Abused, But Working Hardware Stories? 1352
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."
So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Interesting)
- Removed RAM. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Inserted PCI cards. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Removed PCI cards. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped hard drives. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped CD/DVD drives. Windows survived.
My power supply and mobo must be very fault-tolerant, I suppose, because other systems have not taken a liking to this behavior. I have an Enermax 350W and an Asus P4C800-E. Currently I own two SATA hard drives. According to the standards group, SATA is "hot-swappable." Given my previous activities, I can verify their claims.
Obviously, the system did not enjoy having its RAM removed. And while it did not mind the removal of a PCI card, it froze up solid when I inserted a new one. A quick reboot took care of that.
I've also dropped my iPod about 5-6 times, and it still keeps on ticking!
It blew up (Score:2, Interesting)
a luggable meets the baggage handlers (Score:5, Interesting)
Unintentional, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Solded off the sound port (Score:4, Interesting)
replaced a CPU pin on a P4 (Score:5, Interesting)
Blown speakers (Score:5, Interesting)
We later found the correct AC adapter, plugged them back in, and to our surprise, both speakers worked just fine. It makes you wonder what useless part broke in the speakers, and why that part was in there to begin with.
Nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, I just thought of something! You know how toaster ovens say DO NOT IMMERSE? Well, if you DO immerse them, water gets into the heating tubes, which are filled with compressed poweder magnesium oxide. It takes a very long time to dry, more than a few days. If you decide to plug the thing in because it LOOKS dry, the water in the tubes turns to steam, which cannot escape fast enough, and the tubes RIIIPPP open from end to end, blasting powdered MgO all over the place.
That would be a funny prank, huh?
rain cooled motherboards (Score:3, Interesting)
I didnt get it finished so i left both my desktop PC's with the covers off and went to bed.
That night there was rain (as usual) but it was also severely windy - enough to blow the rain at enough of an angle so it went under the eave section and straight onto my desk.
I got up in the morning and found both PCs and motherboards completely soaked and water pooled everywhere. Turned them upside down, dried them as best I could and left them (inside the house this time) for 2 days. When I powered them up they both worked, without a hitch and continued to work for years afterwards.
(one mouse was dead though - a small price to pay)
Repaired SIMMs with Soldering Iron and Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
Luck was definitely required in the days of expensive parts, and $0 technology budgets.
I'd like to say we later installed Linux on that machine and used it to run our first web server, but alas, we used it for playing deathmatch Doom after the computer lab was closed. That's why we needed 4MB of memory and a FPU.
Hostile fire (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It blew up (Score:5, Interesting)
In late 80s one of my friends brought a brand new computer from USA and asked me to help him to set it up. I switched the power supply to 220 Volts and plugged it in. There was a loud bang and small cloud of black smoke came out of the case.
The power supply, while worked fine on 120V, had pretty much shorted the 220V to the motherboard. There was a quarter sized hole on the motherboard, with black charred remains of a chip sprinkled around.
Amazingly, the computer came with a circuit diagram, so we figured out that the charred chip was actually a simple 4xNAND or something like that. After we found a replacement chip, just soldered its legs with wires to the closest intact parts of the motherboard, replaced the power supply. And it actually worked. The chip was hanging over the hole supported by the wires, like a little spider. I wish I took a picture.
Needless to say the owner was very happy.
BeBox loses half its brain and keeps going (Score:5, Interesting)
One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...
Please remove any metal objects..... (Score:2, Interesting)
In this case while connecting the sound cable from the CDROM to the sound card (which I had forgotten to do when I installed the drive) the metal d-ring on my plastic watch band shorted a +5v pin on the sound card to ground resulting in a burnt a trace on the motherboard. I soldered a wire across the burn (after it was OFF) and all was well again. The machine had a long well used life, and is now retired to the position of household fileserver.
I have since gone to using VELCRO watch straps.
hardware development (Score:5, Interesting)
Now one of my favorite stories: a friend of mine worked for AlphaSmart [alphasmart.com] - they make inexpensive portable word processors - really PC keyboards with memory. He said they got a report of a woman in India who had run her alphasmart through the dishwasher to clean some gummed up keys.
If you think about it it's not surprising... the equipment they use to clean PCBs at the factory is pretty much the same as a home dishwasher - just different solvents I guess.
Re:HP48 (Score:5, Interesting)
An armed robber broke into my house, collected various valuables, put my TI SR-51II calc into his chest pocket, and I shot it with my
Bullet went thru the padded case, bounced off the manual, and into his chest. The calculator was not even dented.
I should make a jacket of those old TIs.
I cut off half an add-in card to make it fit! (Score:3, Interesting)
The one I had was a SCSI card with an ISA sound card onboard. I needed the SCSI card, but it wouldn't fit. Looking at the card, it became pretty clear that the ISA sound bits were mostly on the end of the card, and if they weren't there the card would fit. It wasn't going to be any use to me if it didn't fit, so out came the tin snips (!!).
After this butchery, it worked fine - despite the somewhat ragged, sheared line across the back of the card and the fact that I'd cut all the ISA-extension connectors off.
Re:I haven't done anything extraordinary (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:rain cooled motherboards (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, I recently dropped my Nokia cellphone into the toilet. I took it apart, let it dry as much as possible, but it still didn't work. Just don't build them like they used to. (But the cellphone probably has a lot more MIPS and RAM than the VAX!)
Not working but funny. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, Compaq made a system where the the main processor along with all the other chips were mounted so that the letter was right-side up when standing at the front of the machine.
However, the coprocessor socket was rotated 90 degrees. If you installed it so the lettering was the same as everything else, one of the pins melted off when power was applied. Don't ask me how I know.
great design.
Electro Static Discharge? Right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, we got a batch that we just couldn't get installed. Tried the cards on a few different systems, different bios settings trying to force irq's and whatnot, but not a thing. We declared them all defective (being a 17 year old kid working as a co-op student mind you), and decided to go with the tried and true Sound Blaster pci's instead. We then proceeded to take some of the Sonic Impacts and play frisbee, use them as coasters and ridiculously large keychain items.
Years later I'm assembling spare parts to make a secondary system, and realize I have no sound card to put in it. All I have are isa cards, and this motherboard is without an isa slot. So I go rummaging in my room and of course what do I find but a well worn Diamond Sonic Impact. I figure what the hell, and toss the thing into the box. On first reboot XP found the card, and proceeded to lock up while installing it's drivers.. On second reboot the drivers completed, but windows core dumped shortly after. Third time was a charm though, and I still can't believe this thing produces sound after what I did to it.
