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How to Destroy Your Computer
Dan's Data writes
" Destroying your own computer is every user's right
and is the pattern of behaviour expected by the manufacturer
s and, especially, repair personnel, whose very livelihood
is put in peril by those users who perversely persist in
correctly upgrading their equipment." Just read it.
Its funny.
Finally one of the most secretly hidden secrets of the BOFHs is being revealed! Aren't you happy?
That Apple pays them for advertising.
Do they really? When I get close to a MS machine, they seem to work better, in hopes that I'll put linux on them even faster. For instance, my bosses machine performs well for me, but not for her. I keep telling her that if I put linux on there, it would never mess up. She still doesn't believe me, even though she's happy to ask me to fix her computer again.
And not far below that, a link to a PC crisis line. So what's your point?
I've plugged the motherboard cables in the wrong way, and had no permanent damage occur to the machine. The power supply just wouldn't do anything in that configuration. Drive power cables, on the other hand, are quite another story (tried to make a Y cable, but inverted the wiring).
I've but in my 486 rotated such that the text is oriented backwards (wonder why they did that.. to burn the clueless users like me, i guess :)), and all it did was not boot..
Woaah, that same thing happend to a friend of mine. Tons of white smoke cam out o' the back of his computer case. He said His PC speaker's wire was being pinched or something. Is this a common thing, pc speakers catching on fire?
Hmm... I think that site may have something to do with computers. This is BAD.
I earn hefty commissions when replacing expensive parts such as Apple SYSTEM boards (take that you Apple tech support WANKERS!!!!). I heartily recommend that suggestions in this article be followed to the letter.
My uncle recently bought a computer from Dell and his computer caught on fire one night so he sent it back and they "fixed" it and a couple of weeks later it caught on fire again.
try popping out your bios chip, turning it around and replugging it in. 20 seconds later, touch it and if your skin on your finger melts off, smile and grin.
Thank god for anon posting... I couldn't tell this otherwise:
10 3c509 NICs
2 486 motherboards
2 686 motherboards
3 15" monitors
all rendered non-functional and in the case of 2 monitors and a motherboard, rendered alight...
If you cut out the power switches on the machines and twist the wires together, make sure to tape them so as not to have them weld themselves to any grounded metal they touch... Circut breakers are also a nice thing to have... and it's probably not good to stack things so close together that they'll touch when knocked over by a violently spasming tech...
That happened to me too, according to Dell this is caused by the virus Melissa.
(Can you spell s-a-r-c-a-s-m ?)
I once made smoke come out of a "very important" computer -- the Netware :-)
file server for a certain medical company that I better not name. My boss
and I were upgrading the motherboard, and somehow I managed to plug the
speaker wire into a live power connector. A few seconds later, it started
smoking as the insulation around the fire started burning. Poof! It was
quite a cloud. We got a fire extinguisher for that room the next day.
My boss laughed at me and still teases me now and then when I'm programming,
"Hey _____, wanna come over here and plug in a speaker wire for us?" D'oh!
I don't think I'll ever live that one down.
BTW, except for the melted insulation, the machine worked fine afterwards
and the poor suckers are still using it as their main server. If only
they knew...
First of all the guy mentions all these weird screws. Personally, I've opended up a whole bunch of computer cases (Apple, Commodore, Gateway, Sony, Packard Bell, Compaq, and a few others) and all of the screws are flat head.
It must depend where you are from. All the computer cases I've seen (IBM, Apple, Compaq, HP, Sun) used different type of screws head.
Watch the fun begin.
A guy in my apartment building has a decked-out Civic with every performance part sticker in the world on it, including, for unknown reasons, an Apple logo on the inside of the hood (over the engine).
Are you certain it wasn't because of Windows being installed?
I almost pissed my pants when the picture tube exploded while I was playing!
Sounds like an ad for an over-the-top video card...game play so intense that...
Hey what about the other periphials?
Howto destroy a laser printer.
Run that film that they use to make overhead transparancies thru it.
A couple years ago, I attempted to install a hard drive with the computer running. I was lazy, to say the least. Anyway, it's a bit like that old board game Operation.. if you have steady hands you can pull it off. I didn't have steady hands that day. I swung the drive too close to the power supply and a visible spark jumped from the drive to the power supply casing, destroying the drive. I use that drive as a bedside coaster, now.
Now we know why the XF86Config Howto warns people that they can destroy their monitor with incorrect settings.
People who work at those testing labs have all the fun.
Even worse it messes up your wallet.
A better way to do this is to very carefully shave the key off of the connector on the cable. That way if you kill it accidentally, all you need to do is get another cable.
Steven
Someone said, "But, everyone's doing it."
And I replied, "That's the best reason not to."
- S.K.
... these 3 FBI looking guys. They riddled his new PIII full of bullet holes. My friend had been trying to locate some guy named Morpheus.
Well one of the things I liked when working on apples was that you didn't need tools to open them up and work on them.
http://www.dansdata.com/comics/comic0001.htm
Actually, at one time they were. You'll notice that on the power supply connectors there are a few tabs, and the tabs are arranged differently on each connector. The motherboard power connector is supposed to be keyed, my old 286 is that way. They only way you are going to get the connectors wrong on my 286 is if you force them. But nowdays most aren't. That's cost cutting for you. :( At least you can't goof the new ATX connector (at least not without some effort).
