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Most Common Ways to Kill a PC
Sparky the Service Center Dude writes "PCstats covers the most common ways to kill a PC in this "what not to do" guide. Everything from exploding capacitors, to cat hair, to dodgy components and overclocking account for users killing their own PC's. The most common PC killer? The Power Supply."
Like used! Slightly Shotgunned.
easiest way ive ever seen
The most common PC killer? The Power Supply.
I'm tearing mine out right now!
air and light and time and space
26% PSU and power issues
23% Bad gear and user negligence
13% Heatsink related
15% Assembly and moving
10% Lightning strike and static
3% Computer cruelty
6% USB related
2% Overclocking
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
Odd. They omitted placing a Microsoft OS onto a computer as a sure-fire way to kill it.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Personally, my systems tend crash after applying the Elvis Technique for Irritating Home Electronics (Handgun).
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
In my opinion, the most common killer is spyware. With $400 computers, people are more reluctant to clean their hard drive every 4 months and take security precautions then to just throw the computer in the trash and head back to walmart.
Slashdot the crap out of it. 9 comments and I get a "Connection Refused" error trying to load the link.
Let me guess, they tested out the "Most Common Ways to Kill a PC" on the web servers, eh?
I would have figured dust would be #1. I've cracked open my parents' Windows PC every six months or so only to discover the horror of a totally alien world caked in a layer of gray-brown fuzz. Like the Cowboy Bebop episode, I half-expect a new species of organism to form from the unique atmosphere. If I start seeing a human Martian face forming on the soundcard, I may just end up throwing the whole thing away.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
1. Install web server
2. Post link to it on Slashdot
Get a woman. You'll forget your PC was ever there.
The coolest voice ever.
Don't those stats mean the most common way to recycle a PC is just to replace its power supply? I've pulled several working PCs out of the "trash" (NYC curbside - cleaner than a dumpster, dirtier than a Toronto dumpster). I had a "$2000" stereo system I rescued from yuppie abandonment by merely replacing its "motherboard" and speaker fuses.
--
make install -not war
I had a Commodore 64 for years, it suffered through insane adversity. My mother threw it across the room in a rage when we wouldn't come to dinner, my dad dumped an entire can of beer into the heat vent by accident when he was checking his wristwatch. It was dragged off a rickety TV dinner tray when cords were tripped over at least weekly. It always still worked. That thing was built like a tank. In the end, the power supply died.
Yeah, I know it was replaceable, I didn't have any money.
...or my girlfriend who plugged a Maxtor powercord into an S-video out port on the back of the shuttle that I gave her. Apparently they fit in and run 6V into the motherboard effectively toasting your average Shuttle. I am suprised girlfriend, siblings, or parents didn't make the list.
Speaking as someone who has worked at a college computer store, I would have to say water/beer is the biggest enemy to the life of a computer.
"OMG! I was just having a drink and chatting with my girlfriends online, and I accidentally spilled it on my laptop! Daddy, buy me a new one!"
On several occaions, I have also run across a laptop that was damaged during...um...let's just say "coital activities". Those definitely make the hall of fame.
Windows ME. Seriously, all trolling aside, this is the worst operating system known to man.
heres the Mirrordot copy incase the thing totally dies: http://mirrordot.org/stories/4ec4acbeb790ac0270a10 94afdd09d56/index.html
While in itally or (any other country that uses 230 volt power) switch the "voltage" switch on your power supply from 230 to 115 while the computer is running, a bright blue spark will fly out and you will have successfully screwed your computer.
(I actually proved this while in CAD class in high school)
Routed CRT internal voltage levels down VGA cable to motherboard. Bad bad, very bad. The magic smoke escaped, while making several bangs.
I've been running with the same 250w power supply for ten years now, and I've never had a prob...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've been running Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 on my computers since each of those operating systems was released, and none of them have died on me. Say what you will, those are fucking rock-solid.
