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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.
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 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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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 had just sold a computer to a customer many years ago.
:D
I showed him everything it did etc etc....I had been using it for a good 15 mins.
Why dont you have a go?.....so he sits down and just touches the mouse. instant BSOD...I guess some people have no luck
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
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!
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.
Actually, I forgot the time my SNES got tossed across the room into the wall and still survived, except for a chip in the case and a slightly bent RF cable.
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.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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 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)
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.
Who cares about the PC, did the egg taste good ?
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).
--
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.
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'
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.
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 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
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.
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 ...
We can't forget the beauty that is The Etherkiller, can we?
A T H L O N : ATHLON
How many years have AMD been making them and idiots like you still insist on adding a's and g's to the damn name.
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.
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
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....
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 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.
Except this baby seems to work just fine.
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.
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
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
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.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
(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.
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 :)
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
Ouch, this is so much a troll... Read here, or here for the original...
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!
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' ;)
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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....
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
No, he went to smoke pot and the room was full of noodles.
We had an old RS/6000 that was apparently home to a mouse for a while. It had squeezed in through the hole in the back left by a missing Microchannel slot cover. No, we didn't find a dead mouse inside, but we found lots of "evidence".
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
I'm surprised that worked. Most cell phone companies put stickers in the phone that will change color if it comes in contact with water, and most cell phone contracts do not cover water damage.
Look at the picture - it's an old console TV, built in the pre "lawsuit prevention" school of industrial design. It probably had half assed clips on particleboard, not tamper resistant torx.
You know - Darwinist design theory.
I think my son is going down that route. I have a jeweller's screwdriver with different shafts stored in the handle. R3.0 wanted to take something apart, but I had to step away for a few minutes, so "Don't mess with the screwdriver!"
I come back 15 minutes later, and his toy is pieces. He took the screwdriver, selected the correct bit (#0 phillips), mounted it in the handle, dismantled said toy, and then dissasembled the screwdriver and put the bit back. I was torn between praising his ingenuity or punishing his disobedience.
He was 3 years old at the time.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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
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........
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.
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.
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.
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.