;)
Of course, my 286 is from the days when they actually put some effort into building the computers. It only weighs about 40 pounds.
Stephen
"Any time."
--The predator in Aliens vs. Predator on the Atari Jaguar
Hotswapping components is such a rush man.
Damage list:
2 socket 7 motherboaords
a 15" monitor
my last eisa grapichs card (last week, my 486 is now officially dead...this was done by hotswapping a monitor, and shorting the card, cool!!)
I also run my power supplys "naked" to increase air flow in the case, thats an accident waiting to
happen...hee hee hee
During my old development, I managed to completely blow up a 486 in the following way. It's still my favourite: it's so efficient. I simply tried to put a probe into one of the ISA bus slot and slipped it. I heard "puff", I smelt something, and I found that the thing won't work. By trial and error, I know that the MB, the CPU, the display card and the IDE card are all non-functional.
After some investigation, I've found that I simply shorted -12V into one of the data bus signals.
I once flipped the 110V/220V switch at the back
of the power supply.
It didn't work out very well, and that blue smoke didn't smell too good either.
They just get in your damn way. They never fit the one screw driver you have and if they do, the head has been so badly deformed by your previous attempts to unscrew them that you can't open them anyway. The best thing in that situation to do is chop the head of the screw either by force with ordinary plyers or with a knife. Then you have to hope you can pull out the rest of the screw with plyers!
Don't get me started with computer cases, I must have cut myself a thousand times on those and bent a couple of harddrives trying to get them to fit in.
i have a harddrive that i can't remove from my puter because the screws are fubar.
why are the insides of a computer so frustrating?
The 8500 and 9500 are/were a pain... But the tight confines of a Gateway tower (either the metal case or the fluffy plastic case) aren't much better.. As for Apple upgradability what do you say we look at a couple more recent models?
Ever tried a 9600??
Push a green button on the top, remove the side of the case, lay the box on it's side, unplug the power cord, flip two little green plastic levers, SWING the power supply and the drives out of the way, and insert the DIMM(s) into one of the twelve slots.. The beige G3 models use essentially the same case (actually it's the 8600 case and has room for one 3 PCI cards in the lower portion of the case), and the b&w G3's look appear easier..
The 7200/7600/g3 desktop cases are also a joke.. Press two buttons on the front of the case, slide off the case, flip two lever, SWING the drives and the power supply out of the way, and insert the DIMM(s) into one of the 4 slots (3 on the g3).
On 8600/9600 machines:
Now that we've covered RAM, what do you say we look at upgrading the processor?
Push a green button on the top, remove the side of the case, lay the box on it's side (it easier to see what you doing) carefully remove the processor card (looks similar to a PCI card), and push the upgrade card into place. The new card could have multiple processors, such as duel 604e chips or a 400Mhz G3 processor.
There's something very appealling about owning a machine that can be upgraded rather than replaced ever year or two.. The funny thing is, I haven't had any problems playing Unreal on my two year old 9600/233 and don't see a real reason to upgrade...
I can say that in the Ford environment I have worked in for so long that what you've said rings all too true. The first few times it is rather funny but looses its humor after awhile. :)
Yes. The PIII let us right to Mr.Anderson.
If only his Linux OS would have crashed!
Damn its robust nature.
-An Agent Smith
How I usually fix a "broken" computer:
1- Open case
2- remove the card causing problem
3- KISS it gently, telling it how much I love it (at that point, your public will look at you in a mix of admiration and incredulity...)
4- Put it back in its slot
5- Put the power back on, saying "C'mon! Give it to papa! You can do it".
Works 92.7692% of the time. (For the remainning 7.x% of the time, you could try a french kiss).
Conclusion: computers need love and a little attention.
In the decade I've been doing my own repairs I've only ever done one really bad thing; back in the days of the MFM drives, my company ordered a brand-spankin' new Dell system with one of those newfangled IDE drives.
At the time the company's SOP was to get a system in, fire up ontrack disk mangler, low-level that sucker, put our software on, and ship it out to our remote sites.
Well we did just that and sent the system up to West Memphis, Arkansas. A couple of days later they called us up and said the system was losing data off the hard drive. I drove 600 miles up that way and had a look and yep, the hard drive was dead. Dell had advertised next-day service, but that doesn't apply in West Memphis, Arkansas (If I'd been across the river in Memphis, Tenn, it would have.) So I had to spend 2 days in that freakin' armpit of a town waiting on a drive. Needless to say, we learned our lesson and never did that again.
Had a couple of odd ones call me on phone support for a huge corporation I can't name (Hint: It was an International Corporation.) One guy called wondering why our half-OS couldn't install on his system. He was getting divide by zero errors at random places during the install. A little investigation turned up that he also got those errors a lot in Autocad under DOS. Turns out he was running a 20 MhZ 386 at 40 MhZ. I told him that wouldn't do and he told me the guy who built it for him said it wouldn't be a problem. I managed to convice him to go get his money back.
