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How to Destroy Your Computer 129

Dan's Data writes " Destroying your own computer is every user's right and is the pattern of behaviour expected by the manufacturer s and, especially, repair personnel, whose very livelihood is put in peril by those users who perversely persist in correctly upgrading their equipment." Just read it. Its funny.
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How to Destroy Your Computer

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    A friend decided his hard drive was too loud. What's the best way to fix a loud hard drive? Open it up and oil it... Needless to say, the hard drive didn't work for much longer.

    Later on, he bought a CD-ROM drive. He found it didn't work, and called me to help him. He told me that he had plugged one of the plugs in backwards. I told him that that wouldn't break it, and looked inside his computer. I was wrong. He apparently managed to force the 4-pin power cable in upside down (first chipping off the plastic on both sides).

    One that I did: I was trying to reverse-engineer the 3-pin CPU fan plug on my motherboard. I was measuring the voltage between 2 pins, and my hand slipped. I shorted +12V to 0V. Fortunatly, Epox had stuck a fuse on the fan plug, so instead of frying my whole motherboard, I only fried the fan plug (which is now plugged into one of the two other fan plugs).

    - pm
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I sometimes thought about buying a t-shirt
    with the letters " JUST DESTROY IT " on it
    and then wear it at work . . .

    Now, there is my MESSAGE :

    YES, READ THIS ARTICLE ! DESTROY IT !
    CRASH YOUR DAMNED COMPUTER YOU DONT LIKE ANYWAY
    THEY ARE JUST THERE TO OPPRESS YOU -
    AND TECHIES DONT NEED SLEEP -
    HELL, THEY ACTUALLY WANT TO WORK AT NIGHT
    THE WHOLE WEEKEND THROUGH . . .
    DONT CARE IF THEY WHINE AND BEG -
    THEY WANT TO SUFFER ! LET THEM SUFFER REAL HARD
    DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER NOW,
    SMASH IT BURN IT HURT IT . . . .
    WIPE ALL FILES ON YOUR HARD-DISK OUT
    ALL OF THEM
    TRASH theonlycopyofmyphdthesis.doc NOW !
    TECHIES JUST WAIT FOR THAT . . .
    AND DONT FORGET TO COOMMMMMPLAAAAIINNNNN !!!!!
    AS ALWAYS THE TECHIES ARE AT FAULT
    NEVER THE OS . . . THEY JUST PRETEND !
    WINDOWS WOULD NEVER SELL THAT GOOD IF
    IT WOULDNT BE THE BEST OS OF THE WORLD -
    TECHIES ARE UNFRIENDLY - THEY USE A STRANGE
    LANGUAGE NOBODY UNDERSTANDS AND ALWAYS WANT
    TO LOOK AT YOUR PRIVATE FILES . . .
    AND THEY TELL YOU IF YOU SMELL !
    PUT THEM TO TEST NOWWWWW !
    DESTROY IT ! BURN THE SUCKER !

    . . . thanks. Everything is fine now.

    Im happy and dont want to hurt anyone.

    I worked for three years in tech support.
    If I ever meet Bill Gates, I swear I will
    bite his tie off -

    You can quote me on that.
  • In the days of 80486, I had a 80386 which I used
    as linux-server. Since I needed another serial
    port which the board did not provide (actually,
    even the first serial was on an ISA-Card), I
    plugged in another card, turned on the machine
    and - nothing. Not even the ventilator of the
    power supply started. As soon as I removed the
    serial card, it began to work again. Obviously,
    something on the card was able to produce a
    short-circuit which not only affected the board
    but the power-supply as well. Weird.

    The machine worked for several months as server;
    had an Adaptec 1542 controller and was later
    replaced with an 80486. With this 80486 I lost
    two harddisks. The first had a headcrash during
    a weekend. When I came back, the thing made an
    awful noise, was very hot and refused to do
    anything. So I replaced it and opened the disk.
    Looks very nice on my shelf, with the marks. The
    other disk I lost was due to inactivity. The thing
    had been working for months until I took down the
    machine for about an hour for a hardware-upgrade.
    After that, it didn't work anymore. I guess it
    was a crack on the circuit which widened while
    the disk cooled down.

