Your Most Damage-Resistant Hardware? 945
questamor writes "After reading the recent Slashdot article linking to drivesavers and their list of damaged hardware that was still recoverable, I'm curious about the worst things slashdot readers have done to their hardware and still had it work. So far I've been lucky, and in more than a decade of owning computers I've hotplugged almost everything except a CPU (sometimes accidentally, sometimes through laziness) and never knowingly broken anything. What have you all done to your machines? I imagine there are many stories of dropped, drowned, stolen and generally abused machines still working and doing their thing; or at least, able to be brought back to a working state"
Super Nintendo (Score:3, Funny)
I... (Score:4, Funny)
loads of stuff (Score:2, Funny)
Every time my old box crashed while playing GTA3 I'd hit the top of the case. The CD-ROM was in the top slot, and I once hit it hard enough to scratch the CD.
I've also had PCs running while I messed around inside, i.e. changing cooling, which involves moving all the cables around.
Re:loads of stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that dangerous? First time I ever installed a hard disk I forgot about the power cable and wondered vaguely why it wasn't working, till I noticed that all the other IDE gadgets had an extra plug into them beside the ribbon. Was I in danger of smoking something there?...
Re:loads of stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose some controllers might get confused if there is the extra wire length that goes to dead circuits instead of nowhere, but I'm sure that will only bother anything if you have your drives set to "cable select" instead of master or slave.
Re:loads of stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Re:loads of stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, one of my Linux machines really didn't appreciate the hotswap experience that I accidentally gave it - I was testing a RAID card on it, with the motherboard and card sitting on my desk, and accidentally ripped the card out in the middle of a filesystem stress-test. Oops. *kernel panic*
Re:loads of stuff (Score:2, Informative)
Everything you list is pretty harmless. Well, except the drive dropping, although when they're off, the head employs a locking device.
Drives are meant to receive power and signal independently. You can even give it the 5V line before the 12V, or the other way around, it'll be fine. Just don't UNplug it while it's on, as that will likely crash your OS (but not damage the drive.) And you don't want to plug the signal cable in after it's powered up, unless it's SATA.
You can also safely power it up without a signal cable if you want to test noise or something.
sh
Re:loads of stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend did this, and the amount of smoke from just one wire on the ribbon was amazing (to me anyway, he didn't seem to take it the right way).
It was like someone took a knife and sliced the ribbon all the way down, making two parallel ribbons. You ask: was everything OK afterwards? Yes! The scsi card and all devices were fine. Did his scsi card have a fuse on the terminator power wire? Obviously not. The event was locally named the "Lonergan SCSI terminator power-wire-fire". Boy I can't believe how tough some of this hardware is. The only HD I've every blown was because I let the onboard controller touch the case chassis. Spark! I've got cables the wrong way round, forgotten to plug fans in, hotplugged stuff I shouldn't... I can't kill anything!!
I used to drink a LOT... (Score:3, Funny)
One night four or five years ago, while I was drinking a rum and Crystal Light and smoking, I reached to grab my drink which was sitting to the left of my keyboard (this was not my first drink of the night) and I knocked the entire drink (probably 20 ounces at least) into my computer. While I was trying to catch the cup, I hit my hand on my ashtray and flipped that over too.
I fully expected the computer to just stop working, but, with the exception of the CD-ROM opening and closing on its own several times that night, the computer worked fine and still continues to work fine.
I cannot say I have had the same luck with keyboards. I have unknowingly spilled drinks into keyboards multiple times and not realized it, until the next morning when I would realize that, no I was NOT so drunk that I could not type, it was just that the keys were sticking together...
Floppy (Score:5, Funny)
TI PEB and the 4-sided diskette (Score:5, Interesting)
One time I accidentally dropped a floppy from about 2 inches above the desk, and yet it still worked! (although I did have to completely reformat, losing the data already on it)
You just reminded me of something that happened to a friend in the late 1980s.
We were die-hard members of one of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user's groups. He had his PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) at a meeting, and was carrying it on a cart up a set of stairs. He was at the top of the stairs when it feel off the cart.
Before I continue, a word on the TI-99/4A. If there's a nuclear holocaust, I have every faith that the only survivors will be the Jews, Dodge Darts, McDonalds uniforms, and the TI PEB. You see, Texas Instruments built them out of stamped steel, with each card housed in a cast aluminum case [glowingplate.com]. They were overbuilt for military use, let alone as a "home computer".
So, the PEB went end for end down the terazzo stairs. Bang, bang, bang. Little chips of terazzo breaking off the corner of each step, and a few small dents in the PEB.
He picked it up and shook it. Nothing sounded loose inside, so he hooked it up, and it still worked. Until he tried to save to a diskette.
The old full-height Shugart 5.25" double-sided single-density diskette drive now had a new feature. He could format a diskette, flip it over, and format it again. One of the heads was now halfway between tracks, so the net effect was that he had a four-sided diskette. 360k to a 5.25" diskette, while the rest of us were only getting 180k.
Good Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good Idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point a few friends were ridding in the suzuki version of the Geo Metro and didn't have space in the car for the PS/2 so they put it on the roof and someone put his arm out the window to hold it.
The get most of the way home when the thing blows off the roof while the car is going 110Km/hour and bounces twice on the shoulder before going into the ditch.
They stop and pick it up and when they get home they plug it in.. still works.
Pity they don't make them that solidly anymore.
Re:Good Idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
They do. I've got a 4 year old Thinkpad that I've dropped countless times from normal table or standing height (a couple of times while it was on and the hard drive spinning!) and it's only got a single small scratch on the top of the casing to show for it. IBM still makes probably the toughest hardware out there, and they don't even advertise the fact - it's just assumed. IBM makes hardware the way people expect hardware should be made. (Though it's true that their PC keyboards are no longer built to the same standards as their old Model M's, but then most people don't even seem to like typing on that kind of keyboard anymore. I'd never give up mine, though.)