Had another guy call me up and he's in the middle of adding another IDE drive. So I'm sitting there talking to him and he says "I'm going to plug it up now," while I'm doing a search of our databases for him. Then he says, "Oh! The computer stopped!" I was like, "Er, sir, you did turn the POWER OFF before plugging that drive in, right?" Nope. Then the system wouldn't boot. I thought he'd blown his hard disk controller and possibly fried his hard drives too, but he got lucky (I found out later) and only forgotten to set the master/slave jumper on the new drive. Had 2 people do that to me in one week actually. The second one had a laptop and called up wondering why our half-OS would crash when he swapped the IDE drive out of his laptop. The light dawned for him about halfway thorough asking the question to me, leading me to believe that very few people actually think unless forced to.
Obviously, you've never tried to work on a Mac Plus.
Wow. Do the 9600s run Linux (well)? Where can I get a decently-configured used one these days?
Was it overclocked? Or were you using a 3.3V chip in a 5V socket?
The best I've managed so far is plugging in a SCSI cable one pin off (so that the 2 far left pins on the CD-ROM drive weren't connected to the cable, and the 2 far right pins on the cable weren't connected.)
Everything seemed okay for a few seconds, and then I noticed smoke coming out of the computer. I looked in, and the SCSI cable was melting. Pretty cool, actually. Good thing I wasn't using a case on that machine. I shut it off, put in another cable, and luckily the computer, SCSI card, and CD-ROM drive were all still working.
I think I'm going to hook up a spare, old, small hard drive to my machine (with no case) so it's visible, and take the top off. See how long it'll last until it gets too many errors to be usable (or someone drops a screw onto the spinning platters...)
Anonymous Coward
(N-methyl-pyrrolidon). It dissolves most plastics very nicely (and your skin too
Roland [rsmith@xs4all.nl]
ehmm....nah..
The 12/5 trick works really well on a
CD-ROM drive as well. My friend once
installed one without allowing me to
help because he was worried that I
would screw up and break his computer.
So of course, when he turned it on,
it began spewing black smoke and
making a great sound...the great
thing is that we put it right back
in the box and took it back to the
store and claimed it was broken.
They didn't even check it. Gave us
a new one for free and everything.
Hah!
I might add that after the unfortunate incident, ,my brand new PII333 and mainboard
I opened the power supply. I didn't find any fuses there. It was quite scorched on the inside.
My Matrox card and SB32 card was unusable afterwards. (A friend and me took the cards outside and smashed them with a sledge hammer).
I also managed to blow a fuse in the house.
However
survived (ah well).
Why did I flip that switch in the first place?
Hmm, I guess that is one of those questions that may never be answered.
Don't get me started with computer cases, I must have cut myself a thousand times on those and bent a couple of harddrives trying to get them to fit in.
I once got 17 stitches in my left foot courtesy of a computer case, it now decorates my wall in a slightly flattened form. Oh and I have found a very effictient method of computer destruction is to place it on the hood of your car, then lean into the car to unlock the passenger door, that combined with a little wind can do wonders.
The very first computer that caused me to spill my own blood in atonement for reaching inside was a CompuGraphic 2961 HS phototypesetter, back in 1974. I still have a very distinctive scar on the knuckle of my left thumb from that experience, caused when a filmstrip font detached itself from its 5000 rpm font drum while I was reaching inside the compartment.
The instructions with this beast advised when changing font strips never to grab the shaft to stop the drum in a hurry as there was a substantial risk of personal injury, however the boss demanded otherwise (newspaper deadlines...).
Later versions of these phototypesetters were equipped with a safety switch that used back EMF to stop the font drum within seconds if the cover was opened. Even more advanced versions had a little solenoid powered lock as well as a brake.
Cleaning blood off a font strip, which consists of an 18 inch long by two inch wide strip of negative with a metal clip at each end, is not fun -- anything that takes blood off also does a pretty good job of removing photographic emulsion as well, potentially ruining the font and missing the press deadline.
Bloodletting was actually quite common in the early days of photoset type. If the typesetting machine didn't rip you apart, the exacto knives at the pasteup table were great for shaving off excess bits of fingertip.
The worst pasteup injury I ever saw was when one of the artists (not me) poked himself in the abdomen accidentally by leaning against an exacto knife left hanging over the edge of the desk.
He looked okay at first except for the hole in his shirt and the quarter-inch stab wound next to his bellybutton, but a few days later he ended up in hospital with a raging case of peritonitis. Oops.
A friend decided his hard drive was too loud. What's the best way to fix a loud hard drive? Open it up and oil it... Needless to say, the hard drive didn't work for much longer.
Later on, he bought a CD-ROM drive. He found it didn't work, and called me to help him. He told me that he had plugged one of the plugs in backwards. I told him that that wouldn't break it, and looked inside his computer. I was wrong. He apparently managed to force the 4-pin power cable in upside down (first chipping off the plastic on both sides).
One that I did: I was trying to reverse-engineer the 3-pin CPU fan plug on my motherboard. I was measuring the voltage between 2 pins, and my hand slipped. I shorted +12V to 0V. Fortunatly, Epox had stuck a fuse on the fan plug, so instead of frying my whole motherboard, I only fried the fan plug (which is now plugged into one of the two other fan plugs).
