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"
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).
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
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.
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
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?...
cdroms phones and sparks (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
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!
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.
Old Apple IIG (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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.
"Dead" motherboard I got working... (Score:4, Interesting)
Plugged in an old Cyrix 486DX4-100 CPU backwards.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Turning the machine, I instantly knew something was horribly wrong, and the smell of burnt plastic filled the dorm. By the time I could pull the plug, a single hole in the socket had been burnt out to about 3 times its size, and the corresponding pin was singed.
Figuring I had very little to lose at that point, I determined my error, reinstalled the CPU in the correct orientation, and fired up the machine. To my amazement, the CPU and motherboard both appear to have survived, without any apparent problems. The machine ended up being used as my desktop for several years after that, and never had any noticeable problems.
The hardware gods definitely had mercy on me that day...
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.
Flying laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
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!!
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:A quart of water into the monitor (Score:2, Interesting)
When I got to class, I opened my backpack to find two inches of water in the small pocket. I knew Jansports weren't waterproof, but I did not expect to find 2 inches of water in the small pocket. Well, guess where my iPod was? Right, in the small pocket. I ran to the bathroom to get paper towels, but I was pretty convinced that my iPod was fried.
I let the sucker dry out for the whole day, using a space heater turned on to low. That evening, I turned it on to find that nothing was wrong. All the condensation under the screen cover is gone, and I haven't had any problems playing MP3s since.
I have a poncho now for when it pours....
i put hte power supply to the mobo backwards (Score:2, Interesting)
So anyways i put them on backwards. The thing made a loud buzzing and i though hmm thats stupid, lets turn it off then on again...more buzzing. Lets leave it on and see if it sorts itself out.
a little while later i realized i put the power on backwards. Swap the plugs and bingo, it still mostly worked. I sorta fried the video card, temporarily. I had to swap it out, cause it wouldn't wrok. Tried the video card a week later and everything wroked nearly perfect(the computer could *never* run java applets...go figure)
Fried Processor... mmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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: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]
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.
the Amiga 4000 and a flight of stairs (Score:2, Interesting)
I walked back down, picked it up, carried it back upstairs anc plugged it in. Worked perfectly and had hardly any marks on the case.
Still works to this day.
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.
linux stability (Score:4, Interesting)
how's that for stability?
Re:A quart of water into the monitor (Score:1, Interesting)
Hurled drive (Score:2, Interesting)
needless to say, I use western digital drives now
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].
Zip drive if you can believe it (Score:2, Interesting)
The zip drive he gave to me in like 5 pieces. The bottom shell and top shell of plastic, and the circuit board wit the drive rails. The rails were bent, but after some coaxing I managed to bend them back in shape (they are plastic) and fit the case back together. It is missing the front panel (with the little spring loaded door and the LED light pipes and the bush button eject), but other than that it works fine. The Iomega drives use a soft eject system anyway, and the circuit board is undamaged. Missing some springs though, but it still manages to eject.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
A Tough IBM XT (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
How about full of metal shavings? (Score:1, Interesting)
But the machine is just dos usually. I'd get calls that there computer was not working and come see if I could fix it. Well since there sitting so close to these huge cutting machines and they have fans they would fill up with metal shavings and die. I'd blow them out with compressed air and 9 times out of 10 I could get them to run again. I never realised how much abuse a computer could take till I worked there. Like pounds of metal inside. Years of conductive dirt and dust. Sure they eventually died but it would take 1000 years at home to get the same abuse these things got in about 6 months at the plant. Amazing. Like sitting next to a 20,000 volt plasma cutter. Like you would not think these machines would take it. Impressive. The most brutal enviroment I ever seen a computer operate in and survive. Nothing special just regular everyday pentium II usually with no filters added. Nothing. Missings cards would have holes in the case. No blanks. You could pour two pounds of dirt out of the keyboards alone. And everything conducts cause it's all metal based dirt. Life expentancy averaged about 2 years and would need to be fixed on average 4 times during that time. Even when it complety died most things inside would still work and we used the parts to build a new box.
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.
No, I believe you. (Score:2, Interesting)
The solution?