Just to compare, my wife has a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo, a made-in-Japan notebook with a metal casing. Her system has hinges that no longer work (she needs to prop up the screen on something) and the speakers crackle when the network's being used, apparently due to a bad connection. My IBM still looks and works as good as new despite the abuse it's taken.
Re:Good Idea! (Score:4, Informative)
You just contradicted yourself completely. Before you moderate this flamebait hear me out.
I've been working at my college as a laptop service technician for 3 years and I've had incredibly intimate experience with 3 models of IBM thinkpads. The 390, the i1422 and the i1300.
All three have had serious design flaws that made them break in predictable particular ways due from normal use.
- The 390's battery latches broke like popcorn, and the hinges would break the covers into smithereens.
-
The 1400's would get white dots on the LCD from the LCD bezels being so flimsily made that slight presure on the outside of the closed laptop would squash it down onto two upraised areas on the keyboard bezel.
- The current model my college has is the i1300. The hinges. Oh dear god the left hinges....For some inexplicable reason they made the LEFT hinges in these things out of pot metal, while the right hinge is good material and breaks about 1/2000th as often (Yes we have ~1700 machines on campus). Normal use will cause the left hinge to give out well within a year (the lease is 3 years). And if the hinge starts loosening up (the metal splitting) without being seen to it will eventually break the hinge cap, the upper and lower covers, both LCD bezels AND the LCD itself ($800 that IBM gets to eat, becaues it's a warranty issue).
Oh and each new model we get has more and more of its components integrated into the motherboard. Currently if any one of the following parts becomes broken/inoperable the $700 motherboard has to be replaced: power port (can't count the number of times a trip over the power cord has cost the student $100 deductable and the college $600 to replace it)- headphone jack
- microphone jack
- bios (corrupted etc)
- CMOS battery holder
You ask why the college has to pay for what should be covered under insurance? Because these things are so fragile that our 2nd insurance carrier dropped us like a rabid hamster! So don't even begin to say they still make them solid! I know better, I have to fix the damn things. Not to mention the hd in the stupid things has a transfer rate of 2.0MB/s (1/3rd the speed of my ipod's drive!)it never has forgiven me... (Score:5, Funny)
Motherboards (Score:5, Interesting)
The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think).
Re:Motherboards (Score:2, Funny)
Pop, Smoke, and Tantalum Capacitors on Motherboard (Score:5, Interesting)
The most drastic case I've ever come across was a motherboard that I installed without grounding. Turned it on, nothing happened for a few seconds, then "POP!" Smoked the thing. The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think)
I'd expect that you had a capacitor fail. I don't know what that would have had to do with forgetting to "ground the motherboard".
The black leads in your AT/ATX power supply connector are the power supply grounds. The RF grounds are provided when you screw the motherboard down into the case - the little pads around the screw-holes are connected to the motherboard's ground plane and serve to take care of that requirement (although, as most of us know, a motherboard will run outside of a case - it's not recommended for RFI reasons).
If it was a new motherboard, probably it was defective. There are generally lots of capacitors on motherboards, to provide RF bypassing and power supply filtration. If an electrolytic capacitor (aluminum or tantalum) is installed backwards - or has too low a voltage rating - then it will fail. Aluminum (ordinary) electrolytics tend to fail leaky - which means that the capacitor will dissipate energy and heat up, sometimes exploding, but often just remaining there. If they pop, they often remain shorted, and cause your power supply to shut down, or damage other parts of the circuit.
On the other hand, tantalum electrolytic capacitors (generally small yellow-orange rectangular surface mount) will tend to fail shorted. They eat up a lot of current, generate a lot of heat, and pop. Once they've actually exploded, they tend to be open circuited, so they're effectively no longer there.
If this was something like a bypass or a filter capacitor, your motherboard almost certainly will no longer work as well as it was designed (ie. RF emissions, susceptibility to RF noise or power supply ripple, etc.) but if it still works well enough for you, that's good.
All the same, I'd be taking a look at what failed and replacing it. You need a very steady hand and a good iron with a clean tip, but you can replace the defective capacitor.
As for the likelihood of a motherboard leaving the factory with a badly placed or wrongly-rated capacitor, well, sh*t happens. In the late 1980s, Toyota shipped over 10,000 Corollas with missing passenger side front speakers. That's a little easier to spot than a shipment of mislabelled capacitors, or accidentally putting a spool of caps into the pick and place machine the wrong way around.
Re:Pop, Smoke, and Tantalum Capacitors on Motherbo (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why you should wear eye protection when you peer over an open computer, especially a newish one!
Not exactly computer hardware... (Score:2)
(Yes I really hated that game).
(Yes, the fourth hit killed it).
Re:Not exactly computer hardware... (Score:5, Funny)
Spent too much time playing with video games, I guess. Have your muscles _completely_ atrophed or are you just _that_ big of a wuss?
Drove over a laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
It looked horrible, all cracked and what not, LCD and keyboard destroyed.
But for grins I hooked it up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse and she booted right up.
And I've been using Toshiba lappies ever since
Re:Drove over a laptop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Drove over a laptop (Score:5, Funny)
The 486 that wouldn't quit (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally we decided we'd had enough, so we shorted it out and sent it to the dumpster.
They sure don't make 'em like that anymore.
Re:The 486 that wouldn't quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Baked Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Not me, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
AMD - takes a burning, keeps on churning.
Hacksawed Video Card (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine who frequents here once had a video card that would not fit into his case. I forget the exact model. He called up the manufacturer and asked them what he could do. They told him that everything on the board past a certain point was just redundant, and that it could be safely removed without affecting performance. Naturally, he got that in writing before taking a hacksaw and hacking off almost half the card! It worked when he finally got it in.
