. We yanked the power cord thinking the drive was a goner. However, when we rebooted the computer, this time with the drive safely mounted, it worked just find and kept on "floppying". The drive is still in use to this day and has outlasted every other component in that machine. Who knew Packard Bell use quality parts in their machines?
After a party back in college, I awoke around noon to find my keyboard full of beer up to the lowest weep-hole on board. Being a starving student, I took it apart, peeled the layers apart, washed them, and made it work for another 2 years. Only problem was a key would stick occasionally, but the actual top physical part of the key (the part with the letter drawn on it) wasn't pressed downnnnnnnnnn
Ages ago, my first x86 type computer was a 286. My father works for the county government, and had gotten his hands on some old MFM hard drives that were being thrown out. They were 40 meg hard drives but I only had a 20 meg controller, so I installed it and was ready to go at 20 megs :(
Well, eventually the hard drive stopped working. It would spin up and then spin right back down. I was way too poor to just go buy another hard drive, so I took the HD case off and screwed around inside it for a while. I found two leads I could short across during the spin-up, and if I released them at the right time the HD stayed up!
Being poor and generally slovenly about such things, I just soldered wires to those two leads and hung the loose stripped ends of the wires out of the case. When I turned on the PC, I had to hold the wires together to get the HD to spin up properly. Then when it was up, I just let 'em go. It worked fine for as long as I used that machine.
I also had crammed the motherboard into the wrong kind of case (AT vs ATX? I don't remember for sure now) and I had to mutilate the mainboard power cable to get it to have the right pinout.
I have had a PDA for some time and would be lost without it.
After several years in the Navy, I went back to college, and I worked at my in-laws flower shop weekends and some summers to help both myslef as well as them.
I don't know how much you guys know about florist shops, but in the back there can be as much water as there is air.
I have tried many methods for carrying my PDA, but found the only one that I didn't break on a regular basis to be my shirt pocket. Well, I was leaning over to pick up a box that had three inches of water in it and...
After two days the PDA finally turned back on, but it hasn't been the same since. Among other things, I have to wipe the memory everytime I change the batteries, or it goes into some sort of power up loop. What's worse is this wasn't the first time that I did this.
This signiture copied from somewhere.
YEARS ago, we had an old IBM dot matrix printer that our cat would sleep next to (presumably because it was warm). One day we discovered that she had thrown up a freaking hairball...INTO the printer. It had fallen down onto the circuit boards, so we cleaned it out with q-tips as best we could. We managed to get most of it out and the printer worked fine until we upgraded to ink jet years later.
Sadly, not all USB is hot-swappable. We use NI-GPIB-USB cards here. If you try to unplug the card while it's running, you get the lovely smell of something burning as well as the knowledge that you've lost another $500 card... We learned pretty quickly, but we're still working on our clients. As for the person commenting on their computer being bulletproof, some of ours are. ^_^ Well, actually it's more the hardened cases on the laptops that are required to survive being driven over by a tank, but I suspect bullets may not do much more damage.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I physically abused my Blue and White G3 Tower. Apparently the plastic on it is not "bullet proof", as repeated punches to the side panel caused it to shatter. It didn't hurt or help the crashes.
Then there was the time my L3 cache went on a dual 800 processor module. Soldering wasn't helping as the capacitors kept falling off like they were trying to get away.
Apparently a dremel with a metal-oxide cutting wheel grinding the cache down until the bare copper of the circuit board is exposed does not fix that problem.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
And by bus, I mean one of those big vehicle type things, with wheels.
:/
Mid 90's, the company I was working for was having a recruitment push, which involved several of us developers moving our dev machines onto a converted bus, which was then driven to the local university. The idea was that we'd do some work, show the students what we do, ply them with free beer and convince them that ours was a good career choice.
Unfortunately, the only place we could park was next to the psychology department - the furthest point on the campus from the computing dept. As a result, 99% of the people we managed to coax onto the bus were only interested in the beer.
Anyway, the whole day was finished off nicely when the driver turned off the generator. For some reason this must have created an almighty power surge. My Mac Quadra, sitting underneath one of the tables, even though it was turned off, suddenly sounded like a deep fat frier, accompanied by a large plume of smoke. We yanked the power cord, but the damage had been done. Fortunately, the hard drive was fine, and we were able to swap this into a spare machine. I know at least the PSU was destroyed, but I can't recall if the motherboard had survived.
I think the only thing we achieved with this recruitment drive was a small section in the local paper saying how a local firm was attempting to recruit students with free beer.
I was once "dusting" off my computer with some cheap radio shack air duster stuff, and when you turn it upside down it shoots out freezing cold vapor that is very fun to play with. Little did I know how flammable that vapor was. I was spraying it all over my motherboard and inside everything, while my computer was on, when I accidentally bumped some power connector in the wrong way and it made a little spark, but it was enough to burst my entire motherboard into flames for half a second, and singe off part of my eyebrows too. And of course my computer stayed on the whole time!
Matt
Every computer in the house was plugged into surge protectors, so when lightning hit the tree out front I wasn't too worried. The TV got a little green and purple and the subwoofer popped a fuse because they were both plugged directly into the wall, but everything else seemed OK--until I noticed that the internet was broken. It turned out that one hub was not plugged into a surge protector, and every ethernet card in the house had to be replaced, even ones not plugged directly into that particular hub. At least I discovered that surge protectors work when you use them. And (surprise!) ethernet cables conduct electricity.
When installing new heat shrinks on my power supply i guess i got the wires too hot because they melted together which resulted in my power supply spitting a 6 inch spark towards me when I turned the bastard on. I thought it fried every component I had, but I stuck a new 500W in there and the board and everything ran fine.
I have also left both an IPOD and a Cell phone in the middle of the pouring rain on top of my car and both ran fine. Interesting enough my old 1g ipod actually ran better after the dousing.
When I was in high school my dad brought home an old MAC (clone?) that he had found out in the scrap yard. The power supply was missing the cord and bird had pooped on it. A wash in the sink and some light soldering later I had a machine capable of programming BASIC. Score!
I was working as a consultant and had to take a trip out of town to setup a system. I put all the software on a SyQuest drive (made two copies), and since this was a SCSI drive, took my drive and SCSI card along with me. When I came home, I threw my dirty clothes in the washer, then dried them. When I took them out of the dryer, I found the SCSI card, sans the firmware chip. I stuck my head in the dryer with a flashlight, and found the chip stuck to the drum.
Straightened the pins on the chip, plugged it back into the card, put the card in my system, and "viola!", everything worked fine!
Here's a hint: When designing racks, mount all PCBs vertically so mud and debris falls off rather than sitting on top.
One day a good friend asked me how he could get his computer fried so he could send it to the insurance company to get a new one. Me being the good friend, I told him it's possible and how. I left and later asked him about it. As directed, he had plugged in a bare 3-prong plug and touch the hot end to his motherboard. Needless to say it burned a hole right through it. He sent the PC in and got a new one right away.
I'm really curious as to how you could've done this when you were only 2.
I lit a 486 on fire once. It kept running for about a minute before it gave out.
about 8 of them we remodelled:
Drill pin X away from connection (0.1 mm margin)
Solder wire on it to connect another pin to socket A
Remove some plastic from the connection socket to prevent the soldered part from breaking off while inserting the processor
Do the same for the next processor
And all on day on of the not anymore applicable warranty (-:
That is how you made a dual processor machine in 1996/7
We modded 8 procs this way, none failed yet!
I know someone who managed to completely salvage a computer after a soft dring was spilled into it WHILE IT WAS RUNNING.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I work for an industrial computer manufacturer and we have this single board computer that got into a speedboat for telemetry.
For sure, the boat had to take a wave the wrong way and, you've all seen what happens then, the boat cas desintegrated before anyone had the time to sat "WOW". Divers managed to get the computer back to the surface and to everyone disbelief, once dried up the almighty 286 SBC booted up !!!
Once worked for a company where they bragged that there server has been up for 10 years. So one of the first things I did was restart it for the first time ever.... I did, and it died.
also, in the 5inch floppy days, I would fold the floppy in half, then half again, so that it was in quarters, severely creasing the floppy, and it would still work....
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
One time at work one of our IT guys stopped by my desk to give me a RAM upgrade so I could run Dynamo without bogging down my machine. He forgot to power down and unplug my machine, so he just opened up the box and popped the stick of RAM into the mobo while the machine was running. We both realized what he did then we started cracking up. Power down and power up again and, whaddyaknow, it worked!
This may not qualify as abuse, but it's worth telling: the Papa John's Pizza Box Print Server.
A bunch of geek friends and I shared an apartment for a while. One day we realized we needed a print server for a project we were working on. We had all the parts, but no case.
Someone took a Papa John's pizza box, put the motherboard inside, closed the lid, and cut a bunch of slots for cards to stick up out of and small holes for the keyboard, mouse and other cables. The power supply sat on top of the box as well. We plugged it in and it ran on the kitchen counter for at least a couple of weeks. Great conversation piece.
Don't spill the beer on the server took on a whole new meaning.
1. I had the case open while working on it with the power on.
2. I had the second drive cable attached to the mother board but not to a drive, hanging over the side of the case to keep it out of the way.
3. I was reaching over to get the working drive and move it.
That's when I nudged the loose drive cable. It flopped back into the case and landed right on top of an an open expansion slot. It must have aligned a power line in the slot with a power line in the drive cable, because when it hit, there was a massive spark. The lights went out in the appartment. It had blown a fuse.
So, after much tounglashing and laughing, we went and reset the fuse in the fusebox. I then started up the machine again, and it booted, came right up. I didn't actually test the affected slot or the second drive cable/controller. They may have been toast. But the rest worked fine.
It's nice to know that a PC motherboard could take more than enough to blow a house fuse and still work. I doubt a modern board could do that.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Ages ago I worked in a 2 story datacenter, where the first floor was full of equipment and all of us operators really avoided going down there most times.
So one night facilties had a crew pouring pink epoxy into cracks in the second floor concrete slab to "seal" them and prevent dust from being generated.
So this one crack is taking an awefully large amount of epoxy to seal. Perhaps that could be construed as a sign of trouble? Nah. Instead the security guard, who had just made his rounds through the first floor machine room, was a much better sign of trouble when he ran in yelling for them to stop immediately!
So we all went downstairs to find pink epoxy-sickles (epoxy-tites?) hanging from a sagging ceiling tile, and dripping into...
...a still working Liebert power distribution unit which was feeding a mainframe with 440 volt goodness. Almost as impressive as the epoxy-sickles was the 5 foot diameter puddle of epoxy on the floor under the PDU, and the equally sized puddle on the concrete slab under the raised floor under the pdu.
The only thing more impressive than the sight of a PDU with pink epoxy oozeing over live circuit breakers and such was the unbelievable shade of red the facilities manager turned when he was screaming at the crew about their newly unemployed status.
I managed to power up a PC several times with the CPU (which was a slot, not a socket) not all the way inserted. Even after having found my mistake and then fully inserting the CPU, it still worked!
Many years ago I was working at a help desk for a major retailer. All of the terminals in our stores were IBM 3151's that weighed about 50 pounds and looked like a mailbox with an 8" screen on one end. At least once a day we'd get a call from a store to report a broken "lookup terminal". Our answer to this was to go unplug the thing, pick it up about 5" off the counter, then let go. This almost always worked. Why? The cards would work loose, and dropping the thing reseated them! The drop wouldn't hurt the rest of the thing because IBM seemingly made them to withstand a thermonuclear war back then. Ah, the good old days....
I was fixing my tiny little E Machines Etower 500is, while sitting on the carpeted floor scooting around. When I turned on a giant spark flew out the back of the PS and it left the faint smell of smoke. I reset the breaker in the basement and turned the computer on. It's been a few months and it still works just fine.
Ooh, do I have a good one for this thread!
:)
Back in the late '70s I was stationed on a guided missile destroyer (DDG class) in Pearl Harbor. I checked in just as the ship was preparing to go into the yards after a long Indian Ocean/WestPac deployment. She was overdue for a major overhaul by about 18 months. Since DDGs were supposed to be on 12 month maintenance cycle, you can imagine just how close to riding on the ragged edge a lot of the systems on board were.
Well, I was assigned to the electronic tech comm group (ETN) and told that I was taking over the UHF and HF radios from a guy who had left the ship about six weeks before I got on board. The ship had 4 HF transmitters, 2 100W and 2 1KW, 4 HF receivers, and a bank of 8 UHF transceivers. The UHF tranceivers were in pretty good shape, as there was still a guy assigned to them who had been doing most of the work. The HF receivers were sorta OK. The HF transmitters, OTOH, was a complete mess. I found to my (literal!) pain that mixing high powered electronics with an incompetent tech is a really, really bad idea.
Not knowing exactly where to start, I picked one of the 100W transmitters at random and dove in. I found 13 problems in 11 days. I should have known that I was in serious trouble when I closed it up to take it over to MOTU-9 (MObile Technical Unit number 9, a support facility full of senior techs), then couldn't get it re-opened when I got it on their bench. It turned out that the slide rails had been completely trashed somewhere along the line and the previous tech hadn't bothered to order replacements. Instead he had just let it sit partially open. After about 3 weeks I still didn't have it completely up to snuff. At least it would transmit on a portion of its designed frequency range.
The second 100W transmitter turned out to be in somewhat better shape. It would at least transmit across its assigned spectrum, but it had far more in the way of reflected power than it should have had. I finally figured out that he had damaged the antenna jack somehow. Considering that those things are almost impossible to put on wrong, I don't know how he managed it. In any case, after running so long with that much RF bouncing through the circuitry, the entire output amplifier was always iffy. I never did get it all the way back up to full strength.
The first 1KW amplifier was dead, dead, dead. That one turned out to be a simple fix, though. I just had to replace the last stage output tube and some burned out control circuitry from when the output tube had shorted across a couple of its plates.
The last 1KW amplifier was the worst. It had a habit of going from full strength power to off as the ship rolled, then back on again. When I pulled the power supply apart, I found that he had replaced all four diodes in the full wave rectifier. Not such a problem, except that most of the leads leading to the rectifier on the board had burned away when the rectifier burned up. Rather than lay down some new ones, he had simply threaded the leads of each diode through their holes, folded the legs down to touch the unburned part of the leads, AND HAD NOT BOTHERED TO SOLDER THEM DOWN!!!!
Every time the ship would roll, the diodes would shift enough to break contact, then reconnect. The truly amazing part is that he didn't start a fire in the comm shack from all the sparks in that power supply.
It says a lot about how well built that comm gear was built that even after all of that abuse, I was able to keep at least some HF transmitting capability up at all until we made into the yards. Granted, most of the time I was busier than a one armed paper hanger.
We went out 3 times before we went into the yards on training exercises. The exercises were in Hawaiian waters, and lasted 3 days, 3 days, and a week. I actually had 8 hours at the start of the week's cruise where I had every piece of hardware assigned to me up and operational at the same time. After two months straigh
PII 450 Linux router/firewall...
:)
The CPU fan was missing the clip to go attach itself to the cpu. I duct taped it a over 1.5 years ago and have not had one failure...
Amen, I still use old AT clickity clack keyboards too. Every other keyboard seems like a toy and doesn't really seem like it's something I can actuaslly use to do my job, at least efficiently.
They cost big to get. I have one here on my desk that WILL NOT DIE and two spares in the barn. This one cost me $5 from a thrift store and the ones in the barn were free from one of those small country computer stores. "You want THOSE? Just take them".
If I could make it work with a mac I'd be a happy camper. Yes, I said the M word... after two decades of railing against all things Apple somebody gave me an OSX iMac and I couldn't be more impressed. PC hardware is now on the endangered list here... but I am gonna miss my keyboard terribly.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Took the same system to yellowstone... worked great right next to some huge guysers. (why did I think it would be smart to weak tevas there?)
yellowstone operation photos
Took a laptop to antarctica. Tried to download data from a remote outdoor station during a blowing ice store. After a half hour, the powersupply died, but after getting a new powersupply it worked great.
We took an SGI Indy to the remote Arizona desert and the high Chilean desert. That's when we realized that optical mice rule. The mechanical ones freak out. You do have to remember to dump out the sand from the computer every couple of days.
Last one... on board embedded computer on an ROV in lake tahoe... flooded the first day there. One night with a hair drier and the next day it worked more reliably than before the flooding. No troubles with the Amiga 1000 control station setup on a chair on the beach.
Hope those were entertaining :)
NO. Sorry to shout, but I had to play safety-nazi on this one having seen the aftermath. It's actually easier to do yourself serious damage with DC than AC, and HV DC is very scary indeed. First off, as noted above there's a point around 600V where, despite the skin's apparently high resistance, it gives in like a diode breakdown and the current punches through the hard, horny outer dermis that is so resistive. Inside you are a nice squishy bag of saline solution, with very little resistance... Think about the old demo of cooking wieners with two nails and wall current.
Second major issue is that DC causes sustained muscle contraction so you grip involuntarily. AC changes direction, causing muscle contractions in sympathy with line frequency which gives you some chance of letting go/pushing clear. DC gives you no such option, and the effect is noticeable at quite low currents. Very, very dangerous.
Google for more info, but DC is not remotely 'safe'. If you must play with HV DC - anything over 50v basically, let alone valve (tube) amps - treat it like it will bite. Keep one hand behind your back, let someone watch within reach of the breaker, and use current limiting whenever possible.
I was working with an electrical company at the time, but we were quoting to replace some of the PCs and control gear in a brick refractory. This is a really harsh environment; acids, brickdust, high temperatures. The factory floor PC was in a small office in the side room, and when they showed it to me;
"I'm not touching it"
"Why not?"
"Well, I can see that it's embedded in roughly 1/2 inch of brick dust, and it appears to be a standard desktop. There's no way I'm going to be responsible for the thing falling over. I'm surprised it's still running."
The quotation included a full environmental system for the replacement PC, and they decided not to buy, but I did hear from the guy that eventually replaced it. Apparently the bottom of the case had corroded to the floor, meaning that they had to kick it to remove the machine, and the inside was _choked_ with dust. There was discolouration on all the components and they were as amazed as I was it was still working.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
The big iron z/OS (formally S/390) machines are supposed to be even beefier. They have the ability to virtualize a processor if one becomes damaged instantly.
I once shorted A8 and A9 on an old Speccy 48, trying to rig it up to a homemade lighting controller using an expansion card originally meant for a ZX81 {and hence requiring much crosswiring and bodging since the edge connectors were very different ..... ZX81 had the lines in the kind of order you would expect them to be, Spectrum had them in the order they could get them out in .....} I had mounted the expansion card in a metal project box with a 37-pin DIN connector on the front and a length of ribbon cable to the edge connector. The poor little Sinclair crashed at once; but amazingly, it worked again once I removed the short. I eventually had to abandon the lighting controller project due to the fact that it wiped out MW radios for three streets around ..... Had it succeeded, I would have burned my program to a 27128 and patched out some of the Spectrum's RAM, so the controller could have run tapeless.
..... using a resistor of 470 kOhms in series, to limit the current just under 0.5mA, and a 4V7 zener across the input ..... It worked like a charm, but it gave me the willies every time I thought about it, so I ended up doing it properly with an opto-isolator. Then I had to re-write my software, since of course this was now pulling low when the mains was on.
I have also had great luck with plugging and unplugging 8-bit expansion cards from old-style 286 PC motherboards. As long as you line the card up well, and it isn't trying to draw more than a few milliamps, it doesn't seem to cause a problem. These were simple logic I/O cards using low-power 74HC TTL chips, so there was not much to go wrong.
And I once fed mains into one of those cards
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
When I was a kid, I had an old Amstrad. My step mother threw water at me while I was on the computer and a large amount of it found it's way in to the keyboard. The keyboard was non-standard and I was only 14, so I had no way to get a new one. The keyboard didn't have individual buttons for the keys, instead it had one of those two plastic sheets sandwiched together. Well, the water ruined that, so I got another keyboard, ripped out the PCB from the amstrad and put it in the new one. Then I individually wired each button on the new keyboard to replicate the connections on the plastic thing from the Amstrad. It was a mess, but it eventually worked -- mostly. Some of the keys, including the double quote didn't work. Needless to say, you couldn't program without that, so I became really fast at entering ALT+keycode sequences.
I had two computers at home. When I bought a GeForce 4 Ti4600 to put in the fast one, I took out the GeForce 4 Ti4200 it had previously contained and put it in the slow one.
Now here's the thing: this was winter, and I left both computers running all the time. But I mostly used the fast one, and the slow one (usually) sat there with the monitor off.
Shortly after installing the Ti4200, I set it up with a serious overclock. It didn't really occur to me that the card might run kind of hot like that if I left it running continuously for a few months.
So a few months later, I was working away on the other computer when I heard a POP and saw a flash of blue smoke come pouring out the back of the computer, combined with a nasty plastic-on-fire smell.
I immediately powered everything off and opened a window.
I got the case open and studied the damage--the Ti4200 was blackened and two of the larger caps were missing. Nearby components looked melted. It was toast, but the rest of the PC was fine.
In 1994 i've blown a Soundblaster Pro by accidentally shorting pins in the mainboards ISA slot. The mainboard and videocard died beyond repair.
But it turned out that the soundcard's bus interface (a 74LS245 chip) was the victim. The original was a surface mount (SOIC) IC, and as replacement I had only a DIP version of it. So I had to wire the chip's pins one by one to the PCB, and to glue the chip's shell to the PCB also.
The card worked perfectly until retirement time.
I was trying to run some cat 5 cable through a wall from my bedroom to my new office. I thought I had a good idea as to where the bit would come out, as the drill bit was super long. Boy was I ever wrong. I drilled through, then confused, I went back around to see where the drill bit came out, and there wasn't a sign of it. Back and forth I went searching, till I realized my measurements were off by a few feet. That's right. Feet. I found the drill bit (which happened to have the same circumference as say... two RJ45's and a Coax taped together) had ripped clean through my brand new video projector. Christ, was I ever pissed. The projector still works - it seems the new vent hole I put in the top of it hasn't slowed it down a bit.