- pm
I sometimes thought about buying a t-shirt
with the letters " JUST DESTROY IT " on it
and then wear it at work . . .
Now, there is my MESSAGE :
YES, READ THIS ARTICLE ! DESTROY IT !
CRASH YOUR DAMNED COMPUTER YOU DONT LIKE ANYWAY
THEY ARE JUST THERE TO OPPRESS YOU -
AND TECHIES DONT NEED SLEEP -
HELL, THEY ACTUALLY WANT TO WORK AT NIGHT
THE WHOLE WEEKEND THROUGH . . .
DONT CARE IF THEY WHINE AND BEG -
THEY WANT TO SUFFER ! LET THEM SUFFER REAL HARD
DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER NOW,
SMASH IT BURN IT HURT IT . . . .
WIPE ALL FILES ON YOUR HARD-DISK OUT
ALL OF THEM
TRASH theonlycopyofmyphdthesis.doc NOW !
TECHIES JUST WAIT FOR THAT . . .
AND DONT FORGET TO COOMMMMMPLAAAAIINNNNN !!!!!
AS ALWAYS THE TECHIES ARE AT FAULT
NEVER THE OS . . . THEY JUST PRETEND !
WINDOWS WOULD NEVER SELL THAT GOOD IF
IT WOULDNT BE THE BEST OS OF THE WORLD -
TECHIES ARE UNFRIENDLY - THEY USE A STRANGE
LANGUAGE NOBODY UNDERSTANDS AND ALWAYS WANT
TO LOOK AT YOUR PRIVATE FILES . . .
AND THEY TELL YOU IF YOU SMELL !
PUT THEM TO TEST NOWWWWW !
DESTROY IT ! BURN THE SUCKER !
. . . thanks. Everything is fine now.
Im happy and dont want to hurt anyone.
I worked for three years in tech support.
If I ever meet Bill Gates, I swear I will
bite his tie off -
You can quote me on that.
In the days of 80486, I had a 80386 which I used
as linux-server. Since I needed another serial
port which the board did not provide (actually,
even the first serial was on an ISA-Card), I
plugged in another card, turned on the machine
and - nothing. Not even the ventilator of the
power supply started. As soon as I removed the
serial card, it began to work again. Obviously,
something on the card was able to produce a
short-circuit which not only affected the board
but the power-supply as well. Weird.
The machine worked for several months as server;
had an Adaptec 1542 controller and was later
replaced with an 80486. With this 80486 I lost
two harddisks. The first had a headcrash during
a weekend. When I came back, the thing made an
awful noise, was very hot and refused to do
anything. So I replaced it and opened the disk.
Looks very nice on my shelf, with the marks. The
other disk I lost was due to inactivity. The thing
had been working for months until I took down the
machine for about an hour for a hardware-upgrade.
After that, it didn't work anymore. I guess it
was a crack on the circuit which widened while
the disk cooled down.
When I last month replaced the server with a new
one, I remarked another interesting fact: break
off one wing of the processor-ventilator and it
not only makes a terrific noise but also vibrates
heavily. I guess the board wouldn't honor that
if running for a long time.
Speaking of weird hardware-damage: Did anyone else
ever have a processor _glowing_? I had that with
an AMD x86, 80 Mhz. A cable was touching it, so
the plastic melted. On the processor there was
that spot with the plastic on it, which began
to glow afterwards, even after removal of the
cable. The socket was molten, the processor broke
into two parts when I removed it.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Yeah, I tried frying a 486 by plugging it in wrong. There are a whole hell of a lot of wrong ways to plug a 486 in wrong (at least the one I had--there was an extra "ring" of pins in the socket). Damn thing still works...
They don't make much mention of shorting various points on the motherboard to ground while the machine is running. I found out (on an already-broken machine) that shorting CPU pins to the case can have all manner of interesting and wierd effects. It's kind of hard to find ones that do any real damage, though. Oddly, most of them will do a hard-reset. It's pretty damn fun, in any case :)
Heh you're lucky that you aren't also a coaster as well now. Although I'm guilty of working on computers with the power on quite a bit. Disconnecting hard drives usually doesn't affect the computer at all, unless its trying to access them at the time... Yanking out an active NIC is another matter altogether though...
Posted by kenmcneil:
This happened under...(drum roll)...Windows!
Posted by kenmcneil:
The best I've been able to do is destroy an older monitor with my new PII 400MHZ, 128 MB, and AGP 2x (w/ 8 megs) while playing a game of Unreal! I almost pissed my pants when the picture tube exploded while I was playing!
Apparently you've not worked on some of the recent Compaq systems that have those damned Torx-head screws. It's damn impossible to get the right size Torx-head driver to fit those stupid things.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
A better question is, What kind of idiot would mock the author when he hasn't read the article?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
i've seen that one....
:)
and they had the cheek to phone up and ask us to fix the printer under guarantee!!!
the mess a transparency makes when it goes through a printer fuser is pretty cool..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
>Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the >power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. >Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and >it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.
I've attached power supply cables backwards as well. My system did nothing and nothing was damaged, but it scared me half to death. I will forever have "black cables go on the *inside*" etched in my mind. Also, one of my friends accidentally put a 486 CPU in at a 90 degree angle from the correct position. He was lucky: when he powered up the system, nothing happened, and nothing was hurt. Again, though: it scared the hell out of us.