Nope, I didn't believe him either.
ESD, and Deceleration baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
I was amazed... and that drive is still running in one of my boxen
cdroms phones and sparks (Score:2, Interesting)
Palm IIIc marathon.. (Score:5, Funny)
It's alright though. The palm survived and it turns out the people at the table were my ex girlfriend and a couple of her friends. She got pepsi all over her...
Re:Palm IIIc marathon.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't try this at home, kids! (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally don't think this is right. I think you ought to be able to do whatever you want to someone who robs you (again, I wouldn't advise taking the risk, but if you choose to take the risk I think you should be given a free hand). However, the law sees it differently. I suppose the police don't want any competition...
Re:Palm IIIc marathon.. (Score:5, Funny)
Dare I ask what you were doing with your Palm that near the toilet?
My keyboard! (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine how many keys you have typed on your keyboard throughout its life. Imagine how much frustration you have taken out on it during a rough match of Quake 3 or Starcraft. Imagine how many food particles and hairs have been caught in its grasp. Pretty amazing that it's still clicking away, eh?
Re:My keyboard! (Score:3, Funny)
My Dell Laptop has never been abused... (Score:2)
Anyone know how to fix a laptop keyboard?
Re:My Dell Laptop has never been abused... (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, I owned a Winbook and that thing would fall apart if you were to breath in it's general direction from the other side of a football field. NEVER BUY WINBOOK. Junk junk junk junk. I could give you examples. I WILL give you examples:
And that's just a TASTE of what they put me through...
Re:My Dell Laptop has never been abused... (Score:5, Funny)
Worst thing I've seen (Score:3, Interesting)
Once we decided he wasn't going to die, I picked up the 250 myself and moved to the QA rack, by some act of god, it booted and showed no ill effects of having close to 400 lbs of human land on it.
You won't see those intel POS computers doing that!
Xircom CardBus Network Card (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Xircom CardBus Network Card (Score:5, Funny)
(I believe it's from ancient Knurdic.)
Flaming Motherboard (Score:5, Interesting)
We were pretty anxious as we had both just bought brand new machines... so we headed over to my house and started building the computers.
I swear that there's nothing better than the first time you turn on your computer after you've successfuly built it. Anyway, as soon as my friend was finished building his, he turned on the machine, and I kid you not, the motherboard caught on fire! the details of how we stopped the small fire alude me at this point, but after we finally finished putting it out... he turned it on again, and it worked perfectly!
Re:Flaming Motherboard (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Flaming Motherboard (Score:5, Funny)
Of all the places you'd expect to have a good firewall...
A quart of water into the monitor (Score:5, Interesting)
My coworker took a replacement monitor up to her. Then he turned the monitor upside down (after unplugging it of course), drained out all the water, and instructed the secretary to let the monitor dry in the corner for a few days.
A few days later he connected the formerly hydrated monitor back to the computer and everything worked fine.
Re:A quart of water into the monitor (Score:4, Interesting)
The monitor had a nice broad, flat, top, and Being Stupid, I would do things like leave glasses of water sitting on it. Of course one day my luck ran out, and I knocked a full glass into the well-ventilated top of the monitor.
There was a zapping sound, and the display on the monitor sort of warped, and `exploded'; it's hard to describe, but it went completely nuts, like a particularly impressive screensaver. The effect was really very cool.
I was momentarily stunned, so didn't do anything. Then I noticed that although the display was most certainly totally bizarre (there were no scan lines to speak of, more like spinning scan parabolas), it didn't seem to be getting any worse. So I decided that hell, if it's fried, it's fried, and it will probably dry out a lot faster if I leave it turned on...
So I just left the monitor turned on overnight. When I came to look at it in the morning, it was back to normal, looking very nice indeed.
HP had some really impressive hardware back in the day...
Re:A quart of water into the monitor (Score:4, Funny)
As a special bonus you get a nice coffee aroma when after it's first turned on.
BFL
Re:A quart of water into the monitor (Score:4, Funny)
That reminds me of what happened to the Windows laptop of a friend of mine. He had a knack of using it in the tub... Of course, one day he accidentally let it go, and with a big bzzzzt, fizzzzz, the screen went black.
We turned it upside down, the used the hairdryer on it, and after an hour, it worked again. And the amazing part is that Windows hasn't crashed on it since then!
The CD "Changer" (Score:5, Funny)
Appartenly, someone didn't teach her that while you have to put a CD in the drive to play her games, you also have to TAKE THAT CD OUT when you want to play a different game. I'm still trying to figure out how she managed to get the drive to open/close when there were 4 CDs in there.
Re:The CD "Changer" (Score:5, Funny)
My daughter (now 15 months old) recently yanked the ejectable CD-RW tray out of the drive. Just walked up to it, hit eject, grabbed the tray, and yank. Completely yanked the thing loose.
The next thing I know, she's running around the house brandishing her CD Tray like a weapon.
Anyway, after I got it back from her, I put it back in the old fashioned way... sheer brute force. I just opened the tray cover, put the tray back in, and forced it back into position while it made its horrid little ratcheting noises.
After that though, it worked perfectly. The tray ejects when the button is pressed (though sometimes closes randomly now. Annoying, but not surprising), reads perfectly, and even burns usable CDs at 24 speed.
For the record, it's a 24x10x40 Lite-On, and it's currently working without a problem after two months of use.
-9mm-
Old Apple IIG (Score:5, Interesting)
Input devices (Score:2, Insightful)
And the only exception to that is probably keyboards and mice, which take years of punishment.