    When I last month replaced the server with a new
    one, I remarked another interesting fact: break
    off one wing of the processor-ventilator and it
    not only makes a terrific noise but also vibrates
    heavily. I guess the board wouldn't honor that
    if running for a long time.

    Speaking of weird hardware-damage: Did anyone else
    ever have a processor _glowing_? I had that with
    an AMD x86, 80 Mhz. A cable was touching it, so
    the plastic melted. On the processor there was
    that spot with the plastic on it, which began
    to glow afterwards, even after removal of the
    cable. The socket was molten, the processor broke
    into two parts when I removed it.
  • Yeah, I tried frying a 486 by plugging it in wrong. There are a whole hell of a lot of wrong ways to plug a 486 in wrong (at least the one I had--there was an extra "ring" of pins in the socket). Damn thing still works...
  • They don't make much mention of shorting various points on the motherboard to ground while the machine is running. I found out (on an already-broken machine) that shorting CPU pins to the case can have all manner of interesting and wierd effects. It's kind of hard to find ones that do any real damage, though. Oddly, most of them will do a hard-reset. It's pretty damn fun, in any case :)
  • Heh you're lucky that you aren't also a coaster as well now. Although I'm guilty of working on computers with the power on quite a bit. Disconnecting hard drives usually doesn't affect the computer at all, unless its trying to access them at the time... Yanking out an active NIC is another matter altogether though...
  • Posted by kenmcneil:

    This happened under...(drum roll)...Windows!
  • Posted by kenmcneil:

    The best I've been able to do is destroy an older monitor with my new PII 400MHZ, 128 MB, and AGP 2x (w/ 8 megs) while playing a game of Unreal! I almost pissed my pants when the picture tube exploded while I was playing!
  • Apparently you've not worked on some of the recent Compaq systems that have those damned Torx-head screws. It's damn impossible to get the right size Torx-head driver to fit those stupid things.
  • A better question is, What kind of idiot would mock the author when he hasn't read the article?
  • i've seen that one....

    and they had the cheek to phone up and ask us to fix the printer under guarantee!!!

    the mess a transparency makes when it goes through a printer fuser is pretty cool.. :)
  • >Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the >power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. >Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and >it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.

    I've attached power supply cables backwards as well. My system did nothing and nothing was damaged, but it scared me half to death. I will forever have "black cables go on the *inside*" etched in my mind. Also, one of my friends accidentally put a 486 CPU in at a 90 degree angle from the correct position. He was lucky: when he powered up the system, nothing happened, and nothing was hurt. Again, though: it scared the hell out of us.

    And all the PC screws I've ever seen have been basic Phillips heads.

    --Lenny

    //"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
    It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
  • This is no fault of my own, but...

    About four months after I bought my current monitor, the display went inexplicably dead. After a day or so, whenever I turned on the monitor, 2-inch long blue sparks would shoot out of the power supply in back, scorching my table and making impressive crackling noises. I showed it to my friends and they all agreed: it was seriously cool.

    It was still well within warranty, so I shipped it back to Princeton with a nice note about the lightning. A few weeks later, I got it back, all fixed and fully functional. The note attached simply said: "resoldered power supply...".

    I don't know if the electrical arcs hurt anything internally, but I'm still happily using this monitor 2 years later, so...

    --Lenny

    //"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
    It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
  • Next time you have a pizza party and use printer paper for everyone to place the pizza (as a napkin), be sure to recycle the paper back into the printer. Tomato stains really liven up stock white paper. It will be sure to rival that expensive colorful graphic paper. Don't be shy with salt and pepper as they might contribute to the background. Coffee stains are an added bonus.

    When you fire up the printer for the next job, people will swear its luchtime when the onions hit the fuser sizzling.