Man, that's like some sort of bizarre, dark geek action flick. Perpetrator breaks in, beats geek with hammer (see his other posts for more details) and steals all his valuables.
The helpless geek can do nothing until his calculator is stolen, which is CROSSING THE LINE for a true nerd. Enraged and empowered by having a reason to fight, the geek fights back, killing the calculator-kidnapper, but in a horrible twist, discovers he has shot the very thing he was trying to save.
Fortunately, due to the heroic engineering efforts of TI, the calculator pulls through, leaving the geek and his arithmetical love to live happily ever after.
In the late 80s, I was mucking around with an old IBM PC XT computer - my family's first computer. We had two newer PCs in the house, but I was playing around and I thought I'd steal some parts.
:) It continued to work while I tinkered with it for a few months, until I stole the power supply for another project and retired the box for good.
While carrying the (heavy) case down the stairs to our basement, I slipped, and the case rolled down the stairs (thunk Thunk THUNK!) and landed at the bottom, a concrete floor.
Sure, I wasn't TOO worried because the machine wasn't valuable, but I was curious. The case had a few dents, but the machine booted fine, and shockingly enough, when I ran Norton Disk Doctor the monstrous 20MB hard drive in it (full-height, of course) didn't have a *single* bad sector! Good thing I parked the heads before I turned it off last, I guess
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
When I was real little, I had a Speak and Spell. :), but that little episode caused me many :|
One time, I was playing with it when the batteries
ran down. It started crackling, and in a very high, very evil voice, it started going
"ELF! ELF! E! E! E! E!". The display also became
erratic. I tried to shut the thing off, but it
wouldn't (soft power), and the battery case was
child resistant. So I freaked out and chucked the
thing accross the room *hard*. Amazingly, it worked fine aftwerards (with new batteries, of course
nights of staying awake , terrified
I got shocked by trying to reinsert some faulty spark plug cables while the engine was running. Dumb thing to do. ~12000 volts do make a point.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
A friend of mine sold me a Athlon 750. After I got it, I bought a MOBO off of eBay and when I got it, surprise! No clips to hook the chip too (the slot was there, just nothing to clip to). So I took some rubber bands, ran them through the holes on the MOBO and looped them around the chip package. And it works fine, never had any probs..
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
A friend of mine once rigged a Braun waterpick (you know those water things that you use to floss your teeth) to water cool a Pentium 1st gen. He got it up to about 256 Mhz from 100Mhz. He basically just used the water pick as a pump and he epoxied tubing to a piece of plastic that just happened to fit perfectly over the heatsink. It ran fine for a few days until his roommate decided to try to get a little more umph out of it by dumping ice into the water storage tankof the water pick. Needless to say the condensation burned out the motherboard after about 5 minutes of running.
I once took a motherboard and mounted it on the back of a toy truck, wedged in some playdough so that it would hold, then draped some twine over it like ropes to make it look like a government sci-fi transport convoy. I don't have a picture of that, sorry. One time my friend and I crudely squished the motherboard, hard drive, and cdrom inside of a castle greyskull playset. On both of those casemods I had to underclock the processor because of heat issues.
When I was building the GPS receiver module for the 'Techmobile,' I was working with an old Trimble six-channel unit that was originally part of a system they made for the military. Said receiver was built into a very nice machined-aluminum housing, designed explicitly for mobile use, and I really wanted to make use of at least the housing and its connectors.
I ended up doing a little more than that, as the web page mentions. There were two original circuit boards inside the Trimble receiver, one for the power supply side and the second for the actual receiver and logic. It took me about two hours to literally slice all the original PLCC surface-mount chips off the old board, clip off some through-hole components, drill mounting holes for the new board, and get everything mounted. In essence, the old board became nothing more than a physical substrate to mount the new module.
Since the upper board had such a nice, heavily-filtered, ready-made DC/DC converter on it (9-32V in, 5V out), I wanted to use it. The challenge I faced was to cut enough traces to isolate the converter's output side from the original circuitry (which was now presenting a solid short, thanks to the mounting screws punched through a four-layer PC board), but not enough to disable it.
The challenge was met, and the new receiver still works like a champ. In fact, last year, I upgraded the original GPS-25 module to a WAAS-enabled module, the GPS-15LV.
Like I said in the 'Subject' line: I'm not sure if this counts as "abuse" or simply "modification" (probably a bit of both), but I had fun doing it.
73 de KC7GR
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I went back to sleep and when I woke up I heard the sound of the phone being off the hook. It turns out the relay on my modem had blown. Everything worked except that whenever I had to use the net I had to manually put the rj11 in the jack before dialing as the line was picked up immediately.
Also on an A7V mobo, got home after a lightning storm and the PC would no longer boot. removed the jumper for the onboard audio and everything was fine... except that I only had one audio card now :(
I remember seing a Quick-time video in the '90's (it was B&W and only 15 FPS, which my Mac SE30 would JUST barely playback)Of some guys who were trying to market a re-configurable fault tolerent computer system to venture capitolists. The machine was based on Motororla 68030s and had something like 256 of them. It ran a 'Nix of some sort and the demo was this:
Machine sitting accross the room (garage) from the terminal, guy at terminal logs-in, starts an X term session, launches a fractal rendering program. Meanwhile guy on the other side of the room picks up a sledgehammer and procedes to beat the living piss out of the box, it was almost flat before the thing died. Little peices of circuit board were flying every where, there was smoke and electrical arcs and "zizzing" noises. I don't know if it was real or not, but if it was that's got to be some sort of record.
I am the head technician at a company that refurbishes computer equipment. I have seen everything you can imagine. My two personal favorites are:
A system was donated to us, but left outside our door all weekend. The induhvidual decided he didn't have to come during business hours. Anyway, it rained all weekend, and I mean it rained. Now this person was polite enough leave everything in a blue plastic recycling box for us (which happened to be in front of the door too) which happened to be below a major rain run off. This box nearly filled with water. We arrive to find a computer system fully submerged in icky rain water. Out of perverse interest we dumped out the water, and let it dry for a couple of days. The damn thing still worked, worked perfect actually. Even the floppy drive still worked.
The second story involves some of the more odd things we do around my shop when we're bored. The odd time we like to pick one system and do evil things to it. One day we decided it would be funny to wire together 3 power supplies in series and then connect them to 3 motherboards, also in series. God only knows why we did this, bordom I suppose. Regardless it smoked, wires melted, and flames came out of one of the supplies. All 3 boards had large scorch marks on them. Well I'll be damned if 2 of the 3 boards didn't still work. It was rather funny.
My parents had bought me a new sound card for my 16th birthday. I was in the process of installing it when my little brother came by to watch and accidentally dropped his entire plate of cake and ice cream into the open case. After totally freaking out and yelling at him, I cleaned out as much as I could, removed the motherboard and ISA cards, wiped them clean, and let it sit overnight. The next morning I put it all back together and it worked fine. I used the computer for several more years afterward.
In the cube next to me I saw an engineer apply 120v in to the DataHighway port of a AB SLC 5/04 PLC.
When the snap, crackle, and poof was quickly over, he looked up at us and said:
"You know when you let the smoke out of these magic devices they stop working."
I had an old Dell machine that I was trying to get back up and running. it wouldn't boot so i was going to reseat the ram and the cpu. well i apparently didn't hold down the power button long enough for the system to go down. i unplugged the cpu and stuck it back in. then i realized the fan in the power supply was still running and about shit my pants. turned it off and back on and it powered right up. i though for sure i would have shorted something. especially in a component that is typically not very tolerant to adverse conditions.
"...if you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed..." -Homer
We've dropped them out the backs of trucks, let the innards of 286s fill with desert sand, etc., and had them still work. I'm sure some soldier out there has had his PC shot by now.
Fsck, I thought.
There was a huge crack in the bottom near the memory expansion slot, the slot cover had been detached and the 3.5 drive was pretty much naked.
Needless to say, everything was working, including the disk ejection button that had been popped out.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Back when I was a tech trainee at a local computer shop, I was asked to repair a PC that would no longer power on. This, mind you, was in the days when power switches actually switched power, not just initiated "soft" power sequences.
I plugged it in, hit the switch --- gooshy. Ick. Dead switch.
So, I crack the case open, yank the switch, and begin to install a replacement. I failed to notice, though, that I hadn't unplugged the power supply from the wall. As I'm about to hook up the last lead to the new switch, a nice bright arc jumps from the lead to the grounded case. Lots of smoke, and a nice little black-and-lumpy line that looked like someone took a tiny arcwelder to the case.
Unplugged the power supply, attached the switch, bolted it all back together -- works beautifully. Sigh of relief heaved.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
This is the best post I've read so far, just because I had several C64s and I think this is a great hardware hack.
I was making cookies, and I needed two sticks of butter "softened." I decided to put them on top of my CRT for a couple minutes, because that is usually pretty warm. Then I got distracted for about an hour. When I realized what had happened, I checked my monitor, and both sticks had completely melted and dripped through the cooling grates on the top. There was a puddle beneath the monitor and a bizarre smell coming from the boards inside. Mmmmm high voltage capacitors covered with butter.
I was actually excited because I had been looking for a good reason to upgrade to an LCD. But it kept working. Every day, I would wipe up the new puddle and it would continue to work. Eventually the puddles stopped.
7 year old gateway Vivitron... Still working... Still mocking me.
Back in 1973 I worked for T.I. as a calculator design engineer. The manager of the consumer division had a final test for new models that consisted of him throwing the prototype against the brick wall by his desk and allowing it to fall to the tile floor below. Dents and scratches were OK, but the case had to stay intact and the unit had to work. We made sure that we ran a similar test well before the prototype got in his hands.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
That E.T. trike is dope
After ordering his replacement a couple of us went over to the area that had our hardware lab and tried to figure out how to open that card without destroying it and we never did find a way. How that engineer not only opened but soldered it I would love to know!
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
I used to be notorious for spilling stuff on my keyboard. Five years ago I went 'over' to natural keyboards, and bought Microsoft's one for about $65 (they aren't that much cheaper here even now - UK). Within a few weeks I'd dropped something in it and it busted so I went out and bought another one. A few weeks later, I spilled some coke in there.
Sick of dropping $65 a go, I decided to try and fix it. Turns out Microsoft keyboards are dead easy to fix. Just wash down all the plastic sheets inside, dry them off, and throw it back together.
I've now had this keyboard over four years, and have repaired it about six times, it's had pints of coke, water, orange juice, and all sorts gone through it.. and it still keeps on marching. The space bar isn't as perfect as it was, and I removed the caps lock/num lock lights, but otherwise it's great. I've been looking for a new one, but my favourite retailer doesn't do them in USB form, except for a wireless version (which I don't want).
I accidentally left my 802.11B Symbol Compact Flash card in a shirt pocket once and only realised while I was removing my washing from the machine and it clattered to the ground. I'd only just bought it too.
Left it on the radiator for a week or two and it worked fine.
Just about 2 years ago on the dot, I was in Calculus I when a massive thunderstorm broke. I remembered I left my window open...and I'd been doing work on my computer and it was sitting in front of said window. Well, I got back and it was kinda dry except for the one thing that stuck out the most from the mobo: the video card (an all in wonder 32mb pre-radeon edition *sniff*), which was totally drenched. Needless to say, it was displaying random snow and lines on my screen. I took it out, dried it off with a towel and tossed it on my bed. After letting it dry for a day or so, I decided to try it and lo and behold, it worked! Sorta. I picked up my ti4200 about a week later :)
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
I once decided to "mod" my case with a .22 and a couple of .45s. After the system was reassembled complete with bullet holes, a guy actually asked me, "Was your computer inside the case when you shot it?"
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Once I bought an AS400 off ebay. The thing had to weigh like 800 lbs.
On attempt to move it into my basement, it tilted, smacked me in the head, knocked me to the bottom of the stairs and flew down after me.
Luckily one of the friends I had helping me was a REALLY BIG GUY, and he ended up catching the beast right before it landed on me. (he was bright red, with his back up against one of my house supports, but he stopped it)
Probably saved my life.
Anyhow, I never booted up the entire AS400. I really wanted it for parts. (hey I'm a geek, I like messing with things)
Everything I ever took out of that box worked just fine. (Hard Drives, fans, CPU boards I resold, etc).
Those things can take a serious beating.
- Hotplugged IDE HDDs and CD-ROMs. Works only under certain conditions, but the hardware always survived
- Put a Pentium 100 CPU on a chair and someone sat on it
- Inserted a Pentium 200 MMX a in non-MMX Pentium motherboard (the voltages are different). The P200 MMX worked @133 MHz and survived.
- Overclocked the AGP bus @100 MHz
- Dropped a 60GB HDD from a ~ 1 meter height. HDD intact, no data lost (wouldn't try it again, though)
I hate sigs
I do not know if this is true:
.....
Some Marines on a ship were told to "Bolt down a computer system"
They used one large lag bolt through the CPU case....
The machine simply didn't care.
It wasn't that the BIOS was shadowed or anything... It's just that nothing in the BIOS is referenced. Physically pried it out of the socket with a butter knife during a local LUG meeting. Much to everyone's oohs and ahhhs, the box continued compiling a kernel without any problem.
I dropped a wire-stripped 12 Volt lead from my running computer's power supply into the exposed chassis (I had taken the cover off and stripped and extended the wire to try to power a car stereo so I could fix it. heh). it fell on top of my huge 5.25" hard drive that had an exposed circuit board and after the power supply's circuit blew and I turned it back on, HD wouldn't boot. Got a new drive off eBay that was the same model, swapped the little circuit boards, and got my data back!
Heard this one from a hardware tech I once took a class with, back in the day. My job at the time involved working with a high-end standalone rackmount graphics processor, so my company had me go to a class to learn how to maintain the hardware.
Anyway, the guy says that he got this call from a helicopter manufacturer who was using his product for a glass cockpit in their latest chopper model. It seems that under certain conditions the processor would do a hard reset, leaving the pilot without instruments. Since this was a prototype, the pilot had standard instrumentation as well as the digital on-screen ones, so there was no real danger, but still the company wanted to know why the device was failing.
To make a long story short, they ran every remote diagnostic they could without coming to a solution, so the company sent the tech to the chopper plant to have a look. The chopper guys took the guy out to the prototype, and the tech's jaw fell to the ground when he realized that the chopper guys had bolted the processor into a pod on the bottom of the helicopter - And this was a rackmount unit meant for a machine room - Not for the vibration or dust of a chopper on a runway!
After a couple of test flights they figure out the problem. Above a certain airspeed, the air pressure was high enough to physically push in the reset button on the back of the processor. After he got them to install a rackmount in the cockpit, all of their problems went away.
Yeah, I know it sounds like Snopes bait, but the guy seemed otherwise reliable, and swore it was a true story.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
Last year on Hawaiian Shirt Day, I was attempting to print out my TPS reports (with the new cover sheets) when the printer displayed a message saying "PC Load Letter"
We gave that printer the beatdown it deserved - and Lumberg never noticed!
One was mine, when I was new to the Apple II. Irritatingly, a program locked up and the disk drive's access light remained on for several minutes! My solution was to yank the disk controller card out of slot 6 and plug it into slot 7, hoping this would stop the disk access and unfreeze the computer. Some funny text characters appeared in a few different places on the screen. "That's odd," I said, then removed the controller card from slot 7 and plugged it back into slot 6. Still nothing. I think some of the random characters on the screen started flashing. I gave up and rebooted the computer, which kept working fine, not to my surprise -- why on earth would it not work perfectly fine?
The other story is thirdhand: in Softalk Magazine, I recall a wonderful abuse story of this kind from a fellow whose house was flooded with mud. After dealing with all the things that are important in life, he retreived all his 5.25" floppy disks, put them on the lawn, and *hosed them off* with a garden hose. He reported that only about 30% of the disks had disk errors.
Closer to home, I have a keyboard that still functions after numerous fizzy, sugar-loaded beverages have been spilled into it. Some keys need to be pounded a little harder than normal, but I'm not replacing it until my son either: 1)develops better hand-to-mouth coordination while playing Quidditch; or 2)finally lets all the magic smoke out...
Back in that day calculators were a lot more complex and used heavy ni-cad batteries with lots of mass to contend with when exposed to high-G situations. The original TI-2500 "Datamath" basic 4 fundtion calculator had three circuit boards in it with a lot of interconnecting wiring. There was simply a lot more to go wrong with it than the very simple, highly integrated, designs nowadays. BTW, I still have some of the calculators from that era in working condition.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
The Baked Apple?
Remarkably, it still works.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
All pretty minor, but:
1) I have an old 486DX2/66 that I inherited when my parents upgraded. It worked as my primary computer for a few years, and happily withstood my inept hardware hacking attempts. Once, after installing a new CD-ROM, that involved removing the IDE controller board, I fired the thing back up, to be met with a few beeps and 'IO Controller Failure Error', and a waft of Magic Smoke. Turned it off and looked around inside. I found that I hadn't pushed the IDE board all the way back in, so some pins where where they should be, some were crossing a couple of mobo pins, and the remainder were in free space. Took it out, put it back in and tried again, same error. So I took the board right out, looked it over, and found a half charred/half blue electrolytic cap, fortunately I was able to read the rating. So I trimmed it off, leaving the leads on the board as long as possible. Found a similar one in my junk box, only with an order of magnitude higher rating, and soldered it in. This time the machine booted. After that, it gave me about a half-dozen errors again, and since then has been running perfectly (relegated to on-again/off-again firewall duty).
2) Same 486, flat BIOS battery. This had the ones that are about as wide as an AA battery, but about a third the length. So I go to take the current one out, and it looks like it is simply held in by pressure from the two contacts. Slide a screwdriver under and twist. *pop*, one end of the battery comes off the mobo. Turns out that the contact is part of the battery, and it is soldered on the board. Luckily, the join broke cleanly and didn't take a chunk out of the mobo, so replacing it was easy.
...which puts both 120V and 240V firmly in the lethal current range. Good choice.
If we ran our mains at a couple of kilohertz and I think about 700V (and UHT DC for long distances), not only would transformers and such be lots smaller but the risk of death from electric shock would be minimal. 700V is high enough to take it out of the danger zone for muscular control, and a little short of burn damage; the couple of kilohertz is too high to easily induce fibrillation.
100KHz would be even better, because the current would prefer to travel outside your skin - and even if it chose to go through you the fibrillation risk is essentially nil - but you don't want to know what line losses are like at 100KHz. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have a P3 Coppermine that two of the outside pins broke off of while chaning motherboards. First I tried running it without the two pins on the slight chance that it didn't need them. It looks like it needed them, but I had run it for a good 30-40 seconds without a heatsink. Then I soldered the two pins back on and have the CPU running like new.
Dad's PC had a surge down the modem line, that actually melted the solder joints to the PCI slot of the motherboard. The modem was lost,(well, we never tried it, but obvious smoked components) but removing the drool of solder shorting the motherboard to the chassie, and all else worked. even all the PCI slots worked, after replacing the modem.
A few years back, we had co-worker who was an extreme vegan, and would complain about people eating any meat item near her at lunch (because of the smell).
So - we started putting various food items into her Mac IIci after hours, including a piece of chicken, pepperoni pizza, and part of a burrito. Of course, there was a heavy monitor on top of the box, so it was near impossible for her to look inside to inspect what was up. This practice continued for years, with her mac slowly roasting all manners of meat.
When the computer was finally pulled from service, it was FOUL inside. But it continued to operate, even with nasty food sludge on most of the components.
I was sleeving the power cables and accidentally swapped the 5 volt cable with the 12 volt cable. When I powered on the computer I immedediately began to smoke so I switched it off. The entire circuit board for my hard-drive, which had been daisy chained to the floppy connector, was blackened. After correcting the wires, I was too scarred to plug back in the hard-drive, thinking that a damaged hard-drive could potentially cause other devices to burn out so I plugged it into an external USB enclosure and behold! The hard-drive still worked!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
A guy I know was one of the first 100 or so people to actualy GET a powermac 6100 when they first came out. The machine he got had an absurdly low serial number. After about 6 months it started crashing badly and regularly. He figured it was an OS problem and did a clean install, then he re-formated the HD, then he replaced the HD, etc etc etc... Finaly he got a letter from Apple "we are recalling PowerMac 6100's serial #s xxxxxxx through xxxxxxx due to faulty heat-sink glue on the processors." He thought "huh, I've got some heat-sink glue, no need to send it back to Apple, I'll just fix it myself"... So he opened up the case, sure enough the heat-sink was slid off the processor and laying ontop of a few other chips, (He had just shut the machine down) then poked the CPU, pulled his hand back and said "ouch! that's Hot!" upon further inspection he discoverd that the CPU had actualy partialy de-soldered itself from the mother-board due to the temperature it was running! He re-installed the heat-sink, touched up some solder joints and the thing worked fine for years to come.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
An old 10M (this will date me) hard disk at work was on its last legs. I had always wanted to see a head crash, so we opened up the case and brought over one of the marketing folks, a notorious smoker, and had him blow cigarette smoke directly on the disk head. Smoke particles are supposed to be 10x larger than the distance between the flying head and the platter. There should have been a glorious kaboom. Or something.
Nada. It spun away, and happily booted and stuff.
We considered getting Jack, our CEO, to blow his cigar smoke at it, but he was a mean bastard and would probably have asked us "Why aren't you working?" So...
Okay, little disk drive. We poked the disk head with a pencil, driving it into the platter. Happy. We dropped the drive. Happy. We finally poured soda on the platter, which *did* generate a head crash, which was anticlimactic -- just a little screeching, and the inability to boot.
I would gladly have traded this valiant little drive, tested to destruction, for any six of the Apple Profile drives we were also using at the time. Those things died if you looked at 'em funny...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
A long time ago (I'm talking 386sx time) I got a motherboard with one of the memory slots a bit broken. The memory would sit but would not lock very well. So, I got out a small piece of sewing line and used it to tie the memory to the motherboard. It worked perfectly.
Many years ago while I was in college, the hard drive on my laptop died, and I couldn't afford a new one. Knowing full well that a hard drive should never be opened in a non-cleanroom environment, I popped it open and decided to tinker.