SGI Indigo2, built like a tank (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure beats my PCs, Mac, and Sun for reliability of both hardware and software... maybe it's the fact this beast weighs over 50 lbs!
Non-dairy creamer (Score:2)
Well, I didn't do this, but a vandal at my work place did...
Someone dumped a full bottle of non-dairy creamer into an open (non-running) system. Over a humid summer weekend. It solidified, then hardened. Washed the PC in hot water, and a good dry later, fixed it.
Check it out... [mrchuckles.net]
"Dead" motherboard I got working... (Score:4, Interesting)
A few Mac mishaps (and more)! (Score:3, Funny)
Just the other day, I pulled a motherboard out of an old Mac Color Classic, updated the RAM on it (a couple of 4MB 30-pin SIMMS max. it out - woo!), and slid it back in. After that, I suddenly realized it was plugged in and the power switch was on the whole time. Oops! Well, I pressed the power key on the keyboard, crossing my fingers, and yep - it booted right up.
I've also watched a former co-worker swap internal SCSI hard drives on a PowerMac 7100 while the machine was running. (Dumb idea - but again, he got away with it. Of course, I yelled at him to never do that again afterwards. Heh.)
I did, however, kill a perfectly good 2GB Micropolis hard drive just recently, because I attached it to a power connector that had been ripped loose and improperly repaired. (It looked ok, but I guess a couple leads were shorted somehow from a bad re-crimping job.) The whole system powered off as soon as I powered it on, and then I smelled smoke. Luckily, only the hard drive died though.... Everything came up fine with a different HD in it.
HardCard (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway - fast forward to the year 2001. I'm playing around with an "old" 266MHZ system I'm about to sell to a coworker, when I find my old HardCard in a box of old crap. I stick it in the ISA slot, turn the computer on -- and it works! With all my gay little files from when I was 12 years old. 16-color porn, anyone?
Anyway.. it starts to smell like smoke.. I hear a "crackle" noise.. and turn around to see the hardcard is ON FIRE. And it looks like it's been on fire for a while. It's melting. And I'm still copying the files on it over to my C:\ drive! Ack! Can I copy 70 MB before it turns into a pile of melted GOO? . .
The fumes get too intense, and I leave the room to find something to put the fire out with. I come back, and the copy is complete. I saved the data! I put the fire out... wait a few hours.. and turn the old 266 box back on. The hardcard works. It still works! To this day. And it dosen't catch on fire anymore.
Worth the $700 IMHO. Try that with an IBM Deskstar.
Re:HardCard (Score:3, Funny)
definitely (Score:5, Funny)
Re:definitely (Score:5, Funny)
How can you have a hardware durability story. . . (Score:5, Funny)
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... Ok, quick as you can, I want you to flick the power switch of your PC on and off 30 times"
"Should I take my disks out?"
"NO! Do you want to lose all your data!?!"
"Oh! NO! Ok.."
I listen carefully..
Amazing, it probably made it to 27 - the power supply usually shits itself at 15 or so...
"MY COMPUTER BLEW UP!!!" she screams at me down the line
"Really? Must've been a dodgy power supply! Lucky we found out now! Is your machine still under warranty?"
"NO!"
"Dear oh dear. Well, Best get it repaired then. Did you backup your files?"
"Yes, to the system, Yesterday, but all this morning's work is gone!"
"Oh dear. What was your username, I'll just check that your backups worked ok?"
She tells me....
Well (Score:5, Funny)
Aparently I was one of those kids.
Water damage (Score:3, Interesting)
I got the old computer with a waterline halfway up the mainboard (stunk - wastewater). The CD and harddrive got salvaged into the new PC - no apparent damage. The mainboard, processor, soundcard and modem all got tossed into the junk bin for a couple of months.
I decided one day to see what would happen if I tried hooking it up (would it pop and smoke). To my amazement it all started up fine. The modem was fried - no dial tone. But the P166 CPU and board were fine and the shitty old PacBell sound card worked as well as a PacBell 16 bit sound card could work.
Fire inside mid-tower case, survived. (Score:4, Interesting)
It came on instantly, but as this was before "soft" power switches were everywhere, I just figured the pushbutton switch was already in the ON position. After watching the POST and seeing everything okay, I started to walk away-- and then the room filled with smoke. Fast. Those little case fans are wicked efficient for that, apparently. So I dove for the plug, and pulled it out.
I opened the case back up, and the inside of the PC was blackened with soot, and the tiny LED wires were still glowing-- their insulation burned clean off. Clipped the wires off and taped the ends, plugged the switch line in instead, and everything just worked. And continued to do so until today, 6 years later.
Took forever to get that damned burnt-plastic smell out of my room, though!
Nintendo (Score:3, Funny)
My Dad decided to fix it.
My Dad is a truck driver.
Needless to say, I got a Super Nintendo that Christmas.
Re:Nintendo (Score:3, Interesting)
It was a mini-atx style pc that I put together during college. Once I finished college and got a job, I built a new PC and gave that one to him and my younger brothers.
About 1 year later he was in town so I went to meet him for coffee. He had the tower with him and told me it just quit working one day and asked if I would look at it.
I took it home, opened it up, and saw that the entire motherboard and everything in it was caked in thick yellow soot. He had been smoking while using it for over a year, all that smoke being sucked into the power supply must have slowly made it overheat.
After I cleaned it out (took 3 cans of Dust-Off!), I found that the power supply and the motherboard were dead.
(Note that my frivolous use of canned air may have contributed to the death of the mobo - static electricity and all that
This also reminds me of this story:
Found here. [rickadams.org]
The list (Score:5, Funny)
RAM, Video cards (PCI+AGP), Harddrives, G4 Upgrade CPU's, CD-ROM's, Soundcard... most of the time without noticing the system was running. That's what happens when engineers don't have enough cool hardware and most cases are open G4's lying around and way too many machines turned out and buzzing to figure out which are on and which are off.