ISA is Hot-Swappable! (Score:2, Interesting)
110v over Ethernet (Score:3, Interesting)
Turned out that there was a current in the shield of the coax. Why? Because the outlet that one of the boxes was plugged into was miswired. 110 volts running between the computers for months, maybe even a year.
When I realized what was going on, I shut both PCs down and repaired the faulty outlet. Both booted right up. The problem that I was troubleshooting never appeared again.
Old Horror Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
Spilled a glass of grape juice (real stuff, not cool aid) into the keyboard of my Commodore 128 computer. Again, after some washing and drying it worked fine. Well, except some keys would stay depressed if you were not real light with the typing.
My friend tried to overclock a his near new Amiga 3000. While trying to desolder a chip he managed to yank it off, along with a half dozen traces off the motherboard. He ripped apart some speaker wire, resoldered the lines and it booted up fine.
While working at a computer dealer, a co-worker tried to replace a hard drive on some IBM machine. Problem was it LOOKED like IDE but was really some wacky mainframe thing. When turned on, about 5 of the wires in the IDE cable turned red hot and exploded into flame. The HD was toast, but the computer was fine once the right HD was ordered from IBM.
While using my trusty old Pentium II I heard a SCSI drive inside make a PING-PING-PING and a horrid grinding noise as the platters ground to a halt. Opening up the drive case revealed a read write head had somehow come loose and gotten wedged under the arm against a platter. Carved a nice circular trench in the disk platter.
Umm, guess the last one isn't a survival story. But I did have backups...
Re:Nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Same cellphone got drowned about twice since then by rain: once it was in my pocket while I was standing in pouring rain, the other time I accidentally left it in the boot of my car with the boot open while it was raining heavilly. Same procedure to fix it and it works just fine.
I'm pretty amazed at how rubust that phone is... Of course I won't be dropping my P900 in the sea any time soon.
Re:12" Powerbooks are tough little bastards... (Score:4, Interesting)
Much to my surprise and delight, it worked flawlessly when I opened it up. It was sleeping, and it was ready for use near instantaneously like you expect from an Apple laptop. It had landed on the corner by the power and Ethernet ports, and sure enough the case crumpled noticeably. However, I can still plug into both ports (not sure about the modem jack though), so I haven't bothered hammering out the dents yet since they are only cosmetic.
I must applaud Apple for excellent laptop design. After seeing what happened to my laptop, I suspected that they had designed the case to be a crumple zone. Your story confirms my theory. If I'm faced with the worst case scenario being paying $50-$100 for case repair to a dropped laptop, I'll take that any day of the week over having to get a new mobo at first drop.
A Real Information Highway Speedbump (Score:5, Interesting)
I awoke in a panic, with just barely enough time to make it to pick up my Mom in time. I raced outside, jumped in the car, and tried to back out of the driveway. The car wouldn't move. I thought it was just a snowdrift, so I pressed harder on the gas. Still no good. So, I pulled forward a little and got up some speed in reverse. After a few more attempts, I finally managed to make it over this huge hill. I looked at the mass in the car's headlights. As my eyes adjusted, the horror of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Lying on the ground in front of me was my laptop's bag, with my laptop and several floppy disk cases full of floppy disks.
What I had done was so overwhelming that I did not even try to feel an emotion. I just picked up my laptop and carefully placed it in the back seat of the car.
When I had the chance, I checked out the results of the evening. The LCD screen was fractured down the middle and the case was split down the middle. As I balanced each half of my laptop on my lap, I turned on the power. To my surprise, she booted up. One thumb-sized piece of the screen revealed the DOS prompt.
I still have that laptop, though, of course, I have not used it very much since then. I was able to perform some important data transfer operations with it, though, relying entirely on memory of what the computer should be displaying in response to each of my inputs. Most of the 3.5-inch floppies came out OK, too, though a few were unusable due to their shutters being welded into the plastic. The floppy disk cases cracked a little, but I still use them, too.
Re:rain cooled motherboards (Score:3, Interesting)
5-6 years ago i found an Apple ][+ atop a pile of demolition debris. Living in Belgium, it was of course raining cats and dog that day, so when i picked it up, the water literally poured out of the case. That velcroed toplid was dislodged, so water could come in very easily. The insides were a mess of muddied dirt.
At home, I rinsed it thouroughly, using the shower-head and let it dry. Sometime later, just for kicks, I tried to start it up, not expecting too muck except for a bit op pyrotechnics, but it worked fine.
Had similar experiences with audiohardware, recovered from a rehearsal-room that got inundated by water from the fire-fighters trying to prevent a fire in the adjacent lot from spreading. Same result. Just rinse and dry.
PDP 11/40 at 180 degrees F (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the late 1970s, I did some volunteer programming for them. At the time, translation support ran on a PDP 11/40 that was installed in the cargo hold of this aging steamship that they owned; they'd sail to the port nearest to the next tribe they were working for, teams would collect dictionary words, create orthographic phonetic spellings for them, and send them back to the ship to be collated for the dictionary, then printed out and sent back out to the teachers and translators. The rest of the ship had no air conditioning, so they built a climate-controlled computer room below decks, with orders to people that they were only to enter on the rare occasions that a magnetic tape needed to be changed.
Unbeknownst to them, the air conditioning failed as soon as they left port and never actually turned on. When they went in to change a tape while docked in Rio de Janeiro, they found that the temperature in the computer room had risen to somewhere in the close vicinity of 180F
But then, what can I say about 1970s DEC hardware? The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really - that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.
Computers may have been expensive back then, and huge, and we thought that 128k of RAM was a lot, but boy could they take a beating, at least if you bought them from Digital Equipment Corporation.
Build Your Own Exploding Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
I put my computer together on the kitchen table, stood nervously looking at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned on the power. There was an immediate loud POP, and half of a capacitor made an arc that took it across the kitchen. A cloud of bright pink smoke rose up from the shattered capacitor as a small flame burned from the capacitor. I quickly turned off the power and blew out the fire. After I calmed down and looked over my setup carefully, I found that I had plugged the AT power supply cable one pin over on the AT power supply plug. I adjusted the cable and turned my computer on, again. To my surprise, my computer worked! It was a beautiful sight!
I still have that computer (in fact, she is on the table behind me right now, watching me type this). She still works when I turn her on, but I have to adjust the system date to less-than 2000. She is not Y2K compliant.
Oh, loads of war stories... (Score:5, Interesting)
The iDX4/100 CPU that was supposed to be powered by 3.3v but was configured by the vendor without the motherboard's voltage regulator module, so was running off 5.0v (I fought to have them replace it anyway).
The sound board that needed a new edge connector [syscon.com.tw] fitted after I slipped on some stairs whilst carrying it, landed on it and ripped the old connector off, together with some tracks.