With the hard drive open, I booted the laptop and watched the hard drive spin up and the heads zip back and forth. After watching this for a while, and witnessing the heads making a clicking sound as they hit one end of the unit, I decided that the problem had something to do with the rubber bumper at that end losing its elasticity.
This was a long time ago so I can't remember exactly what I did to remedy this, but one way or another I took some corrective action. I think I might have just rotated the bumper so that a more "fresh" section of rubber was exposed to the head mechanism.
I then rebooted the laptop and... voila! The hard drive worked again! So I closed up the hard drive and called it fixed.
I must say that I was completely surprised that I was able to successfully repair a hard drive. I had thought that opening the unit in a non-cleanroom environment would only put the nails in the coffin of the already dead drive, so I was astonished that I was actually able to fix it.
I must note, however, that there were a few bad sectors found when I did a check of the disk with Norton, but I didn't lose any data that I ever noticed.
I'm not sure if this is a better or worse story than the time I replaced the broken rubber belt on a cassette deck with the ring of rubber at the base of a condom... that one got applause from the folks in the dorm.
oldSCO, this is.
Customer calls to tell me that their app server is kicking clients off occasionally. I drop into the office about ninety minutes later and ask where the machine is. They don't know. It turns out to be mounted vertically in a box under the front counter. The case has about 8mm clearance on top and about a mm each side, and when I go to haul it out (still running), I burn my fingers. The back of the box is closed.
Taking two notepads, I use one under and one over to wiggle the case (yes, still running) out far enough to get a screwdriver onto the case bolts, rest it on a stool, and unscrew the lid - letting the screws drop to the floor because they're too much too hot to touch.
When the lid comes off, assisted by the notepads, I get a blast of heat which literally frizzles my fringe and eyebrows. The machine stops kicking off users, and to my amazement nothing inside has actually melted. The PSU fan is dead, and the CPU fan is simply circulating the heat evenly throughout the box. This is a Pentium (last of the 486-style fans) running approximately 200Mhz.
I take a fan heater, set it to blow-not-heat and aim it into the case. Four hours later, at close of trade, I come back, shut the beastie down and replace the PSU. The machine then continues to operate for some months until they replace it.
Another customer running Linux called me out when their machine went all wonky midsummer. Both the PSU and CPU fans had been dead for some time, judging by the coatings. They'd added a new staff member, and the new desk had diverted the air from the airconditioner away from the box, else it'd probably still be working.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The most reliable machine I've ever had was built from pure garbage. The motherboard I pulled out of the garbage pile at a computer shop I was working at. I mounted a 200mhz IDT winchip that was laying around the tech area on it and fired it up to find the serial ports were dead (hence, it was in the garbage). I yanked an I/O card out of an old 386, and placed it in the machine. After fiddling with the jumpers for awhile, low and behold, I had serial ports and a working parallel port. This machine would sometimes boot and recognize the cpu as a 200mhz IDT chip, sometimes a 150mhz IDT chip. However, this served as my main machine without any problems for longer than any other machine I have owned.
Back in the day, at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, we were working on a new hardware/software system called Project L. The astute readers here have heard me spout on about this project before, as it was years and years ahead of it's time. (Regrettably, funding issues forced it's early demise.)
... and the computation chugged along just fine, completing somewhat more slowly than it would have otherwise. These were not idle nodes, but rather ones intimately involved in the computation. While we, naturally, designed the system to be able to do this, it was actually pretty cool.
One of the goals of this project was to create an extensible, modular multiprocessor computer. The idea was that you would have some commodity hardware which was packaged in neat little blocks that you would snap together. Each neat little block would be more-or-less a fully functional unit, so if you had, say $1000 you could buy a 100-node machine, but if you had $2000, you could buy one twice as big, and hopefully, twice as powerful.
One of our demonstrations of the redundancy concepts involved to achieve this kind of extensibility was to have a four-node L machine running a reasonably long parallel process (realtime spectrographs). In the middle of one such computation, we physically removed half the nodes
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I think this qualifies as unintentional abuse. I was riding my motorcycle home from work and as usual I would put my laptop in a backpack to ride home.
;-)
On the way out of the parking lot I hit an unexpected pile of sand and gravel when I was doing around 25 to 30mph. I didn't go well. I highsided over the left handle bar, screwed up my rotator cuff, lost my big toenail and sustained about $1000 of repair to the bike.
On the way down from the bike I bounced a few times and rolled 2 or three times, finally landing sort-of-spreadeagled.
After I came to my senses and realized I was alive and not badly hurt it occurred to me that I had a backpack on with my Dell Latitude laptop. I knew it was going to be trashed, but out of sheer morbid curiosity I booted it up.
To my amazement it booted just fine and the hard drive contents were completely intact.
I considered calling Dell to see if they wanted to do a commercial.
And I didn't use anything as robust as wire. (-:
Links to two sets of pictures within.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I was in canada visiting a friend, and I lost my temper because I had been on the road for three hours trying to find his house and the my service wasn't great on my cellphone. So I stopped, got out of the car, and threw my cell phone straight into a power line. I had a distinct snap and crackling sound, and and the line flickered. Two minutes later, I hear my cell phone ringing =D. spend a minute and go find it out in a side ditch, phone worked fine, charred black, the back and front cover were comple tely burnt to a crisp and melted. I hotfooted it back to the car and burnt my leather jacket in the manner. when I came back to the states, I took out the front and back cover, and looked at the insides. it was fine except for the green boards having charred black. I sitll use the same phone. =D reception sucks
Something like this, anyone?: http://fiftythree.org/etherkiller I've tried putting RAM in my computer while it was running. The computer rebooted, without any errors. I've also swapped PCI cards in and out while the thing was running. Nothing happened, but when I put in a Winmodem, the thing rebooted (typical).
After years of ignoring that mantra I finally blew a fuse on my Asus motherboard for my 233mmx system. I took out my multimeter and tested the fuses near the AT connector and found the one that blew. Rather than going to radio shack an buying the fuse my father and I decided to pick up some used motherboards at a flea market (probably cost the same) and removed a fuse from one of those motherboards and soldiered it on to my motherboard. It's been working fine ever since. I also never screwed in the ISA sound blaster 16 card and it comes out every time you try to plug headphones into it. The system beeps like crazy but plugging it back in fixes the problem :/
When I was younger I was having IRQ problems with an old 2400bps modem that I didn't have the manual too so I figured, what they hey, there aren't that many jumpers on this thing, let me try changing this one here... after booting up some smoke started to come from that jumper (or the area near it). Turned the thing off and sent it to my uncle. He couldn't figure out why it smelled that way.
Well, I used to have lots of fun hot swapping ISA and PCI cards, to see what would happen to the system itself.
:)
Although you must be fast to do it, I rarely did this and had a board blow out.
If any of my customers are reading this, this was in my "lets beat up the computer days", not since PCI was new
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
You ground your cable splitter to your metal desk. Everytime I changed the channel, the system would reboot. This happened 6 times or so before I removed the ground wire; computer is still running well.
Once I picked up a non-functional 4mb simm from a small computer store for use on my keychain (I sware it was cool then)
When I got home, I made sure it was dead, drilled a hole in the end and placed it on my keychain.
A couple months later of travelling around in my pocket I tried it again and it worked!
I was at an internal IBM tech conference in NY last year. A few of us where off to the side talking to an engineer when he mentioned this. He said it called home for three days complaining of over-heating problems until the UPS finally ran out of power. I have no idea if this is true or not, but after seeing fireman pull dozens of unbroken wine bottles out of the wreckage, I'd believe it.
I had a 486dx2-50 notebook. It was a monster with a black and white lcd display. It used desktop 3.5" hard drives.
First, I updraged the drive from 200megs to 1gig.
Then I bought the expansion bay which was really a box with 2 isa slots in it. I put a 16550 board in one of the slots so I could use a 14.4 modem. That left one slot which I filled with a new isa video board so I could get more than 16 colors in windows.
That left no slots for a sound card. And I still had no way to get a cdrom. So I split the case on the expansion bay and got a riser board from a packard bell slim desktop case. I plugged the riser board into one of the slots, then plugged the video board and sound card with cdrom controller into another slot. Then put the cdrom drive in a separate case with an old 386sx motherboard to appease the power supply. Then I ran a ribbon cable from the controller on the sound card to the cdrom drive in the separate case. If I turned it all on at once, it worked just fine.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Compared to some stories here I feel like a lightweight. Had a 400Mhz or so Quantex Lappie that I loved. Bezel around the screen was all cracked (as my current lappie is), the rails for the CD-ROM were completely snapped. so the Drive itself flopped around, but it still worked fine. Then one day I accidentally dumped an entire large Coffee (extra cream extra sugar) right onto the keyboard. Lappie pulled a "Bill the cat" then went completely dark. GAAAAHHHHHHHHHH I took out the battery, rinsed it down with water. Sprayed some PCB board cleaner in it. The next day it booted fine. Monday at work I took it apart and cleaned it. Ran for a good year after that, when I finally turned it in it looked like it had been carried by a war correspondent for two years, but still the best laptop I ever had.
Back when I worked for a computer store, I had a system that got a corrupt BIOS while flashing it to a new revision. It was a customers' system, so I had to save it. Found a dead motherboard that was kind of similar, and yanked its BIOS chip. Stuck it in the first board, powered up, and turned on "Shadow System BIOS in RAM" on. Hot-swapped the BIOS with the corrupted one (motherboard still on) and then re-flashed the corrupted BIOS. Problem fixed. Hope I never have to do it again, but it's a handy trick to know.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
I was in the process of installing new KVM's at work a couple of years ago when I discovered a neat "feature" of Proliant 7000's.
I turned on the new KVM, plugged in the cable to the KVM, and routed it to the new servers. When I plugged the monitor cable into the back of the Proliant, I got fire inside the server. You could literally look into the back of the system and see the flames licking around.
Ok, cool, I got a little fire, right? Not cool when 3500 users are pulling files. But, turns out there was NO PERCEPTIBLE DAMAGE. When the fire put itself out (it really did), I ran to the console and it was fine. I verified all services were up and operational.
Fluke? No, way. I got the same result on 5 other Proliant 7000's. By the end of the day, I had a small crowd gathered behind the racks to see the amazing burning computers. Of course, the Server Room smelled terrible, but it was worth it.
i work as a pc tech and a guy brought his computer in saying he heard a 'pop' sound and smelled smoke... i figured it was just a bad power supply, but apparently whatever 'popped' in the power supply set the motherboard on fire, melting the agp and pci cards to the board... amazingly the pc posted, but didnt get past the memory test :)
And then there was E
This isn't quite a PC story, but close enough. I'm a hardware designer and one of the earliest projects I've done was a wireless computer. The main board had two FPGA's (field programmable gate arrays) to handle all the memory management. In one test, I accidentally swapped the files and programmed the chips backwards, tying many outputs to outputs and inputs to inputs. One of the FPGAs did actually burn through the plastic that contained it. It had a two mm diameter spot that glowed bright red, like the end of a cigarette. I powered the unit down, swapped the programs back, and the unit began working. It amazes me to this day that such a catestrophic event left the chip in a working state.
I have removed running HDD's (2). IDE does not take very kindly to having power removed (big blue spark)- very dead drives. I have switched out ribbon cables with no problem, can't bring myself to yank out a PCI card yet.
My poor old web/mail server right now is a Tyan Tomcat IV D with two Pentium MMX chips running at 233MHz. It's been in constant service for years. Recently, I moved, and put the server in a co-worker's house so it'd remain up while my DSL was getting transferred to the new house. When we turned the machine back on, none of the CPU fans worked.
So, the machine is running with the lid off, with the FSB and clock multipliers set down as low as I could make them go. It's an SMP box with two 124MHz Pentium (not PPro, not P2, Pentium MMX) chips.
It's been running that way for over a week now. Seems to work. It ain't zippy, but there isn't much load on it, so it's okay. I doubt it'll survive the move back to the new house, so I'll probably throw its hard drive into either an Athlon 750 or 500MHz Alpha I've got sitting around.
While moving a print shop around '90 or so I hit a bump and had a Macintosh II, (the very first one, PCXT looking thing, 680020), fall off the truck and cart wheel in a 35 mph shower of parts.
Top case half got run over by a car before I picked up bottom and salvaged the mother board and power supply from it, nailed to an old computer table it works great still to this day affectionately known as, "Mackenstein".
Once as a youngster I accidentally plugged my monitor into my serial mouse board. Of course, this was an IBM AT system with a CGA display - 9 pin D-shell just like a serial port. Fortunatly I had the case cover off so I immideatly saw the smoke rising up and cut power. Looking closer I saw that a few traces on the serial board where burnt up. A little solder and wire later and the card worked fine. In fact I still have that system somewhere at home.
Once when I was little and the original gameboy had been out for quite some time I accidently left a Donkey Kong cartridge in my pants pocket and it made its way through the watch. When I realized this I let it dry off and tried to play it. It worked, execpt I effectively destroyed its equivalent to the hippocampus in the human brain, as it basically ended up with what could be described as anterograde amnesia as I could contine playing the game where I left off, I just couln't save any new progress. Needless to say I was very surprised that it worked (somewhat) after going through the washer and dryer, and I don't think I ever remember beating the game.
Someone in the USA had a PDP-11 and a Fujitsu Eagle disk drive sink under muddy water during a flood (the water eventually covered the rack and came to just below the ceiling). The machine continued to operate until the power failed, after the flood peaked. Underwater. Under muddy water.
When the flood subsided, they needed the computer back up in a hurry so they hosed it out, dried it off, replaced the air filter in the hard disk and tried powering it up again. It worked. The tape drive (Cipher F880, I think) didn't survive, the rest did.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
and it still... uh wait...
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Back in January this year, I built my first DIY PC. I had good instructions to follow through the head IT guy at my mother's workplace. He highlighted a few danger areas for me. Everything went well (except for a minor snafu when I tried to turn it on the first time, when nothing happened I remembered that I forgot to turn on the power supply, too--no problem, but still enough to startle a newbie). The processor is an AthlonXP 2500 (Barton) on an Asus A7N8X-X, so naturally I overclocked the processor to 200 Mhz frontside bus to have a 3200+ at less than half the price. Things is, I did this while using the stock heatsick.
I monitored the temp pretty carefully and everything seemed fine. But I couldn't run SETI all day anymore because the CPU would heat up gradually to around 50C. This solution worked fine until one day, I started getting random crashes, expecially while playing KOTOR. Well, I finally figured out that the CPU was getting unstable at around 49C while running the game. I down-clocked while waiting for the new heatsink.
Here's where it got fun: the new heatsink arrived, and I set about the replacement procedure. Taking off the old HS was no problem. I discovered that the thermal pad had basically become completely hardened and crusty. I scraped the left over bits off the CPU with a tissue. Then, not wanting to take out everything in order to put in the new HS, I tried to do the procedure with the MB still in the case. The new HS (some Thermaltake thing with a manual fan adjuster that takes up a 3.5" slot) was quite a bit bigger than the stock HS. I tried hard, but watching the MB flex underneath the pressure made me nervous. By this time, I was sweating and my hands were shaking. I started unplugging stuff, trying carefully to remember where everything went and should go again. Then I started unscrewing the MB. Unfortunately, the MB screws had seated so solidly into the standoff screws, that the standoff screws came out of the case rather than the MB screws coming out of the standoffs! (Not really a problem, but I shudder to think about replacing that MB in the future (guess I'll just have to get some more standoffs)). Well, of course, once the board was out, putting on the HS took 30 seconds. Finally, I put the MB back in and started reconnecting everything, carefully checking the MB and case manuals. I was still sweating. I connected that last component or wire, and as I stood up a drop of sweat came off my forehead straight into the case! It was like something out of Mission Impossible. I freaked. I figured "If I just wait for the water to dry everything should be fine, but what about the salt in my sweat?" Well, after carefully drying my forehead, I searched around the motherboard and actually found the wet area. Fortunately, the drop landed on the top of some chip (probably the on-board sound) and not on the copper paths, so the wet area was localized and limited. I quickly soaked up the drop with a tissue. The computer booted up just fine, and no ill effects were ever suffered to this day. But, damn, after flexing the MB, the problems with the screws, and the sweat, I figured I was just lucky I didn't completely ruin the darn thing.
A neighbor of mine had an old Apple //c years ago, and one day we decided to 'stress test' a 5.25" floppy disk to see what it would take.
We spilled coke on it, coffee, Peanut butter and even jelly. We took the disk out of the enclosure, washed it off, and dried it with a hair dryer.
A format later, and it still came up OK with no bad sectors! Amazing!
I have a box of Computer City floppy disks that started growing bad sectors by just sitting in the box unused. They just don't make disks like they used to.
i once spiled iced tea into my powersuply. totaly f'd the system. the psu was fried, the onbord sound died, and my hdd died.
Nathan Friedly
Once my apartment caught fire. My bedroom was completely destroyed. All that was recognizable were the springs from the matress. In my living room, everything was black and burnt. My monitor was black and soaked wet by the firemen.
The monitor case had melted over the tube. When i got the monitor to a new place, i gave it a try. It worked. It still does today.
Since then, all my monitors have been samsung.
Incident 1.
We had a 20,000 gallon water tank on the roof spring a leak one day. About 6 PCs in an office below were soaked through. We put them in a dry room for a week then switched them on using a 10 foot pole. The only casualty was one of the keyboards.
Incident 2.
Another time a 30 year old steam pipe cracked in a tunnel and superheated steam flooded upwards into a corridor. The nearest PC was an ancient Pentium 1 running the payroll (aaugh!). The disaster recovery team hired industrial dehumidifiers to pull the moisture out of the air (and the carpets.)
This PC was so old the BIOS had no facility to set 'stay off after mains power loss', so when the hard hats finally let me into the building it was already on. Since it was running, I left it on to dry itself out. We didn't lose any computers that day, though the plaster fell off the wall all down that corridor.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
I purposely needed to destroy my cell phone (long story about evil cell phone company) So I started this quest one afternoon. First I started by throwing the phone against a wall several times. Still worked. Then I proceeded to fill the bathroom sink with water and let the phone soak. Phone still worked. The final blow was when I popped the phone in the microwave for a quick 5 second blast. I saw sparks coming up through the keys (transistors blowing) After that, the phone turned on, but all I could see was lines criss crossing back and forth on the screen. Enough for me! I claimed insurance on it and got out of the mess my cell phone company put me in.
Left my cell phone in my pants about 8 months ago and sent it through an entire wash cycle and half a dry cycle before I realized it was missing and was probably what was clunking in the drier.
I took it out, let it dry for about 4 days and it finally turned on again with just a little problem with the 9 key. To this day I still have to press the 9 a little harder to make it register, but it did survive a double rinse, the detergent, and a dry cycle.
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.
I crushed an Athlon 1GHz T-bird's core with an orb heatsink, it still booted linux, and then had a kernel panic because "no processor could be found." I used to run a Pentium 166MHz MMX at 400MHz with an Athlon heatsink and a case fan strapped/wedged on top and it ran fast/stable. Oh yeah, did I mention that I sanded away the top of the core down to the copper, sanded down the heatsink, and used a special epoxy to bond them together?
It was uninintentional, but the designers at Dell messed up when they laid out the backplane for their notebook. The power cord and serial port are next to each other. The power cord has a hot pin. The serial port has exposed pins. When the 2 meet the smell of fried circuits permeates the air. The serial port is dead but everything else is working fine.
Circa 1998- A now ex-girlfriend of mine living in her Smith college dorm room (they called them "houses" actually) had a fancy new Compaq laptop du jour and also happened to own some pretty sweet looking two-layered glasses with some floating glittery substance inside a liquid filled space created by the two layers. It's decorative but unfortunately doesn't indicate too well as to whether the glass is full or empty.
:)
One day she was drinking some water out of this cup while using her laptop. At some point, a housemate popped in for a visit, saw the cup, and not able to tell it was full of water, proceeded to turn it upside down like a snowglobe to watch the floating glittery substance move around the cup. Over her laptop's keyboard. DOH!
She calls me in a fit of panic and I call my ultra-savy with electronics Dad. Instructions are turn laptop off, turn upside down over paper towels and let it dry for a day or so.
Afterwards she turned it on and it still worked! But here's the funny part-- it started acting up months later. To us it seemed like it wasn't related to the original water incident. Basically it would randomly lock up. Reinstalling windows didn't seem to help. Compaq had us send in the laptop.
Days go by and we get a call from Compaq. "Uhm, we're very sorry to have to tell you this, but your laptop burst into flames while operating on our test bench!" Wow that could have been bad! Subsequently they sent us a new one under warranty and she's kept her friend away from her fancy glittery glasses
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
When I was in college I lived in a "quad" which is basically four guys living in a closet. I had very little room and so I had my coffee maker right above my 17" monitor. These babies were expensive back then! Of course, this was the only computer on the floor so I had guys down the hall come over and want to use my computer all the time.
I was making coffee and while pouring the water in the back I spilled some down the back of the monitor. Aw crap... right then some guy from down the hall walked in a jiggled the mouse... Zap Crack! The image on the monitor turned into a tiny white dot in the middle of the screen. I promptly turned off the monitor and unplugged it after much cursing.
So, I decided to take it apart to see what happened. I only got so far until I read the giant label that said "Danger High Voltage 10,000 Volts" or something. It also had one of those nice pictures of a stick guy getting fried by electrical circuits. I noticed the circuit board was wet but didn't see any char marks.
I put it back together and had my ill-fated cup of coffee and waited a few hours, hoping it would dry. About half a day later and some fans pointed at it... I turned it on AND IT WORKED! It went on to live another two years...
One guy who's computer was pretty nasty (it was filled with virii and spy/adware, ran ME - your typical American's computer) asked me for help when his machine wouldn't turn on - at all, no fans, no lights, no nothing. I ended up tracing it to the PSU, which I cracked open and found it was PACKED full of cigarette tar and dust. Removed that, and it's worked to this day - without a fan in it, even - of course, he ignored me telling him that was a Bad Idea. Most of it's electronics were covered in dog piss, but that's not much of a story.