Yeah I'll second that: I have Windows installed on my PC and it's never failed me ever since I installed Linux on my other partition!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Power supply is dead simple to replace. remove four screws and possibly your cd-rom drive and slide it out. The real problem is that after market power supplies usually cost more than a cheap case. Of course the power supply in a cheap $40 case is not the same quality as the $60 replacements.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As those of your who live in beachfront houses already know, salt tends to destroy lots of things around the house. My office was in a Malibu beach house right up against the ocean, and all machines we got were completely rusted over within the year. Maybe manufacturers don't think about corrosive elements in the air...
Solomon Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I knew a sound engineer who would clean out mixing decks with sprite. He would just dump it down the fader slots. I managed to get him to switch to plain tonic water. The theory being if you did not have it plugged in or on the liquid would not conduct and the carbonation would remove grime sticking the faders. You just let it dry before turning it back on and all would be well.
I only witnessed this act twice and it still gives me shivers.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Here's a comprehensive list of failed software:
1995: Windows 95
1998: Windows 98
2000: Windows ME
2001: Windows XP
Not totally true.
My PC had a cheapo 250 or 300 watt PSU that came with the case (case+cpu was like $25 total)
i moved to my current apartment and within a few months the PSU blew. All the capacitors popped, fan died, smoked and smelt up my room. Luckily it was just the PSU that died
So I got a nice expensive PSU.. 6 months later i noticed the voltages were dropping on my monitoring program.. i thought it must be a mistake, bad sensors or something.. But it kept getting worse.. Until a couple of months ago when i noticed tons of RF interference with my TV tuner..
Then last month my hard drive would occasional click off then instantly spin back up and lock my pc.. a reboot would fix it for several days
Then last week, click, spin up, lock.. reboot, click, spin up, lock, reboot, etc.. the PSU could no longer power my hard drives
Why? Crappy wiring in my crappy apartment. Brownouts and surges. So I bought another PSU, and now an APC LE-1200 line conditioner/voltage regulator. It's working great.. except I found out the outlets in my room are not grounded (the voltage regulators Ground Fault Indicator came on, so I plugged in a cheap AC circuit tester, it indicated OPEN GROUND, so I used a multimeter to confirm it, yep not grounded.. argh!)
Wonder if thats why I always get static shocks whenever i touch stuff in my room.
Anyway, i guess what im saying is even good expensive PSUs can go bad cause of crappy home wiring and whatnot.
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Just a couple of weeks ago a PC nearly burned down the house. I was out the front and heard frantic calls, came round the back to find smoke pouring out one of the windows, I mean thick acrid black smoke. Neighbours had already called the fire brigade.
Anyway they arrived in a couple of minutes and went inside and put it out. Luckily there were two windows open and a good breeze blowing in one and our the other so the damage was minimal (all smoke went straight out the window).
The PC was completetly incinerated though, I've never seena anything like it, the hard drive was actually warped from the heat generated in that steel case. The plastic fascia was gone, just, not there any more, the motherboard, well what loosly resembled one was pretty much ash. The solder holding the ICs obviously melted and they had popped off etc. Luckily, it wasn't my PC, and it was only an old P200 or something, or I'd be up shit creek.
It burned right through the carpet immediatly under the case, and burnt a good impression into the wooden floor beneath. Burnt a chunk out of a couch next to it, but it was caught early enough that there wasn't really any other damage.
I can't see what caused it, the heat generated inside the case was incredibly intense, basically anything inside it that could vaporise, did.
Let it be a warning - install smoke alarms near your PC if you leave it running unattended.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I have seen some Pentium II motherboards with dual AT/ATX power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ok, this actually happened.
One day our secretary comes to me and says her keyboard isn't working properly. I just assume it died naturally and so I grab a replacement from a pile in my cupboard and hand it over. 30 minutes later she comes back and says that the one I gave her is broken too. Now that seems strange, so I go to her system and do a full check, thinking that either her motherboard is faulty, or something is shorting out the keyboards, or she has some practical joke walware like the old Amiga virus which re-mapped keystrokes but only if you typed fast enough. After a thorough check, I confirm her system is OK and both keyboards are indeed dead. I take another spare keyboard from the cupboard, test it on my computer first to make sure it works properly, and then give it to her. 5 minutes later I decide I better check to see if it's OK, so I walk over to her desk just in time to see her take a bottle of spray'n'wipe, spray a massive amount directly into the keys, wipe them off, then bang the keyboard upside down against the edge of her desk to dislogde any dirt which may have been there.