And all the PC screws I've ever seen have been basic Phillips heads.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
This is no fault of my own, but...
About four months after I bought my current monitor, the display went inexplicably dead. After a day or so, whenever I turned on the monitor, 2-inch long blue sparks would shoot out of the power supply in back, scorching my table and making impressive crackling noises. I showed it to my friends and they all agreed: it was seriously cool.
It was still well within warranty, so I shipped it back to Princeton with a nice note about the lightning. A few weeks later, I got it back, all fixed and fully functional. The note attached simply said: "resoldered power supply...".
I don't know if the electrical arcs hurt anything internally, but I'm still happily using this monitor 2 years later, so...
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
Next time you have a pizza party and use printer paper for everyone to place the pizza (as a napkin), be sure to recycle the paper back into the printer. Tomato stains really liven up stock white paper. It will be sure to rival that expensive colorful graphic paper. Don't be shy with salt and pepper as they might contribute to the background. Coffee stains are an added bonus.
When you fire up the printer for the next job, people will swear its luchtime when the onions hit the fuser sizzling.
Paper jams? No, that means you are not doing it right. Try, try again. Sometimes you have to get the right consistency on the paper ingredients. Be sure to print out a few memos. Make a copy for everyone.
Bad solder joints account for about 50% of television and monitor repairs. At least it was that way when I used to repair them a few years back. It was the heat damage from the high voltage section and other hot spots that caused improperly soldered areas have hairline cracks. The cracks got hotter and the connection would break. Hitting a monitor would bring it back to life in this case. The solution to this would be simply to resolder. This kind of repair is an easy $100-$400, depending on the value. I know a tech that charged $450 for a projection unit, because he "repaired the power supply" this way.
Also related to heat damage are the electrolytic capacitors. They are easily guessed by the toasted and 0darkened areas of printed circuit boards. The oil in them boils away and they go out of tolerance. Bad capacitors cause the picture to get scrunched or out of sync. In the worse case, the sync gets so bad, the flyback circuit burns up including the transformer. While the transformer itself costs about $20-$50, the repair is worth $150 if you like to make money...
Most people now days will junk the bad monitor and try to buy something that is properly designed. It seems like engineers of yesterday built the chassis with absolute maximum ratings in mind to cut costs.
Most monitors will have an operating life. Increase this by keeping them cool. Allow them to breathe. Don't place stuff on top. A small fan could be very promising.
There is a small problem with plugging live devices while the power is hot and its not designed for it. The problem is SCR lockup and it is a condition inside integrated circuits where an input is biased beyond the supply rails that can cause the semiconductor junctions to mimic a triggered SCR. The result would lock down the supply rails and heat the IC, possibly to destruction. I suppose most chips nowdays have this worked out, but it used to be something to think about.
About bodily fluids in a computer... I had a cat that got a little sick on top of the monitor.
Good thing it was shut off while I was at work. When I was home, I turned it on, the screen had a slight flicker. I smelled something burning, but could not determine its source. It got real bad. That is when I discovered the smoke. When the cover was off, I had to scrape the shit off the high voltage section. It looked like it was close to catching fire...
A friend found a great way to destroy a 27 inch TV. Water a plant on the top when the tube is nice and hot. The neck will crack. That TV was a good source of parts for many projects.
I shorted my motherboard once, and the only ill effect it had was that it caused Windows to take 25 minutes to boot. Anyway, once it booted, it ran fine, but it took quite a while to get to that point. Weird stuff.
-mike kania
Sounds realistic....
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
I had a 486SX server motherboard (32 simm slots, 10 isa slots..) that I hooked the cables up to wrong.. it kinda went pop.. never worked again..
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
I once had a professor from the local community college bring in a computer that him and his students built with our parts (I worked at a small computer retailer). He said his keyboard port was bad, because it told him the keyboard was locked when it was not. I opened up the computer and he had the power for the 1/4" FLOPPY DRIVE plugged into the keylock pins on the motherboard.
The kicker: This guy teached a intro to computer hardware class.
I had a Linux book that reconed it was possible to set up Xfree to cause a monitor to burst into flames. Never tried it myself tho.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
My only concern is that an intelligent user may be able to use the information in this article to avoid destroying his computer. I accordingly urge everyone to e-mail the author to revoke his article until it can be effectively stripped of all information that may help such a user.
My apologies. I forgot "intelligent user" was an oxymoron. Please ignore the previous post.
Guess I'll chip in my two cents.
Back when I was still using a 486, I was having some trouble with a game controller. I reached in back of the running machine to make sure the plug was firmly seated in the game port and **POP**!! The screen went blank, the fans stopped turning and I got this terrible sinking feeling. But luck was with me that day - all I had to do was unplug the sound card and put it back in again, then all was well. (Everything was securely fastened and properly aligned to begin with - so I still don't know exactly what went wrong.) Needless to say that was the very LAST time I touched any wires on a running machine.
Overclocking
Overclocking is an important part of any computer upgrade, because it makes your chips go much faster. However, you have to be careful when you overclock because sometimes, overclocking a chip can cause it to work incorrectly or damage it.