    Paper jams? No, that means you are not doing it right. Try, try again. Sometimes you have to get the right consistency on the paper ingredients. Be sure to print out a few memos. Make a copy for everyone.
  • Bad solder joints account for about 50% of television and monitor repairs. At least it was that way when I used to repair them a few years back. It was the heat damage from the high voltage section and other hot spots that caused improperly soldered areas have hairline cracks. The cracks got hotter and the connection would break. Hitting a monitor would bring it back to life in this case. The solution to this would be simply to resolder. This kind of repair is an easy $100-$400, depending on the value. I know a tech that charged $450 for a projection unit, because he "repaired the power supply" this way.

    Also related to heat damage are the electrolytic capacitors. They are easily guessed by the toasted and 0darkened areas of printed circuit boards. The oil in them boils away and they go out of tolerance. Bad capacitors cause the picture to get scrunched or out of sync. In the worse case, the sync gets so bad, the flyback circuit burns up including the transformer. While the transformer itself costs about $20-$50, the repair is worth $150 if you like to make money...

    Most people now days will junk the bad monitor and try to buy something that is properly designed. It seems like engineers of yesterday built the chassis with absolute maximum ratings in mind to cut costs.

    Most monitors will have an operating life. Increase this by keeping them cool. Allow them to breathe. Don't place stuff on top. A small fan could be very promising.
  • There is a small problem with plugging live devices while the power is hot and its not designed for it. The problem is SCR lockup and it is a condition inside integrated circuits where an input is biased beyond the supply rails that can cause the semiconductor junctions to mimic a triggered SCR. The result would lock down the supply rails and heat the IC, possibly to destruction. I suppose most chips nowdays have this worked out, but it used to be something to think about.
  • About bodily fluids in a computer... I had a cat that got a little sick on top of the monitor.

    Good thing it was shut off while I was at work. When I was home, I turned it on, the screen had a slight flicker. I smelled something burning, but could not determine its source. It got real bad. That is when I discovered the smoke. When the cover was off, I had to scrape the shit off the high voltage section. It looked like it was close to catching fire...

    A friend found a great way to destroy a 27 inch TV. Water a plant on the top when the tube is nice and hot. The neck will crack. That TV was a good source of parts for many projects.
  • by zempf ( 4454 )
    I shorted my motherboard once, and the only ill effect it had was that it caused Windows to take 25 minutes to boot. Anyway, once it booted, it ran fine, but it took quite a while to get to that point. Weird stuff.


    -mike kania
  • Sounds realistic....
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • I had a 486SX server motherboard (32 simm slots, 10 isa slots..) that I hooked the cables up to wrong.. it kinda went pop.. never worked again..
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • I once had a professor from the local community college bring in a computer that him and his students built with our parts (I worked at a small computer retailer). He said his keyboard port was bad, because it told him the keyboard was locked when it was not. I opened up the computer and he had the power for the 1/4" FLOPPY DRIVE plugged into the keylock pins on the motherboard.

    The kicker: This guy teached a intro to computer hardware class.
  • I had a Linux book that reconed it was possible to set up Xfree to cause a monitor to burst into flames. Never tried it myself tho.
  • My only concern is that an intelligent user may be able to use the information in this article to avoid destroying his computer. I accordingly urge everyone to e-mail the author to revoke his article until it can be effectively stripped of all information that may help such a user.

  • My apologies. I forgot "intelligent user" was an oxymoron. Please ignore the previous post.

  • Guess I'll chip in my two cents.

    Back when I was still using a 486, I was having some trouble with a game controller. I reached in back of the running machine to make sure the plug was firmly seated in the game port and **POP**!! The screen went blank, the fans stopped turning and I got this terrible sinking feeling. But luck was with me that day - all I had to do was unplug the sound card and put it back in again, then all was well. (Everything was securely fastened and properly aligned to begin with - so I still don't know exactly what went wrong.) Needless to say that was the very LAST time I touched any wires on a running machine.
  • Overclocking

    Overclocking is an important part of any computer upgrade, because it makes your chips go much faster. However, you have to be careful when you overclock because sometimes, overclocking a chip can cause it to work incorrectly or damage it.

