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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."
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!
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.
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.
In late 80s one of my friends brought a brand new computer from USA and asked me to help him to set it up. I switched the power supply to 220 Volts and plugged it in. There was a loud bang and small cloud of black smoke came out of the case.
The power supply, while worked fine on 120V, had pretty much shorted the 220V to the motherboard. There was a quarter sized hole on the motherboard, with black charred remains of a chip sprinkled around.
Amazingly, the computer came with a circuit diagram, so we figured out that the charred chip was actually a simple 4xNAND or something like that. After we found a replacement chip, just soldered its legs with wires to the closest intact parts of the motherboard, replaced the power supply. And it actually worked. The chip was hanging over the hole supported by the wires, like a little spider. I wish I took a picture.
Needless to say the owner was very happy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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(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.
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 :)