Abused, But Working Hardware Stories?

RPI Geek writes "Everyone's heard the stories about people who, knowingly or unknowingly, abuse their computers. Personally, I've had a faulty power supply literally burn a hole through the motherboard, with the only ill effects being a dead PCI slot and USB ports. I'm curious as to what kind of abuse fellow /.ers have done or seen done to electronics while the hardware still worked afterwards. Soldered a broken keyboard PCB back together so that it worked fine? Taken sticks of RAM out of a running computer to see when it would notice? Overclocked a 386... to 386MHz? I'm interested in hearing any stories about abused-but-working hardware."

Re:HP48

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

No, an ARMED ROBBER came into MY HOUSE and BEAT ME WITH A HAMMER, and THEN I shot him, you IDIOT pACifist foreigner. If you have a problem with self-defense, I recommend you get yourself a white flag and wave it vigorously. Then, the criminals will assault you instead of me.

Damn, I could have shot him in the head if I'd known he had my calculator in his pocket.

Re:Serious computer abuse ...

[jrockway]

Well Linux has a lot of workarounds for bad hardware (f00f bug, etc.)

Re:HP48

[nordicfrost]

Fuck the cowardly Europeans

Yeah! Fuck them and their low-violence, low crime rate! Fuck them and their low, low gun death murder (or just murder) rate! Screw them! I want to blow away whoever I want, even though they are significantly less armed than me!

Asshat.

Re:So far I have attempted the following:

[Anonymous Coward]

> I just measured my resistance from my hand to ground as about 1 megaohm (2 if i'm in my chair, infinity if i'm jumping...). By ohm's law, 240V / 1 megaohm = 0.24mA

I presume you used a generic all-around multimeter? Not good. Since the human body is made of electrolytes packed in "cells", the human body doesn't obey Ohm's law - for the couple mV that the multimeter uses, the related resistance may be 1 MOhm, but for higher voltages the resistance may be a lot smaller. Hence your logic is very dangerous: 230 volts can, and *will* kill you if used properly!

Re:Home Run

[toddestan]

Someone needs to make an "old school" destroy-the-computer virus combined with modern delivery methods. Millions of zombies all over the internet would suddenly be silenced, and after losing all their pr0n and mp3's, people might start caring about system security again. And undoubtably, lots of good hardware will end up on the curb for me to pick up and use.

Re:So far I have attempted the following:

[Psyrg]

In my experience, 80V is quite tolarable. An unloaded arc welder will produce this kind of voltage, and when loaded it will drop to roughly 20V.

I've electrocuted myself in many different ways, I have taken the full brunt of New Zealands 240V household mains potential, and I have stopped a lawn mower engine by grabbing the spark plug HT lead. :)

I will take no risks when dealing with conductors and car batteries however.

My fathers friend almost lost an eye when he didn't connect the batteries correctly while jump starting a car. The reason for this was that lead shrapnel splinters from the batteries embedded themselves into his face and body, and into the softer pieces of the engine compartment of the car. One implanted itself into his eye socket between the bone and the eye itself.

One might also wonder why you never see a power engineer on the job while wearing a nice shiny metal watch. You'll find it is because that even across the terminals of a car battery, 12V and 500Amps of current truns your watch into a 6KW bar heater. In this sort of situation, you don't normally get to keep your hand. :(