    I learned this lesson many years ago when I overclocked my 286 chip to 300 MHz. (That's 286 MHz, right?) Well at this point the chip stopped working.

    Computer chips work on blue smoke. I know this because when the blue smoke left the 286, it didn't work no more.

  • The problem is SCR lockup and it is a condition inside integrated circuits where an input is biased beyond the supply rails that can cause the semiconductor junctions to mimic a triggered SCR. The result would lock down the supply rails and heat the IC, possibly to destruction. I suppose most chips nowdays have this worked out, but it used to be something to think about.


    This is indeed addressed in modern IC designs, though I don't know if it's implemented widely outside of CMOS. For CMOS circuits, you just place a fair number of "ohmic contacts" between the supply rails and substrate regions/wells. This ensures that even if a voltage spike forward-biases a junction that should never be forward-biased, it will be pulled back to the proper voltage levels in short order regardless of SCR effects.


    OTOH, hot-swapping components that weren't designed to be hot-swapped is still usually a Bad Idea...

  • Another way to destroy hardware is to find some way to put the power cable for a hard drive upside down. There is something about 12 Volts that 5 Volt components just don't like one bit. What's also great about this is that the hard drive won't spin up and one might wonder if the power cable wasn't put in properly. Oh yeah and the smell isn't too pleasent either. :)

    I've also done some really stupid things in my life like adjusting a potentiometer with a metal screwdriver on a monitor with the case off and the monitor on.
  • Hah!
    Ever try installing ram in a 9500?
    First you need a flathead to open the case, then you must remove every single pci card (not easy in a fully loaded Pro-tools system) and the processor daughterboard.
    Then you have to unplug all the cables to the logic board (motherboard to the rest of us)and remove the fiddly little plastic assembly that holds the leds and power button (i think you need apple authorised fingers to do it properly).
    Then you use a philips head screwdriver to unscrew the logicboard, and slimpy slide it out (harder than it sounds, (lots a little plastic clippy things))
    Then you pop in the ram, and do it all backwards to re-assemble.
    Remove the motherboard to upgrade the ram. Someone was thinking.......
  • The best thing I probably ever did was trying to force RAM into a simm slot by pushing it in vertically (don't ask me what i was thinking). Not only did I break the cheap plastic the holds the ram it, but I shorted out my motherboard as well.
  • I've got an old 486 box that partially fried. I plugged the 3.5 floppy cable in one pin off because I bumped it while installing a new hdd.. as I was hurrying to get the stuff plugged back in. 2 minutes after powering up the PC I wondered why the floppy light wouldn't shut off, 3 minutes later I wondered why black smoke was coming out of my machine. I looked and saw that the power cable was melted, along with another cable close by.

    After powering off, I ended up clipping the melted cable and duct-taping the others it oozed on. I've got the floppy still running in another 486 box to this day. It's not the most reliable, but it still works. Quite amazing! The power supply still works, too, although I occasionaly smell smoke every now and then...

  • My favorite happened at a company that I worked for. We used DEC to repair our Mac IIci's in our remote offices (like in North Dakota).

    We had a failed HD in one Mac. The tech unhooked everything from the back of the Mac and replaced the HD. He then hooked the monitor up to the AUI port on the Ethernet Card.

    It stated smoking. So he turned it off, then drove 3 hours back to his supplier. The next morning he drove back for 3 hours, replaced the NIC and then promply plugged the monitor right back into the AUI port again.

    More Smoke. He got it right the third time. That made for 18 hours of driving time. All because he could not plug a monitor into the port with the picture of a monitor on it.

    That reminds me of a joke:
    Q: How long does it take for a DEC engineer to replace a lightbulb.
    A: It depends on how many trips to his car until he runs out of spair bulbs.
  • With all the computers I have put together, I have never been able to break the computer while the case was off. Maybe I didn't use enough force.
    In climates like here in Perth, leaving a fan disconnected (or if it stops) will do a lot more damage.