Craziest tool for fixing something:
A guy I knew dropped food into an ISA slot while he was plugging in a card. Didn't quite work when he powered it on so when he noticed the food near the slot, he pulled out the card and tried to clear the crumbs. The only thing in arm's reach was a 4 prong fork. So he forked it. Forked it good for a few minutes - then decided it was a good idea to turn off the computer while doing that. Replugged in the card and everything was good.
My "near" disaster... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some years back I worked for a company that had several large HP plotters. If you're not familiar with them, they are basically large ink-jet printers, capable of printing on sheets 48-inches wide and up to tens of feet long. They're obviously useful for printing CAD drawings, GIS maps, etc.. And highly-precise ones can cost big $$$ (precise meaning the scale of the drawing that ends up on the paper is accurate to less than .01" of distortion over the 48" width of the paper) - at the time at least, these plotters cost over $10k each.
Anyway, we grew out of our office space, and we therefore rented new space, and started moving. Myself and another college-age guy were in charge of moving all the computer equipment, since we were the "geeks". We took a couple of these plotters - which stand about 4 feet tall, 5 feet long, and only about 8 or 10 inches deep - and all of the mechanics are along the top - so they're tall and narrow, and very top-heavy - and loaded them into the back of a small pick-up truck, and headed down the road. Being a dumb 20-year old (and driving like one) we zipped around a corner, and both plotters lauched themselves over the side of the pickup-bed and bounced across the road. Needless to say, we nearly crapped our pants!
We stopped to pick the "garbage" up out of the street, so it would be out of the way of other cars - we assumed that the plotters were a complete loss, and that we were going to have a fun discussion with our boss. We placed them back in the pickup truck (including many broken-off pieces of their plastic cases, a few gears, belts, etc.)
Well, we got them into the new office space, set them up, and snapped back together all of the parts that we could. To our amazement, not only did they "power up", but they actually worked! And not only that, their callibration wasn't off by a hair! In my mind, this was absolutely amazing (and a god-send)!
Aside from looking ugly (cracked, scuffed, and holy cases), there was no problem, and (according to my former co-workers) they went on to work for several years.
I've never been a fan of Hewlett-Packard PCs, but their plotters and printers sure hold high respect in my mind.
Seagate 40MB RLL hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)
My computer at the time was a Tandy 1000SX, so it had 2 low density 5.25" floppy drives... I spent many afternoons playing the original MechWarrior on this machine.
<DIGRESSION>
The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics! Because the processor was a lowly 8088 and MechWarrior was a true-3d engine (one of the first? filled polygons, but no texture mapping or anything), my mechs would take a step every 10 seconds or so... Battles would have taken forever, except for the fact that it was very easy to win in this game: Just take a Locust mech (the fastest), and use only machine guns (which generate very little heat)... It was very easy to run around behind enemy mechs, and then just shoot out a leg (which makes them fall over and die)
</DIGRESSION>
Anyway, I bought a Seagate 40MB RLL hard drive out of the Want Advertiser for a measly $25. (HDs were far more expensive than this at the time). This was a godsend for me because I was only like 14, and my parents did not approve of my "computer habit." I had more money than other kids, although still not much... I babysat 4 days a week after school, 3pm til 9pm, for $10/day.
The guy said on the phone, "The drive works fine, except for one thing: Sometimes you have to turn the power off and on a few times to get it to work, it doesn't always spin up on the first try"... I got the drive, and it worked fine, I almost never had the problems the guy mentioned.
Another digression: The drive was RLL, but I only had an MFM controller (which I had also bought used, for $10). You could hook up an RLL drive to an MFM controller, but you could only address 17 out of the 32 sectors per track an RLL drive had, or something like that... So I only got like 20MB of usefulness, but after years of swapping 360k floppies, I was still happy.
Anyway, the drive got worse and worse over time, until finally I was afraid to turn the computer off because the drive would take sometimes 20 minutes of monkeying to get it to turn back on.
One day, I just couldn't get it to spin up for the life of me. I let it rest for awhile and tried again, and it still wouldn't work.
What I ended up doing always gets some people calling bullshit, but it's the truth: I took the case off of the drive, and I could see the platters and the arms and everything right there... I tried turning it on and I saw how it sort of jerked in one direction... So, I started it spinning in that direction by myself, and then turned it on, and it spun up fine, and I could use my drive. I replaced the cover and used the computer and everything was fine. The drive lived maybe 3 or 4 months after this, with me powering it down as infrequently as possible, but it was growing steadily worse in terms of bad sectors... I didn't have scandisk or anything, so every couple of weeks I would reformat the drive (the lowlevel format marked and avoided the bad sectors), and reinstall DOS and the software I used... (I had been used to having no HD anyway so this wasn't such a huge deal). When I finally gave up, more than 60% of the sectors were bad, and the top platter on the stack had fingerprints on it from where I had occasionally slipped while doing the manual spin up.
That's my wacky hardware story.
the importance of those little brass spacers. (Score:3, Insightful)
He couldn't figure out why the thing wouldn't power on. Every solder joint on the board had been short circuited to each other for who knows how many flips of the power switch.
Fearing the worst we corrected the installation and powered it up.. machine promptly gave us a cheerful beep as it completed POST.
phew.
Coming to on the floor. (Score:5, Interesting)
When i came to, I was on the floor and the lights were out.
I'd almost killed myself, and this was in australia where we have a full 240V (not wimpy 110)
The power supply still worked, but I wouldn't touch it again
Re:Coming to on the floor. (Score:4, Interesting)
At work one day we had a power supply that would work intermittantly. I would power it on, it would go for a few minutes, and then power off. I figured it was just a short, so I turned off the computer, pulled out the power supply, and proceded to open it up. It is now that I tell you that at this point in time, I was in the main server room of a large corporation in Mascot (Corner of Kent and Coward).
