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."
I think now's the time to know . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think now's the time to know . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think now's the time to know . . . (Score:4, Funny)
The heavy metal frame makes for excellent bruising.
(These "I'm better than you because I use an ancient keyboard" comments have to come out every once in a while, don't they?)
Re:I think now's the time to know . . . (Score:4, Informative)
I've got a Microsoft Internet Keyboard that's served me well for about 4 years, even when clogged to the gills with cat hair. I've got the extra buttons mapped to stuff I need, and the Windows key is actually fairly useful, despite all the naysaying:
Win+L: Lock Station
Win+M: Minimise All Windows (Win+Shift+M to undo)
Win+D: Hide All Windows (Win+D again to undo)
Win+E: Open Explorer
Win+F: Open "Find File" Dialog
Win+R: Open "Run" Dialog
Re:You mean you fingers hit the wrong keys? (Score:4, Funny)
We had an old RS/6000 that was apparently home to a mouse for a while. It had squeezed in through the hole in the back left by a missing Microchannel slot cover. No, we didn't find a dead mouse inside, but we found lots of "evidence".
My cup-holder stopped working months ago... (Score:5, Funny)
But the rest of the box seems to be OK.
Lit on Fire? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except this baby seems to work just fine.
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!
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:4, Informative)
My point-n-shoot camera's viewfinder got dirty. I opened it to clean it out, and touched the capacitor for the flash light (12v). It knocked me unconcious and burned my hand.
Yeah, 12v can bite.
The flash capacitor is about 4kV, not 12V. The whining noise after you fire it is the inverter pumping the cap back up for the next shot. It's also not current-limited, delivering all power it can to the flashtube in a few milliseconds. The TV EHT supply you mention later *is* current limited hence it gives less of a perceived shock even though the voltage is much higher.
I've taken belts from a camera's flash cap before now; they made my arm muscles spasm and throw the camera across the room.
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:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Informative)
Your skin has a "break down voltage", much like a diode has. Past a certain voltage, your skin no longer provides much resistance (I don't have the exact values) and so as voltage increases, your "hand to ground" resistance decreases. This causes the current to increase exponentially, not linearly.
So you are absolutely not safe in touching 240V.
Girmann
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.
WRONG (Score:4, Informative)
NO. Sorry to shout, but I had to play safety-nazi on this one having seen the aftermath. It's actually easier to do yourself serious damage with DC than AC, and HV DC is very scary indeed. First off, as noted above there's a point around 600V where, despite the skin's apparently high resistance, it gives in like a diode breakdown and the current punches through the hard, horny outer dermis that is so resistive. Inside you are a nice squishy bag of saline solution, with very little resistance... Think about the old demo of cooking wieners with two nails and wall current.
Second major issue is that DC causes sustained muscle contraction so you grip involuntarily. AC changes direction, causing muscle contractions in sympathy with line frequency which gives you some chance of letting go/pushing clear. DC gives you no such option, and the effect is noticeable at quite low currents. Very, very dangerous.
Google for more info, but DC is not remotely 'safe'. If you must play with HV DC - anything over 50v basically, let alone valve (tube) amps - treat it like it will bite. Keep one hand behind your back, let someone watch within reach of the breaker, and use current limiting whenever possible.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Funny)
That won't do much unless you find some way to lower your resistance a lot (like the darwin award mentioned above). What is dangerous is that a car battery can sustain a large current for a long time.
(A quick shock to the hart is not as bad as keeping it from beating for several seconds). But you still need the low resistance to actually let it flow.
Jeroen
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3)
The worst I've ever seen a computer was a publ
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:5, Funny)
Can you push it back in again? I've been finding Google a bit unreliable in the last few days.
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:4, Funny)
ATA is also kind of hot swappable;
Words to strike fear in the heart of a tech if I've ever seen them....
Re:So far I have attempted the following: (Score:3, Funny)
Ticking... did you get the zip drive model?
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: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.
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.
Ran Windows XP (Score:5, Funny)
a luggable meets the baggage handlers (Score:5, Interesting)
Unintentional, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Solded off the sound port (Score:4, Interesting)
my cd-rom (Score:4, Funny)
Re:my cd-rom (Score:5, Funny)
I've hung (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Blown speakers (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blown speakers (Score:5, Funny)
Shorted a running NIC with a dropped screw... (Score:5, Funny)
Home Run (Score:5, Funny)
-Rylfaeth
The monitor (Score:3, Funny)
It got the monitor too, huh? Wow... I must have missed that particular strain of CIH. Lucky for me! Sorry to hear that, though.