The 3rd keyboard she got that day was a new one so she didn't have the urge to clean it. It still works.
The funny thing is that I felt an immense sense of relief knowing why they broke. 3 keyboards "mysteriously" dying in an hour is something I don't understand and makes me nervous, however stupidity is something I do understand and just accept.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
That's why I always use quality fake components from Korea.
How the crap do you smoke a floppy? Or more importantly, why? ;)
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
"Remove me, unsubscribe, take me offa list"
I'm not surprised that PSU related problems is on top seeing how it's the most important component of the computer but the one that people seem to pay the least attention.
What people must understand is that they need a PSU that have the most stable rails (such as the +5 & +12 rails) and that isn't made by Mr. Bingo Bongo. Sure you can save around $20-30 going with a cheaper PSU but that action is a gamble. Are you a gambler? My friend sure was. Bought some power supply made by some unknown manufacturer and he's still surprised that it was the cause of his exploding CD-Rom.
People in general should take power supply reviews more seriously and consider to spend the extra bucks to hafve something that will work for years as you want it to.
Wouldn't the sugar from the Sprite lock those things up worse than whatever he rinsed off?
Last week's issues:
#1 - Call from remote office. Server isn't working.
Office manager was cold, so she bought a 1500W electric space heater. She needed a place to plug it in and there just happened to be an empty outlet on the UPS that fed the server, which was conveniently located right across the hall from her office.
Plug in heater, heater kicks on, high current starts, battery backup melts down, and server goes into SSF mode (Sparks, Smoke, and Flames). RAID card burned out and the machine is pretty much toasted. Defintely a power issue.
That office needed a new server anyway.
#2 - Call from dentist's office. Computers won't connect to the network and they are getting weird errors. Drop by office to inspect. Reboot computers and everything seems to work fine.
Network swtich and router are located in a cabinet in the darkroom. There is a single cable that comes out of that cabinet from the UPS that feeds the network equipment. They are short on outlets in the darkroom.
When some of the employees need to use the film duplicator, their solution is to unplug this plug that doesn't seem to connect to anything important. (Never mind that beeping sound in the background!)
Network doesn't instantly fail, since the equipment stays on UPS for ten minutes. Since they don't have instant feedback to realize that what they're doing is bad, they never associate the bad action (pulling the plug) with the bad event (all computers quit working).
Power issues. Yep. Sheesh!
1998: CD
2000: HDD
2004: PSU
That's it - since 1985! The CD was broken by impact. The HDD was garbage from Quantum, may they rot in hell. The PSU was overworked and gave up. It took the mobo with it, but not the RAM or CPU.
The worst part is that I only upgrade when I get a failure or when the parts are horribly antiquated. (My last upgrade was in 2002.)
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The number one killer of PC's, IMHO, has been the modem.
Lightning usually doesn't even have to enter into it. Everytime the phone rings you get voltage running into your PC.
Once I heard a long ring and the PC never turned back on (well, for a year at least. Later the machine was revived but using any PCI slot mysteriously disabled DMA. On a 333Mhz machine you can imagine boot times).
Another killer was USB related too. Microsoft's Trackball Optical cable shorts out occasionaly which for some reason killed my $3000 custom-built PC about 3 years ago. Someone here on Slashdot told me I can get a refund or some sort of offer but it wasn't worth the hassle.
Get your Unix fortune now!
A guy I once worked with had a customer of his computer store get so frustrated with the "flaky" PC he bought, that he sent it back to him as a 6x6" cube. He used a hydualic press of some kind.
To quote my friend "I didn't know if I should call the cops or laugh, but it made a great paper weight"
I've never had cat hair kill a computer, but a few years ago my cat killed one. She has a penchant for tipping over glasses. Especially ones filled with liquid. Actually you might call it a bit of a neurosis. Anyway, one day I was away from my desk for a few minutes, and sensing a golden opportunity, she dumped a glass of water onto the strip-style surge protector below. The surge protector, not exactly of the highest quality, must've overloaded and sent a spike into the computer, taking out the motherboard, several PCI cards, and RAM chips with it. Needless to say, I use an APC UPS located in an area not easily reachable by falling water now.