I learned this lesson many years ago when I overclocked my 286 chip to 300 MHz. (That's 286 MHz, right?) Well at this point the chip stopped working.
Computer chips work on blue smoke. I know this because when the blue smoke left the 286, it didn't work no more.
Finding God in a Dog
This is indeed addressed in modern IC designs, though I don't know if it's implemented widely outside of CMOS. For CMOS circuits, you just place a fair number of "ohmic contacts" between the supply rails and substrate regions/wells. This ensures that even if a voltage spike forward-biases a junction that should never be forward-biased, it will be pulled back to the proper voltage levels in short order regardless of SCR effects.
OTOH, hot-swapping components that weren't designed to be hot-swapped is still usually a Bad Idea...
Another way to destroy hardware is to find some way to put the power cable for a hard drive upside down. There is something about 12 Volts that 5 Volt components just don't like one bit. What's also great about this is that the hard drive won't spin up and one might wonder if the power cable wasn't put in properly. Oh yeah and the smell isn't too pleasent either. :)
I've also done some really stupid things in my life like adjusting a potentiometer with a metal screwdriver on a monitor with the case off and the monitor on.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Hah!
Ever try installing ram in a 9500?
First you need a flathead to open the case, then you must remove every single pci card (not easy in a fully loaded Pro-tools system) and the processor daughterboard.
Then you have to unplug all the cables to the logic board (motherboard to the rest of us)and remove the fiddly little plastic assembly that holds the leds and power button (i think you need apple authorised fingers to do it properly).
Then you use a philips head screwdriver to unscrew the logicboard, and slimpy slide it out (harder than it sounds, (lots a little plastic clippy things))
Then you pop in the ram, and do it all backwards to re-assemble.
Remove the motherboard to upgrade the ram. Someone was thinking.......
The best thing I probably ever did was trying to force RAM into a simm slot by pushing it in vertically (don't ask me what i was thinking). Not only did I break the cheap plastic the holds the ram it, but I shorted out my motherboard as well.
I've got an old 486 box that partially fried. I plugged the 3.5 floppy cable in one pin off because I bumped it while installing a new hdd.. as I was hurrying to get the stuff plugged back in. 2 minutes after powering up the PC I wondered why the floppy light wouldn't shut off, 3 minutes later I wondered why black smoke was coming out of my machine. I looked and saw that the power cable was melted, along with another cable close by.
After powering off, I ended up clipping the melted cable and duct-taping the others it oozed on. I've got the floppy still running in another 486 box to this day. It's not the most reliable, but it still works. Quite amazing! The power supply still works, too, although I occasionaly smell smoke every now and then...
My favorite happened at a company that I worked for. We used DEC to repair our Mac IIci's in our remote offices (like in North Dakota).
We had a failed HD in one Mac. The tech unhooked everything from the back of the Mac and replaced the HD. He then hooked the monitor up to the AUI port on the Ethernet Card.
It stated smoking. So he turned it off, then drove 3 hours back to his supplier. The next morning he drove back for 3 hours, replaced the NIC and then promply plugged the monitor right back into the AUI port again.
More Smoke. He got it right the third time. That made for 18 hours of driving time. All because he could not plug a monitor into the port with the picture of a monitor on it.
That reminds me of a joke:
Q: How long does it take for a DEC engineer to replace a lightbulb.
A: It depends on how many trips to his car until he runs out of spair bulbs.
With all the computers I have put together, I have never been able to break the computer while the case was off. Maybe I didn't use enough force.
In climates like here in Perth, leaving a fan disconnected (or if it stops) will do a lot more damage.
Over the years, I have destroyed two network cards -- one through overheating (the computer was in a room with bad ventilation and it was 40 degrees C outside. There was smoke comming out through the fan) and two by lightning, a motherboard (it was a long time ago, but I know a capacitor exploded), and a few other components.
Heh, me too, lots of white smoke being expelled by the fan. Jeez, the speed at which I hit the power-off button...
:) -- well it was a long time ago when i was young
There was a good reason though -- I was experimenting with making my own joystick with two potentiometers and a couple of microswitches. I had a load of wires plugged directly in to the little holes in the female joystick port on the SB card in my PC.
Made a little adjustment, plugged of the wires back into the wrong hole, and cay you say "short circuit"
Been there, done that, shame about the blue smoke, on mine I heard a fuse go "pop".
Had to open the PSU (naturally marked 'do not open') remove a few bits, until, right at the bottom, I found the fuse wich had blown then spent 15 mins trying to get a new one back in cos it wasn't designed to be replaceable. -- 'duh'!
Very recently (this last week I believe) I had a ribbon cabling problem that just wouldn't go away. I took a closer look at the cable and drive, and it turns out the ribbon was keyed the wrong way. I had to gouge out part of the socket to plug in the miskeyed ribbon...
...I haven't had to match up the red wire with pin 1 in years!
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
By far the simpilest and easiesy way to destroy a perfectly working piece of computing power doesn't even involve opening the case. All you have to do is install M$ Windows 98 :)
:)
I have found that the best way to make any perfectly good computer unusable and worthless
surprised the article didn't mention that
Back when I did hardware, my favourite job was kicking in the CRT before scrapping monitors, I LOVED that pop.