I once was replacing an athtlon 2100+ and acidently dropped it into a large glop of artic silver
(the stupid tube fell apart on me and it got freaking everywhere)
the pins were absolutley lousey with the stuff...i proceded to get a tub of water put some soap in it and dropped the processor in...scrubbed the pins with a toothbrush and dried it out...popped it in a half hour later and PRESTO
good as new...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
I cut a section off my I-Opener mainboard using a dremel but the carbide drill bit I was using caught, and the force tossed it hard against a wall about 2 feet away. It works just fine to this day./ page6.p hp
quoted from my own webpage here:
http://www.unixmonkey.net/projects/iopener
"I then realized the RJ45 jack would not fit in the place where the phone out jack was, due to the number of pins being different and longer (not to mention clearing the solder). So I got out the dremel and cut about a 2cm x 1cm sqare out of the motherboard. I guess I was just pissed and bullheadedly determined, because I know I shouldn't have done that.
Yes you heard me right yet again, We (the royal we) cut (WITH A DREMEL!) a square (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!) out of the motherboard (THE DAMN MOBO!!) to fit the RJ45 connector (BUT IT COULD HAVE EASILY FIT ANYWHERE ELSE!!!)
I never claimed to all that smart, and at that time didn't know that most motherboard PCB's are sandwiched with 3 or more layers. I cleaned up the board of all the debris and powered it on (just to make sure, since my tungsten carbide bit flipped out during the cut and sent the board flying 2 feet into the wall).
THATS RIGHT, I CUT MY MOBO WITH A DREMEL, AND IT CAUSED IT TO FLY 2 FEET INTO A WALL!!!
hrm...Anyway, I powered it on and....nothing. I guess I wasn't that suprised.
I cleaned it off even more meticulously, and checked the whole PCB for signs of damage. Sure enough, right by the cut, there was a broken trace (actually the trace was hanging off the board like a piece of hair coming out of your arm). I repaired that and tried again. Woila! LIFE!"
Here are some pictures of a network card hit by a stroke of lightning. A costumer called us complaining that the internet is down.
Some of the solder of the NIC hit the SCSI card at the next PCI slot and caused a SCSI bus reset, but the machine was still running.
.. but this guy did. Funniest thing I read in awhile.
If You Screwd Up And Melted A Chip
twitter.com/gravitronic
When I was working at a university computer lab, one day I had to do some fairly major RAM upgrades to a dozen computers.
I brought an anti-static mat from my office and set it up on the instructor's desk, then went to connect the grounding wire.
Normally I unscrew the center screw on the nearest AC outlet; insert the pronged connector for the wire; and tighten everything back up again.
This time, I fumbled the metal cover plate as I was removing it. There were two extension cords leading to the front rows of computers, and the top cord was not plugged in all the way. The metal plate dropped right onto the hot and neutral prongs of the top extension cord.
Sparks! Loud bang! Smoke! Two cord-sized slots burned in cover plate! (Scared computer tech cowering under desk wondering how to explain this to boss)
The maintenance man came in and replaced the outlet and the plate. I plugged in the cords again, and, lo and behold, the 24-port Ethernet hub and the front row of computers worked flawlessly.
And I kept the burnt plate as a reminder to Never Do Something That Stupid Again.
Yes, my mother had a P3 (The slot type) that my dad assembled, and it was unstable, but we blamed this on Windows 98. 3 weeks later, I came back, and everyone was like 'its not working'. A quick boot-up showed me that the pentium 3 was over 100 degress Celcius. Hot enough to boil water. On this CPU. I took it out (burning my fingers in the process... it really WAS hot!!!) and put some heat sink compound on it. Tada! It worked fine. And at normal temperature. This same machine I just retired yesterday, when its PSU gave out, and rather than getting a new PSU, I'll just get my mother a faster computer.
There was a while when I was buying (or getting free) cheap LaserJet IIP/IIIP printers that were non-functional. Usually, it would be one of a couple things that were wrong with them. What I'd do is get two non-working printers and combine them in to one working printer.
Well one night I get home (like 2am or 3am) from a nights worth of partying, drunk as hell. I see these two non-working printers on the table and for some reason decide now's a good time to fix them. To get to the broken part, I basically had to completely tear down the printer (actually two in this case). So hear I am drunk, with two printers completely in parts everywhere.
I get the one printer assembled and go to bed. Waking up the next morning, I see the second printer in parts (a real mess). I fire up the first printer and it actually worked (somehow I had fixed it and got all the "right" parts back together).
Last time I ever did that (I think)...
Well, I was a little drunk that night, and I wound up, due to carelesness, inserting two of the ROM chips and the CPU BACKWARDS on the motherboard, and powered the system up.
No beep. No drive activity. No nothing but a sinking feeling. I actually powered it up 4 or 5 times before going to bed and sleeping it off.
I was pretty concerned the next day when I looked at my handiwork, but, as is the theme with this article, setting the chips in correctly resulted in everything being fine -- even the new CPU.
I think computer can survive a lot more than the general population thinks...
After squeezing a motherboard into a different case (requiring some work with the dremel tool to make holes that lined up with ports), I went to plug in a PS/2 mouse and since it's dark in the corner of my basement where the box was, I inserted it into an opening in the case that led to some pins on the motherboard (instead of the PS/2 port). Saw and heard the spark, and from then on, the keyboard, mouse and onboard serial ports don't work. Fortunately, I already had ssh access to the box, and it boots headless, so I'm still using it. Linux never even crashed when the spark happened. It actually took a while to notice all that was wrong with it.
You know those inspection stations all around California that the CDFA runs? "Got any fruits or vegetables?" They look like a phone booth, but not much bigger. When they started to outfit those with computers they wisely choose the IBM PS/2. I say wisely because those were built like a tank. Needless to say they needed it. One day a truck lost control and went right through one of these little shacks in the highway sending the computer hurtling down the road. They fetched the computer from some distance down the road and, after purchasing a new monitor, all was well. The thing worked fine.
1. Burning an old motherboard... 150$
2. Going to the store to buy a new one... 10$
3. Making the front page of Slashdot telling how you were proud to have an half-working motherboard after burning it up and asking if other people did similar stuff... priceless.
About 10 years ago, back in my high school PC newbie days (I was great with Apple/Mac's at the time), I had a Packard Bell 486 computer. In return for maintaining a classroom network, I had a teacher who couldn't pay me w/ money, but could buy me parts for my PC. I took advantage of the situation, and had her buy me 16MB of RAM and 256kb of SRAM (socketed) to add some L2 cache, which at the time was worth well over $1000. RAM was obvious for me, slotted, and I had inserted 30 pin SIMMS many a times in the Macs at school. However, socketed SRAM was a new beast. Not knowing that the SRAM *was* directional, and not knowing that them dimple indicated pin 1, I put every single piece in backward, then proceeded to power on the machine. Nothing happened on the screen, and then I happened to touch the SRAM to make sure it was seated - only to discover that it got hot enough for my fingers to leave permenant fingerprints in the plastic (as well as burning my fingers). Of course, being young and of not alot of money, and knowing that I had spent my entire college savings to date on that computer, I freaked out. Fortunately, I was able to take out the SRAM pieces and the computer did power back on w/o a hitch, but I was out $700+ in SRAM chips. I tried putting them in "the other way", and still no dice - they were fried.
On the same day, I also happened to put my floppy power cable on upside down when putting things back together, switching the 5 ans 12V lines.
I was young, and thankful for understanding warranties on both parts. The memory company replaced the memory even though it was my error, and Packard Bell replaced my floppy drive under warranty, again even though it was my fault.
Since the worst I've done is hot swap IDE cables, PS/2 keyboards and mice, shifted/reseated PCI cards with the machine on, and occasionally powered down a hard drive w/ the machine on via a power cable. I've also shorted the 4 pin case speaker terminals on a motherboard once or twice, only to get a nice arc on the screwdriver.
Live and learn.
$ man woman *
-bash:
Around the time ATX came out, a friend of mine bought a mobo that claimed to have both AT and ATX power connectors. He had a ATX power supply. When the mobo arrived, sure enough it had the capability to have both connectors, but only the AT's were soldered in. So we went down to Kinko's and grabbed a handful of paperclips. We soldered them in and the mobo ran perfectly. Lasted a long time like that too.
I was experimenting with the idea of running an ATX system from a 12v battery (UPS battery). Most boards will fire up with only the +12 and +5 leads connected, and I had built a 5v regulator to supply the 5v side.
... possibly return the drive with the fried board. Didn't work, the drive still didn't function.
:)
So I connected black to black and red to red, from the battery to the board. Oops -- red is the 5v lead in the PC.
The board still works, as does everything in the PC except for the hard drive. Unfortunately this was my MP3 drive (15 gig Maxtor, huge at the time), so I attempted a repair. First I bought an identical drive ($149 IIRC), thinking I'd swap the circuit boards and
Then I decided (stupidly and desparately) to try and swap the platters. Needless to say, I lost my MP3s, and was out not one but two drives.
All this stupidity from someone holding an A+ cert at the time, no less...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I once had a 486DX120 that had a broken finger contact in the VESA slot (this was the video slot, for those who don't remember). I took a piece of #22 bell wire and stripped off the insulation. I hammered the wire flat, then trimmed it with diagonal cutters. I used a pin vise and a very small modeler's drill bit to drill a hole in the side of the VESA connector where the broken pin was. After using a pair of needlenose pliers to remove the last bits of the broken finger contact, I bent the wire into approximately the right shape to replace it, leaving about a quarter inch of the copper wire sticking out the side of the connector through the hole I'd drilled.
I used baking soda and an alpha cyanoacrylate adhesive (called "Hot Stuff" - modelers use it, it's sort of a super-strong version of "Permabond") to secure the wire in its hole. Then I soldered a small jumper wire between the end of the new finger contact and a point on the motherboard where the original contact had been connected. This involved running the wire around the edge of the motherboard to the other side.
The surgery worked, and I used the motherboard another year. I replaced the motherboard only because I wanted to upgrade - it wound up in my parents-in-law's computer, where it served another two years.
GF3 Ti, Visiontek. Fan apparently stopped working. GPU got very hot. Realized why computer had locked up. Repaired fan and now it runs fine, except occasionally when rebooting the display stays black. Unplug monitor cable. Turn monitor off then on, then plug cable back in.
My vid card, a Radeon 9700 All-in-Wonder Pro, has sadly been dying on me. A few times a day 5 or 6 large vertical stripes appear across my screen, making it very difficult to continue working. I finally discovered that I could fix the problem by reaching into the case and wiggling the card.
I'm thinking that the connection is simply loose, but I can't seem to reliably seat the card in the AGP slot so the problem goes away.
I dropped my HP Pavilion ze4365 laptop 3 feet onto a concrete floor while it was running. The cd tray popped out and the corner of the screen cracked, but I'm typing on it right now. It's all good except for that damn screen crack.
I just tell everyone it has a black eye. I've dropped it a few times since then, with no other affects. (This is why I don't have nice things). I highly recommend HP laptops for (ab)users like me.
three weeks after I bought it.[...]650 bucks and 11 days later...
Shouldn't the warranty cover that? Sounds like something that should be covered.
bp
back in the 80's I used to be allowed to go into my dads office on weekends with him to play karatika on the colour apple II. One weekend the disk just wouldn't load, I pulled the disk out had a look, spat on the exposed surface through the slot and rotated the disk while I rubbed it clean with my T-Shirt. When I put it back in it loaded first go!
Joe
I was working for a computer manufacturer back in the mid '90s, and for a really shitty salary. If we made _one_ mistake during one month, we would loose NOK 2000 ($285!) from the pay. I was usually sitting with the case on my lap, leaning up against the desk at about an 45 degrees angle. I had just mounted the mainboard when I felt my lap getting wet. Wondering wtf was going on, I checked. It turned out to be blood, I'd been bleeding down the backside of the mainboard, dripping in my lap (damn cheap compo cases, they'll cut you up just looking at'em!). So I unscrewed the MB, took it to the toilet, and washed it of under the tap. wiped it mostly clean with some toiletpaper, and took it back to production. Screwed it in an turned it on. It worked. So I shipped it =)
I dropped a PSU into a compo case, and managed to break the mobo in half. Looking at the MB, turned out only one chip had loosened completely, and none was broken. Soldered all the broken wires, believe me when I say that that is a shitty job! It looked crazy, but worked.
Lost a screw down on the motherboard, and heard a pop, and saw som white smoke. The screen went blank. To get the screw out, I lifted the case and turned it over. Another pop, and more smoke. I actually forgot to turn of the power befor I turned the machine around. I blew a capacitor on the mobo, and one of the chips on my NIC. Mobo worked, the coax part of my combo NIC didn't (AUX and TP worked though).
Spillt a cup of coffee in my IBM keyboard, but continued to use until half of the keys got stuck as the coffee dried. washed it under the tap, let it dry for a couple of hours, and it worked again (still does, 8 years later).
Had a heatsink on the CPU that came loose, and fell down on the graphics card. The screen went blank, the machine rebooted, and the still blank. Probably would have gotten a POST beep error, but I had removed the PC speaker to fix a broken radio. Moved the graphics card one PCI slot down, reseated the heatsink, and turned it on. It worked.
We had a testmachine when I worked doing techsupport. That machine took some beating. It had been dropped several times. We had hotswapped just about everything several times. Any new card we would try, we hotswapped with one of the current ones. And since the carpeted floors on dry days would build up a helluvalot of static, we had zapped it unnumerable times. After some time, the both the HDDs started to show wear and tear. We just mapped around all the badsectors and continued to use it. A truly marvelous machine.
I had read somewhere that, if programmed directly and incorrectly via assembly code, one could well and truly hose the adaptor. Being a curious little monkey, and not a little bit mischievous, I decided to see if it was true. I sent the mysterious instructions to the Hercules card, and nothing happend, at first. Then I started to smell something burning, something very stinky and plastic-like. Suddenly I noticed small wisps of smoke rising from the back of the computer. I had indeed fried my employer's graphics adaptor! Too cool.
a few years ago, at work we decided to take the lid off an old 500mb hdd & see how long it would work just hanging open in our dusty old warehouse.
i set it up on top of the case, hooked it up, uploaded a buncha mp3s onto it & set it to play constant (to keep the hdd active, i didnt want it going to sleep at night)
it worked fine for the 1st week, then about 1/2 way through the 2nd week it started losing files here & there, but was mostly still working.
by the 3rd week there was not a single file on the disk that was readable, however the FAT was still intact. shortly after that, someone saw it sitting there running & just *had* to hock a lugie onto the spinning disk, which of course, terminated our experiment.
My former neighbour spilled cherry kool-aid into the keyboard of his desktop PC. I lent him a spare keyboard until he could get a replacement, but he decided to try to fix it. He removed the small circuit board from the keyboard (the one that attaches to the cord) and put the rest of the keyboard in the dishwasher.
After going through the energy-saver cycle it was a good as new--including the remaining circuit boards that he washed (basically just copper traces and such). I guess as log as you don't use detergent or the lower rack/too high temp it works pretty well...
Another keyboard-related incident: A friend's P133 stopped responding to the keyboard. Other keyboards wouldn't work either and the original keyboard would work on my PC, so I figured it was either the keyboard connector or the keyboard controller chip. Re-soldering the joints on the connector did not work, so I used tin-snips to cut all the pins from the keyboard controller chip and soldered a chip salvaged from an old 486/40MHz in its place (onto what remained of the pins from the old chip). Worked like a charm...
Seems keyboards and related circuitry are quite resiliant. I guess they were engineered with the anticipation of many different sorts of incidents. Not only that, the technology is quite mature. From my observation, it looks like identical, pin-for-pin compatible controller chips were used on all AT and early ATX boards from the 286 all the way up to PII's (even in the same style DIP case. I suspect even today the same exact circuitry is used--just integrated into another chip or on a smaller surface-mount package.
someone please mod this up... Man, now I gotta go clean the coffee outa my keyboard.
In college, my friend's computer was running without a single case fan. She had bought it from some chop-shop and they had done a real crappy job putting the thing together. I had a spare one so we popped open the case and threw the fan in to cool it down a bit. Upon plugging everything back in, the computer booted fine, however her network connection seemed to be dead. It didn't receive an IP from DHCP, but everything seemed to be working fine otherwise. We decided (as it was late) to try and figure it out the next day. The following morning she sat down at her computer and decided to play a little Unreal Tournament. As soon as she fired up the game, her AIM came on in the background. When she quit out of the game, her network connection died again. We stared at this phenomenon for hours wondering how installing a fan could have done such a thing... and how Unreal Tournament could've possibly fixed it.
Kneel before Sig!
(n/t)
After hours and lord knows how many gallons of water pouring from a burst water pipe on the 8th floor (above a 7th floor data center), it was finally noticed as it poured into the building lobby on the 1st floor (this was a holiday Monday). Much of the key equipment, including an IBM ES9000 9021-9X2 mainframe (so obviously this was a while ago) was directly in the path of the water.
Once the water had been shut off and the electricians had done their walkthru and signoff that it was OK to power the equipment back on, we started doing just that. Initially we couldn't get all of the mainframe LPAR's to initialize. Most would but one (the most important one) wouldn't come up. We were puzzled for a while till we figured out that it must be a memory issue - for a particular range of central storage. Sure enough, the IBM CE pulled the boards for that range and they were wet. I'll never forget the sight of an that CE holding a hair-dryer (I think we bought out the supply from the Walgreens down the street) to those memory cards to dry them out. Once he popped them back in the other LPAR initialized just fine and all systems were back in business.
The DASD? Well that's another story. It ran but within a year began to experience a much higher failure rate than normal.
To this day visitors to our data center always ask about the containers of plastic sheeting that hang from each of the machines.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
I am about 130 kg (280 lbs), and during winter, i stepped on ice, and after some aerobic, i was fallen to my backpack. In my backpack was a nice old Thinkpad 380 xd. Some small parts lost (pcmcia slot doors), but the TP worked, without problems.
I have an old AMD-k6 running linux, right now; however it spent a few weeks shelved while I upgraded some things on my main computers and needed to canabalize parts.
While it was in storage my cat decided that the computers interior would make an ideal litter box, and he peed on the network card- when I finally came to turn the computer on I noticed the horrid smell, and fused shut with rust/salts network card.
My solution was to windex the computer throughly until the card was free, and the board was clean, then apply rubbing alcohol to evaporate the water in the windex, then apply a thin layre of WD-40 to the entire thing to drive off the water. I turned the computer on immediately to find it working.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
The instructor shared a story of how robust and easy to set-up these scanners were. As the story goes, one of these scanners was shipped to (I think) South America, and by the time it got to the destination, it had been roughed up a little. The frame was so badly bent, that placing the scanner on a table, you could clearly see that one of the feet was at least an inch or two off the table.
Instead of shipping a new unit, a tech was shipped to the site. He took a mallet and banged on it until it was more or less level. He then followed the standard procedure (using a 'scope) and in 45 mins had the unit working perfectly again.
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
When I was running my 486 with the case off once, I spilled a can of Diet Coke onto the motherboard. The monitor made a fascinating pixel design the likes of which I've never seen before or since, and I quickly unplugged the box and let it dry. I turned it back on about a day later. It was absolutely fine, and I kept using the machine until I upgraded six months later. I guess the moral of this story is "diet soda less destructive than the sugary kind."
"I never really used Joe either but a stupid editor is a stupid editor." -D. Reed.
My father, when working as an EE for Hewlett Packard, accidentally dropped a bowl of chili face-down onto the top of a prototype motherboard. Before anybody had a chance to notice what had happened, he took it into the bathroom and washed it off in the sink. After letting it dry thoroughly before turning it back on, it worked just fine.
proccessor U2 computer dropped 9 feet from the back of a truck, broke the motherboard in 3 spots, BROKE the frame, and shook loose nearly every component in the box. The insurance guy insisted we try the machine so I put things back in generally the right spot and OMG the SOB fired up and is STILL RUNNING...I really don't like HP hardwaer but this little tank is an inspiration...The little web box that WOULD. I'll see if I can get some of my pictures of the Frankenstein Web Box up later.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Once upon a time back in the day circa 1985/86 I was using an Atari800XL, that had been modified from 64K to 128K with a toggle switch for compatabilty, to control an experiment on molecular regeneration.
Basicly there were two box like devices. You put a sample in the first box flipped a switch and the sample disapeared from the first box and was recombined in the second box.
We'll one Saturday night something very strange happened. Just as I was replacing the Plutonium core, lightning struck outside and fried the whole experiment. The next thing I knew I was in a different world with powerful strength that I didn't know I had. We'll needless to say when I finally woke up, I found the experiment totally vanished along with the Plutonium, but ther was my Atari.
I turned it on and guess what, it WORKED! It still works unto this day.
I've done stupid things like drop harddrives onto hard surfaces, but the dumbest thing I did was when I was messing with my Athlon CPU. I got the fan wires caught between the cpu and heatsink, which quickly melted, shorted out, and fried all the fan controllers on my mobo. I hacked togethere a 80mm fan connected to main power with an adapter from 80mm to 60mm on the cpu, booted up, and everything worked fine. On top of that, it was quieter than before!
Since blue LED fans were the same as quiet black ones I went with the LEDs, which quickly became addicting and now I have about 20 blue lights on and in my computer.
I think I've told this story before but it's a good one so I'll tell it again.
While in high school I worked at a small sub shop that was just big enough to have one arcade game. It sat right across from our main counter and so during our down time and after work we would often play them. This being during the 80's these were oldschool scroller type games that you can play on a phone now a days but at the time they were teh bomb.
One day one of us figured out that if they kicked the panal where the coins went it they would get a credit! This was then made into a science by using a stool to hit the exact "sweet spot" on the machine to rack up tons of credits. Mind you this was done mostly during after hours so the game still would make some money during the daytime but the effects of such a treatment was none the less noticable. When the owners of the games would come back and see the machine we would always attribute the damage to "some damn kids!" (Truthful in a sence.)