The PCs that were under a leaking air conditioning unit at a former employer and got soaked in water and/or coolant. Once dried out, they worked (mostly) and were given the hostnames 'itchy' and 'scratchy' in order to make people suitably nervous about using them for anything important. One of them even had a failing hard disc, so I partitioned around the failed sectors.
The 17" CRT monitor that was dropped (NOT by me!) down some stairs in 1998 whilst the same employer was moving buildings. It acquired a large crack in the case, but is still working fine.
The M68000 CPU [homecomputermuseum.de] that had several pins bent and re-bent whilst I was attempting to fit it to a new socket on an Amiga accelerator card (that in turn fitted into the original CPU socket on the Amiga motherboard).
--
Completely submerged during watermain flood. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blown speakers (Score:2, Interesting)
I was working at a university in Canada a few years ago, back when LinkSys wireless routers were cutting edge technology and quite the novelty. I was setting this router up on site for a "career expo", so that the employers could fire up their laptops and, using the wireless PCMCIA cards we supplied to them, access the internet and highlight the careers section of their web site to potential new recruits.
I wasn't even looking when I asked the tech intern I had hired to "hand me the power supply" for the wireless router. He did, and I plugged it in. We both watched, horrified, as some acrid smoke started to pour out of it.
"What the hell?!? Did you give me the right power supply?"
"Um, I don't know... was there more than one?" (Perhaps the fact that the power cube was stamped "US Robotics" instead of "Linksys" should have been a clue - but, really it's my fault for not even looking.)
So I unplugged the thing, checked the label and sure enough - we had given the router 18 volts when it was expecting 9.
I then cracked open the case of our brand-new-toy-with-the-pretty-blue-case right on the spot, and saw that we had fried a surface-mount capacitor. Hmmm. I scraped the charred remains of the capacitor off the circuit board with my flat blade screwdriver and then re-assembled the unit, praying to the gods of electronics.
After plugging the CORRECT power supply, we were both shocked that the darn thing just worked. Good thing, or we would have had to refund a few thousand dollars we had charged for on-site wireless internet access that day.
IBM 55's - harder than diamonds (Score:2, Interesting)
It had a dodgy hard disk that would randomly crash and freeze the system, after a reboot, you would get a disk0 failure code, the solution we found was to remove the HDD (IBM had a great quick remove option with the 55 where you did not need to take the cover off it just slid out the front - ahead of it's time really!) and gently tap it on the desk/wall/co-workers head, reinsert and power up, if this did not work remove it again and tap it somewhat harder. The true elite support guys knew just how hard to hit it to get it working first time.
After about 2 years of this 'system' the old girl finally gave up the ghost and no amount of slamming it against the desk worked, so seeing as they had nothing to loose the guys cracked the disk open, breaking the vacuum seal, and spun the platters round by hand!!!, reassembled, reboot - it worked fine!! I kid you not, I still to this day do not know how it worked after such abuse, imagine it was a bit like the bumble bee!
Atari moved to new case (Score:2, Interesting)
Not computer but digital camera. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:a luggable meets the baggage handlers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried plugging a cheap Realtek NIC into a running machine once...and was greeted by a very visible arc that left a soot trail on the PCI connector. Two of the pins on the card itself were burned completely off. The overload protection in the PSU tripped and I had to replug the thing to get it to boot again. But boot it did, and I all lost was a $5 NIC. Never doing that again though...
Mega-spark RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at a computer repair shop, and I noticed that all the counters were covered with cheap, commercial-grade carpet. It was a dry day, and I shocked myself several times just moving about.
So, I asked the guy (the owner) at the shop about this, and problems with ESD (Electro-Static Discharge) with the carpeted counter tops.
He laughed. On the counter was a high-dollar memory tester. He grabbed a then-expensive 4 MB 30 Pin SIMM and, holding it in one hand, walked around the room, dragging his feet. He did this until (No kidding) his own hair was beginning to stick up.
Then, holding one end of the SIMM, he walked over to a doorknob, and threw a 1", bright blue spark directly thru the simm to the doorknob.
He then calmly walked over to the memory tester, and ran tests on it. It ran for 5 minutes with a hitch.
I don't worry much about ESD, and haven't for years, with no trouble. The problems I have are with stressing the parts - putting undue stress on a MB when inserting a RAM stick, for example.
Re:Serious computer abuse ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Spirit's right hand side front wheel is damaged (drawing about 2-3 times more power than all the others - they think its a problem with particles in the gear chain).
Those incredible folks over at Nasa are currently looking at how to carry on without it (it can still operate but only when absolutely necessary).
They have been practicing driving in reverse and dragging the limp wheel along.
This in itself wouldn't be a major issue if the machine were under direct human control, but they are currently rewriting the operating commands for its autonomous driving mode - hazard avoidance etc.
How many others go to the trouble of rewriting the OS to work around a hardware disability?
Heres a link: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20040716
Re:Laptop Survived Car Accident too (Score:3, Interesting)
During the damage check, I booted up the laptop. No problems. The Punto and the Vectra had severe damage. The Vectra still runs, but I doubt the Punto was good for anything but parts.
While the laptop was in a protective laptop bag, the impact was still severe. Mind you, the braking probably sent the laptop flying right up to the back of the back seat and the impact sent it flying back, so the impact was probably not directly absorbed by the laptop against the trunk wall.
J
Lightning Strike (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyways...a bit into a year later, after a heavy lightning and thunderstorm, the thing wouldn't turn on the next day. We had a powerstrip but not a surge protector of anysort, let alone a UPS. It simply wouldn't boot. I don't really recall the moment when lightning struck, but after a repair guy had a look it was found that the metal disks within the hard drive had
To my utter suprise everything else was fine, the CPU, RAM, you name it - fine. Not a damn thing wrong with the other components. Its dead now, hollowed out as I stole parts from it for other boxes, but I'm sure if I wanted to it would still run if I simply added back some stuff. Its amazing, as faulty and buggy as software often is, hardware - good hardware at least - can be amazingly resilent.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:1, Interesting)
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
0.24mA won't kill you.
Now if you jab the electrodes into your heart you might get 1.2A over your heart, and that will kill it. But the stabbing killed you first.
According to http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/JackHsu.shtml [hypertextbook.com]
If I'm only touching one wire (I'm grounded, and the wire I'm touching isn't), then I need 15kV. So it's pretty hard to hurt yourself with DC.
AC is different due to the body's power factor (I guess), and you need a bit less current to lose muscle control, but more to kill (I _think_).