I pressed various place with my plastic handled screw-driver trying to identify any broken relays or other such things. After about ten minutes, I finally admitted to myself that I knew absolutely nothing about power supplies, or electronics in general. I plugged it in and turned it on to test it, just to make sure it still worked. No problem. I turned it off.
I started to close it back up. It was around this time that I put my (bare) finger on the lid in an effort to hold it closed to put the screws in. BANG. When *I* came to, the lights in the server room were out. It was eerily quiet. Apparently while trying to cheap out of a $20 power supply, I had taken the business to its knees... I had forgot to unplug the power supply.
Later inspection of the power supply (now dead) showed that the case had arc-welded closed, and my fingerprint was burned onto the outside. I kept it as a souvineer until I left for the USA.
Three Cheers For The Darwin Candidates!
Amiga (Score:3, Funny)
Back in the old days I had a friend who posessed some strange magical powers. He was able to fix any hardware with almost anything tool he found.
Once he was working on my Amiga 500 with a russian military bayonette. He took out a diode which was controlling the brightness of one of the two leds on the front. Snap-snap, it was done.
Then, just for fun, he took out all the chips and the processor from the sockets (paula, denise, m68000) and put them on his T-shirt like buttons. It was fun. Then he put everything back nicely. After switching on, the computer did show any sign of life. It was not fun.
The guy looked at it, said "whoops", took out the processor (M68000), turned it around by 180 degrees, then inserted it again. The computer turned on, and worked perfectly.
Burnt alive (Score:5, Funny)
One time, I didn't quite put it in all the way. Next thing I know, my computer wont boot, something smells awful, and half my motherboard is yellow-hot. Literally, a quarter of the ram stick was lighting up my entire room; it was that hot. You see, I stuck it in unevenly; half of it wasn't in at all.
So I quickly pull the plug, pull out the ram stick and juggle it for a while until it cools down. I make catch my breath and clean off the ashes. A good portion of my ram slot was completely incinerated and part of the connection strip on the ram chip was completely black. Luckily, the metallic contacts were still intact on my motherboard. I took a set of pliers and adjusted them to the proper position. I cleaned the ram. I tried sticking it in. I boot up. Tada, it works. Phew, that was a close one.
A few days later, I come home from school and turn my computer on as I always do. While it boots, I go off to wash my hands and change. I come back under two minutes later, my entire room is engulfed in smoke. I dive to turn it off. I vent off the room. I couldn't figure out what burnt. The ram stick was still fine, but I took it out just incase. I run it again, it runs okay for a couple of minutes. Suddenly, smoke again. Then I notice the wires that connect the ATX case to the motherboard are melting. Horrible smell. I unplug them immediately. Turns out that one of my wires was plugged in upside down. I think it was the PC internal speaker wire. I tore off the wire, I don't need it.
I turn on the computer, all is fine for a while. It struggles to boot and then, again, smoke! Ahh. I turn it off, I sniff around. The entire room smelled awful. I couldn't tell what burnt this time. I try to turn it on again, wont go. I unplug all non-essential hardware, wont go. I take out all the hardware, piece by piece, analyzing it, sniffing it. I get to the PSU. My god. It smelled like a skunk crawled up another skunk's urethra, set itself on fire and gave birth to another skunk.
So my PSU burned down. I get another one.
Yay, my computer works again. But wait, my hard drive is dead. The PSU must have been kind enough to overload before keeling over and dying.
I got the hard drive replaced. I stuck the burnt ram stick back into the burnt ram slot. I stuck the burnt wire back into the burnt connector. I brushed off the ashes from various parts. I even overclocked it a bit. It all works fine now.
As good as new. Just a few tints of black here and there.
- shazow
Re:Burnt alive (Score:3, Funny)
"My god. It smelled like a skunk crawled up another skunk's urethra, set itself on fire and gave birth to another skunk."
Thanks. I needed that.
linux stability (Score:4, Interesting)
how's that for stability?
Nokia 5160 in a bathtub (Score:4, Funny)
It continued to work for about a minute after the incident, and then worked the next day after drying out overnight. It was acting flakey for about a week until it would just not turn on anymore. I decided I would try more drastic action.
I preheated my oven to about 150F, shut the oven off, removed the faceplate and battery, wrapped it in a towel, and left it in for 45 minutes.
It has worked ever since.
Well, nothing like that has ever happened to me. (Score:4, Funny)
It might soon. I'm not even going to get out of my comfy computer chair. All you have to do is click this link [212.229.115.84]. That link is a link to the webserver running of my RH Linux machine at home. Did I mention it's running purely off a 56K modem?
(yikes, am I gonna take a pounding from this)
Two stories... (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in 1981, I had an Oric 1 [gdargaud.net] and was fiddling with the internals, motherboard upside down. Then I plugged the power in to test it, forgetting that it was upside down and put the power plug inside the video out... A huge spark came out, my hair briefly caught fire and I was scared I'd just busted my first computer in which two years of savings had just gone. Plugged it properly and it works fine.
2nd story in Antarctica [gdargaud.net], 1997. I had two rugged military laptops for data acquisition and an HP Vectra desktop for use inside. One of the laptops video fried when a snow machine started a few feet from it and the other didn't have the right connectors. I had to program an eprom on some equipment outside and just put the Vectra+Monitor on a box. For 4 hours at -45C and it worked fine. I even have a picture [gdargaud.net].