Re:Home Run (Score:3, Informative)
Don't miss those days much.
HP48 (Score:3, Informative)
I had an hp-48g in 8th grade. I used to play basketball before school with the 48 in my pocket (without the soft-cover, no less) and it would usually fall out of my pocket during play (onto hard asphault) about twice a week. In addition, I once dropped it into a puddle about 6 inches deep when I was getting out of the car (again, without the soft cover).Yet, the calculator still works perfectly, even if it has a few nicks (no majorly visible dents or anything though).
I guess this is a true testament to the quality of pre-Carly HP hardware.
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.
Re:HP48 (Score:5, Funny)
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:HP48 (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn, I could have shot him in the head if I'd known he had my calculator in his pocket.
Re:HP48 (Score:5, Funny)
That's not fair! We Europeans are only less free cause we do not yet have a EU PATRIOT act to protect us.
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?
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.
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)
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!)
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 u
let see (Score:3, Informative)
I solder a simm to get it to work in as a sip.
Replaced the gridge chip.
My forst computer I own had to be put together from scratch. By scratch, I mean soldering compnent to a PCB board.
Replace the board on several hard drives
Used laplink and wrote the data onto the disk I was getting data off of.(instead of the new drive). Deleted everything. Microsoft said the files couldn't be recovered. I recovered them.
I've used gallon milk caps as a mother board stand.
replced several capacitors on motherboards.
Soldered a pin back onto a cpu
and much more.
And yes, everything worked when I was done.
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.
Serious computer abuse ... (Score:5, Funny)
Launching into space, then crashing on Mars with just some air bags for cushions. THAT IS ABUSE! And yet they made it work!
My worst (Score:5, Funny)
This is why drugs and hardware support do not mix.
The machine continued to work fine and works to this day.
Work related stress (Score:5, Funny)
And you know what? The damn thing still worked after it dried off. The LED display was cracked but functional (was replaced later), and it needed a new plastic handle (that, oddly enough, holds the top of the case together). But the fucking thing could still read a bar code. We were all so freaking amazed that everyone burst out laughing.
But the funniest part? The guy who smashed the shit out of the scanner? He still works for us.
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...
Re:BeBox loses half its brain and keeps going (Score:5, Funny)
Did you check if is_computer_on_fire() returned true?
Pen kills LCD... (Score:5, Funny)
I did it...
It was dark...
I closed the Lid...
rather forcefully...
I can still hear the *CRACK*
ooohh t3h p4!n !!!
Re:Pen kills LCD... (Score:3, Funny)
I did basically the same thing with a brand new HP PAvilion ze5385us, three weeks after I bought it.
Only difference is, it was the CORD from a set of mini-jack headphones I had plugged in that shattered the screen, got caught in the middle right corner of the screen, and shattered the ENTIRE screen.
650 bucks and 11 days later it was chuggin along flawlessly, but it certainly has made sure *I* never rush
-- vranash
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.
Inside out MIDI interface (Score:4, Funny)
I carefully etched the board by hand and manually drilled all the holes, only to discover to my horror that I'd printed the board upside down. So, rather than waste time doing the board over, I bent the pins of all the chips 180 degrees and mounted them upside down! Worked like a charm!
Peeing on laptops (Score:4, Funny)
Dog pees on laptop photo [funnyjunk.com]
Cat pees on laptop story and discussion [macrumors.com] Keep pets away from your laptops!
Drooling directly onto Pentium 100mhz MoBo (Score:5, Funny)
Back around 94 I had a friend who ordered a motherboard and a Pentium 100mhz processor when they had just come out. We were all very impressed--a hundred mhz! On Monday morning at school, we were all waiting anxiously to hear how the setup went over the weekend, and to see if Linux installed smoothly -- I think Red Hat had just come out, and we were anxious to compare it to AIX running on our two mini-fridge-sized RS6000's.
He walks in, looking rather sheepish. We ask him what happened, and he says it was a dud motherboard. Tough luck. Later, he and I go off-campus for lunch, and he reveals the truth.
"I hooked everything up, and booted it up. It was humming perfectly. I was standing there, staring at it with the case off -- one hundred megahertz! And then... (he pauses a while here)... I drooled on it. Right onto the Pentium. Motherboard and P100 both totally fried."
It was so sad, and yet so freakin funny. He replaced the parts, and his computer was the envy of us all for about 6 months until my friend Paul got Linux running on a 486 laptop. But I'll never forget my friend who straight dr00led all over his radical P100. :)
- benI 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 cut off half an add-in card to make it fit! (Score:3, Informative)
insert coin ! (Score:3, Funny)
The computer was still working perfectly, but it was making pocket change noises whenever moved.