Anyway people die because they play with more than 15kV. Tesla coils are at least 60kV. 15kV makes X-rays, though. Fun stuff...
Lit on Fire? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except this baby seems to work just fine.
Parallel port abuse (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HP48 (Score:3, Interesting)
My run-ins with electronic destruction (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Back doing some PC tech stuff in a class I took a couple years ago back in high school, we had a couple P1 and 386/486 mobos around, so the teacher would have us use those, god forbid we touch the P3(smart guy haha
2. This wasn't me but another group in my electronics class in HS. We were doing more voltage testing on PSUs in our basic electronics class this time, and 2 smart guys decided to take paper clips and metal wires and stick them inside the AT PSUs while they were on. An explosion, lotsa sparks, tripped circuit breakers, and a pissed teacher later we found that the PSU had still worked, just 2 of the IDE power plug didn't work.
3. My friend had purchased a little 1.53GHz P4 CPU, and bought a very cheap motherboard, some offbrand name. Well as he was driving around crazily like usual, the the CPU unit was in his trunk upside down so the CPU/heatsink was hanging. You all know how heavy those P4 heatsinks are! So the heatsink clip breaks off the motherboard, and goes crashing around for another 10 min till he gets to my house. When he brings it over, he notices that his computer keeps shutting down, we open it up, look inside, and the CPU was burning hot besides the fact the heatsink was off. We saw the heatsink did plenty of damage and knocked dings all over the case but didn't touch any chipsets luckily. Our solution was simple......duct tape! Yes he had that heatsink somehow strapped down tightly with duct tape. Don't ask me how he did it, but I was afraid the tape would somehow catch fire. Sure enough he gave it to me recently after he upgraded for a server. I took the heatsink off and to my suprise the CPU came out too! The thermal grease basically glued it to the heatsink, so I had to take a flat head screwdriver and pry it off. It went flying a bit, bent a pin or two, I fixed them, put it back together, and walla it worked!
4. Someone at my dad's office who worked in the field somehow dropped one of those rugged outdoor special laptops off a 2 story building. It went flying to the ground with a thud landing LCD screen open flat onto the ground. As you can imagine the guy was pretty much ghost white. They rushed down to check it out, turns out that the thing survived! Perfectly, there was no damage to any components, just the RF wireless network access antena was a flimsy aluminum strip, it bent in half, but still worked!
5. At a small buisness I had worked for a while, had a server in the back storage room that backed up their tax files (it was some tax/investment buisness). There was no AC back there so they left the side window open that just opened 6" to a tall cinder block wall. So they never go back there, and it rains a couple times. I come back and turn on the server monitor, it makes a this LOUD screeching noise as it warms up. I quickly turn it off and run out of the room(wouldn't you?). I told my boss and he just says, "Oh, we left the window open over the weekend, some of the rain musta got on the monitor, it's ok right?" I just shook my head lol. So we got a broom, and went back, we poked the monitor power switch with the end of the broomstick from outside the door, then as it turned on we flipped and hid around the other side of the wall. As it warmed up the screeching quieted, then we noticed smoke comming up from the monitor, but we realized it was water vapor when it didn't smell like it. The
Its the US... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.
In the morning two things happened
1) Security Guard was arrested
2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.
Total downtime : ZERO.
A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.
Re:a luggable meets the baggage handlers (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm typing on it now, so it must have worked. This I largely ascribe to the fact that, being a 500MHz Celeron and veteran of several years' life with my sister, the processor is pretty much rammed into its slot with bits of matchstick and TicTac box. Off-topic, this is the way I solve many computer problems. When the microswitch on my monitor died, I just wedged it down with a bit of matchstick. One UK computer supplier who shall remain nameless (and bankrupt) uses a glue gun for this purpose (I know; I had to clean out the glue from the pci slots), but I think matchsticks have more style.
In my view computers are a bit like asthma patients, and can get accustomed to irritant behaviour on the part of their owners if it happens all the time. The trick is never to treat them too well. If you do, watch it, or one day when you're tenderly prising a hard drive loose from its socket there'll be a very small whiff of smoke and that'll be it.
At this very moment I am looking at an autopsied computer belonging to a friend, which gave up the ghost one day in a highly interesting manner after he tried to replace the hard drive. It still boots, still POSTs, and still runs FreeDOS - but nothing that uses extended memory. Somehow, it has transformed itself from a 266MHz Genuine Pentium II into a 286 doorstop, despite having no visible scars. Spooky.
Getting into SUN bootprom (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I got home with the thing and found out I didn't have the root-password for the OS. So, install a new OS: OpenBSD. To do that, you need to be able to tell the thing to boot from floppy. You do that using a little command at bootup. And you need.... a password to enter that mode.
great.
No-one on earth was left that could tell me about those passwords, so I googled around and found the sollution:
1. Startup the sun
2. Press STOP-A (or something) to get into the OpenPROM / OpenBOOt/Whatever menu
3. When it askes for the password RIP OUT THE PROMCHIP FROM THE MOTHERBORD
4. Enter blank password. The machine will try to validate it against its non-existing memory.
5. It will accept the blank password and you can do "ALTER PASSWORD"
6. INSERT THE PROMCHIP JUST BEFORE YOU ENTER THE NEW PASSWORD
7. Enter the new password
8. It stores it in the now replaced memory-chip.
9. Install OS. Have Fun.
It really amazed me that this just worked. But it did.
Bullet proof printer (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago, I went with a friend of mine to his boss's house to fix his computer. This guys' house wasn't a house, but a log cabin in a rustic town along a river with a winding one-lane road to get there. There was a general store and everything!
So we get there, and I sit down at this computer on a desk and start plugging away. Meanwhile, my friend gets a call from his wife. He starts pacing around, handling the various antiques and oddities one rarely sees except in a rustic environment like this.
When he picks up the revolver, his boss starts yelling "Put that down! Put that down!", but my friend was too distracted with his conversation to pay attention to the outside world. Sure enough, a loud *BANG* rang out. My friend dropped the phone and everyone checked themselves for holes.
After we were confidet we were all still alive, we noticed the HP LaserJet III printer sitting inches away from me on the desk had a hole in it. Wiping the sweat form my brow, I started laughing because the printer was still printing at the time! We later took some of the external housings off the printer and found some fragments, but the printers guts weren't damaged and it was printing fine.
(I wish HP's products were still that good)
The gun, of course, was real. My friend's boss sais he kept it on the end table to shoot the bats that inevitably found their way into his cabin. I think now he might stowe it when guests come over.
Space stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at a space company that produces the OBC (onboard computer) for the Ariane 5 (you can see where this is going already right?)