Damn cat... (Score:5, Funny)
Boy he loved wires. He loved them a LOT. He learned a lesson about that one day, though, when he bit into the cord on my cell phone charger. I didn't actually witness this, but I did notice chew marks on the connector along with a sudden drop in the number of damage reports. I have a good feeling he learned what electricity is.
Even though he was taught not to bite cables, he still loved them! As a matter of fact, he found my mouse cable far too irresistable. This one was on my laptop. I had a little velcro tie to keep the cable wound up. I also had my laptop on a pair of TV tray tables (hey! I was a bachelor!) the cable dangled between them with this furry looking velco strap. Oh he loved that. I'll never forget one day he jumped up, caught the tie, and learned a physics lesson. Once his weight was on the cable, the path of least resistance (my mouse) started sliding off the table. Moments later *Whap* he was hit in the face with an optical mouse. The look on his face was hilarious! I imagine all he saw was a blinding flash of light quickly followed by a smack to the forehead!
But that's not why I'm writing. You see, I was a bit careless back in those days. More efficient in some ways, I never put the screws in my PCI/AGP cards on my computer. Never needed to! Call me lazy if you like, but if you ever tilted this comuter you'd hear the scrape of sliding screws that fell all the way to the bottom where I cannot reach them. Never bothered me, though. Everything was cool. Until I got this damn cat... You see, I came home one day and noticed that my monitor didn't come back on upon moving the mouse. This was odd. I assumed that the computer had frozen or something and pressed the reset button. Only, nothing really happend other than the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beep beep message you get from your bios that basically says "Somethin just ain't right." I was a little worried. I hadn't done anything to the computer, had no reason to think something was up. I thought about it for a sec and realized that the monitor hadn't come on, fortunately this observation lead me towards the video card. And what'd I find?
I found an unseated AGP card. After examining it for a bit, I realized what probably happened. My cat attempted to assassinate it. I'd seen him do this type of stunt before. He did a Tarzan stunt where he jumped off a shelf and grabbed the cable. The leverage caused the card to turn and unseat itself completely. From there, I assume he landed on the ground and found something else to do. I don't think that would have worked on the PCI cards, the AGP one was the loosest. Grr, I wanted to kill that little shit over that. I was worried he might have blown the video card or the mobo. Either would have been bad financially. After that happened, I decided a new directive would be issued that required ALL cables and cards to be securely fastend down. And I did.
My cat helped me with the operation. He must have either loved or really hated my computer. I brought it out on the floor under my apartment's only light. (Hey! I was a bachelor!) I then got the screws I needed and started the operation, only to find that moments later my cat was INSIDE the case sniffin around. Grr. I had no idea what kitten fur would do to this computer, fortunately I never learned either.
My computer survived the assassination and malpractice attempts. It didn't survive, however, the upgrade to a 3x faster Athlon.
Re:Damn cat... (Score:4, Funny)
So which are you saying is impressively durable: your computer, or your cat?
IBM server dropped from 5 feet (Score:5, Funny)
The plan was to lift the ServerIrons from the back of the rack and slide the IBM underneath. It was an attempted time saving measure. Oh, and everything still had to be plugged in and working while I did this so our web sites didn't go down -- only the new IBM 4500R was not yet running.
To make a long story short, the IBM didn't remain balanced once I moved the ServerIrons and it fell front-first 5 feet onto a tiled floor. The plastic face is smashed in a bit, the tabs that hold it on are gone and the case cover had its tabs bent so it wouldn't fit back on.
I bent the case tabs back so the case would fit back together and put on the face as best I could, booted up and it worked.
In fact, it's running our web site right now!
Oh, and don't tell my boss
FLOPPY OF DOOM!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, so here's the story of the floppy of Impending Doom.
When I was 11ish, I met the first guy that programmed-- he programmed basic among other things, and I thought he was the coolest guy-- We kinda played around a bit, and eventually, he gave me a floppy full of dumb little games written in basic-- Not well written, mind you, but when you're not supposed to touch the computer, any game is cool.
Anyways, he gave me a floppy full of games. Fast forward a couple years, I had moved, and didn't have contact with this guy. I had met another guy who was into computers, and I ended up giving him a bunch of stuff on disk-- hex editors, game trainers and their ilk. Having no other disk accessible, I ended up giving him the disk of impending doom.
Fast forward, another year and a half, said friend had passed that disk around, and I ended up getting it from a friend who got it from a friend, who got it from some guy I don't know, who got it from another guy, who got it from my friend. I realized there was something special about this disk (it went through like 7 people that time. It had my original label on it, which is how I know it's the same disk.
The disk was used for a couple years a couple times a week, I didn't have a printer, so I would bring it to school/a friends house to print stuff. Eventually, I left it in the computer lab.
It made it's way around back to me, after more than 2 years, right before I graduated high school. This disk is now so old, and has so many writes on it, that I didn't trust anything I ever wrote on it-- Yet somehow it still worked fine. I brought it up to college, and, because my computer didn't have a floppy drive, I didn't use it... I ended up giving it to someone who needed it in the computer lab (I worked in the labs). Three years later, about a month and a half before I drop out of school, the disk turns up yet again. Someone left it in the computer lab, and so I grabbed it again.
At the time I was working on a search engine for a small non profit organization, which had me moving all around, so I used this disk to port my writings from place to place. I ended up leaving it with my non-profit supervisor (I was volunteer, I was having a bad time at the time, so I gave up the stuff, I didn't get paid anyway).
I'm sure that in a few years, I'll be living on the streets of some large city, and I'll find it stuck to gum in a trash container. It'll still not have a bad sector.
car accident computer survived (Score:3, Interesting)
The Grand Old Amiga 600 (Score:3, Interesting)
The Abstruse One
Hurricane Andrew and an AT&T 3B2 UNIX Server (Score:3, Funny)
I was at another base at the time, and my base's IT requirements were growing rapidly, so we had set the 'we want hardware' flag.