Take off the back cover of the SE, and power it on. If the drive didn't spin up, remove the drive screws, but leave it attached to the MB by the cable. Hold the drive horizontally, and quickly jerk it clockwise 180 degrees.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. The last ditch solution was to take the drive cover off and spin it up yourself. That usually killed the drive after a few times, though.
The Grand Old Amiga 600 (Score:3, Interesting)
The Abstruse One
Melted P3 (Score:2, Interesting)
-There is no sign the oven failed.
-The mainborad doesn't work, as all the caps exploded,
-the hard drive worked for a few weeks, but failed. The platters seem be warped, but
-The RAM and video card (ATI I believe) are still in use!!.
New rule, no more unsupervised temperature tests
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.
Betty the 486 (Score:3, Interesting)
Rammed RAM (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, in some rapids their canoe capsized and the RAM got bashed around into rocks and soaking wet of course. Amazingly, it still worked after that.
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!
Washed SmartDrive (Score:2, 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
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...
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.
Justifiable Return (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Drive Toss (Score:2, Interesting)
I eventually got the courage to power my case back on to see if my data was still there, and it was! Turns out only the serial port is dead, so I disabled it in the BIOS and made sure I had an up-to-date backup.
My new MB should be in Monday. When I replace it, I'll see if I can post the picture of the transistor that exploded. I'm just amazed the board still works.
Still mocking static kits? Static kit - $5 Motherboard - $70. Which would you rather spend money on?
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!
Re:Hacksawed Video Card (Score:2, Interesting)
That worked so well at they then advertised 16 transistors and only a few were again in use. Eventually our import people got a handle on it and shut down that practice.
In those days a direct relationship was made between quality/fidelity and the number of transistors.
cleaning disk drive heads (Score:2, Interesting)
The routine was to unload the heads and then wet the swab with alcohol and then clean the platter. Making the platter turn was done by a maintenance switch on the back of the drive.
I carelessly forgot to unload the heads one time and saw that the platter was spinning (thinking that I must of had hit the maintence switch already) so began cleaning it... then I realized that the heads were leaving paths in the alcohol on the platters. I quickly unloaded the heads, cleaned them, cleaned the platters correctly this time, prayed real hard because there was critical data on the platters and then restarted the drive. Fortunately no harm was done and the drive continued to work.
Worse case scenarios (Score:2, Interesting)
One that comes to mind from Jasmine was Joe Cocker. He was on tour in Italy and his keyboard player had all their sounds stored on a 160mb drive. (HUGE drive for the time.) It died.
So over the phone I took the guy through some board-level repairs to the controller card of the hard disk so it would work long enough to get the data off. And they gave me free tickets when Joe Cocker came to SF!
The other one was when I was supporting the original PowerBooks (100/140/170) at Apple. An Indian man called with a laundry list of problems with the computer. After listing 25 or 30 things, I asked him what the heck happened to it!
He explained that he had been using the PowerBook too much in bed, and his wife had hit him over the head with it!
Then Steve Wozniak called with some problems, and I got to go to his house and fix his computer. Not often does one get to say they fixed Woz's computer!
Also the famous PowerBook at the bottom of the Amazon was my call. Customer called and explained the situation to me, and I got them in touch with DriveSavers (who had just opened their doors a few weeks earlier). I knew there was nothing I could do for them at Apple, but the DriveSavers gang were top-shelf techs.
I got hundreds of those kinds of stories. Maybe I should write them all down. Mail them to posterity, or something....
- Christian
Budapest, Hungary
Re:Hacksawed Video Card (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of when I was selling PCs. A batch of MBs came through the pipe that were $60 retail. (MBs in those days were usually $80-100 for low-end ones.) I never saw one that ran reliably, but that's beside the point.
In that time, it was common for slimy MB manufacturers to replace cache with lumps of plastic, and just code the BIOS to report that it's there. Well, one day I looked at the cache chips on these two, and traced the leads... they weren't connected to anything but each other!
(Lots of people saw these MBs, but nobody knew the manufacturer's name. It took me all day and both the FCC and FTC databases to track down the manufacturer. If I made this piece of crap, I wouldn't want to advertise it either!)
Heat (Score:1, Interesting)