Well, I don't know if you remember (most Europeans probably do) but the first Ariane 5 blew up (due to software reasons) in spectacular style. The French foreign legion was tasked with finding any important bits in the swamps surround the launch site. Surely enough they found the OBC intact (it is built like a tank), eventually it got returned to the company I worked for, and whilst it didn't work entirely, it did return some diagnostic bits that *something* had gone terribly wrong. The original computer was sat in a cupboard by where I worked for a while, had a few dents in it but looked quite okay. if you are into these kinda things you can see a picture of it in this pdf here [space.se]Beat that for hardware abuse :)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if you jab the electrodes into your heart you might get 1.2A over your heart, and that will kill it. But the stabbing killed you first.
As was drummed into me repeatedly in my first year physics labs "it's not the volts that do the damage it's the current. And the most dangerous current is not Amps (which cause the heart to lock and then recover) but 100 mA or so which sends the heart into fibrillation ... which you don't recover from when the juice is turned off". Although I wouldn't want to try it I think I'd have a better chance with with the 1.2 Amps than with say 120 mA. Yeah I know you said 0.25mA, but I just want to make people aware that just because it looks like a low voltage and only 100 mA doesn't make it safer than a larger current. Be careful.
Re:Home Run (Score:3, Interesting)
The fun virii were the ones that encrypted your hard drive, so if you booted off a floppy (write protected, of course) you could not read your hard drive to fix the problem. Without removal tools, these were pretty damn hard to fix, because they would be in memory, so they would rewrite the file if you deleted it. I haven't seen many virii lately that attempt to write to boot sectors, unless you count Windows as a virus.
99% of the viruses now are not viruses really, but worms or trojans, designed to deliver payloads of spam or replication. Annoying, but hardly destructive to hardware, and often easy to prevent the spreading of using the "properly configured firewall" we hear so much about on slashdot.
That'd be Tiny Computers then (Score:1, Interesting)
Operation (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, instead of it coming off in my hands it fell partially into the case. So far so good but certainly not enough action for me. I decided top take a pair of needle-nose pliers and try and grab the slot cover and pull it out. I was doing good until I bumped the MoBo and "jzzzt" I lost my little game of "Operation."
I used that PC for another two years with only a blown serial port and one blown slot.
You wanna see abused PCs? Look inside my parents' PCs to see the 4 pounds of dust and ashes that have accumulated!
Roadkill (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Solded off the sound port (Score:2, Interesting)
The robot ended up looking pretty nasty [kfib.net], but atleast it was running Linux, a webserver over WLAN with a video feed and it could navigate somewhat on it's own.
Re:Bullet proof printer (Score:1, Interesting)
Being a tech with a bunch of underpaid imature college students, the company we worked for was contracted to fix public school computers. One of the said computers had intermittent problems that we replaced everything but the motherboard, and it still didn't work. I remember we got called every single day we were out there to fix that computer. Most of us took to trying to find a way to make the POS die so we could replace the motherboard, because our superiors didn't understand that just because it showed a healthy post screen didn't mean that the problem was elsewhere. I know there was lots of stabbing with a screw-driver, spitting, and shorting things out. Nothing could be done to that machine to make it become "officially defective". It certainly needed more than windows installed on it... it wouldn't even finish that process.
Oh, and never see how fast you can turn CRT monitors off and on. They break in about 5 seconds if you are fast enough, and they don't have any kind of protection. They emit a lot of smoke and some sparks. It begins to smell like burnt peanut butter. Thats what your average electrolytic compacitor smells like, so I assume that somehow one was blown.
I used to have a computer that would freeze hard. Everything looked fine on the screen, but nothing worked. I used to take the keyboard and strike the computer almost hard enough for the keys to come off the keyboard, and it would just continue like nothing happened to it. Other people in the room thought it was funny, and looking back on it, I do too, but at the time it was really annoying.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3, Interesting)
One New Year's Eve, I had gone to a buddy's place to jam, since he had a drum set in the basement of his place. We had played a set of pretty cool tunes, and decided that it was time to take a break and go for some beverages.
I put my left hand over the strings to mute them, as I reached out with my right to flip the power toggle. Next thing I know, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, and my vision is rapidly darkening, when my buddy kicked the guitar from my hands and I collapsed onto the concrete floor.
As you may have guessed, the amp wasn't properly grounded, but my bare feet on a concrete basement floor must have been a great natural ground. My screaming was for someone to get the f***ing axe off me.
Needless to say, after I stopped shaking, the amp went into the nearest Dumpster.
386 crystal oscillator swap (Score:2, Interesting)
I managed to get it runing stably up to 25MHz w/o a heatsink (didn't need serious cooling back in the day). My max was 30Mhz, but that required a passive heatsink.
That's double clocks! I'd like to see someone do that with a modern processor! Too bad I never tried this till I had a P120, and my 386 was uber obselete.
Re:I think now's the time to know . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
And the official service message after something had gotten into a Tandberg keyboard (those keyboards are heaven to type on, btw, beats the Model M) was "Set washing machine to low temperature, use no detergent."
Re:Its the US... (Score:4, Interesting)
The wiring was torn from the wall, same wall as the car entered though, so it traveled with S/36 though the next wall. The machine was dented and case torn open, but was still running operations for 2 weeks until a replacement was installed.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bit different if you've managed to break skin (e.g. wire thru finger). There are stories of people who've managed to kill themselves with two 9V batteries and a couple of needles.
It turns out to be a lot easier to kill yourself with DC than AC. A long jolt of DC across your heart will cause it to freeze up. The only way to get it going again is essentially a short jolt (preferrably of AC).
AC will keep your heart jerking, so in that case, fibrilation isn't as likely. My understanding is that the way electric chairs work is that they essentially cook you.
BTW: the reason why electric chairs use AC instead of DC is that Thomas Edison had a falling out with Telsa. Telsa pushed AC for power distribution, but Edison thought DC was the way to go. Edison had more money. Edison ordered the electric chair to be invented [google.com] to make the public think that AC was more dangerous. Whether or not it takes a lot more work to reliably kill someone with AC than with DC, that didn't stop Edison from making AC the standard for executions.
Hot-swapping (Score:2, Interesting)
Abusing Hardware to Fix It.... (Score:3, Interesting)
US Navy electronics (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the late '70s I was stationed on a guided missile destroyer (DDG class) in Pearl Harbor. I checked in just as the ship was preparing to go into the yards after a long Indian Ocean/WestPac deployment. She was overdue for a major overhaul by about 18 months. Since DDGs were supposed to be on 12 month maintenance cycle, you can imagine just how close to riding on the ragged edge a lot of the systems on board were.