But I would guess the biggest PC killer is brownouts. I worked at a startup for a while where the admin chose not to use any surge protectors on our computers. I suppose he assumed because we were in a fairly modern office complex that they had clean lines. It took him a bit to figure out why he had to keep supplying me with new power supplies every few weeks after the previous one would die.
I burned up one of my first computers with upgrades :(
:(
by the time i finished i had IBM AT with:
Dual monitor
dual floppy
dual HD
task swapping and scrollback
and
16-17 M of Ram !!! 1M main + BOTH extended and expanded (100+ little chips on 2 fullsize cards+MB)
Most awesome AT ever....while it lasted....which was less than a MONTH before cpu melted
My friend was working on one of his computers one day and saw one of those small connectors coming out of the power supply not connected to anything.
Anyways, he thought it needed to be plugged in somewhere and what better place than the little 2-pin port on the back of a CD-ROM drive.
It looked like it was meant to be plugged in there because it fit, and he decided to turn the computer on.
White smoke was everywhere. Something inside the power supply exploded, killing the cdrom drive, and everything in the computer.
That just goes to show that even if the plug fits, it might not always be the right place to put it.
"One example being them using IE instead of Firefox even though I've told them a hundred times to use Firefox."
Simple solution: Change all the shortcuts with the big blue "e" and point them to Firefox.
You have to look at users like Pavlov looked at dogs
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I only buy genuine Sorny, Panaphonic, and MagnetBox.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I once had a motherboard killed by a keyboard short -- or to be accurate, what died was apparently the keyboard BIOS. (This was back in the 486 era, when such things still had their own chips.) I accidentally hit the F6 and F7 keys at the same time, the nasty Focus keyboard objected by going PHZZT, and sent its protests off down the cable. ALL the lights on the main box came on, and stayed on until I jerked the cord out of the UPS.
Much testing later (involving a POST card and some mix-and-match with an identical system), I determined that the PSU was still good, the motherboard was still getting power and passing it along to the components in the usual way, all the components were still fine, and the CPU and system BIOS were still alive and well. That left only the keyboard BIOS as suspect. Guess which chip was SOLDERED onto the motherboard??!
After that I started looking more closely at "dead" motherboards, and discovered that nearly ALL of them had evidently died of a fried keyboard BIOS.
About this time, APC started marketing surge-and-noise protectors for NICs, because they'd found that there was significant incidence of system-frying shocks (and plain old electrical noise causing packet corruption) coming over network cables. Thus inspired, for several years I whined at APC about making keyboard protectors, but nothing ever came of it.
So... I find it perfectly believeable that a mouse could commit similar mayhem.
Oh, the 486 in question started life as a $2000 box, but by then was (fortunately!) overdue to be upgraded anyway.
As to modems, I've wondered about that... My modem cables all run thru a heavy-duty surge unit; one hopes that helps. -- I personally know two people who had PCs fried by lightning strikes coming down the phone cable; in one incident, it set the internal modem on fire and melted a hole in the motherboard. Miraculously, the HD survived this abuse, all data intact.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A former roommate told me a story about how he'd killed one of his computers. Seems he left the thing on the floor in his room.
Now, his living spaces tend to be trash heaps; it was only constant nagging from his ex-fiancee and me that kept mold from growing in their room when he was living with us. So this did not surprise me at all when he told me what happened...
For whatever reason, ants decided to visit his computer. Ants. I guess he might have spilled something in there, probably Mountain Dew. He saw the ants crawling in and out of his computer, didn't pay much attention to it, and turned the thing on.
Poof. Fried.
I laughed at him.
An ex of mine wound up with a few extra chips in his computer (chocolate and dorito) owing to leaving it open, but never before or again have I heard of ants infesting someone's computer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder how many slashdot-related server deaths have occurred. Surely a human DDoS must have some lasting effect on servers.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
"The PSU looks like cake after you do the motherboard"
These days, yes, back in the old days pre ATX, when PC's had turbo buttons and "megahurtz LED displays" the powerswitch was often on the front of the case and their was 240 power being routed to the front panel. Ofetn times you had to remove the front panel so you could get to the powerswitch which also had to be removed, and occasionally you had to unsolder and resolder the switch back on to the power switch leads.