The coins stayed there until the case was opened for a HD upgrade.
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.
They Don't Call it a Thoroughbred for Nothin' (Score:4, Funny)
I knew one day it would die, and I was really just curious about how spectacularly it would go. Would it explode in a giant ball of flame, or maybe shoot lightning from the floppy drive? One day it did have a massive aneurism, but it did not die in the way I had hoped - the case became extraordinarily hot, the machine restarted and displayed an error on post stating something about the corrupt 64k base memory, and, when I restarted it again, I smelt a terrible scent coming from inside the case, then nothing.
After letting the room cool down for a bit, I tried to get it going again but the thing would not start. Instead it just beeped at me, kind of painfully.
The motherboard was fried, all the other internal components survived. After investing in a new mobo, a case with 8 fans, a water cooling kit, and some cables that are supposed to cool the whole thing down, I now have the Beast operating at 2.7 GHz stable and a much cooler workspace. It's also quieter - I did not expect the water cooler to run silently.
Of course, the fish miss having that big tank to swim in and all...
M
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My TV (Score:4, Funny)
My buddie and I had a prank on a guy in high school. I took a VCR tape and open it up placed a bunch of stapes, nails and whatever else I could find inside (stapes fit perfectly on the tape) I wrote on the lable that it was some crazy porn.
Well I forgot the tape at home. I come home and my parents are waiting for me - They were pissed and wanted to know what was on the tape. I told them it was a joke, and whated to know why they were so pissed... "Becouse our VCR is broken now"
Mind you this was one of those expencive Sony Milti-system VCR's.
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.
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.
Stupid 80287 tricks (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Burn baby burn... said the Turbo-Switch. (Score:3, Funny)
The Turbo-Switch was totally fried. Will never move again. Molten plastic filled out its interior. I figured a rather high current must have moved through it. That was a scary situation, but after removing all unused wiring to the frontpanel the box ran fine.
Seperate incident:
He had plugged a stoneage transistorradio into the line-in of the oh-so-good noname 16bit soundcard. I figured later that the impendance of the two devices were not compatible. The chip on the soundcard was fried and smelt rather funny too. It did not make any sound.
After I replaced the soundcard with a new one, all went fine. For about 6 years thereafter... then he sold it.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Fried Airport Base Station Recovered (Score:5, Informative)
I opened it and noticed the two main capacitors had bulging tops. Turns out the original Airport Base Station had poorly rated capacitors, and they were prone to dying. The bulging top is a clear sign of failure. A website explained which capacitors make appropriate replacements. For the 5 dollars it would cost I figured it was worth a try.
Turned out it was a good gamble. After soldering in the new capacitors the bloody thing worked again.
There are probably a few busted Airport Base Stations floating around out there - and well worth recovering. The older graphite model is the one with the poorly rated capacitors. Even if the base station itself can't be fixed it contains a Lucent wireless PCMCIA card which may be perfectly usable.
Boot Therapy (Score:5, Funny)
The labs in question were fairly ugly even for that time, being a swath of 486/33 computers on a 10-base-2 (can't remember) network; kick-ass at one point, but slim-pickings when entry level machines were P166s. The printers were hefty old (Okijet?) dot-matrix printers used for printing out assignments and such. They were connected to the PCs via a 4-port LPT switch box, so one printer per 4 computers.
The typical printer complaint was "I can't print", this could usually be fixed by jiggling the switch on the switch-box, or sometimes by turning the printer on and off (sometimes in rapid succession). The majority of the printer problems were of this type, and relatively easy to fix.
Sometimes, however, a printer would get in its head the idea that it wasn't going to print and throw all manner of tantrums instead of working properly. This was a Troublesome Printer, prone to all kinds of ill-mannered behavior and outbursts.
A Troublesome Printer was usually treated with Boot Therapy, outlined below, but other methods included:
-Picking it up, then dropping it
-Taking it out back and working it over with the Reset Stick (a baseball bat)
-Screaming and cursing at it with the most foul obscenities imaginable, sometimes including a dash of voodoo magic
-Showing the printer the Reclamation Pile, an assortment of leftover parts from other failed printers (like taking a delinquent child to prison to show them where they might end up one day)
-Boot Therapy, elaborated below
Boot Therapy was the most successful treatment for delinquent printers. It was a robust yet simple method which could be quickly executed, not unlike a sudden backhand-slap across the face. Completing a Boot Therapy session required very little time, only a few seconds, and I'm proud to say it had a 100% success rate.