Having crossed the line such that we no longer respected these machines we got more ambitious and would open up the cabinets after hours when beating them to get credits wasn't working. We still beat them up of course just to make sure that our story would not seem out of place.
Finally one day we got a gawd awful game. I don't remember what it was but we all decided that we hated it. We knew better than to try and display too much intrest in it to our bosses as they would then tell us that we should be working yada yada and also knew that it was not going to be due to cycle out for a while so unless something "happened" to it we were going to be stuck with it. (A machine had previously burnt on it's own accord before and it had been promptly replaced with a diffrent one so...)
Various methods of disableing the machine was discussed. I, being the geek of the bunch, was consulted and after some debate I said that it had to look natural or we would be picked as the prime suspects. Now after reading the many storys involving soda related mishaps I am duefully impressed at some of the recovery storys. However most of these storys involve quick actions with drying and cleaning. We had no such intentions.
Fully 3 large fountain Cokes were poured into the top of the cabinet before it finally sputtered and died. The fact that it took 3 was impressive no matter how you slice it. After number 2 I was actually, I was doing the pouring mind you, getting nervous that it would blow up on me before it just died. But finally after number 3 it clicked a few times and then would not come back on.
Even with it's seemingly "natural" death it took some fast talking to explain how the Coke did get into the case seeing as how it had mostly sloped top. Once again those "damn kids" with their sodas were to blame.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I was taking a college network administration course... and was working on my A+..
;)
I had removed the power supply and put it back in but the place for the turbo wire was capped so I put the wire on the next pin over...
Started up the computer and it imemdiatly started smoking up the computer room with dark smoke..... I just stood there amazed windows was still booting up....
So I killed the power.. and took a look inside the case - all the power suplly wires were fried together. I just removed the turbo wire and restarted the computer.. EVERYTHING was fine except the A: drive.. poor thing.. but with that abuse im surprised the rest of the computer was fine.
Turns out i had put the turbo wire into the reset one and the reset button was depressed causing the circuit to keep shorting out..
I won't be doing that again
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
"I worked for five years at Epson America, home of the EPSON dot matrix printer (at the time.)"
Would that happen to be the Indianapolis Repair Depot?
I once hotswapped my PS2 keyboard WITHOUT FRYING THE BOARD!
Oh the sweet adrenaline rush it provides...
I was soldering a video extension to my atari ST, that's one of those homecomputers which did not know about PCI. And to see results it was running live and I was checking the monitor.
OOPS... the soldering iron slipped and scratched across the whole motherboard bouncing off various chips. No SMD that time, lucky me... still it made contact somewhere.
For some obscure reason this triggered an SCSI-format command to the harddisk. Huh?
Punishement for soldering on a powered up computer is harddisk erasing? Interesting...
Georges
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
Just because you used a voltmeter and found that the resistance of your body was 1MOhm does not mean a thing. Your body is not a linear resistor. If you plot an I/V curve for your body it will not be a straight line. In fact, if you take several readings at different times, you'll probably get different resutls.
I've "measured" the "resistance" of myself many times and gotten results from >2MOhm to -20kOhm. Yes, that's a negative sign. As in, the results are meaningless! There's lots of electrochemical "stuff" happening in your body. The negative reading happened after working out, and I was sweating. I was also measuring the resistance on the high-Ohm register of my voltmeter, which means it was using only a very small current. Evidently it was small enough for my body to overcome that, with the aid of the lowered (equivalent, non-Ohmic) resistance of my skin because of my sweat.
coke:2 40p ?t=12109
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=9
vodka:
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.ph
also put this in the freezer, and am currently waiting for it to stop working after about 8 months in the rain (see http://joshwaller.tk for the "rusty 486" link, and freezer pics are in my gallery)
I did a video card upgrade, flipped the power on heard a POP and saw some smoke.
Hit the power button and took a look at what could have caused that. Remember those double rows of pins that stuck out of video cards for "upgrades" that never happened? The 5v floppy power connector had attached itself to that. I unhooked the power connect and started the machine. The display came up except it was missing the Red RAMDAC.
Friends used to ask me how I changed the color of my terminal dispay under DOS and Linux.
A few years ago when travelling in NYC, I was walking down a quiet steet somewhere
in the lower east side.
I almost walked past a Phone booth, and noticed something sticking out from
it's roof. It looked like a motherboard, with some IDE cables sticking out.
It was raining a lot that time, and the motherboard and everything on it was soaking
wet.
At first I thought it was a bomb (it was in front of a police station). I looked
around making sure no one left this behind. I grabbed it, and it was an old no name motherboard
with an Intel P90, and some EDO RAM SIMMs. I grabbed the RAM and the processor, and chucked
the rest.
Once I got home, I thought it would be funny to see if the processor and RAM worked.
And wouldn't you know it, the processor is powering my AptNet's OpenBSD firewall, and before the
last power outage, had an uptime of close to 320 days.
I used the RAM in some other machines and it works!
Oh, I also once dropped a Panasonic cordless phone in the toilet as I was taking a leak.
The phone was dead. I cleaned it off, and figured I could fix it someday. 2 years later,
my dad opened it up, cleaned off the various debris, and is using it to this day (it's
still better than comparative modern 900mhz phones!). The battery
didn't survive long though.
Actually, SCSI is hot-swappable if you're careful. First, unmount the drive. Second, remove power from the drive. Third, disconnect the SCSI connection to the drive.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
The second thing were reversed eproms in on of my other atari related projects. Powering the system on made the golden wires used to connect the die to the eprom package to glow. Both eproms worked like a light bulb. Correcting the searting made the system work as well.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well I do believe Motorola did their homework when they engineered the original black startac phones.
After abusing the phone in my pocket, dropping it hundreds of times, etc., I finally attempted (unintentionally) to finally drestroy it. Riding in the pocket of my jeans, the phone went through an entire cycle in the washing machine. Not being aware that this had happened, I dutifully placed the load into the dryer, and sent it through the entire cycle there as well.
Upon finding the phone still in my pocket, I turned it on and it worked perfectly. I ended up selling it on ebay after my contract expired, for nearly what I originally paid for it.
Him: It was plugged in, right?
Me: Yes
Him: You saw a snake crawl down that hole and now you are going to stick your hand in it?
Me: Thinks, hmmm, he's right. Never work on anything plugged it and be careful anyway because capacitors can store enough zap to get you. Short those bitches with a screwdriver. A few seconds of caution can add years to your life.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...oh and I'm gonna need you to come in on sunday as well to clear up the backlog. Mmmkay?
I had a $30 RC car from RatShack back in the mid 80's, some little dune-buggy thing. That thing would really fly, and since I was a GREAT driver, it somehow ended up at the bottom of my neighbor's swimming pool.
Twice.
We'd fish it out, DOA, and let it dry for a day, and it'd be up and running the next day, no problem.
The harshest abuse i've seen was my brother's cellphone, a Sprint TouchPoint from the mid-90's. He was wearing it when he totalled his 2nd vehicle, and somehow found it after he recovered. The plastic screen was cracked, but everything worked perfectly, the LCD was 100% intact, battery was fine and the phone still worked.
The &%^$#$^ serial card would not work! Tried three different serial cards in three different Cubix boxes... no joy. After many, many tries, I finally got tired enough that I committed the error I'd been trying to avoid all night: I plugged the serial board in to a Cubix section that still had the power ON!! Instead of frying, the darn thing instantly worked (including across reboots).
After no more than a moment's thought, I plugged the other two with power ON and lo-and-behold had three working boxes...
Jan
My trusty old Mac G4 400 was struck by lgihtning a few years back. My brother who was there at the time said there were blue sparks coming out of the outlet in his room. My family had plugged the Mac in without a power strip !!! after moving the furniture around. Needless to say, I was not amused when I returned home. I thought it was completely gone. The monitor was blown out, and I could not type on the keyboard, but the computer still powered on. I had to buy a USB card and network card (after searching high and low for a 10/100 PCI card with Mac OS X drivers), but the computer is still running! True it is missing internal USB, Modem, and Network, but it still survives.
My wife threw up an entire breakfast onto a Dell laptop about a month ago. We turned it off and started the very tedious clean up job. A few vertical lines show up on the screen but otherwise the laptop is running fine.
Another software developer at my shop was having strange performance problems and occasional lockups wiht his work PC. We have a separate IT group so normally we don't open our own cases, but he decided to take matters into his own hands due to the support queue. When he opened the case he found a large tupperware lid lying on the motherboard, apparently left by a hungry IT guy. Removing it solved the problem.
... lol
I guess this is the PC equivalent of having a surgical instrument sewed into your belly
When my idiot neighbor lit his house on fire with a blow dryer, my house sustained heavy damage. My office was drenched with fire department water and caved in all ceiling plaster. The Power Mac 8500 had rusty looking water residue inside the case. I didn't dare boot the monitor, and the keyboard was toast, but the Mac came up fine in firewire disk mode from my TiBook that I grabbed when it became obvious that the fire was spreading to my house (fire truck was in a car crash on the way there.)
If the drive is unmounted and unpowered, that is not a hot swap. This was a drive, which was part of a volume group, which was removed while the system was running and the volume group was active, with mounted filesystems on it.
http://xkcd.com/386/
"If I'm only touching one wire (I'm grounded, and the wire I'm touching isn't), then I need 15kV. So it's pretty hard to hurt yourself with DC.
AC is different due to the body's power factor (I guess)"
Bad guess. First: you mean "impedance", which is the combined linear Ohmic resistance and reactive (capacitive and inductive) equivalent, wheras "power factor" refers to the losses due to current vs voltage phase errors introduced by the reactive components. Since the body's impedance is largely Ohmic resistance, the power factor is small enough to be safely ignored in any calculation.
Secondly: AC vs DC is largely irrelevant in this regard, since the skin's insulation breaks down very rapidly above 50V, AC or DC. The only difference is how your muscles respond.
Try repeating your test with a meg-Ohm meter (the type that produce about 2kV), and you will find your body resistance drops to about 600-1000 Ohms; easily low enough to allow15mA from even a 12V supply (incidentally, 15mA is needed to lose COMPLETE muscle control, as with a taser or stun-gun, which are only non-lethal because the current does not pass through the heart. It actually takes less than 2mA to cause a muscle to contract, and that's all that's needed to cause fibrilation; no, I can't quote a web reference, since I still refer to my 20-year-old dead tree EE textbooks).
"Anyway people die because they play with more than 15kV."
Wrong again: Plenty of people die coming into contact with ordinary mains (110/220VAC); just read some coroner's reports and Occupational Health & Safety bulletins. Having built Tesla coils that produce 100kV (but at very low current, the microampere region), I can assure you that it is indeed the current that is lethal, not the voltage. If you have ever zapped yourself with the piezo element from an "electronic" cigarette lighter, then you have come into contact with at least 5kV, however this short pulse at pico-amps is far from deadly.
Your simplistic logic supposedly proves that mains isn't lethal, wheras it clearly is. Care to argue that hemlock isn't poisonous, too, oh great philosopher? (those without a classical education may need to google for the reference).
"15kV makes X-rays, though."
Only under very specific canditions (ie, not in air, only when electrons are being accelerated. Note to budding physicists: 15kV is not the same as 15keV, please look up "electron volts" on wikipedia). Long electrical arcs do produce ultra-violet light though, so always wear eye protection when playing with Tesla coils.
Your post proves the adage: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
1) 6-7 years ago I was exploring how an old pentium 60 based computer was built. I had the computer on the floor with no cover and motherboard face up. Lazy as I am it was lying around like that for a week maybe until I one day accidently dropped a glass full of coke on it - the glass broke and I had coke all over my room :( I wiped up as much coke I could + removed all the glass I could find. I let the computer dry for a few days and then tried it - it worked fine! :)
:)
2) Same computer a few months later, it was being used as a client in a civnet game. For some reason the computer had no cover (motherboard face up) and since we just had moved in to our new home there were nails and stuff lying around on shelves. Naturally when I opened a window i accidently pushed some nails in the computer. It said *poff* and the fuse for the room broke. So I thought something bad had happend - however when I fixed the fuse and removed the nails - everything worked as nothing had happend
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it wasn't properly seated and I bumped it fully seating it.
it caused the magic smoke to escape from the mobo but the card works fine.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
we had just gotten a used 386/40 computer and I was looking at it. I had the flu so I was feeling pretty bad. Suddenly I got the idea to yank the CPU to see what was beneath it; I did, but in my diminished physical condition I miscoordinated and ended up ripping off all the pins on one edge. Since I realized I was better off doing something else, I left the apparently dead CPU lying on the table. When some friends came back one of them took a soldering iron and proceeded to solder and straighten up the destroyed pins. Some were missing so he just soldered small pieces of wire in place. He then plugged the CPU back in and the computer worked! and did so for about two years after that, when the original owner took it back and for all I know it kept working for a while. So now I don't do any important work when I have the flu :)
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i have found that sneezing in the general direction caused Western Digital harddrives to fail.
whereas my maxtor hds are all surviving some (4 gigs) are 6 years old.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
This may be a bit off topic, but... I once left my el cheap-o (~7$ at walmart) digital watch in my jeans pocket and it went through the whole washer and dryer cycles, and works fine to this day.
Last week my Epson Stylus 800 went into it's famous "Print 10 characters of gibberish and feed a page until the paper is all gone" schtick.
It had done this to me dozens of times, but for some reason this time I snapped and started punching it. Predictably, this hurt my geeky little fist. Further enraged, I grabbed the printer and yanked it out of the room...breaking the power strip and knocking over the computer it was plugged into via parallel cable.
Having wrenched it loose, I stomped out to the driveway and proceeded to perform Backyard Rassling on it...flinging it, stomping it, kicking it, screaming the most foul of names, and insulting its ancestry (all of whom share the design flaw that had touched off the episode). For the finale, I seized it by the power cord, gave it three vertical overhead rotations and slammed it into the trash can, where it made a most satisfying crash and spewed parts back out the top. At least the power cord was attached well...I will give them that.
It felt good. REALLY good...and now devices with congenital engineering defects tremble at my passing (as do the neighbors, oddly enough).
My father was an EE and broadcast engineer, one of those kids who saved his alllowance to buy an early transistor radio, and promptly took it apart once he had it. He ended up in television as an engineer, but kept his workshop and a side business selling printed circuit board supplies, as well as designing custom boards for his projects. I woud often hang around while he was working, so he taught me how to charge up capacitors and discharge them on various objects - a metal vice, the copper pipes in the basement, and of course, myself and my friends. I can't imagine how this was ever ok, but I loved 'showing' that big yellow capacitor to my friends.
"Yep, look right there it says 400 volts, but its not charged. here you can hold it. ZZZZAAAAAAPPPPP. "
by the way, LEEEEEET photo and SWEET ET scooter !
do you have SMART enabled? if so, (assuming you are running windows 2k/xp) check the event viewer for warnings about it. On my only windows box, it has been predicting that my 30gb drive will fail for like 2 years. hasn't yet.
It also says that my DVD drive is causing paging errors... windows is weird...
btw, i'm posting from an ultra5.... otherwise i would copy the text in from the event viewer...
--
OT - you know there is a rapper known as Canibus, and i guess he went to virgina tech or something for computer science... weird... Geek rapper.
I have an Apple PowerBook G3 Pismo which was dropped 300 feet from a helicopter on Antarctica in January of 2001. Despite a cracked screen it has functioned flawlessly as a small server for three years now.
I used to work at an Acorn dealership, we attended a tradeshow and someone wanted a SCSI card fitted to their RiscPC.
So I fitted it, then we both realised the computer was still on, so I then even more stupidly removed the card, with the computer still on!
All the while, RISC OS was still chugging along.
I turned the machine off, fitted the card properly, connected up his new scanner and the customer left a happy man!
Moral or the story: the Acorn Podule Bus is one hardy piece of kit, as was that Castle SCSI card!
As an aside, there is actually an AGP graphics card for the RiscPC, and if you have a problem flashing the firmware, it is actually RECOMMENDED that you hotswap it before re-flashing!
#include <sig.h>
I was playing with my trusty Amiga 2500, with which I had a joystick that could also be used as a mouse, and thus had two plugs for it. For a reason no longer apparent to me I decided to plug both of those plugs in at the same time despite the warning messages on it. The computer immediately crashed with my favorite guru meditation error, but after a quick resolder of a few shorted wires in the joystick port (which while resoldering I discovered was actually connected to the mouse port in some twisted way), it worked fine. The computer still works perfectly except for some bad sectors on the fifteen year old scsi hard drive.
I've got SMART enable, and I've run numerous online and offline tests on both drives. And none of the internally tracked stats are PRE-FAIL or OLD-AGE, either. In fact, they're all at optimum values, as near as I can tell. (No swapped sectors, etc.)
The only odd thing I've seen is I recently discovered that DMA is no longer enabled, and I can't enable it using hdparm.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I had an ASUS motherboard that crashed in the middle of a BIOS flash update. The machine would no longer boot, so I could not re-flash. ASUS tech support told me to do the following:
Boot a second system I had that used a similar MB
Once booted, remove the PROM
Insert the PROM from the dead machine
Flash the PROM with the BIOS for MB #1.
Shut down, and swap PROMS to correct machines.
It worked.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Once my mother decided to hang my jacket out on the balcony. In winter. I forgot to pull out my palm first, and only realised it when I wanted to use it. Damn it was cold. And even in the next morning, after having it recharged in the craddle, it still had a reaction time of about 30secs.
The company I work for has many site offices around the US, and each has a file server running linux w/ samba. One of these was found next to a space heater in a closet, horribly melted, looking like a salvador dahli sculpture. It still ran, but he replaced it anyway.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
I was running Slackware on a 700Duron while trying to compile ATLAS BLAS. However, every 5-10 minutes my computer would reboot. So, I dumped Slackware and downloaded FreeBSD. Although my computer no longer rebooted, it would freeze the compilation process about every 5-10 minutes, so I kept having to manually resume the build process. After I finished building ATLAS (which is about a 8 hour build process) I decided to open my CPU case to clean it. There, I found that my heatsink and fan had fallen off my computer. So, everytime the build process got up to speed, my CPU was too hot and gave errors. As a result, I've continued to run FreeBSD.
There, right next to the motherboard was an exposed cap. The metal sheath had shot right off, leaving the dielectric completely exposed! Unfortunately, I couldn't get the sheath back on because the dielectric was this foamy stuff that expanded outwards if it wasn't constrained by its sheath. So with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I adjusted the sheath's bottom to accomodate the larger dielectric. Shoved it back, being careful to not break leads.
Voilá! Problem solved! This was about 2 or 3 years ago, and that system is still running strong, and without the constant reboots and freezes. The morale of the story is to not get intimidated by the multitude of electronics inside your computer's case, as you can often repair them yourself using a little ingenuity.
I didn't have kids back then, so I never kept the cases on my computers. I bought a new soundcard so I took out the old one, stuck in the new card, and noticed a "new hardware found" message appearing on the screen.
Stupidly, I thought, "Gee shouldn't I get that message AFTER I turn it on? Oops!!!"
I ignored my first impluse to turn it off, then I installed the drivers, rebooted, and everything worked perfectly.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"Farrell Eaves' camera was a perfectly ordinary Nikon CoolPix 990 until he accidentally knocked it into a pond last summer. Now it's a magic camera.
... but it still sloshed. So he decided to see what a soggy Nikon could do, and soon discovered the resurrected camera was creating curious effects in each image."
. html and see pictures here http://www.brucedale.com/Farrell/default.htm
"After the accident, Eaves spent weeks broiling, baking and blow-drying the camera
Read the full story on Wired http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51205,00
(The one I'm typing on right now, that is) Awoke to my grandfather kicking the hell out of it. Working fine.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
Jack's not a bourbon. Use Jim Beam instead. From their website: Whiskey Fact #1 Charcoal Mellowing is what makes Jack Daniel's a smooth sippin' Tennessee Whiskey instead of a bourbon
I was standing on the subway platform. I was wearing a parka. I was struggling to pull my backpack on over my parka, whipping around this way and that. Suddenly my backpack was about 7.5 pounds lighter as my Powerbook G3 flew out and landed, corner first, on the concrete platform. It bounced, and then clattered to the ground.
That was four years ago. Today, I'm typing on that computer as we speak. Err, type.
I was running a job in my old server (sitting on the basement floor of course) when my basement flooded during a hurricane about 3 years ago. I fully expected to return home to find the server dead, but to my surprise, it was still running. The surge suppressor it was plugged into (also on the floor) had sockets that were partially melted, but the server was ticking right along. There was still about a foot of water on the floor and it was lapping up against the MB. Go figure! Oh, and NEVER try to insert the power supply cord for a hard drive reversed with the power running. You get a nice little arc and a dead hard drive.
The opinions expressed here are not mine, but those of these dang voices in my head.
Urine, for example (why do cats & dogs hate electronics?). In a humid environment, urine will eat PCB traces within weeks.
Ferric chloride can make a mess out of anything in 10 minutes; always store your chemicals securely, folks!
And finally, the liquid that can make an appliance totally unrepairable: mineral turpentine. Sure, it doesn't hurt the components or PCB, it just dissolves all the component markings; you know that the little black thing with lots of pins is an IC, but damned if you know what type! (yeah, I'm one of those crazies who never bothers with service manuals...)
When I was about 11 I had a Nintendo controller called Max (had some slidey thing in place of the standard d-pad, easier to control) that stopped working after being hung by the cord across the freshly turned-on TV screen too many times. Lots of voltage + nice conducting controller cord + controller = bad.
So my Dad, being the EE guys he is, rummages around through some random bins of ICs in our basement, finds a replacement for this totally random chip, removes the old one and pops in the new one, and it still worked fine 7 or 8 years later.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I had a linux machine have half its ram, its video card, its sound card, and a hard disk die while it was running. The only reason I did anything about the ram, sound and video was because I was shutting it down to replace the HD anyway -- it had been working fine for months! I attribute this to the Tyan motherboard.
-"It seems like you're trying to exploit a security hole. Would you like help?"