Well, I was assigned to the electronic tech comm group (ETN) and told that I was taking over the UHF and HF radios from a guy who had left the ship about six weeks before I got on board. The ship had 4 HF transmitters, 2 100W and 2 1KW, 4 HF receivers, and a bank of 8 UHF transceivers. The UHF tranceivers were in pretty good shape, as there was still a guy assigned to them who had been doing most of the work. The HF receivers were sorta OK. The HF transmitters, OTOH, was a complete mess. I found to my (literal!) pain that mixing high powered electronics with an incompetent tech is a really, really bad idea.
Not knowing exactly where to start, I picked one of the 100W transmitters at random and dove in. I found 13 problems in 11 days. I should have known that I was in serious trouble when I closed it up to take it over to MOTU-9 (MObile Technical Unit number 9, a support facility full of senior techs), then couldn't get it re-opened when I got it on their bench. It turned out that the slide rails had been completely trashed somewhere along the line and the previous tech hadn't bothered to order replacements. Instead he had just let it sit partially open. After about 3 weeks I still didn't have it completely up to snuff. At least it would transmit on a portion of its designed frequency range.
The second 100W transmitter turned out to be in somewhat better shape. It would at least transmit across its assigned spectrum, but it had far more in the way of reflected power than it should have had. I finally figured out that he had damaged the antenna jack somehow. Considering that those things are almost impossible to put on wrong, I don't know how he managed it. In any case, after running so long with that much RF bouncing through the circuitry, the entire output amplifier was always iffy. I never did get it all the way back up to full strength.
The first 1KW amplifier was dead, dead, dead. That one turned out to be a simple fix, though. I just had to replace the last stage output tube and some burned out control circuitry from when the output tube had shorted across a couple of its plates.
The last 1KW amplifier was the worst. It had a habit of going from full strength power to off as the ship rolled, then back on again. When I pulled the power supply apart, I found that he had replaced all four diodes in the full wave rectifier. Not such a problem, except that most of the leads leading to the rectifier on the board had burned away when the rectifier burned up. Rather than lay down some new ones, he had simply threaded the leads of each diode through their holes, folded the legs down to touch the unburned part of the leads, AND HAD NOT BOTHERED TO SOLDER THEM DOWN!!!!
Every time the ship would roll, the diodes would shift enough to break contact, then reconnect. The truly amazing part is that he didn't start a fire in the comm shack from all the sparks in that power supply.
It says a lot about how well built that comm gear was built that even after all of that abuse, I was able to keep at least some HF transmitting capability up at all until we made into the yards. Granted, most of the time I was busier than a one armed paper hanger.
We went out 3 times before we went into the yards on training exercises. The exercises were in Hawaiian waters, and lasted 3 days, 3 days, and a week. I actually had 8 hours at the start of the week's cruise where I had every piece of hardware assigned to me up and operational at the same time. After two months straigh
The z/OS (S/390) machines (Score:3, Interesting)
The big iron z/OS (formally S/390) machines are supposed to be even beefier. They have the ability to virtualize a processor if one becomes damaged instantly.
If that's true, it's the most bizarre story here. (Score:5, Interesting)
The helpless geek can do nothing until his calculator is stolen, which is CROSSING THE LINE for a true nerd. Enraged and empowered by having a reason to fight, the geek fights back, killing the calculator-kidnapper, but in a horrible twist, discovers he has shot the very thing he was trying to save.
Fortunately, due to the heroic engineering efforts of TI, the calculator pulls through, leaving the geek and his arithmetical love to live happily ever after.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting; I've always heard this as a story of Edison vs. Westinghouse. It seems Westinghouse bought (or licensed) some patents from Tesla.
"Electrocute" is, according to some sources, a verb invented to describe execution by electricity; Edison allegedly considered promoting "Westinghouse" as the verb (perhaps only in jest, but, then again, he did arrange to fry people as a PR stunt, didn't he?). Edison staged various gruesome demonstrations of the deadly dangers of AC current, of which the electric chair is only one. He killed an elephant in one case -- and filmed it.
Company Antics (Score:1, Interesting)
A system was donated to us, but left outside our door all weekend. The induhvidual decided he didn't have to come during business hours. Anyway, it rained all weekend, and I mean it rained. Now this person was polite enough leave everything in a blue plastic recycling box for us (which happened to be in front of the door too) which happened to be below a major rain run off. This box nearly filled with water. We arrive to find a computer system fully submerged in icky rain water. Out of perverse interest we dumped out the water, and let it dry for a couple of days. The damn thing still worked, worked perfect actually. Even the floppy drive still worked.
The second story involves some of the more odd things we do around my shop when we're bored. The odd time we like to pick one system and do evil things to it. One day we decided it would be funny to wire together 3 power supplies in series and then connect them to 3 motherboards, also in series. God only knows why we did this, bordom I suppose. Regardless it smoked, wires melted, and flames came out of one of the supplies. All 3 boards had large scorch marks on them. Well I'll be damned if 2 of the 3 boards didn't still work. It was rather funny.
The wall test and TI calculators.. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Watah (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why I poo-poo naysayer who worry about running with a portable hard drive. I have shocked these things TO DEATH and they've been more reliable than any of my desktop drives.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:2, Interesting)
dry skin resistance = 500,000 ohms
voltage of your power supply = 20 millivolts, or
I=E/R =
What that means is that I'll grab your power supply with both hands. The most it could push through my body is
AS400 - Nearly Killed Me (Score:1, Interesting)
On attempt to move it into my basement, it tilted, smacked me in the head, knocked me to the bottom of the stairs and flew down after me.
Luckily one of the friends I had helping me was a REALLY BIG GUY, and he ended up catching the beast right before it landed on me. (he was bright red, with his back up against one of my house supports, but he stopped it)
Probably saved my life.
Anyhow, I never booted up the entire AS400. I really wanted it for parts. (hey I'm a geek, I like messing with things)
Everything I ever took out of that box worked just fine. (Hard Drives, fans, CPU boards I resold, etc).
Those things can take a serious beating.
Glass Cockpit Graphics Controller (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, the guy says that he got this call from a helicopter manufacturer who was using his product for a glass cockpit in their latest chopper model. It seems that under certain conditions the processor would do a hard reset, leaving the pilot without instruments. Since this was a prototype, the pilot had standard instrumentation as well as the digital on-screen ones, so there was no real danger, but still the company wanted to know why the device was failing.
To make a long story short, they ran every remote diagnostic they could without coming to a solution, so the company sent the tech to the chopper plant to have a look. The chopper guys took the guy out to the prototype, and the tech's jaw fell to the ground when he realized that the chopper guys had bolted the processor into a pod on the bottom of the helicopter - And this was a rackmount unit meant for a machine room - Not for the vibration or dust of a chopper on a runway!