The actual method of Boot Therapy is very simple, simply put: kick the printer. The sudden Percussive Therapy* shocks the Troublesome Printer back into a state of readiness, allowing ink and paper to merge within its confines once more. The subtleties of Boot Therapy, which make or break it as a successful form of treatment, are contained entirely in *how* you kick it.
Boot Therapy is much too complicated to describe herein, more like PHD dissertation material, but I shall endeavor to list the kind of factors that need be considered when employing this kind of treatment:
-Force of the kick
-Approach angle
-Footwear (soft-soled runners work better then steel-toed boots, they don't leave a brui--er.. mark)
-Crash impulse duration
-Where the kick is directed
-Does the printer know you're going to kick it? (this is very important, as most will attempt to block you)
-Is the printer on?
-By far the most important: ** Are there any faculty members present in the immediate area? ** (they tend to frown on such progressive treatments as Boot Therapy using such harsh invective and "Criminal" and "Insane", if only they knew what they were up against)
-And a plethora of other second- and third-order effects.
So there you have it, a brief description of the cutting edge world of Boot Therapy. The printers in question continued to work well, despite being kicked repeatedly, except one, which needed Therapy several times a week. They always seemed to keep working well, especially on my watch, but I think they were replaced a few years later with cheap Mexican Printers
Disclaimer:
-Yes, I actually did do this for real.
-No, I never got caught.
-Yes, it does (or did, rather) actually work (though maybe not 100% of the time).
-No printer damage was ever attributed to a faulty application of Boot Therapy
-Don't do this for real, especially on those new-fangled $50 Inkjet printers, all plastic and such. The printers I treated had steel in them.
*-I'm aware of the Babylon5 reference to Percussive Therapy or some such; Boot Therapy was pioneered slightly before that, I think.
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:Mega-spark RAM (Score:5, Informative)
Coke on motherboard (Score:5, Funny)
So, I get it all assembled in the case, and it being around christmas (this was a present to myself), it was very hot that day (remember this is Australia), so had a glass of Coke to keep me fresh.
I rested the coke on the PC case, as I was assembling the machine. And, no prizes for guessing, I knocked the coke all over my brand new motherboard! Oh I was shattered to see Coke fizzing and spreading all over my dream motherboard, and into the pins under the RAM sockets! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
In a sorry attempt to do something about it, I quickly whipped the board out of the case, shook it dry, and used a whole roll of paper towels mopping up all that cose, as well as a very slightly damp cloth to clear it fully.
And after about half a day of drying, it went back in the case, completed the assembly, prayed like I've never prayed before, and brought the power up.
"131027Kb memory OK"
HOLY SHIT IT FUCKING WORKS!!!!!!
Still does, too.
One Time... (Score:4, Funny)
The CPU was shattered, the ram was all cracked, and my drives were blown open with bent platters. Well an electron microscope and some JB Weld was all I needed to fix the CPU. I took the hard drive into the cleanroom in the back of my trailer and used the vice grips to bend it back. And the ram, I stuck together with some duct tape. Its amazing, I put it all back in the case, AND IT ALL WORKED! Damn they sure do make these things well these days! Well okay so I did lose a few pr0n pics that I had open before the computer blew, but I guess thats the price you pay for a simple mistake....
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 :)
Took a licken but kept on ticken... (Score:5, Funny)
Another case had a printer that had been inhabited by a mouse for nearly a year, and it workd right up until Mr. Mouse had relieved himself on a high voltage component... the interesting part was upon receipt of the printer for repair, it was discovered the prior urination and defacation had rotted the electronics to the point the parts nearly fell off the board, nonetheless it had worked up to the final shocking excretion by the now defunct rodent.
Marie
I'm sorry, Dave (Score:5, Funny)
Did that. Eventually it just sang "Daisy" really slow and shut down.
Testing Joysticks back then (Score:5, Funny)
Their test routine was as follows:
First several rounds of Decathlon (fast wiggling of joystick back and forth)
Then it was held by its cord and swung around for a few minutes.
Then it got dropped on concrete several times. Then they poured lemonade over it.
If it was still funcitoning, it was good. OK, I think the ergonomic factor and Extras like AutoFire and such got tested too.
In an April(fools) issue they supposedly did that with a printer.
Now I'd like to see them swing a 200$ Thrustmaster HOTAS Stick on its cord...
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
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
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.
Re:The Humanity! (Score:3, Funny)
I showed him everything it did etc etc....I had been using it for a good 15 mins.
Why dont you have a go?.....so he sits down and just touches the mouse. instant BSOD...I guess some people have no luck
Re:I haven't done anything extraordinary (Score:4, Interesting)
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.