Well, the RAM looked like it would fit from the dual PII 450 reck mount Compaq server into my UNAX s900 Mac clone... but alas, the one notch was a LITTLE off..... so in comes trusty file! Afterword, it fit and ran fine, well, half of it anyway, the 256 sticks read as 128... but at the time memory for that computer was up around $2 per MB!
An acquaintance who runs an independent ISP in Seattle once put about 100 USR Sportster external modems up for sale really cheap. He'd had them stacked up in a huge pile and most of the ones in the middle of all that had melted their cases around the innards like they'd been dipped in caramel. They still worked fine--he was just getting rid of them to upgrade to faster ones.
...sparked when the cable the PC Speaker was connected to (yes i connected the pc speaker to the sound output!) got detached and touched the motherboard! Computer froze, rebooted but to my surprise it was working fine - used that sound card and computer for years afterwards.
I JUST took down a Dell PII/400 running linux that had been running my firewall/sendmail for about 5 years.
The uptime upon takedown was 976 days. It would have been longer, but I inadvertently hit the off button on the UPS once.
When I opened it up, you could have made a sofa out of all the dust bunnies inside, the fan on the video card was toast.
But through the power of linux, this was a durable, reliable machine.
It has been thouroughly cleaned, and placed back into service as a test DNS server.
Aside from a badly bent frame, and a rather juanty look, it worked fine after I reseated all the cards.
:]
GF rage, a little known danger of playing a lot of Counter Strike.
How about 24v DC into a laptop ethernet port? I only noticed because of the smell!
It still works though.
Joseph W. Breu
My brother knocked a just-opened 12 ounce can of ginger ale into an open, running minitower. It hit the CD drive and drained down from there. The drive itself was well shielded, and shadowed the hard drive. The motherboard itself was out of the path of at least most of it, but the sound card and modem both got quite drenched. Curiously, the internet connection did not drop, nor did the mp3s quit playing. We stared at this in disbelief for about a minute, as IMs continued to come in, proving the internet connection was still up. Finally we turned it off and wiped it up.
Years later, the machine was still working as our house router, until I got sick of panicked phone calls from the family whenever our DSL connection would get fouled up. Fixing the problem required resetting the DSL modem, then restarting the PPPoE session on the router. I had it set up so that all they had to do was hit the reset button and everything would be perfectly happy, but it looked like a computer (headless though it was) so they were afraid to do this, despite my assurances that they really couldn't do any damage. I finally bought a black box router for them. Since it didn't look like a computer, they were perfectly happy turning it off and turning it back on again, without disrupting my busy napping schedule. I didn't dare tell them that it was running basically the same software inside.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
At one time, my Macintosh SE/30 and 10MB external disk drive was a very reliable system lasting my almost the duration of my college career. That is until one day when the external disk drive refused to mount. I opened the case removed the drive and smacked it a few times get the drive to ultimately spin up and mount on the desktop. This fix lasted about two weeks until no amount of smacking would cause it to spin up. I figured the bearings were shot and proceeded to open the actual drive mechanism to take a closer look. (I had backed up all the data since this was going to be a mechanical autopsy) I tried spinning the platter and noticed it had a little bit of initial friction but then rolled quite freely. I remounted the cover and attempted to start the drive and would you believe it actually started and mounted with no errors! This again lasted two weeks until once again I had a dead drive. Instead of going through the same autopsy, I simply left the power on and removed the drive cover giving the drive platter a little spin to help start it... the drive started spinning and I placed the cover back on the drive (no screws). For the next 2 months this was the method I used the start the drive... I called it "manual jump start"! The drive finally succumbed to dust and contaimination but it provided a very interesting sight to friends when I started it up!
Fellow I know used to work on Navy ships for Raytheon, building and using ROVs (the little remote control submarines). Some moron accidentally dropped a Compaq laptop full of highly classified information off a ship in the North Atlantic, somewhere around 1,500 meters deep. They found the thing, dried it off, and it booted right up. Worked for a utility district for a while. Salesman came around with "ruggedized" laptops. He said, "Let me borrow one of your boom trucks." OK. He went about 45 feet up in the bucket, dropped the laptop, and after a couple of bounces it booted up. Then he closed the case again, ran over it with the truck, opened it up, and the damn thing still worked. They bought 25 of the things.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
One morning a few years back my brother smelled burning electronics in his bedroom while there were six computers in there. When he went to shut down a (Linux) server we were going to co-locate that morning he couldn't bring up the display, so he had to remotely log into it. It ran a bit on the herky jerky side, but he did manage a graceful shutdown.
When I got on the scene I saw chunks of ceramic material laying on the bottom of the case. It turned out that the cheep Trident card we had in that thing, which was sitting on the PCI base with everything else, gone through a cascading short circuit with solder joints melting and oosing across the board. After there was enough shorts and exploded capacitors on the video card, the main IC got so hot that it exploded. Surprising enough even with an exploded video card and a burnt trace going into the motherboard and the PCI bus mostly jacked, the system kept going!
in a very real sense.
since I used to work at an OEM shop in the valley. We used to overclock the old ceramic-cased 486-33s to ridiculous speeds, sometimes as high as 80Mhz by replacing the clock crystal and modifying the MB.
Now we had a good customer who somehow had dropped one of the tested good 486s and broken the ceramic case so that a corner with three pins had come completely detached. My boss decided to be nice and replace it. I asked for and received the broken CPU.
After four or five attempts I managed to solder and JBWeld the CPU together and it served me well for about three years.
The power cord on a computer of mine shorted out and started a fire a few years ago. The fire was put out after burning a good portion of my desk, wrecking my monitor and melting the side of a nearby TV open. The computer itself, case, power supply, drives and all are still working without a hitch, while almost everything around it was irreparably wrecked.
I still haven't been able to clean off all of the soot from the case though. The soot from all of the burning plastic and PC boards doesn't come off very easily.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
A friend of mine flipped the voltage switch on the power supply while it was on. He fried the mobo, and must have caused some damage to the PS. I swapped the mobo out, and the power supply works fine... once it's running... the catch is, he needs to use a blowdryer on the back of the power supply for a couple min before it will turn on. It's always fun when he shows up to our LAN parties.
Thanks for your comment, I have always mistakenly believed that 'bourbon' equals 'American whisky'. I will have the guy drop his cellphone in a glass full with Jim Beam, then.
Does Four Roses qualify?
Story's true, except for the part about knowing he had the calc. Funny thought, though. But after you're soaked with blood from multiple hammer blows to the head, you really don't require much more motivation.
Oh, btw, the perp did not die, sorry to disappoint some of you. And screw you pacifist foreigners.
(posting as AC because this laptop is going to defcon tonight - no passwords on this puppy)
Sorry, dude - dont believe everything that sound good and comes handy for your opinion.
1st point: I live in germany (big city area) and have been to the US (for long, and not only on holidays). People certainly feel safe where they come from, because they know their way around, but still: try to find a large area in germany where people would be scared to walk around alone at night or even lock their car door while driving.
The author "corrected" his US numbersby substracting black crime (to prove his racist point), but he didnt "correct" german or french numbers.
The numbers cited from interpol (interpol crime statistics) are not publicly available (for internal use only). I will not even consider discussing non-disclosed (maybe fictional) numbers.
Because of the last point I could not check whether the interpol crime statistics counts cross - border crime only (which is more probable in europe - more borders / countries involved in everyday life than in rural US) which is what interpol should be largely concerned with.
Pull your motherboard out the box, and put it in a very well lighted area. Ideally, use one of those magnifying lamps (the ones with a flexible or levered arm that have a lamp and magnifying lens you can look through). Position the lamp so you can see down inside the AGP slots, and can see the contacts.
Now, take a very small jeweler's flat screwdriver (the smallest you can find), and very carefully insert it (which is the reason for the magnifying lamp), and pry the contacts away from the sides - just a little, not a lot - don't bend them too much, just a little bit to give their grip back, but not so much so that when you insert the vid card it catches on them and bends them. Do all of the contacts this way. Sometimes, you may be able to spot one or more of the contacts that seem further "back" than the others - ie, further apart from the sides than the tighter ones. If that is the case, deal with only those first, and if it doesn't fix it, move on to the others - there are a lot of contacts in an AGP slot, don't mess with what isn't broken if you can tell it apart.
My guess is that they have simply lost their grip - either from age or from swapping the card out constantly for a different card (and if you are somebody who upgrades their vid card with every game or whatnot - this is likely the cause).
Good luck - and like I said, this very well may cause damage (ie, you bend a pin too much, it breaks off or it bends/catches on the vid card, you turn it on, smoke comes out from a short, etc)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I used to work as a sysadmin for a large oil company managing their datacenter in Alaska. This was back in the 80's so we are talking big iron. IBM 3090's, 4381's, VaxCluster with 8600's, 785's, and a about a 2,000 square foot disk farm. I was out fishing, (it being a weekend and all) when I got a 911 page. The ENTIRE datacenter had crashed, every single server with the exception of a an ancient Vax750 sitting all alone in the corner. Following a panicked drive back to the datacenter, I was joined by the several of the Operations team when we discovered that the tape librarian had hooked up a degauser to about a 300ft extension cord and was walking around flirting with a janitor while she degaussed tapes on any available surface, mostly the disk farm........
http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/
http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/
Friends of mine screwed that retired 386 to the wall for decoration purposes (they have a wall full of hardware, but this was the only thing which still worked before it was screwed on). Then they sticked in RAM, a HD, a screen and a power supply and tried to boot it. Which it did, amazingly.
I got an 80 GB hard drive that I planned to put into my file server. Rather than replace the existing 8 GB drive (shh), I added it as a slave. However, I had to unplug the IDE cable from the master first. In doing so, I somehow wrenched a pin from the socket, and off the drive's logic board. I freaked out. All my files were on a drive, which I now assumed was inaccessable.
I took a closer look at the pin, and discovered that it was still attached to its lead. I pushed the lead onto its location on the logic board, and slapped some Scotch Tape on it, to hold it in place. The IDE connecter slipped on perfectly, and the machine booted.
I planned to move everything from the 8 gig drive over to the new 80 gig and set that as the master, and just dispose of the broken drive. I haven't gotten around to it. Since I last shut it down (accidentally), the machine has been up for 70 days straight.
And when logging in to chec the uptime, I recieved the following message from the fortune file:
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to
invent it.
It lives up to it's name: http://www.sanspoint.com
When I was a kid I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, you know the first $99 computer. I got it for christmas and was thrilled with it. As with most things, I decided to take it apart at one point. After _not_ putting it back together it went outside next to the garbage can, where it spent the winter buried in snow. At a later point I read in Dr. Dobbs an article about how to wire the larger keyboard from a TI 994a to it and thought it would be a cool project. I dug the sinclair motherboard out of the snow and went ahead with the project. Low and behold, IT WORKED!
Back in high school local companies would donate their old - read: scrap - mainframes to our electronics lab. The computers weren't functional, but we salvaged as many components as we could. Rather than painstakingly de-soldering chips from the PCBs, we'd take a blow torch to the back of boards, shake them and let the chips fall to the floor. The TTL logic chips always survived this brute force approach. With CMOS chips, it was 50/50. Our brain cells likely faired much worse, given that we ended up breathing toxic fumes from the burning boards. Of course, some would say we didn't have that many to begin with considering our choice of chip removal technique.
As a fairly small child, my parents took me with them while they played racquetball. The back of the court was translucent, so they could essentially keep an eye on me and save their baby-sitting money to keep feeding me.
However, this was boring for me. As most of you geeks probably did as children, I played little fantasy games with myself (think Tolkien, not Jenna Jameson gutter-minds). In one of my fantasies I had to unlock a special door that needed two keys. To play it out, I used an electrical outlet slots as the keyholes and my parents' locker keys as the magical keys.
Long story short, they come running out as I'm welding their keys together with my bare hands in the socket. They had to get me to stop crying (apparently from the heat), but even as a little tike the voltage (US 120, for the record) didn't make it through my trunk or cause any medical repercussions.
Of course, they did had some 'slaining to do to the staff. ;)
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
Well, one day he came over to my house and said "Hey cr0sh, I found some computers in a dumpster behind a fast food joint, you want them?" - I took a look at what he brought home. There they were, just laying in the back of his beat up Ford pickup, sitting in some dirt and grease - two Apple IIGS boxes, and a floppy drive...
Yeah, I replied, grabbed them, took them inside - and asked if there was anything else over there. He told me there was a bunch of other stuff, but he had spied them while in line to get a hamburger, and there was a line behind them, and he had to get back to his job site (lunch break, I guess - so they were sitting in the sun, in the back of the truck, on a construction job site) - so he never picked up the other stuff.
I asked him if he could show me where this place was (it was on the other side of town, a good 50 miles away from my house at the time) - and we went over there, and lo! There it was, a bunch of other Apple IIGS junk. I grabbed it all, threw it in the back of my pickup, and went home.
Apparently a nearby "after-school" daycare or something nearby got rid of all their Apple IIGS stuff (but strangely, kept all of their software - I didn't find any) by binning it.
I dusted off the big bits of junk, but didn't clean it greatly - of all the parts, the floppy drives seemed the cleanest, but I checked the heads on those just to be sure. I put the parts together, hooked the output up to an old TV, stuck in my Fallout floppy from highschool (15 years ago) - and booted.
No problem - all ran *perfectly*...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
And while I continue to abuse my hardware, it still works just fine.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
This nice new P60 was starting to make grinding noises and give HD errors. Ran fdisk to let it sort the good sectors fromt he bad. Unfortunately, it started making the noise right away. I got pissed and kicked it. Hard! It stopped making noise and kept going ... for abotu 5 or 10 seconds. I beat on it, it ran. And so on for over an hour. Actually got a little tired.
Once formated, the HD had no bad sectors and never had another problem.
My brother installed a beta of Win95, hated it, and pulled of a nice move. He booted it in command line, erased everything, including the hidden files, then manually copied the boot files from a floppy. Turned it off then on. Everything was back to normal.
And finally, I didn't have a HD bracket for a 5 meg HD for my 8088. So I just stuck a French-English dictionary in the case and set the HD on it. Unfortunately, I didn't know what I was doing, didn't have a HD controller, and FD controllers just don't cut the mustard. Surprised the repair guy 10 years later when my mom took the machine in to get a modem for reading email.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Perhaps I should dig out my old schematics (if I can find them in the basement) and throw them on some museum website...
In high school, a friend of mine hadn't written his paper for science class. He was hoping to get out of it by taking a 3.5" floppy with some random files on it, and running a high-powered magnet all over it until the thing just plain wouldn't read.
20 minutes of trying to ruin the disk later, and the files still read perfectly. That was one magical floppy.
And yet, I've had floppies which failed after less than 20 minutes use.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
I managed my own I.T. department and needed a router. We had a Packard Bell computer that would hard lock after 5 minutes. The CPU fan fell off for a few months and it was never the same.
I put linux on it and configured it to be our firewall & router. It ran for four years. Sometimes it wouldn't come up after a power outage, but it would eventually.
That box REALLY could do nothing else. But it was a great little router.
Parent post reminds me of something that I've been wanting to ask about:
One of the best "hack" repairs that I have ever performed is to permanently repair dead pixels on TFT lcd screens: A strong flick of the finger (focalized impact) has worked for me *every time*!!
I have personally "repaired" about 20 laptops this way, and recommended the procedure to many friends with a 100% success rate.
Is this common knowledge?
I suppose I should say that YMMV, but my experience has shown that TFTs are surprisingly resilient to such shock; I've never made the situation worse.
I love it when you can fix delicate, precise hardware with a sledgehammer! Hmmm... what other ones come to mind:
- Repairing old Quantum hard drives w/ frozen bearings by ramming a pen or screwdriver to get it spinning again
- I know there were many others, but I haven't had enough coffee yet.... anyone?
My room mate one day was really angry with his girl friend and picked up the TV and trew it at here. She was not harmed. The door where the TV landedn and the TV itself however were dammaged.
The CRT was still in one piece so I decided to give it a try. When I opened up the case I saw that the PCB was broken. I put the parts next to each other and started soldering wires between all connections of the two parts. After an hour or so, I powered it on and it it worked! Unfortunately I could not repair the hole in the door.
My room mate ended up marrying her, and as far as I know they have 3 kids and still married happely...
I can't believe in all of this no one has mentioned (at least above the +2 level) "Project E.U.N.U.C.H.," especially in light of the mention of 386-MHz 386s in the Slashdot article. A bunch of British guys overclocked a 486DX/25 to something like 258 MHz (with lots of extra cooling) before it gave out...
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I own a Samsung 950P 19" SyncMaster Monitor that rests on a desk which was at the time flush against the bed I share with my girlfriend. One evening, whilst being very aggressive with one another, the bed was bouncing and moving all over the place and must have slammed into the desk. Unfortunately I had left my drink resting atop my monitor. The drink fell back and poured all of it's contents into the vents of the monitor. After we composed ourselves, I went to check my email or some such silly thing. I flip the monitor on and a loud ZAP/CRACK sound bounded from the beast while the screen had a small white circle in the center, getting smaller and smaller. I could hear something sizzling inside of the case, I turn the monitor off and notice that my drink is missing. - The next day while searching for my manual I realize that the monitor is a few months past it's three year warranty. I call Samsung just to ask for advice, how much might it cost to fix, what can I do to help it limp along if anything, etc. After letting it dry for a few days, I powered it back up. Slowly, very slowly it came back on and it worked fine. A few waves appear around the edges of the screen every once in a blue moon and has one dead pixel near the center of the screen. Otherwise it works similar to how it was when it was brand new. :)
Back in the day, I was working on an embedded system that did automated blood gas analysis. To give you an timeframe, we were using 8-bit 8085 processors "networked" with RS-232 connections.
The controller I was working on controlled a lot of robotic mechanisms developed by the mechanical engineers. Lots of motor controls, relays and stuff with high voltage and current running through them.
So, one of the techs comes in with a new piece of hardware for the software that I'd been working on. Being the first run on the hardware, I always liked to step through the code to make sure nothing unexpected happened.
After setting a breakpoint at the point where the code started talking to the new device, I started the application up. Basically, there were a bunch of read/write registers, that told the hardware what to do.
So I get to the breakpoint and started single stepping...
BOOM!
(And capitalized text doesn't really do this justice. Scared the shit out of us...)
Turns out one of the bits in the register turned on a relay. The relay, in turn, caused 240 V to be applied directly across the inputs of a power transistor. Said power transistor didn't like that...
The transistor was one of those kinds with the metal cap and big heavy base (you still see them in power amplifiers.) The only thing left after this incident was the metal base -- never found the cap.
Afterwards, I looked at the tech and remarked, "Looks like a hardware problem..."
-ch
http://homerzone.net/ebludgeon/e-bludgeonry.wmv
Did Edison show that an electric chair powered by DC was less dangerous? I don't believe he did.
Here's how we deal with Computers in Colorado. (from http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/25/10590 84199743.html )
"In January, police were called to an apartment block in Boulder, Colorado, after neighbours saw a man waving a handgun and yelling that he "wanted to kill" the "bitch". The police, thinking it was a violent domestic row, then called in a SWAT team and the building was evacuated. It didn't take long, however, before the rifle-equipped SWAT team realised the man was simply suffering computer rage and that the gun was actually a plastic pellet pistol. No charges were laid.
Only two months later in the same US state - Colorado must have poor PC support - an office worker in Lafayette walked into a nearby bar (which he also owned) with his laptop, told the customers to cover their ears, and then shot his laptop four times. It was later hung on the bar wall like a hunting trophy. Unlike the other gun-toting rager, however, he was arrested."
I have an old HP computer (originally a Pentium 200MHz, for what it's worth, I forgot the model number). Not knowing it would screw anything up, I held the reset button just a bit too long. When I released it, it started to POST, then made all sorts of funny noises, some smoke, and snow on the monitor. I turned it off and left it alone for about half an hour; when I came back, I turned it on, and behold...it worked. The HP logo that usually displays during POST was gone...but everything appeared to work. Now it refuses to allow anything but BeOS and FreeBSD to boot, though.
We had made this little "follow-the-white-line" robot and programmed. After lots of hours of building stuff, (and I mean overnight) we finally made it work.
:P
We taped the robot following the line, "just in case".
So it was late, and we had to drive to the school to show the professor that we had done it.
I put the robot on top of the car as we pack the rest of the stuff. We make sure everything's packed, and we go to school.
But had forgotten to get the robot OFF the top of the car. ON the first turn.... hee hee hee hee.
I tried to pick it up, but the cars were too fast!
I think some parts got smashed by some evil driver. Can't really remember.
At least the main chip survived. We collected the pieces of the robot, but the project survived! (videotape = evidence A).
We got a 70/100 overall.
A friend of mine had an old (68040?) Powermac with a video capture board. One day he was running it with the case off, as was usual, but an unknown component on the capture board, probably a resistor, exploded with a pop and threw a spark into the air. ...so he masked the area around the now bare contacts with scotch tape, then taped a shiny new penny to it! From then on, his sound was monaural, but it actually worked again!
Somewhat less impressive was when he got a G3, he managed to yank the wires out of an extremely stubborn Molex power connector (god, I hate those things...), so to insulate the wire ends, he stuffed them into a cork he had laying around. For years, the G3 had a cork hanging in the middle of it.
Not one of my prouder moments but one night while getting into bed I decided to do a safety check on the 12 gauge I keep beside it. (yeah, I know. stupid) Well, it was off. the muzzle was about 2 inches away from the wall and blew a 3 inch hole right through it. Luckily there was only birdshot loaded up. On the other side of the wall is my computer room. Couple of pc's one of which was an old acer running openbsd used for nat/firewall. After my heart stopped beating a hole in my chest I inspected the room. shot marks streaked across the wall. The coax going to my cable modem had about 50 pieces of shot imbeded in it and the front of my firewall was shattered. To my surprize it all still worked. Looked like hell but it worked. Btw after a visit to Home Depot for some trim, paint and spackle (lots and lots of spacle) I ended up getting my whole deposit back. Bitchin eh?