After a couple of test flights they figure out the problem. Above a certain airspeed, the air pressure was high enough to physically push in the reset button on the back of the processor. After he got them to install a rackmount in the cockpit, all of their problems went away.
Yeah, I know it sounds like Snopes [snopes.com] bait, but the guy seemed otherwise reliable, and swore it was a true story.
The one SCO got right (Score:3, Interesting)
Customer calls to tell me that their app server is kicking clients off occasionally. I drop into the office about ninety minutes later and ask where the machine is. They don't know. It turns out to be mounted vertically in a box under the front counter. The case has about 8mm clearance on top and about a mm each side, and when I go to haul it out (still running), I burn my fingers. The back of the box is closed.
Taking two notepads, I use one under and one over to wiggle the case (yes, still running) out far enough to get a screwdriver onto the case bolts, rest it on a stool, and unscrew the lid - letting the screws drop to the floor because they're too much too hot to touch.
When the lid comes off, assisted by the notepads, I get a blast of heat which literally frizzles my fringe and eyebrows. The machine stops kicking off users, and to my amazement nothing inside has actually melted. The PSU fan is dead, and the CPU fan is simply circulating the heat evenly throughout the box. This is a Pentium (last of the 486-style fans) running approximately 200Mhz.
I take a fan heater, set it to blow-not-heat and aim it into the case. Four hours later, at close of trade, I come back, shut the beastie down and replace the PSU. The machine then continues to operate for some months until they replace it.
Another customer running Linux called me out when their machine went all wonky midsummer. Both the PSU and CPU fans had been dead for some time, judging by the coatings. They'd added a new staff member, and the new desk had diverted the air from the airconditioner away from the box, else it'd probably still be working.
Removed Half the Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the goals of this project was to create an extensible, modular multiprocessor computer. The idea was that you would have some commodity hardware which was packaged in neat little blocks that you would snap together. Each neat little block would be more-or-less a fully functional unit, so if you had, say $1000 you could buy a 100-node machine, but if you had $2000, you could buy one twice as big, and hopefully, twice as powerful.
One of our demonstrations of the redundancy concepts involved to achieve this kind of extensibility was to have a four-node L machine running a reasonably long parallel process (realtime spectrographs). In the middle of one such computation, we physically removed half the nodes
A well hung PC (Score:3, Interesting)
Links to two [linuxlots.com] sets [linuxlots.com] of pictures within.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:2, Interesting)
35 mph get off! (Score:1, Interesting)
Top case half got run over by a car before I picked up bottom and salvaged the mother board and power supply from it, nailed to an old computer table it works great still to this day affectionately known as, "Mackenstein".
Submersible '11 (Score:4, Interesting)
When the flood subsided, they needed the computer back up in a hurry so they hosed it out, dried it off, replaced the air filter in the hard disk and tried powering it up again. It worked. The tape drive (Cipher F880, I think) didn't survive, the rest did.
Fire in the hole (Score:1, Interesting)
The monitor case had melted over the tube. When i got the monitor to a new place, i gave it a try. It worked. It still does today.
Since then, all my monitors have been samsung.
Bleedin' on the mobo (Score:2, Interesting)
I was working for a computer manufacturer back in the mid '90s, and for a really shitty salary. If we made _one_ mistake during one month, we would loose NOK 2000 ($285!) from the pay. I was usually sitting with the case on my lap, leaning up against the desk at about an 45 degrees angle. I had just mounted the mainboard when I felt my lap getting wet. Wondering wtf was going on, I checked. It turned out to be blood, I'd been bleeding down the backside of the mainboard, dripping in my lap (damn cheap compo cases, they'll cut you up just looking at'em!). So I unscrewed the MB, took it to the toilet, and washed it of under the tap. wiped it mostly clean with some toiletpaper, and took it back to production. Screwed it in an turned it on. It worked. So I shipped it =)
I dropped a PSU into a compo case, and managed to break the mobo in half. Looking at the MB, turned out only one chip had loosened completely, and none was broken. Soldered all the broken wires, believe me when I say that that is a shitty job! It looked crazy, but worked.
Lost a screw down on the motherboard, and heard a pop, and saw som white smoke. The screen went blank. To get the screw out, I lifted the case and turned it over. Another pop, and more smoke. I actually forgot to turn of the power befor I turned the machine around. I blew a capacitor on the mobo, and one of the chips on my NIC. Mobo worked, the coax part of my combo NIC didn't (AUX and TP worked though).
Spillt a cup of coffee in my IBM keyboard, but continued to use until half of the keys got stuck as the coffee dried. washed it under the tap, let it dry for a couple of hours, and it worked again (still does, 8 years later).
Had a heatsink on the CPU that came loose, and fell down on the graphics card. The screen went blank, the machine rebooted, and the still blank. Probably would have gotten a POST beep error, but I had removed the PC speaker to fix a broken radio. Moved the graphics card one PCI slot down, reseated the heatsink, and turned it on. It worked.
We had a testmachine when I worked doing techsupport. That machine took some beating. It had been dropped several times. We had hotswapped just about everything several times. Any new card we would try, we hotswapped with one of the current ones. And since the carpeted floors on dry days would build up a helluvalot of static, we had zapped it unnumerable times. After some time, the both the HDDs started to show wear and tear. We just mapped around all the badsectors and continued to use it. A truly marvelous machine.
Smmmmmmokin! (Score:2, Interesting)
I had read somewhere that, if programmed directly and incorrectly via assembly code, one could well and truly hose the adaptor. Being a curious little monkey, and not a little bit mischievous, I decided to see if it was true. I sent the mysterious instructions to the Hercules card, and nothing happend, at first. Then I started to smell something burning, something very stinky and plastic-like. Suddenly I noticed small wisps of smoke rising from the back of the computer. I had indeed fried my employer's graphics adaptor! Too cool.
Re:I cut off half an add-in card to make it fit! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:replaced a CPU pin on a P4 (Score:3, Interesting)
I did that for a friend a while back when he managed to break a couple of pins off his P4. I used 30ga wire-wrap wire. And that was before I had my stereo microscope for such things.
You've got to clean off the pad where the pin goes and tin it with a bit of solder - silver-bearing works good for mechanical strength. Then you touch the end of the (untrimmed) wire to the pad, add more solder, and use the tip of the iron to draw the solder up the wire which helps secure it to the chip and make it more stiff. Then you just use diagonal cutters to trim it off level with the other pins.
Helps to have a really fine-tipped iron, good eyes, and four arms.