    Over the years, I have destroyed two network cards -- one through overheating (the computer was in a room with bad ventilation and it was 40 degrees C outside. There was smoke comming out through the fan) and two by lightning, a motherboard (it was a long time ago, but I know a capacitor exploded), and a few other components.
  • by AmirS ( 15116 )
    Heh, me too, lots of white smoke being expelled by the fan. Jeez, the speed at which I hit the power-off button...

    There was a good reason though -- I was experimenting with making my own joystick with two potentiometers and a couple of microswitches. I had a load of wires plugged directly in to the little holes in the female joystick port on the SB card in my PC.

    Made a little adjustment, plugged of the wires back into the wrong hole, and cay you say "short circuit" :) -- well it was a long time ago when i was young
  • Been there, done that, shame about the blue smoke, on mine I heard a fuse go "pop".

    Had to open the PSU (naturally marked 'do not open') remove a few bits, until, right at the bottom, I found the fuse wich had blown then spent 15 mins trying to get a new one back in cos it wasn't designed to be replaceable. -- 'duh'!
  • Very recently (this last week I believe) I had a ribbon cabling problem that just wouldn't go away. I took a closer look at the cable and drive, and it turns out the ribbon was keyed the wrong way. I had to gouge out part of the socket to plug in the miskeyed ribbon...

    ...I haven't had to match up the red wire with pin 1 in years!
  • By far the simpilest and easiesy way to destroy a perfectly working piece of computing power doesn't even involve opening the case. All you have to do is install M$ Windows 98 :)

    I have found that the best way to make any perfectly good computer unusable and worthless :)

    surprised the article didn't mention that
  • Back when I did hardware, my favourite job was kicking in the CRT before scrapping monitors, I LOVED that pop.
  • In my last job, I was doing a RAM upgrade on an pre-war 486 (Gulf War, obviously), the box had 1Mb, in 4 256K SIMMS, I removed the old SIMMS, and the clips, which more attached more on hope than anything else, broke.

    I plugged the new SIMMS, sat them up, and repeatedly rebooted the PC until it found all its RAM.

    I then put the computer on a little pedestal between two desks and jammed the desks against it so that it didn't move.

    If the computer stayed where it was it would be fine, if the moved?

    Don't tell the users, that the thing

  • The site seems to have been /.'ed. Unfortunate [netcraft.com]. There is a mirror here [rr.com].

    Mike
    --

  • or not. It's acting OK now. Now I need to figure out why I couldn't get through earlier...maybe it was the idiots @ RoadRunner again...

    Mike
    --

  • Have the machine crash while verifying a newly formatted SCSI hard drive on a Mac. The old SCSI hard drive will be corrupted, but somewhat usable. Unfortunately, the corrupted hard drive can never be repaired through software means. I once accidentally did this. My new hard drive was spared but my old one was mortally wounded. It still worked for a while, but worked worse and worse until my computer didn't even register its existance anymore.
  • I cant help but comment on the irony of not needing a screwdriver to open the case, and not being able to do anything inside with one. Every Compaq I've opened has had some sort of screwy backplane setup, chinese puzzle box drive bays, and their own crazy form factor. If you want do destroy a computer, destroy a Compaq. But at least do it right, chainsaws, sledgehammers, and flamethrowers are the minimum recommended tools. I dont want to have pieces to put back together.
  • Since my last major upgrade in September, I've fried my motherboard twice(once by mucking around with KBPO, once by moving it 4 feet to the left... never did figure out what happened there), and I managed to catch my power supply on fire by overloading it(HINT: a 235Watt can't push 240 Watts). And that's just MY computer. You don't want to know what my sister's done to hers!

  • In reply to your statement about screws, I've had a couple of Commodore Amigas... One of them had not flat-head screws, but very soft aluminium posidrive screws, which I proceeded to completely strip when using a much larger phillips screwdriver. Eventually they got so bad I had to cut slots in them with a knife and undo them using those.