I've made mistakes plenty of times, shorting my system and having it reboot just fine. I've got a switch on the back for the inner light, but I've never properly mounted it, and because of its design, the contacts can touch the case, causing the thing to short out. I also, while overclocking my system once, caused my video card to overheat and die. I've done a lot to this system, but it still works!
unconcious?
Turning disposible cameras into stun guns was quick and easy. Never knocked anyone out but was able to summon profanity with the touch of a button.
I have a KT7A-Raid motherboard that originally ran a 1.33 GHZ Thunderbird (the 75 Watt of heat disapating one) and have lost 4 capacitors on the motherboard (split on the top or bottom, lost fluid, etc) but every function on the board still works fine. I dunno what those caps were doing but they seem to have not been vital to functionality. The system still to this day runs rock solid.
I am working on replacing them, I think they were probably made with that stolen electrolite formula.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
When I was a teenager I found a watch at the bottom(on the drain grate) of the local university olympic high diving with deeeep deep end pool. Other than the mostly rotten band, leather, plastic, or rubber I couldn't tell as it disintegrated when I touched it, it was just fine and still ticking.
You guessed it. It was a Timex.
I sent them a letter describing the situation along with a picture of the watch(sans strap). They replied with a note saying "Thanks, if we decide to use your anecdote, we will be in touch." along with a check for $5.00 for a new band.
Yes, thirty years later, I still have it and it still works.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
hehe i felt some voltage once...(ok well more than once)
.045 seconds to pull it away. seemed like forever at the time.
I was trying to see if I could resurect a monitor and fired it up while the case was open. "luckily" it only went thro my hand to something else in the back of the monitor. I felt 5 pulses of electricity before I jerked my hand away. so it took me about
since then if i can't correct a monitor digitally from the outside I send it to the recycling center.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
Accidentally spilled Mountain Dew into my open desktop case (sitting on the floor)... it was a pentium 90 @ 100 on an intel 430vx board. Still ran fine afterwards. in fact, ran well enough that someone bought it from me for $50, even after I'd told him about the incident.
Bet it's still working to this day...
Sometimes when you make prototype hardware, you get some tolerances wrong designing the PCB, especially for drilled holes. If you do, you sometimes get the power planes shorted together.
:-), relying on the short usually just being a small bit of copper with therefore higher resistance...
:). ;-).
Most people just chuck the boards, but there is one solution that I know works
First, strip off a standard plug, replace the fuse in it with a chunky bit of wire, turn off all the other appliances in your house on the same circuit, wire the plug wires up to each power plane, stand well back and flip the switch.
One bang later, and voila: the short has vaporised. You'll also almost certainly have blown the fuse for that circuit in your electricity supply box, but who cares! You have a working PCB.
Hint#1: don't do this once you have components soldered on
Hint#2: Don't blame me if you set your house wiring on fire as well
I have a Motorola Timeport cell phone. That damn thing has been through the washing machine TWICE and I bumped it off the counter into a sink full of warm soapy water. I all cases, I let it air dry completely and the thing works!! It cannot be killed.
Good phone. Afraid to get a newer model, it may come back to get me.
I've had an LG VX4400 since last November and it's taken all sorts of physical abuse since I use it a lot at work. I've been telling my friends to get one based on their durability for a while. Well, last week it was put to the ultimate test.
I was using the bathroom when my dad called. I flushed the toilet, grabbed the phone, and pulled up the antenna. As I did that it slipped from my hand and went right into the toilet. It swirled around and went into the hole, and I quickly snatched it out by its antenna before it could go all the way down. The thing had water all up inside it and in the screen. It was trying to boot and making a squealing noise from the ringer. I yanked the battery off, blew out as much water as I could with compressed air, and put it in a drawer for a few days.
Eventually I put the battery back on and powered it up. Damn thing works fine, just like nothing ever happened. Speaker is still loud, screen is OK, signal is still great, and battery life hasn't changed. I wiped it off with some rubbing alcohol in a lousy attempt to disinfect it from the toilet water. If you need a tough phone, try the LG VX4400.
About 4 years ago I bought parts for a computer I was building, including a Tbird 750 socket A. I had just gotten around to start installing the heatsink when I had to go somewhere. When I returned, I put the heatsink on and finished the build out. For 2 weeks I had problems with my new computer randomly freezing. I tried replacing parts, etc. Finally, I was going through the BIOS one last time when I decided to look at the PC Health section. The CPU temp said 94C. I thought that was a bit high, so I opened it up and took off the heatsink. Yeah, you're supposed to take the plastic shield off the TIM right? :D
Proc still works to this day.
About a year ago, my father was having a problem with his Celeron comp freezing. The first thing I checked was the heatsink. It was on backwards, and the heatsink was tilted, not even touching the die!
"So it's pretty hard to hurt yourself with DC."
You've obviously never seen the battery plant in a telco CO.
The telephone system (in the US, anyway) runs on -48 volts of direct current. Every telco CO (Central Office -- the other end of your phone line) has big banks of batteries. We're talking rows and rows of shelves of batteries for a big city CO. It may be less then 50 volts, but we're talking thousands of amps. You short a main bus bar with a screwdriver, and you'll likely vaporize the screwdriver -- and go blind from the arc flash.
As I've been zapped by talk battery on residental lines and felt the tingle, *something* must be flowing. So I wouldn't want to bet my line of that 50 volt potential not being strong enough to make it over your skin.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
My first computer was an IBM PS/2-30 that I called Percy. Percy ran at an astonishing 8 MHZ and had a 20 MB HDD. Due to poverty I was still running this machine as late as 1991 when the power supply inexplicably failed. The motherboard etc. would only work with that power supply. The case and power supply were proprietary and I couldn't find one for sale in town anywhere. That was before the internet took off so I couldn't just hop online and order one. So I resolved to fix it. I had it on good authority that it was probably just the switch and it would be an easy swap once I got it open. That's where the fun began. It was sealed with little star-head bolts that were somehow locked in place. Well I didn't have a star driver, but I did have a hacksaw. So I tried to hacksaw off the side of the case and the power supply. (I did remove everything else from the case first) Well that didn't work because the bolts were just too strong. I sawed and sawed but only succeeded in making a terrible racket. My mother hollered at me to take this project outside, so I continued out in the driveway. I gave up on the saw because it was just taking too darn long, but I'd made some headway and figured I could break the bolts and get into the guts of the deal with a steel chisel and a hammer. I thought the saw was loud. By the time I started whaling on the thing with the hammer and chisel the neighbors were complaining. I snapped the bolts and got the side partially pried open but found I couldn't get to the switch because it was actually on the opposite side of the power supply, stuck to the back side of the case, out of reach. Rather than pound the crap out of the back of the case I gave up and went inside. A buddy was over the next day and asked if the computer with the side torn out of it still worked. I decided to humor him and try it, and to my surprise it powered up. In fact it was quite a lot quieter than it had been before. I hooked the motherboard and HDD back up and it worked for another year and a half before I finally threw the thing away. Now whenever I have a power supply act up I just take out a hammer and chisel. It seems to get the message across.
We had a piece of equipment back in the 80s that supported remote hospitals, a Phoenix concentrator connected to a sync modem. The concentrator in the computer room was nicely chilled, but the Phoenix at the hospital was in a sweaty phone room with too much equipment. This datacomm equipment was on 24/7 and worked heavily.
I went to the remote site and was trying to figure out what was wrong. I opened up the Phoenix's front end and along the way touched the board. It was actually gooey, like asphalt on a melted street. The whole board was like that.
It ran successfully that way for three more years.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
About 20 years ago. It was interesting. Nothing happened. Altho the static foam did an interesting light display. Scared the shit out of us!
Smashed a 7404 in incremental steps till it ceased to function. It was amazing how much of the silicon was showing while it was working. That was prior to the nuke incident.
Fun, fun, fun!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Once in college I wanted to build an mp3 player for my car. I got hold of a mini tomato motherboard, and laid out the parts on my desk - including a serial cable and infrared receiver - and booted up the machine. While it was running, the end of the serial cable with the IR receiver connected to it touched something on the motherboard, and the cable basically went up in smoke instantly. Windows had blue-screened, but after powering it off and removing the burnt serial cable, everything booted up fine.
Ahh, the good ol' days.
Sometime in the late '80s or early '90s I took the cover off a 20MB 5.25" half-height mfm disk (maybe a Micropolis, not really sure) that didn't like to spin up. I used it that way without problems for over 6 months although it was sitting on the rug next to an open PC mini-tower case. My cat only batted at the heads occasionally. Every once in a while a stack of printouts would topple and bury it. Eventually it succumbed to massive amounts of cat fur accumulation.
About 13 years ago, I had a TI-81 calculator which I loved. One day I put it in my bag to take to school, along with some honey that I was going to have for lunch. The top of the honey came off and the calculator soaked in it until it became completely permeated by honey. I could see honey inside the screen. The calculator no longer worked at this point.
So I took the calculator home, filled the sink with water, and swished the calculator around in the water for about ten minutes until I couldn't see honey inside the screen anymore.
Then I let it dry out. A day went by and it still wasn't working. Then another day, still dead.
After about three days the inside of the screen had cleared to the point where it only had some condensed moisture around the edges. At this point it not only turned on on, but to my delight I discovered that it still had all the programs that I had laboriously typed in over the past few months.
Woke up with a hang over in very bad mood when the alarm went off. Tossed it into a corner I guess just tapping the snooze button. Darn thing woke me up again in 10 minute or so.
About 3 weeks ago the DVD drive on my Windows box starts opening/closing on its own. It was totally random, and any time the power was on, it would just open or close every minute or so. The drive played movies just fine, untill it ejected 3 minutes into playing! I tried the usual stuff, rebooting, booting into safe-mode, reinstalling drivers, air-dusters, etc. I even tried calling tech-support (silly me).
The kicker was that the open-close button on the front of the drive didn't work real well either, I had to really pound on that thing in order for it to work. At this point, I was pretty sure that there was some strange hardware issue, and thus I was looking at buying a new $100 drive.
In frustration, I unplugged everything and pulled the drive out, took off the plastic face-plate, and with my trusty needle-nose pliers, ripped the open-close button off of the bare circut-board. I gently plugged everything back in, and lo-and-behold, it works fine now!
I need to use some sort of software to get the drive to eject, but hey, it works!
two 32 meg SIMM sticks onto a pentium 75 MB. to this day they work, but i remember sorta kinda i mangled some clips to where 64 meg will be all it ever has cuz something will break due to metal fatigue if those metal parts are ever even just touched again. which is fine, those two 32 meg SIMM sticks were kinda pricey...
Serenity now, insanity later.
...I dropped my original Olympus Stylus camera off of 2nd floor balcony on to concrete, I crashed with it on my mtn bike many times, and I dropped it from a moving car. The thing is 15 years old and still works great.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
I was working late one night a few months ago and getting frustrated trying to get my Geforce 4 TI out of my tiny small form factor case. Well in my haste I grabbed on to a capacitor with my pinky while I was trying to get the card out and POP! off came the capacitor. I was distraught, but amazingly when I popped the card back in and brought up my system, everything seemed to work fine. I later learned that capacitors can sometimes be used for overflow electricity so I'm hoping this doesn't have lasting effects on the card.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
My first do-it-yourself computer has suffered some. The motherboard is an Abit KT7 with an AMD Athlon Thunderbird at 800 MHz. The HSF that I had for it was the kind that requires a flat-head screw driver to hold the clips down while you install it. While attempting to install the HSF, the screw driver slipped to the side and the blade drove right into the motherboard, knocking off a diode or two right next to the CPU. I had a sick feeling in my gut at having just killed my expensive motherboard (expensive to a highschooler at least), but I decided to carefully try again. After slowly but successfully seating the HSF onto its mounting bracket, I power it on to see if I was lucky enough to not kill it. Aparently it was my lucky day. It POSTed and works fine to this day, some many years later. At the moment, it's sitting in my parents' kitchen powering Mom's computer. It never generates errors and is rock-solid (indefinite uptime, in excess of a month though), so either the motherboard is increadibly fault-tolerant, or those pieces I knocked off aren't used for anything that the machine does or has ever done.
I just remembered the horrible thing I did to my first 386. Being an AT baby board, it didnt fit well into the megolithic AST 286 case, in fact massive structural changes were required to the case, still didnt really fit. So I did what I always did when something didnt fit back then, I pushed really hard. Once mounted and bolted down, the mother board was warped in order to make the near transdimentional fit. The center near the CPU was basically about two and a half inches lower than the edges on this baby board. It ran for about two years like that I think. Most reliable and compatable PC I have ever had.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
In High School, way back when PC-AT's were the norm, a fellow classmate accidentally "stored" his class assignment floppy (5 1/4") in the back of one of those old DOS 2.1 "folder boxes". When he found it a day or so later, it was creased in half along the read window on the disc and the casing had been split in multipla places.
Not wanting to give up on a semester's worth of programming work, we unfolded it, placed it under a websters unabridged dictionary for a weekend to flatten out the crease and sure enough, it worked just fine...not a single bad sector.
Lightning strikes are actually not DC. The current goes only one way, yes (AFAIK), but it flickers over the duration of the strike, and the strokes are very short. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electri c/lightning2.html . (note that the arrow indicates the direction that the charge carriers move, not the direction of the current). Also, the voltage difference across your body will not be millions of volts (though it will still be high).
Nonetheless, lightning is very dangerous, and burns and/or kills many people.
These hardware died brutally, but the harddrives were saved
btw -the last previous story on SlashDot on abused hardware was here in March '03 . It's good to see updated coverage...especially in an election year.
Talking about abuse...
In the early 90s, a friend of mine had setup a PC system for a doctor's practice, and a couple of months later the doctor decided to move the system to another desk.
After doing so and booting up the machine he called my friend complaining that the monitor would display garbage only and asking him to come over fix it for him.
When my friend arrived at the practice he proceeded to double-check the doctor's setup and noticed that the VGA connector was stuck somehow.
When he finally removed the connector (using various tools and brute force) he discovered that the doctor had somehow managed to plug in the (D-shaped!) VGA connector the wrong way around...
A couple years back a watermain opened up and blew a 2ft hole in the wall of our computer room. During the next few hours several million gallons of water entered the building through the main server room. The force of the water blew the mounting bolts for the telco racks out of the floor and moved them about 10 feet where they ran into the SAN cabinets. The power didn't go out until the UPS batteries shorted out. Over the next three weeks we recovered the data from about 500 36GB hard drives that populated the SAN. Only 3 of them needed new electronics and only 4 disks were unrecoverable.
So no shit, there I were, stuffing yet another board. Eric had liberated a bunch of RAM chips of uncertain pedigree from Moneywell, and prior experience indicated that we could expect one or two per board to fail on test. Desoldering chips from a double sided board being a pain in the ass, and having a tool that bent the leads for easy insertion without leaving them permanently deformed, so that they still sprung out firmly against the sides of the plated-through holes, I decided to try an experiment.
So all the chips get installed, and I solder the TTL logic chips that support the memory array; solder the other components (lots and lots of bypass caps, regulators, etc.)... and, for luck, the power and ground pins of each of the memory chips. Ooops, except that one that did get the pins too well straightened and was clearly not making any contact with most of them. Finally it's time for the smoke test... There were a couple more pins here and there that weren't making a solid contact, but with the memory test proggy pointing out where the errors were it was easy to spot them. A little solder on those chips, one recalcitrant chip replaced, and the board burned in overnight without any more errors.
So the next day I soldered the rest of the pins, because you just can't trust a non-soldered connection in the long run... and you really can't trust 1024 of them!
Me and a friend decided it was a good idea t purchase some cheap pentium 233 boards and chips, back in the day. Identical everything, like 40 serial numbers apart. so, one of them, (my friends) had a "bios issue", IE it cracked in half and spurted flames. So, we got this bright idea: :p), we got these when a pentium 233 was still alright, as in before diablo II came out, which my machine played for like 8+ hours a day. sometimes 14+.....
get newest version of flash
boot board still working (mine)
insert flash disc, progress to very last step before flash.
pull out my BIOS (still not sure why I agreed to this) and then put in a BIOS from a different machine with about the same size and same pins
flash the BIOS.
what the hell, put the old one back in, its out of date, flash it to
my machine worked, clocked from 233 to 266, no fan or heatsink, for three years before the pro started to get flakey.
his still works (he didnt clock it
After spending a nice day sailing, my buddy and me were unloading the boat when it came time for him to hand me the camera. You know those moments in your life where time slows down, like when you are nearly in accident or your waiting in line for movie ticket that started 10 minutes ago? We entered that matrix like state as my friend handed me the camera from the boat. With all the attention that two sober people could muster, we watched my camera do a slow triple lindy in the salty bayou. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Too late, the camera quickly sank into the murcky bottom. I was ready to leave but my friend was in the water and digging around in the muck for 5 minutes. He found it and we put it in a cooler with distilled water as if it was a black box from a downed aircraft. Later that night I removed the police tape from the cooler, dissasembled it and put it in front of a dehumidifier for 24 hours. The next day I put it back together and it worked! (for 4 weeks anyway, about 100 more pics).
Oh yeah, three CRT monitors (two no-names and an SGI) had a 6 hour underwater adventure in my garden shed when our neighborhood got flooded. I let them dry and they all worked, eventually.
Actually, there's more. I plugged the 5v speaker pins from my apple 2 into 8ohm domestic speakers (for more of a hi-fi effect) and this fried the motherboard. Repairs : USD300. Still works.
Here's a recent one. I just left a laptop in a hotel in Texas.
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I bought a cheapy super-7 (333mhz) a while back anyway. The system kept crashing about a year after I bought. I narrowed it down to the onboard timer.
So I used Seti@home and set it to run all the time.
Only thing is that I have to pray it stay up long enough to get a new packet.
Some times it crashes 4 or so times before I can get the packet.
But as long as it is processing the packet it stays up.
I know sounds like voodoo but it worked.
Luckily this is not my main system.
Back in the early 486 days, a client brought in a system that he had purchased from us a couple of weeks earlier, reported that it "just won't turn on", and left it with me, expecting a warranty repair. I took the cover off and discovered that the plastic stand-offs and the metal screws that secured the motherboard to the chassis had been completely sheared off. The board was floating freely in the case, and shorting against it. I was incredulous. It seemed clear that whatever had happened was outside the scope of warranty coverage. Nevertheless, I extracted the broken bits, re-secured the motherboard to the chassis, and turned on the computer, fully expecting the hard drive to fail. Amazingly, it booted with no problems, and all the data seemed to be intact.
When the client returned, my boss interrogated him until he admitted what had really happened. His company had been planning to use the computer on a generator in the forest to track wildlife movements. So they shoved the thing out of an airplane with its own parachute, and it landed a little hard. I was amazed that my boss managed to keep a straight face when he told the client that, unfortunately, the warranty definitely didn't cover that.
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Checked out an old 386 for a client. It seems that it had been on during a lightning storm, and shut down when a bolt hit the nearby transformer.
Must have been a fairly decent crack 'o' lightning, as it was enough to actually kill - of all things - their refrigerator.
Well, not having much faith in the 386, I nonetheless tried to start it up. It wouldn't detect the drives... and the CMOS had reset
Well, put a new CMOS battery in the sucker, took out the Sony CD drive (which was dead, wouldn't even eject the tray) and I'll be damned if the thing didn't work for quite awhile after.
I had two machine which I use as servers, one a webserver (K62/400) and the other a fileserver/NAT machine (duron 1Ghz). Well, one day I got a UPS to plug 'em into, so I downed the webserver (but left the NAT server up as I had a .torrent downloading). As soon as I unplugged the webserver, the NAT machine died as well.
I figured that perhaps I'd unplugged the wrong cord, but when I traced it back, I had unplugged the right machine. Soooo, turn on the Duron again, everything spins up and the LEDs light up, but no POST. Fiddle with it a bit, and open the case. BIG freaking scorch mark where the power lead connects to the motherboard. Pins fried, motherboard browned, and the cable actually melted and black.
Duron mobo was toast, so I replaced it with another... for which all the components (drives, RAM, etc) worked happily.
What I wonder though is, is the manufacturer of the powerbar liable? The plug was still plugged in perfectly (no grounding), and it's one of those "warranteed against lightning" bars. If pulling another plug in the bar surged my Duron enough to frag the board right through the PSU, I'd say that I wouldn't trust the thing against lightning (and surely such an action should be covered as well).
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I had a friend who got in a car accident on I-95. His PC was in the back of his van, and the back door of the van was bent inwards. The mobo survived, the case didn't. An external parallel port Zip drive flew out the window and seperated. It is missing the front panel, but after bending the disk rails back into shape and plugging the chassis back together, it has worked like a champ for the last few years. It is gathering dust in my closet. No use for it since CD's are so damn cheap and my whole house is networked.
More recently my house got hit by lightning and/or a spike. I lost a hub and an AMI Megaraid card. The megaraid card still detects when I use LSPCI, but you don't see the SCSI Bios on boot anymore, and it doesn't recognize the drives. I may try to re-flash the Bios one day, but I have so many SCSI cards and so little use for dated hardware raid it almost isn't worth the effort.
A Dual P2-333 motherboard I was priming to be my linux server was partially fried (Gotta love the 666 machine). The serial ports were destroyed, and while all the PCI slots work, network cards no longer work plugged into any of them. I had 2 NIC's in it, and neither card worked anymore IN THAT MOTHERBOARD. Switched them to a new PC and they both work. The Video card works in any PCI slot in the server. Very strange. I think perhaps there is some PCI-slot pin that only the NIC's are using and that is what was destroyed. Needless to say, I can't use that as my server anymore. I only paid $7 for that motherboard anyway, I think $8 for the APIC chip.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
...is a plug that specified the voltage it wanted from a wall socket. A double powerpoint is about $AUD20, the cost of fitting one is several times that, and the cost of a bunch of switching electronics to provide an arbitrary voltage at up to a few amps is about half that.
The vast majority of things I plug in draw up to a few amps at somewhere between 6 and 20 volts, some of them through a plugpack and some through internal PSUs, many of them inefficient.