In my last job, I was doing a RAM upgrade on an pre-war 486 (Gulf War, obviously), the box had 1Mb, in 4 256K SIMMS, I removed the old SIMMS, and the clips, which more attached more on hope than anything else, broke.
I plugged the new SIMMS, sat them up, and repeatedly rebooted the PC until it found all its RAM.
I then put the computer on a little pedestal between two desks and jammed the desks against it so that it didn't move.
If the computer stayed where it was it would be fine, if the moved?
Don't tell the users, that the thing
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Have the machine crash while verifying a newly formatted SCSI hard drive on a Mac. The old SCSI hard drive will be corrupted, but somewhat usable. Unfortunately, the corrupted hard drive can never be repaired through software means. I once accidentally did this. My new hard drive was spared but my old one was mortally wounded. It still worked for a while, but worked worse and worse until my computer didn't even register its existance anymore.
DES Khaddafi KGB genetic jihad Uzi Rule Psix Qaddafi cryptographic Peking Mossad Legion of Doom Albanian Serbian Saddam
I cant help but comment on the irony of not needing a screwdriver to open the case, and not being able to do anything inside with one. Every Compaq I've opened has had some sort of screwy backplane setup, chinese puzzle box drive bays, and their own crazy form factor. If you want do destroy a computer, destroy a Compaq. But at least do it right, chainsaws, sledgehammers, and flamethrowers are the minimum recommended tools. I dont want to have pieces to put back together.
Since my last major upgrade in September, I've fried my motherboard twice(once by mucking around with KBPO, once by moving it 4 feet to the left... never did figure out what happened there), and I managed to catch my power supply on fire by overloading it(HINT: a 235Watt can't push 240 Watts). And that's just MY computer. You don't want to know what my sister's done to hers!
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
In reply to your statement about screws, I've had a couple of Commodore Amigas... One of them had not flat-head screws, but very soft aluminium posidrive screws, which I proceeded to completely strip when using a much larger phillips screwdriver. Eventually they got so bad I had to cut slots in them with a knife and undo them using those.
:-)
And that certainly wasn't the worst thing I did to that computer... soldering wires directly onto an edge-connector, cutting tracks on the motherboard.. it lasting a surprisingly long time considering.
The other Amiga, fortunately, had standard phillips screws.
Accually, inladen in the humor of it all the article accually is a very good do's and don't for the person who is looking into doing an upgrade themselves. Very good suggestions, like being careful shorting out the bottom of your hardrive, while its sitting on your chasis, is usually something a person learns the hard way. Or are you accually not wanting people to read this so you can keep your job -grin- heeh jk
This kind of struck home (among other things :)
:) Fortunately, there was no damage, the computer just wouldn't turn on. All I can say is that someone wasn't thinking when they made it so you can switch the two conectors...
When connecting an older style, "AT" power supply to a motherboard, the two-part power connector offers a marvellous opportunity for destruction. Make sure at all costs to avoid the plug configuration shown below.
This configuration, with the black wires towards the centre, will cause the computer to work perfectly. Reversing the two plugs so that the red wires are towards the centre will, gratifyingly, destroy the motherboard.
If only I had know that when I was putting together my new Linux box
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Oddly enough, it didn't do much, after that...
-r13
-Will
This has nothing to do with static.
It seems that on many (most?) PC motherboards, one side of the speaker connector is constantly at +5V relative to the chassis, not 0 as you might expect. I once managed to destroy a speaker by mis-connecting it across the +5 side of the speaker header and one of the ground pins for one of the LEDs, and leaving it that way for a while before realizing there wasn't any sound.
And have you noticed that when they decide to destroy a computer they are almost guaranteed to destroy the monitor first, or even only....isn't that like killing the messenger?
Monitors have rights, too.
There's an Apple logo on the left side of that page. Any conclusions to be drawn from this?
I managed to split a processor in half messing with a compaq 486 lacking proper indication of chip corner alignment. Sloppiness is okay when the subject is a dumpster-dive-recovery.
Some people are required to destroy their computers - at my place of employment we spend a lot of time developing appropriate methods. I actually enjoy the rare occasion when I get the pleasure of destroying some equipment (usualy security has all the fun).
For some reason (??) the black wire on my pc speaker decided to short out one day. Fire + Computer == BAD. Lot's of smoke, really bad smell, mental breakdown. It's a horible experience knowing that your baby is on fire.
"more human than human, that's our moto" -BladeRunner
Accually, it makes your wallet more neat and tidy, with none of that green paper left in there to mess it up.
Hey hey, I'm all for destroying stuff. However, at any point in a movie or tv show, when I see a character destroy a computer I immediatly become heart broken. Computers have feelings too you know. I think I should start a A.D.C.H.(U.I.H.L.I.)P.F.A. club.
(That's Anti Destroying Computers (Unless It Has Linux Installed) Prevention For America.)
Yep, Just another waste of time organization that has a bunch of single-minded people with little to no thought in their head besides selfish ideas.
Just another weird rant by a weird guy.
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Jon Berube
PovRayMan
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Check out my blackbox styles
I have no problem with Linux, and I know for a fact it IS better than any microsoft OS. I meant was that destroying computers can be fun, but NOT fun if it had Linux on it. Guess I should have been more explicit the first time, eh?
