Uhm, _these_ are the most dangerous creatures for your computer!
Just a little while ago my girlfriend stumbled upon my machine which was turned on and working. "The machine" was actually what was left of a computer after pulling out the mainboard out of the chassis and laying it on the floor. I then plugged everything in and turned it on. It worked just fine. Needless to ask why I've done that, but at least it looked kinda hype...
So back to the horror story... One day, my GF stepped on the poor thingie, and as the wires were not all put together very well, she heard a quiet boom and I saw a spark come out of somewhere near my hard drives. I told her to get her feet out of the computer because as I thought it was going to burn and hurt my beloved one's foot. She obeyed me fine, and started to pull the foot out of the trap which was caused by other boards. Obviously, my GF was stuck... which she of course did not believe, and being a rather strong girl was pulling the foot harder and harder.... as a result, I had my machine completely ruined. The AGP slot was completely broken, the graphics board was cracked and the RAM slots were all moved off their usual places. The mainboard was also cracked, and the CPU fan has been broken, but after a bit of tackling it went on fine.
After examining the foot we came to a conclusion that it was doing much better than the electornics, so I went on and powered the whole thing on. It started booting up, and after putting all components back into their places the whole thing was up'n'running. The only bad news was that I had no graphics output whatsoever, but the network card was working okay, and I managed to log into the box and use it for a while to find out that the hard drives were okay.
After that I swapped a second box out of my closet, an old Compaq 486 DX/2, turned it on and brought a crossover cable to connect the two boxes. The old Compaq has been acting as an X display for the other (Debian) box ever since.
So why pay so much for fancy new video boards when you can always use such an oldie as a very decent X display? It's running KDE 3.1 fine, and I've even managed to watch movies on it, despite the fact they've been looking more like slide shows...:) But when performance is not first priority, an average geek would go for anything to has his fresh slashdot portion delivered in the morning!
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Uhm, _these_ are the most dangerous creatures for your computer!
:) But when performance is not first priority, an average geek would go for anything to has his fresh slashdot portion delivered in the morning!
Just a little while ago my girlfriend stumbled upon my machine which was turned on and working. "The machine" was actually what was left of a computer after pulling out the mainboard out of the chassis and laying it on the floor. I then plugged everything in and turned it on. It worked just fine. Needless to ask why I've done that, but at least it looked kinda hype...
So back to the horror story... One day, my GF stepped on the poor thingie, and as the wires were not all put together very well, she heard a quiet boom and I saw a spark come out of somewhere near my hard drives. I told her to get her feet out of the computer because as I thought it was going to burn and hurt my beloved one's foot. She obeyed me fine, and started to pull the foot out of the trap which was caused by other boards. Obviously, my GF was stuck... which she of course did not believe, and being a rather strong girl was pulling the foot harder and harder.... as a result, I had my machine completely ruined. The AGP slot was completely broken, the graphics board was cracked and the RAM slots were all moved off their usual places. The mainboard was also cracked, and the CPU fan has been broken, but after a bit of tackling it went on fine.
After examining the foot we came to a conclusion that it was doing much better than the electornics, so I went on and powered the whole thing on. It started booting up, and after putting all components back into their places the whole thing was up'n'running. The only bad news was that I had no graphics output whatsoever, but the network card was working okay, and I managed to log into the box and use it for a while to find out that the hard drives were okay.
After that I swapped a second box out of my closet, an old Compaq 486 DX/2, turned it on and brought a crossover cable to connect the two boxes. The old Compaq has been acting as an X display for the other (Debian) box ever since.
So why pay so much for fancy new video boards when you can always use such an oldie as a very decent X display? It's running KDE 3.1 fine, and I've even managed to watch movies on it, despite the fact they've been looking more like slide shows...