Integrating a separate small socket on the same fitting into which these things could plug (a three-pin plug with one pin being a zener diode, no zener diode equals no volts) would be cheap, eliminate plug-packs altogether, and could be mimicked by a "universal plugpack" in sockets which followed only the old standard. All of the nasty lethal volts stay in the wall, all of your down-converters are relatively efficient, a universal converter for automotive use is simple, and you don't need wide-spaced sockets to cope with adjacent plugpacks.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Back in 1999 I built my own low tech water cooling using a normal heatsink covered by sheet i got by cutting a beercan apart. Solderd the beast together and used abundant amount of silicone sealing to be on the safe side.
After weeks of perfect function at some day I noticed some strange artifacts on the screen so I rebooted the box but the artifacts only got worse. So I took a look under my desk and was horrified as the back side of my AGP card was coverd by water. I Ripped the power cable out of the PSU, dried the card with a hair-dryer and to my surprise after reinserting the whole thing everything worked!
After this incident I gave up my ambitions towards DIY water cooling.
I do it a couple of times removing the Ram Stick in on condition , but it should not break your system
I was walking home from highschool once when I came upon a bundle of video tape (it was the two reels from inside the case, half unrolled) in a ditch. Nearby I found half a box to an *adult* video.
I figured maybe the two matched so I took the reels home, cleaned them up, rolled them onto two new spindles, put them in an empty case and crossed my fingers hoping it wouldn't get stuck in the VCR.
It didn't, and, needless to say, the tape had a number of good runs left.
Years ago when i was working at compaq repairing computers you know the ones that go out as refurbished I grab a machine put it on my desk and powered it up before I even bothered to open the case. Well i went straight to lunch I came back and the machine was locked up well still powered up i took of the case and noticed that the cpu was glowing hot with no heat sink. The cpu was melted to the socket and was not going to come off the board and at this time for the fun of it i desided to go ahead and put a heat sink on it and run it through the compaq test center just to see if it would pass and everything passed now either the AMD cpu is still good or compaq test just suck...
I banged it on the edge of the desk a few times (on the rubber bumper, while it was disconnected/unplugged) and said "see, it's protected against abuse"
The drive was dead from that moment on.
this sig deleted by another sig
I old trusty commador 64/128 that i still keep around till this day for sentamintal reason being the first computer that i learned to program on. Well When i moved i left it in the back of my truck and it rainned the next morning the computer was completely under water. Well I grabed my g/f hair dryer and went to work after the unit was completely dry i fired it up and suck in a trust old 5 1/4 disk in the drive that was also summerged and everything worked fine.
good old commador the machines that never die.
Are you going to bring lube or should I buy some?
This sounds incredible, but it's true. We had a power supply that was so broken that it made a noise while unplugged and turned off. This was a bit frightening, but not only did it not work, but plugging it in and turning it on would cause the noise to stop.
Having a patently broken device, we decided to throw it against the cement floow, and apply hammers to the damn thing. When we were finally told to stop making such a noise, we ended the madness. I think Eris was in the building at the time, because not only had it stopped making noise while unplugged, but when we connected it to the machine and plugged it in, it worked!
[ approaching AI ]
THE ONLY RESPONCE TO THIS IS SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
When one bitches about a kernel they never worked with and bitches about something you know knowing about then shut up I am sure that even Linux people here have been stuck fucking with NT and will know that NT People Never or rarly mess with linux
This one has probably been said, but there's the story of a GRiD laptop in Gulf War mark I. Some guy in a chopper was taking off and the thing fell out from 60 feet up. Well, the guy lands, him and his buddy take it to their tech. They go "this laptop's broken, we need another one." The tech asked him if he'd tried to power it up, he said no. Turns out it powered up and booted into DOS just fine. Oh yeah, it was a magnesium cased laptop btw. (got one in the garage, need to light it up)
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
I took a machine of mine, and ran it outside in West Michigan Winters, 3 feet of snow, yet it ran. I loved it, you could over clock the crap outta it. then spring came, snow melted, computer died.
SimonTek
This is not an illusion, a rip-off, or a ninja technique!
It's not computer hardware, I know, but I've got to put a word in for my Motorola Micro TAC Elite cell phone. I bought the phone in 1997, when it was the crown jewel of cell phone tech. It has worked flawlessly since then. It has been dropped, sat on, left in a refrigerator, dropped some more, left in the sun until it was too hot to touch (sun exposure in Florida can be severe), and most recently was thrown from my vehicle in an overturn accident. I spotted it on the ground when I was being loaded into the ambulance by the paramedics and asked one of the firemen to pick it up and throw it into the car for me. When I went to the towing yard to recover my personal items from the wreck, I found it on the floor of the car. I took it home, let it dry (it had rained), found the old original battery (the high capacity one had been flung somewhere in the accident), and powered it up. That thing still works fine. I mean wow; that is durability. My friends kid me about my relic of a cell phone, but until my carrier completely eliminates compatible service, I'm keeping it. It never drops packets or cuts out like their digital phones do (static starts to creep in when the signal strength drops).
I have taken several 250GB Maxtor hard drives and poured a thick layer of special rubber on them then been able to throw then out a second story window. Then hook them up and have then work fine.
I have also taken several power supply including an antec 480 watt and remove it from it's case and fill it with epoxy and stuff to increase it's thermal conductivity.
And even saw off the heat sink using a band saw from a $500 ATI Radeon x800 xt graphics card and pour epoxy over it. This was the only part that I was feeling queasy over.
Even unsoldering the heatsinks off of the northbridge on motherboards, and cutting off various connectors.
The end result has been a completely fanless, absolute dead silent computers running at 3.4 Ghz.
www.nisvara.com
Mine you many computers were killed in the learning process of how to do this correctly.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
It's very simple really. In nonelectric methods, it's a cap with some explosive in it. One terminates the fuse by inserting it into a cap and crimping the cap in place. (cf nonelectric system step 5) The name's just stuck for the electric versions.
My understanding of that story was that Edison pushed for DC power distribution and Westinghouse supported AC. Edison ridiculed AC distribution by terming executions as "sending them to the Westinghouse"
was doing an upgrade on a gateway solo 2500, while laptop was open i powered it up after installing the "new cpu" i watched one chip glow orange on the mmc1 cpucard, i pulled the power, screamed obcenities, and then put the old cpu in, and tested, laptop booted and worked, but after testing found i had blown the system that charged/uses the battery.. *sigh* so i got another gateway 2500 off ebay, and transfered the hdd and battery.. and then sold the old one for as much as i just paid for a more working laptop..
A few years ago, my friend was installing a shiny new CD burner. He realized after he had turned the computer on that he forgot to screw it in. So he started doing so without powering down. A screw fell and bounced off the NIC and the motherboard. The system shut down and wouldn't come back on until we removed the NIC.
So then the NIC sat on my dashboard for about a year, taking summer sun and a Minnesota winter. Then I got a new car and finally got around to taking the NIC off my dash. I figured "What the heck, let's see if it works." I put it in one of my computers, and it worked perfectly and has ever since!
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
I was out with my boss delivering a new Gestetner copier to a customer a couple years ago. This particular copier weighs around 400lbs and had to be installed on the second floor of the building. We have a powered stair climber to carry these machines up stairs whenever we can't use an elevator. I took the machine up the first flight of stairs when my boss proceded to tell me that I wasn't doing it right. He then took the controls to the stair climber from me. He made it up about 3 steps before losing his balance, sending the copier crashing down the stairs. The weight of the copier and the length of the stair climber acted like a catapult - sending him head first into a cement wall. He was knocked cold (I thought he was dead it looked like he broke his neck) and was taken to the hospital.
I collected the pieces of the copier and brought them back to our office for the repair techs to check out. After replacing the document feeder, some of the plastic covers and the glass and mirrors in the scanner the copier worked perfectly. To date it has produced almost 2 million copies....and my boss now stays far away from that stair climber.
Dude, please tell us how 3 of your computers got gasoline poured on them and lit on fire. And moreover, was she worth it?
I used to work as a tech in a secondary school (college I guess)..
Teacher comes to me complaining she can't read her 3&1/4" disk.
Not a problem, I grab it off her to see what I can do.
Problem. It's stapled... 3 times.
Enter the twilight zone.
I look at her a little bit sideways.. "What happened?"
"I spilt coffee on it."
"Uhuh.."
"Well, I cleaned it."
This just got CRAAZY.
"Cleaned it?"
"Well, I opened it up and washed it with dishwashing fluid and put it back together. They don't make them well, I had to staple it!"
"Uh." "Uh." "Uh.. Let me see what I can do with it, I'll... Uh.. Leave a message for you in your pigeon hole.."
"Thanks!"
I was tempted to just throw it and say I couldn't get anything.. But, I'm a nice guy. In the drive it goes.
MY GOD. It's reading in the drive...
Using a combination of xcopy, copy, "type blah.doc >c:\1.txt" I was able to retrieve 13 of the 14 files.
Sooo. I copied them to another disk and gave it back.. She was dissapointed about not getting all of her files back..
I then walked back to my office "HEY BOSS, you're not going to believe this.."
Oh, she was also miffed that I wouldn't give back her disk. She liked the green ones and disliked the black ones...
Just in case you want to fix these abused things. - When trying to fix broken computers, I have found it difficult to get advice via Google. So here are some links to step-by-step manuals including pictures or videos for do-it-yourself laptop repair. There are also take apart instructions for PDAs, disassembly manuals for mobile (cell) phones and repair HOWTOs for portable audio and video players.
I had been using my 56k modem for about 2 years, and i had justed switched to cable modem, and a friend of mine wanted to start using internet so i sold him my 56k modem. When i was trying to install it, it worked fine, but there was just no way to turn off the noise from the modem dialing the connection, so out of frustrating of the terrible noise, i ripped off the little speaker and the modem worked just fine afterwards, no more annoying noise. Oh, and it was on windows xp...
I once gave an HP Vectra 486 a mighty kick, as it crashed for the umpteenth time. It was a bad mistake, since they had metal casing inside back then. It's been 10 years & the broken toe has never been the same.
For nostalgic reasons, I wanted to suck all the data off the harddisk in an old 286 system which hadn't booted for about five or six years. System failed the POST with a harddisk error, so I took it in to my brother's work for one of the techie guys there to look at it. He eventually decided to open the harddisk casing and jiggle the head actuator stepper motor a bit by hand (overcoming the stiction), reassembled and the system booted fine! Forget about clean room or anything, this was in a regular office atmosphere. Needless to say, I transferred the data ASAP and haven't ever tried running the system again since then.
Computer Case is still working!
I use to carry CDs inside a Quadra 700 (68040, first Mac to include Ethernet on all models). There was so much space in there without any NuBus cards that a dozen and a half jewel cases fitted in. Surprisingly enough the incredibly small cpu heat dissipator was never ripped off by CDs flying inside the box during transport between home and school. This was the strongest computer I ever had and it never failed despite using it as a handy CD storage. Boy you wanted those games back in the boring boarding school...
I have kept my first computer (dell xps 200) because I feel attached to it. Well a few years ago my apt. burnt down, and my trusty dell ended up being black from the smoke, the front of the tower melted but surprisingly the computer still works fine. the only thing is it won't retain the date and time in the bios even though I changed the battery.
In the good old days (this would be the early 90s), I bought an MFM controller and an accompanying 20 MB hard drive. Little did I know that an MFM controller and an IDE controller wouldn't work together in the same box. I was disappointed that it didn't work, and, not knowing much about hardware then, I figured that the controller card might need some power as well. So I plugged a small power connector (that is normally used to supply power to the 3.5" disk drive) onto the four pins that came out of the MFM controller. When I turned on the computer, the hard drive spun up a lot slower than normal. Then black smoke came from the connection between the power and the MFM controller. I quickly turned the computer off again, and after removing the MFM controller the computer still worked. Phew! When I checked what the connector actually said, it turned out that I had connected the power to the MFM controller's hard disk led connection. :)
We have wireless Internet that uses breezecom/alvarion equipment (www.alvarion.com). One night ligtning stuk on or near our home. A surge came down the equipment. The radio was completely fried. The ethernet jack in the radio was melted. The ethernet cards in my server/router were toast. What's really weird is that the switch I used on the other side of my router was fried along with all the ethernet cards. But the server (which the surge went through) functioned fine.
I replaced the NICs in everything, the switch. And my router/server kept working. Well for a while, after about another year the PS/2 ports stopped working. But the box still sits in the corner of my room being a good little router.
Firstly, the scene needs to be set for those born in the last 25 years or so. In the late 1970's hand-held calculators eventually became programmable. This is days of the Apple II, Space War game consoles etc. There were 2 big companies who made them, TI and HP and they competed in the top end of the calculator business. Now these calulators were incredibly expensive (Say AUD $500, so over AUD$2000 in todays dollars, or about USD $3.25.. :-) ). Anyway, now for the story.Two friends were drinking at the Adelaide University bar, which happens to be 3 stories up with a lovely balcony overlooking the cloisters, which are covered with brick paving. The discussion aided by much beer drifted towards who had the best calculator, and one had a TI (TI58?, first one with card reader) and one had a HP kitted out. TI's were rated as crap, everyone knew this, whilst HP's were pieces of engineering elegance and divinely inspired.(ok, I'm biased too, proud owner of a HP41C that still works and is on it's 3 set of batteries in 23 years). Anyway as the beer flowed and the argument became more heated it was decided the only way to solve the dispute was a drop test.. from the balcony and onto the brickwork far below. So the deed was done and both calculators were soon demonstrating a 1g acceleration on a free body. Well everything was fine until the last few inches when plastic and copper interacted with oven cured clay. The result was spectacular with the TI basically smashing open with many a destroyed components but the HP only suffered a crack through the LCD screen, which still worked , along with the rest of the calulator.Total height was close to 50' as the ground floor has a cafeteria with double height ceiling. HP really knew how to build equipment..
I was busy during a furious match of Star Wars: X-Wing on my old Packard Bell with my fancy two-button Kraft joystick when I heard a loud crack. Apparently, I didn't know my own strength and had snapped the joystick handle clean off the base. "Don't make them like they used to" my arse...
Once had, for about a week, an IBM clickety-clack keyboard with a little eraserhead mouse pointer in the middle of it (like you might find on a laptop). Loved it, but then I went to another employer and IBM stopped making those keyboards. Never saw another one like it, or I would have grabbed it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
When I read that quickly I thought it said your boss dropped a COPPER down a flight of stairs, which I was going to give him rep for ;o)
#include <sig.h>
I was working on my motorcycle once, trying to figure out why I would lose spark sporatically every now and then... So I decided to pull the electronic ignition out and take a look at it's connectors etc.. Well, I couldn't see much, so I though I'd take it apart and look inside, and in the process of trying to dislodge it from it's plastic case, I snapped the pcb right down the middle.
Once it was apart, I could clearly see that it was built in such a way that it was intended to never be disassemled. Well, since a new ignition was more than I wanted to pay for, a friend and I went and got a bunch of paperclips. We found the end points of all the traces that were snapped, and soldered the paperclips there instead. Once we had replaced every trace with a paperclip (about 25 or so) we put some glue across it all to keep them in place. and then wrapped it in foam and a plastic bag.
Once the rebuilt electronic ignition was put back in, my bike ran better than ever, and never studdered again. We're thinking that it was a cold solder joint some where. I'm sure it was just poor manufacturing, since I had already replaced the ignition for like $300 a couple months before, for that exact same reason.
Well first of I have an old jornada, that has fallen down two flights of stairs, throw in the pool while on, thrown out of a moving car, and has survived me not only through high school, but college as well....
then there is my old p2 450...when i first got it, it was a nice comp...after a few months I had to upgrade. I put in a second vid card and couldnt get the punk to boot with two vid cards. A friend who did tech support (jokingly) told me to kick it...so I did...and it turned on! A little later I decided to upgrade the ram from 64mb to 256 using 2 128mb memory sticks. It wouldnt do crap when you turned it on. No beeping, no error msgs, nothing. Remembering how I kicked it last time, I thought I would do it again. However, it was on the table, so I just bitch slapped it. It immediatly worked. A little later, I upgraded the CDrom drive. Same thing, wouldnt work. Windows would boot and wouldnt see the drive...that is till I brought my fist down on top of the case and windows suddenly recognized the drive...Then I got peeved at windows and decided that it was time to put linux on. Linux WOULD NOT BOOT! tried everything from floppy to CD to net boot...always failed with a kernal fault error...no matter which distro I used. So I slid the box off the table and it smacked on the wall, while I was booting off a linux cd, and it installed. It has been running for about a year and I havnt had any other issues...
oh and btw...I have named the box with a big black sign written in a gothic font I found on the net....Masochist!
and last but not least...my dad worked as a hardware tester at a lab for about a year. one time they had a bunch of left over parts and time to kill, so they took an old 486, stuck it in this setup to overclock it..they got it up pretty high when they relized the fan wouldnt keep it cool, so they took some liquid nitrogen and used it to spray on and kept pumping it up...they got it up so high, that you couldnt acutally use it to process anything, but it was just screaming fast...that is until they liquid nitrogen ran out...then it blew a hole straight through the motherboard...
Well thats all I am going leave you with today...enjoy...
~S~
Back when I was still in college I had this old Compaq with a 200MHz Pentium MMX processor, 64MB RAM, etc. that I kept around for light file serving duties and Instant Messaging between rounds of Counter Strike and Day of Defeat. (Being a Compaq, it wasn't good for much else.) Anyway, one day I'm sitting at my desk playing Soldier of Fortune 2 and drinking apple juice straight from the bottle, as any real man would. I'm playing one of the stealth levels, so as I'm watching the screen waiting for this guard to pass me by, I reach out with my right hand to pick up the bottle of apple juice and take another swig. Only, instead of picking the bottle up, I end up knocking it over and spilling 3/4 of a gallon of apple juice on, and in my old Compaq. I quickly grab some towels and soak everything up on the outside of the case and the floor surrounding the case. I then move the mouse on the computer, expecting the worst, and see that it's still running and that somebody had in fact messaged me some time while I was running for some towels.
I figured "Hey, if it's still running, why bother opening it up to survey the damage." I didn't even shut the thing down. I just responded to the IM and went back to my game. In fact, the computer actually seemed to be more stable after the apple juice incident. Sure, the floppy drive wasn't working, but I hadn't used the thing in years anyway, so there's no telling if it was even working before spilling apple juice in the computer.
Almost two years later, after moving a couple of times and leaving the computer in my closet for a couple of months after moving into my current apartment, I decide to open the case up to scavange one of the hard drives for a project. It wasn't until then that I realized just how much apple juice actually made it inside the case. There was brown, sticky apple juice residue everywhere. On, maybe in, the CD drive, on the motherboard, on the SIMMS... practically every where. The processor itself was OK, however, being shielded by a support that held a daughter board for the expansion cards. Although, the support itself was generously splattered by the apple juice. After finally opening the case, I was very surprised that the PC was running all that time. Electronics can certainly take more abuse than I thought possible.
These days the PC still sits in pieces in my closet. I'm not sure what to do with it any more as I don't have much of a need for it these days. Part of me wants start it up and pour more apple juice on it, just to see how much would be enough. For a while, I did think about putting the case in my fridge and trying to see how far I could overclock it before condensation or heat killed the PC, but after some research I found that 200MHz is as high as the board would go. (FSB and Bus speed are already set to max on the jumpers...)
Anyway, I know that I'm posting this so late that it will most likely just get lost among the shuffle. Still, it was fun to "tell" the story to a group of people who hadn't heard it before.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
I had an interesting TV experience when I was 4. We had this ancient Admiral B&W console TV (this was 1970, the TV was old when we got it). We had a problem where it kept losing vertical hold and focus (beyond what the front dials would correct) and after months of begging, my parents had a repair guy come in and fix it. I stood over the repair guy's shoulder and held a light for him and watched everything he did, and he happily gave me a running commentary of what he was doing ...
...
:-)
A few weeks later the problems showed up again, and I asked if I could fix the TV. My mom thought I meant adjust the knobs on the front
When my mom came into the room she found that I had most of the tubes and other removable parts carefully laid out on the floor. She heard me muttering, "almost done, gotta hurry." For some reason she didn't freak out at me, but instead just told me to put it back together -- which I did!!! My father arrived just as I was finishing and my mom told him what happened. He came in to see how bad it was and IMMEDIATELY turned off the power and unplugged it!!! Obviously I didn't pull any of the high voltage tubes and components. I proudly showed my father my handiwork (picture the best part of a roll of electrical tape applied to a tube era TV and you'll get the idea). My father considered the worse case had already been met (the TV was powered on while I applied my tape and re-installed the parts), so he let me turn it back on when I finished. My "fix" worked for another 4 years. We don't know exactly what I fixed, just that one of my many pieces of electrical tape (or just reseating the components) worked
BTW, when asked why I was muttering that I had to hurry, I felt that the answer was obvious: Star Trek (TOS) was coming on soon and my 2nd oldest sister and I couldn't miss it!
Working as an assistant for a guy doing safety research in cars, he had gone and aquired this expensive Head-Up-Display unit in his car. The HUD was basically a monochrome projector that ran on car battery voltages, and projected onto a semi-reflective plastic thing that looked like a transparent rear-view mirror mounted above the dash.
The HUD had an obvious D-shaped socket on it labeled video in, and fit an accompanying VGA extension cable.
The cable came with, two brand-new, top-of-the-line laptops from the university, but on loan from some execs who were on holiday. The execs had a popular setup where they docked their machines and used dual monitor view. I thought this would be neat in the car: a detailed screen and a second screen above the dash from the same machine.
Turned out that the socket on the HUD wasn't VGA, but was some obscure standard that ended up wiring 13.8V into the red and blue signal outs of the laptop. Silently it burnt something out on the laptop, but otherwise the laptop kept running with its LCD just fine.
Of course, I thought it was a dud laptop, so I immediately plugged the cable into the other laptop. It wasn't until I took one back inside and tried to dock it that I realised what had happened.
Trying to explain to tech support that two new and borrowed laptops had simultaneously developed the same fault was interesting.