It could be quite the PITA I assure you. I have some old PC's of this type running Linux to this day.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I'm a firm believer in surge protectors. Years ago (back when the Pentium 100MHz roamed the plains), a lightning storm decided to play havoc on the neighborhood.
When I came home from work, I smelled ozone and burnt plastic. Looking around I noticed that the surge protector power supply plug was melted and fused to the wall socket. Though ruined, the surge protector did its job. Nothing attached to it was affected by the lightning strike that hit the powerline outside.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Several years I helped a friend set up a new computer. I was not watching closely (hey, I was there to help install software). The high end CRT monitor came with two ports: one plug for Mac (old style) and one VGA, and two cables. Until a moment after he turned on the monitor, I had never appreciated that the Mac video connector is the same format used by the PC joystick port... We got flames (briefly) and lots of acrid smoke. Happily, all he lost was a ribbon cable inside the case.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
This is a much better article on the subject.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Google Mirror Page 1
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I remember when I was 10 or 11 and we got our first 386 DOS/Windos 3.11 system. I loved to play around on it and taught myself all the DOS commands. My favorite was format c: because it counted up from 0 to 100% and at the end my parents would be furious because they lost all of their data. Their punishment (which I feel was/is cruel and unusual) was to make me learn to fix all the problems I created and from then till my dying day I will be required for any and all tech support they may need 24/7.
through the vents of a 17" CRT seem to be rather effective in my unfortunate experience....
And with Windows, replacing the motherboard either means reinstalling Windows, or messing with a ton of driver issues (unless you are so lucky to be replacing the motherboard with an identical one). But replace the power supply, and Windows is none the wiser. That fact alone makes changing power supplies far, far easier.
"Your computer is in a better place, Strong Bad. Actually, it's in the same place but now it's got a big hole in it!"
- follow slashdot Voodo ribbon cable foding article; sharp solder on motherboard underside shorts IDE cables
I've cooked about 6 AMD XP's. Even with heatsink fitted properly. Heatsinks can be backwards and gap not really visible. They crumble too.
A blog I run for the wealth
sitting in my pc workstation technical support class when braindead college student #1 brings in a stick of 512mb ddr wrapped in tin foil. He says to me, "Hey, my ram seems to be having a problem so I brought it in for you to look at it." He then produces a stick of ram wrapped snuggly in tin foil (for protection he added). I didnt have the heart to tell him that even if it wasnt his ram that was having the problem it sure was going to have a problem now.
Last summer we had a ground strike at our neighbors house's backyard (about 75' from my house, about 10' from theirs). Trashed their house pretty bad, to the point of even melting a hole in their propane feed line. Nasty bolt
So while I'm watching the fire department, cops, etc...show up at their house (The occupants were all scared shitless, but otherwise fine), I decided to go check the National Weather service. I had mistakenly forgot to turn it off before the storm, so I just sat down and started typing. Worked fine.
Except it said the network cable was unplugged. Huh?
Long story short: 6 (yes, 6) trashed NIC's, 1 trashed router, 1 trashed motherboard, 1 trashed VCR, and a trashed thermostat. Before you ask me about line protection, etc, consider this: the thermostat for the furnace is not on line power. It's battery powered. As for the computers and router: all are on UPS's. Big (2000VA+) industrial ones. Yes, Virgina, the power does suck where I live. The UPS's all reported a mild line spike (147v, if memory serves), but nothing crazy.
As best anyone can figure (though I'm open to other ideas), the spike got in one of two ways: either though the grounding wires (which would make sence, except for the UPS's protecting that line, too, and that still does not explain the thermostat), or some sort of strange transient voltage created in the wiring of the house by having that much current and voltage passed so close (sort of like creating a big A/C alternator).
Point being: when Mother Nature decides to pWn your equiptment, she's going to!
Chris Knight is my hero.
I popped open one of the failed PSUs once and found that, yes indeed, the blown caps were made by that company in Taiwan.
If your machine has a PSU from Deer, replace the unit ASAP, even if it's working fine right now. It will eventually fail.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!