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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."
Most likely what you heard was an electrolytic capacitor. They are used as filter capacitors for your power supply. Without them you may here some humming, but the amplifier will work fine.
Speakers rated 6V will most likely have 10V capacitors, which will explode in the way you describe when applying 18V AC.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
That guy is/was an idiot, and you're too if you think ESD is a myth. ESD can cause anything from no effect through intermittent problems to complete failure, depending on your luck mostly. Obviously older hardware with comparably huge transistors stand less of a chance to die from ESD, but even those are not immune. Don't even think about trying something similar with current hardware.
Unfotunately, you assume one very wrong thing...
Your skin has a "break down voltage", much like a diode has. Past a certain voltage, your skin no longer provides much resistance (I don't have the exact values) and so as voltage increases, your "hand to ground" resistance decreases. This causes the current to increase exponentially, not linearly.
So you are absolutely not safe in touching 240V.
Girmann
Nietzsche is dead. --God