---
Jon Berube
PovRayMan
---
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
The worst I've done is fried an LED display, trying to screw it back into place while the computer was on, after adjusting it to show some strange Mhz amount.
But I didn't learn my lesson quickly enough, as later that very same day, I was screwing something back into the case, again with the computer on (how else?). The screw jumped out from under the screwdriver, and landed on top of the modem... one coruscating electrical bolt later, my computer had rebooted. Fortunately, nothing got fried. Needless to say, I've been very careful since. :-)
A few of the things are true but man I almost fell out of my chair reading that article.
First of all the guy mentions all these weird screws. Personally, I've opended up a whole bunch of computer cases (Apple, Commodore, Gateway, Sony, Packard Bell, Compaq, and a few others) and all of the screws are flat head.
Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.
I kinda missed the Amigas in my upgrade path. i had/have a Commodore Plus 4, down electrical storms. I know my 286 was the last Commodore, but I'm trying to remmber if my PC10 was one too.
Personally, I think companies go through phases which they change their screws. People complain about weird ones and they switch back.
I do tech support as well and I can say two things:
1) User's don't need the help, they know all this already
2) If the users had this, they wouldn't read it anyway
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
I think I remember seeing this in PC Magazine several years ago. Gets a great response every time.
sup
My problem is...I know how to fix computers but MS machines seem to freeze in fear when they see me...
Maybe I am just putting Linux on too many of those computers "Designed for Windows 95"
Crystal Light. That stuff is lethal!
:)
Right Nate?
Kas
--
A friend rosted his Powersupply last week, after he tried out what this nice red switch on the back of his case might be... Good example of WIN-DAU mentality: don't know what it is? Try it!
Well, 110V arn't 220V, are they?
Well I had an old pizza box sparc,
and it only had a Com Terminal as there was no video card.
One day a guy I know gave me one he had lying around cool, me thinks. I put it in, put a monitor on it and fired up the machine.
Of course, nothing worked. I eventually got so frustrated that I stabbed it with a screw driver.
BANG !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fried the card, but the sparc was ok.
phew!!!!!!!
Found out later that the reason the "spare" monitor was lying around, was cos it was broken too.
Regards Redemption
Sticking an AGP card in your PCI slot
-- insomniac --
What kind of idiot would write an atricle like that?
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
An even better question is, What kind of idiot would mock the idiot who mocked the author when he hasn't read the article?
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
Geez, I tell you, this article doesn't begin to
tell some of the important do's and donts to keep an intact computer. They don't even metion the hazard of urionation, and defication directly on the power suppy, or processor. Don't forget hitting your machine repetedly with large hard objects, and then proceeding spray arisal air freshioners all over glowing oblects when you start to smell burning silicon... I tell you, there are some things that really should be added...
-D0n'+ h$+3 M3 b3C0u5e 1'M 4 1337 Hax0R!-
A friend of mine showed me the most brilliant thing I have ever seen!
And old 486 motherboard had shorted out somewhere and burnt a gaping hole through the board itself. The funny thing is, that it'd only damaged half of the RAM in the machine, two SIMM's worked fine and the other two were screwed.... go figure!!!..
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
I have had a friend who decided that plugging in her new power supply would be much easier than waiting for the resident geek to do it for her later that evening. She told me that it was difficult to plug it into the motherboard, but she finally got them in, but sparks flew when she plugged in her computer to the wall. I looked and the reds were inward.
This wound up not only destroying the motherboard and power supply, but also destroying all of the devices she had in there (HD controller, video card, sound card, etc - it was an old 486).
Then, of course, she yelled at me for breaking her computer. Denial is always the first step...
Once (a long long time ago) I was updating the firmware on my Amiga's SCSI controller... and, like a genius, I plugged the EPROMs in backward...
:)
Gee, I never knew they lit up!
As a tech support guy who gets paid by the hour instead of by the job, I implore the general public to ignore this heretical article as it cuts into my valuable quake playing time.
Please please, if you don't know what your doing, don't open up your computer, or even look at it wrong. (Don't understimate the look, I, as a good techie, only have to open the case to fix computers, they're scared of me) looks are powerful.
Keyed ribbon cables!? What else have I been missing!?
Hey whats your problem with linux?! Linux can beat windows 98 (or any other microsoft product) any day! If you think windows is better than linux than you got problems! Even if it has windows on it you should not hurt the computer! it is like killing some one bacasue they cew a specific type of gum. Poor computers! P.A.C.K (people against computer killers) Iamsleepy
-Death is no exuse to stop working!
I have yet to see it, but I've heard a story about a user who brought their computer in complaining that the built in cup holder doesn't work anymore. It took the tech a second to figure out what the person was talking about, but you can imagine his the expression on his face when he did.
:)
Steven
"Television is the retina of the mind's eye."
-From "Minds Eye", on the Tempest 2K soundtrack.
Crystal light? I found a much better way to destroy your computer is to turn it on end and spoon in oatmeal and honey. Once you think you can't get any more in, violently jab the spoon into your floppy drive. . .
Josh
All i can say, Grin.
heh
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