Reminds me of an old story.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Basicly there were two box like devices. You put a sample in the first box flipped a switch and the sample disapeared from the first box and was recombined in the second box.
We'll one Saturday night something very strange happened. Just as I was replacing the Plutonium core, lightning struck outside and fried the whole experiment. The next thing I knew I was in a different world with powerful strength that I didn't know I had. We'll needless to say when I finally woke up, I found the experiment totally vanished along with the Plutonium, but ther was my Atari.
I turned it on and guess what, it WORKED! It still works unto this day.
Coin Op Games (Score:3, Interesting)
While in high school I worked at a small sub shop that was just big enough to have one arcade game. It sat right across from our main counter and so during our down time and after work we would often play them. This being during the 80's these were oldschool scroller type games that you can play on a phone now a days but at the time they were teh bomb.
One day one of us figured out that if they kicked the panal where the coins went it they would get a credit! This was then made into a science by using a stool to hit the exact "sweet spot" on the machine to rack up tons of credits. Mind you this was done mostly during after hours so the game still would make some money during the daytime but the effects of such a treatment was none the less noticable. When the owners of the games would come back and see the machine we would always attribute the damage to "some damn kids!" (Truthful in a sence.)
Having crossed the line such that we no longer respected these machines we got more ambitious and would open up the cabinets after hours when beating them to get credits wasn't working. We still beat them up of course just to make sure that our story would not seem out of place.
Finally one day we got a gawd awful game. I don't remember what it was but we all decided that we hated it. We knew better than to try and display too much intrest in it to our bosses as they would then tell us that we should be working yada yada and also knew that it was not going to be due to cycle out for a while so unless something "happened" to it we were going to be stuck with it. (A machine had previously burnt on it's own accord before and it had been promptly replaced with a diffrent one so...)
Various methods of disableing the machine was discussed. I, being the geek of the bunch, was consulted and after some debate I said that it had to look natural or we would be picked as the prime suspects. Now after reading the many storys involving soda related mishaps I am duefully impressed at some of the recovery storys. However most of these storys involve quick actions with drying and cleaning. We had no such intentions.
Fully 3 large fountain Cokes were poured into the top of the cabinet before it finally sputtered and died. The fact that it took 3 was impressive no matter how you slice it. After number 2 I was actually, I was doing the pouring mind you, getting nervous that it would blow up on me before it just died. But finally after number 3 it clicked a few times and then would not come back on.
Even with it's seemingly "natural" death it took some fast talking to explain how the Coke did get into the case seeing as how it had mostly sloped top. Once again those "damn kids" with their sodas were to blame.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remove Device:
In Device Manager right click the device you wish to remove and select disable. Gently remove the device from your computer.
Install Device:
Gently install device. In Device Manager right click $COMPUTERNAME and select Scan for hardware changes.
I was able to install a new sound card this way, except I selected Uninstall Device before removing the old sound card. Once I poped in the new sound card and refreshed device man it was just a matter of installing drivers (which required a reboot of course
The only time I've had problems doing this is with a friends computer with a sensitive PSU. Plugging in a drive would short out the PSU and required you to unplug the power cord to reset. My PSU seems to be friendly when it comes to plugging in molex plugs when the machine is on.
I've heard you can insert more ram by setting your computer to hibernate (start > shutdown > shift-H if you use the XP eyecandy login), plugging in another dimm, and starting up again, but I havent confirmed it.
300 foot helicopter drop (Score:2, Interesting)
palm getting too cold (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:When you were 2!? (Score:2, Interesting)
You know - Darwinist design theory.
I think my son is going down that route. I have a jeweller's screwdriver with different shafts stored in the handle. R3.0 wanted to take something apart, but I had to step away for a few minutes, so "Don't mess with the screwdriver!"
I come back 15 minutes later, and his toy is pieces. He took the screwdriver, selected the correct bit (#0 phillips), mounted it in the handle, dismantled said toy, and then dissasembled the screwdriver and put the bit back. I was torn between praising his ingenuity or punishing his disobedience.
He was 3 years old at the time.
Underwater? (Score:2, Interesting)
Short Circuit (Score:1, Interesting)
When I got on the scene I saw chunks of ceramic material laying on the bottom of the case. It turned out that the cheep Trident card we had in that thing, which was sitting on the PCI base with everything else, gone through a cascading short circuit with solder joints melting and oosing across the board. After there was enough shorts and exploded capacitors on the video card, the main IC got so hot that it exploded. Surprising enough even with an exploded video card and a burnt trace going into the motherboard and the PCI bus mostly jacked, the system kept going!
How to kill a server room (Score:2, Interesting)
TTL chips can take a beating (Score:2, Interesting)
honey in a calculator (Score:3, Interesting)
So I took the calculator home, filled the sink with water, and swished the calculator around in the water for about ten minutes until I couldn't see honey inside the screen anymore.
Then I let it dry out. A day went by and it still wasn't working. Then another day, still dead.
After about three days the inside of the screen had cleared to the point where it only had some condensed moisture around the edges. At this point it not only turned on on, but to my delight I discovered that it still had all the programs that I had laboriously typed in over the past few months.
First DIY Computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Abused floppy (Score:2, Interesting)
Not wanting to give up on a semester's worth of programming work, we unfolded it, placed it under a websters unabridged dictionary for a weekend to flatten out the crease and sure enough, it worked just fine...not a single bad sector.
Storage Cabinet under water (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Underwater? (Score:1, Interesting)
I nearly died after this. (Score:1, Interesting)
Teacher comes to me complaining she can't read her 3&1/4" disk.
Not a problem, I grab it off her to see what I can do.
Problem. It's stapled... 3 times.
Enter the twilight zone.
I look at her a little bit sideways.. "What happened?"
"I spilt coffee on it."
"Uhuh.."
"Well, I cleaned it."
This just got CRAAZY.
"Cleaned it?"
"Well, I opened it up and washed it with dishwashing fluid and put it back together. They don't make them well, I had to staple it!"
"Uh." "Uh." "Uh.. Let me see what I can do with it, I'll... Uh.. Leave a message for you in your pigeon hole.."
"Thanks!"
I was tempted to just throw it and say I couldn't get anything.. But, I'm a nice guy. In the drive it goes.
MY GOD. It's reading in the drive...
Using a combination of xcopy, copy, "type blah.doc >c:\1.txt" I was able to retrieve 13 of the 14 files.
Sooo. I copied them to another disk and gave it back.. She was dissapointed about not getting all of her files back..
I then walked back to my office "HEY BOSS, you're not going to believe this.."
Oh, she was also miffed that I wouldn't give back her disk. She liked the green ones and disliked the black ones...