Lo and behold a bunch of 3B2 servers arrived, running an antiquated UNIX, AT&T system V release 3, right from the ex Homestead AFB. Most of them were in primo condition, but a couple of them had mouldy, green-stained horizontal lines a few inches above the bottom of the unit. We found out later these servers had been standing in that much hurricane Andrews water for a good while.
Being young, well employed and stupid at the time, I plugged one of the drown ones in and fired it up! To my amazement, the thing seemed to work perfectly!
At least one of those servers was still in production use several years later when I left.
I have to give AT&T credit, at least back then: they built some seriously resistent enterprise class hardware. Years later, I communicated with one of my ex-co-workers, who decommisioned one of those boxes. He said they found some tiny, desiccated minows in the server case after they took it apart.
Absolutely amazing!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Voodoo2 Pass Thru Cable as a Handle (Score:3, Funny)
The entire case was bent, cards popped out, I could have sworn he cracked the mobo. After about 5 minutes of picking grass out of the drive bays and popping the cards back in the slots... it worked, perfectly!
Betty the 486 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sunset Middle School Fire (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow - we had a lab that was about half Apple 2 gs's and half C64's (the place was mostly for learning how to use logo) - I can remember scrubbing cases, - stuff like that. Most of the Apple 2's powered up just fine - all the C64's powered up. Now these computers had black specs all over them until the day they were replaced, most of the Apple 2's lasted for about a year and died, but those C64's all worked until the day they were replaced with dos pc's.
Its interesting how well some electronic devices hold up to being subjected to massive amounts of heat, then massive amounts of water all within in a couple of hours.
Run over and Shot (Score:4, Interesting)
My office is on Pico blvd in LA (a very busy street). On a smoke break i noticed something orange and toilet-seat shaped being run over by numerous cars in the middle of pico. I ran out to find an Apple iBook (clamshell tangerine). The LCD was hosed as was most of the upper housing of the case. Everything in the lower half was perfect. Mobo, CPU, and hard drive all work fine. I work in a Mac store and waited till someone came in with a liquid spill on another clamshell. Found a nice blueberry one with a fried logic board and cpu, but pristine case. Now I have frankenbook [utterer.com]. You cant see it there but the apple glows, the keyboard is half black/half white (powerbook g3 keys and ibook keys) and i have glow-wire around the keyboard and trackpad.
BlackFly
CapsGetPeeled [capsgetpeeled.com] fo Life
FreeBSD will never die! (Score:3, Funny)
Well, one day I get an email that the server is dead. Web pages don't show up, but it responds to pings. I telnet in, but any command locks up the telnet session. So I run reboot, and it never comes back. Final diagnosis: hard drive failure.
Replaced the hard drive, and restored the web site. All is well until I get another email that the server is dead. No pings this time. Turns out that the water main in the floor above it had broken, and it had been thrown into a pile of computers that were behind a makeshift "dam". Once students were allowed back into the area, I searched around, found my computer, plugged it in, and found that it was once again working as expected.
Besides those two events, this old Gateway 486/66 never had to be rebooted or repaired. Ran without a hitch until I unplugged it on the last day of finals.
Just goes to show that BSD will never die...
Apple SCSI card of pain (Score:3, Interesting)
The first time he tried to break the card, the kid who was holding it didn't have a tight enough grip, so it went flying and hit him in the face. The second time, he held on, but the card didn't break or even crack, and he cut his hand on the solder on the bottom of the board. Undeterred, we got two people to hold the card, while my roommate tried a third time. This time, the board went flying again, cut one of the guys hands, hit me in the forehead, and my roommate cut a big gash in his hand. This was no longer amusing.
My roommate was pretty pissed, and he tried to break the card over his knee, but with no success. We stomped on it, we threw it. Eventually we had to have one person step on one end while another pulled up the other. It finally broke, but only after leaving scores of wounded combatants. That day I developed a new respect for the durability of printed circuit boards.
I guess thats a little off topic, since the card obviously didn't work again. To save this post, I should mention that the same ebaying friend bought a full-height 2GB scsi drive, which we used to run around the floor hitting people with. It was known lovingly as the "People-Hitting SCSI Drive". It continued to work, and he eventually sold it to some other poor sap on ebay, as I recall.
Re:I learned that... (Score:3, Interesting)
One, talking my mother through a Sound Blaster replacement over the phone -- and then realizing after the install was complete that she never shut the machine down. Card worked, machine worked, she still uses it as a home MP3 server today.
I once worked at a hospital as technical support. At one point, I had to replace a drive in a machine that stored critical patient data. I figured the best thing to do was hook up that drive as a slave, copy everything over, and then leave it as backup just in case. Well, I didn't pay attention to the screws I used to secure the drive in the case, and they were about a millimeter too long. Needless to say, when I fired the machine up, a lot of red smoke escaped the drive, and a small fire appeared near where the screw had penetrated the circuit board. I quickly shutdown power, fanned the smoke away before anyone could notice, and backed out the offending screw. I didn't know what I was going to do, as the data hadn't been transferred, and losing the data would pretty much mean losing my job. So, I said "what the hell" and fired the machine back up. Wonder of wonders, there was no smoke and the drive booted fine. I transferred the data as quickly as I could, removed the evidence, and put the computer back the way it was before, with no one ever the wiser.
I did eventually take that drive (and the destructive screws) home and mounted it in a bare chassis just to watch it burn. Took about fifteen seconds to turn into a fireball.
Gonzo Fiddles while George Burns... (Score:5, Funny)
my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell... CPU was dead, motherboard was dead, ram was dead, and harddrive had corrupted partitioin tables (But the harddrives do still work)
Heh... The morals of the story...