    And that certainly wasn't the worst thing I did to that computer... soldering wires directly onto an edge-connector, cutting tracks on the motherboard.. it lasting a surprisingly long time considering. :-)

    The other Amiga, fortunately, had standard phillips screws.
  • Accually, inladen in the humor of it all the article accually is a very good do's and don't for the person who is looking into doing an upgrade themselves. Very good suggestions, like being careful shorting out the bottom of your hardrive, while its sitting on your chasis, is usually something a person learns the hard way. Or are you accually not wanting people to read this so you can keep your job -grin- heeh jk
  • This kind of struck home (among other things :)

    When connecting an older style, "AT" power supply to a motherboard, the two-part power connector offers a marvellous opportunity for destruction. Make sure at all costs to avoid the plug configuration shown below.
    This configuration, with the black wires towards the centre, will cause the computer to work perfectly. Reversing the two plugs so that the red wires are towards the centre will, gratifyingly, destroy the motherboard.


    If only I had know that when I was putting together my new Linux box :) Fortunately, there was no damage, the computer just wouldn't turn on. All I can say is that someone wasn't thinking when they made it so you can switch the two conectors...
  • was my flatmate... He wasn't doing anything unusual - in the middle of a quake2 DM. Suddenly the picture shrunk to a dot, then expanded back. Then it did it again. Then it shrunk, more slowly this time, to a dot, and blinked out. We were looking at each other, slightly confused, when it made a loud-ish bang, and a big puff of smoke billowed out of the back.

    Oddly enough, it didn't do much, after that...

    -r13

  • This has nothing to do with static.

    It seems that on many (most?) PC motherboards, one side of the speaker connector is constantly at +5V relative to the chassis, not 0 as you might expect. I once managed to destroy a speaker by mis-connecting it across the +5 side of the speaker header and one of the ground pins for one of the LEDs, and leaving it that way for a while before realizing there wasn't any sound.

  • And have you noticed that when they decide to destroy a computer they are almost guaranteed to destroy the monitor first, or even only....isn't that like killing the messenger?

    Monitors have rights, too.
  • There's an Apple logo on the left side of that page. Any conclusions to be drawn from this?
  • I managed to split a processor in half messing with a compaq 486 lacking proper indication of chip corner alignment. Sloppiness is okay when the subject is a dumpster-dive-recovery.
  • Some people are required to destroy their computers - at my place of employment we spend a lot of time developing appropriate methods. I actually enjoy the rare occasion when I get the pleasure of destroying some equipment (usualy security has all the fun).
  • For some reason (??) the black wire on my pc speaker decided to short out one day. Fire + Computer == BAD. Lot's of smoke, really bad smell, mental breakdown. It's a horible experience knowing that your baby is on fire.

    "more human than human, that's our moto" -BladeRunner
  • Accually, it makes your wallet more neat and tidy, with none of that green paper left in there to mess it up.
  • Hey hey, I'm all for destroying stuff. However, at any point in a movie or tv show, when I see a character destroy a computer I immediatly become heart broken. Computers have feelings too you know. I think I should start a A.D.C.H.(U.I.H.L.I.)P.F.A. club.

    (That's Anti Destroying Computers (Unless It Has Linux Installed) Prevention For America.)

    Yep, Just another waste of time organization that has a bunch of single-minded people with little to no thought in their head besides selfish ideas.

    Just another weird rant by a weird guy.

    ---
    Jon Berube
    PovRayMan
    ---
  • I have no problem with Linux, and I know for a fact it IS better than any microsoft OS. I meant was that destroying computers can be fun, but NOT fun if it had Linux on it. Guess I should have been more explicit the first time, eh?

    ---
    Jon Berube
    PovRayMan
    ---

  • The worst I've done is fried an LED display, trying to screw it back into place while the computer was on, after adjusting it to show some strange Mhz amount.

    But I didn't learn my lesson quickly enough, as later that very same day, I was screwing something back into the case, again with the computer on (how else?). The screw jumped out from under the screwdriver, and landed on top of the modem... one coruscating electrical bolt later, my computer had rebooted. Fortunately, nothing got fried. Needless to say, I've been very careful since. :-)

  • A few of the things are true but man I almost fell out of my chair reading that article.

    First of all the guy mentions all these weird screws. Personally, I've opended up a whole bunch of computer cases (Apple, Commodore, Gateway, Sony, Packard Bell, Compaq, and a few others) and all of the screws are flat head.

    Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.
  • I kinda missed the Amigas in my upgrade path. i had/have a Commodore Plus 4, down electrical storms. I know my 286 was the last Commodore, but I'm trying to remmber if my PC10 was one too.

    Personally, I think companies go through phases which they change their screws. People complain about weird ones and they switch back.
  • I do tech support as well and I can say two things:

    1) User's don't need the help, they know all this already

    2) If the users had this, they wouldn't read it anyway
  • I think I remember seeing this in PC Magazine several years ago. Gets a great response every time.
  • My problem is...I know how to fix computers but MS machines seem to freeze in fear when they see me...
  • Maybe I am just putting Linux on too many of those computers "Designed for Windows 95"
  • Crystal Light. That stuff is lethal!

    Right Nate? :)

    Kas

    --
  • A friend rosted his Powersupply last week, after he tried out what this nice red switch on the back of his case might be... Good example of WIN-DAU mentality: don't know what it is? Try it!

    Well, 110V arn't 220V, are they?
  • Well I had an old pizza box sparc,
    and it only had a Com Terminal as there was no video card.

    One day a guy I know gave me one he had lying around cool, me thinks. I put it in, put a monitor on it and fired up the machine.

    Of course, nothing worked. I eventually got so frustrated that I stabbed it with a screw driver.
    BANG !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Fried the card, but the sparc was ok.
    phew!!!!!!!

    Found out later that the reason the "spare" monitor was lying around, was cos it was broken too.
  • Sticking an AGP card in your PCI slot
  • What kind of idiot would write an atricle like that?
  • An even better question is, What kind of idiot would mock the idiot who mocked the author when he hasn't read the article?
  • Geez, I tell you, this article doesn't begin to
    tell some of the important do's and donts to keep an intact computer. They don't even metion the hazard of urionation, and defication directly on the power suppy, or processor. Don't forget hitting your machine repetedly with large hard objects, and then proceeding spray arisal air freshioners all over glowing oblects when you start to smell burning silicon... I tell you, there are some things that really should be added...

  • A friend of mine showed me the most brilliant thing I have ever seen!

    And old 486 motherboard had shorted out somewhere and burnt a gaping hole through the board itself. The funny thing is, that it'd only damaged half of the RAM in the machine, two SIMM's worked fine and the other two were screwed.... go figure!!!..


  • I have had a friend who decided that plugging in her new power supply would be much easier than waiting for the resident geek to do it for her later that evening. She told me that it was difficult to plug it into the motherboard, but she finally got them in, but sparks flew when she plugged in her computer to the wall. I looked and the reds were inward.

    This wound up not only destroying the motherboard and power supply, but also destroying all of the devices she had in there (HD controller, video card, sound card, etc - it was an old 486).

    Then, of course, she yelled at me for breaking her computer. Denial is always the first step...
  • Once (a long long time ago) I was updating the firmware on my Amiga's SCSI controller... and, like a genius, I plugged the EPROMs in backward...

    Gee, I never knew they lit up! :)
  • As a tech support guy who gets paid by the hour instead of by the job, I implore the general public to ignore this heretical article as it cuts into my valuable quake playing time.

    Please please, if you don't know what your doing, don't open up your computer, or even look at it wrong. (Don't understimate the look, I, as a good techie, only have to open the case to fix computers, they're scared of me) looks are powerful.
  • Keyed ribbon cables!? What else have I been missing!?
  • Hey whats your problem with linux?! Linux can beat windows 98 (or any other microsoft product) any day! If you think windows is better than linux than you got problems! Even if it has windows on it you should not hurt the computer! it is like killing some one bacasue they cew a specific type of gum. Poor computers! P.A.C.K (people against computer killers) Iamsleepy

  • I have yet to see it, but I've heard a story about a user who brought their computer in complaining that the built in cup holder doesn't work anymore. It took the tech a second to figure out what the person was talking about, but you can imagine his the expression on his face when he did.

    :)

    Steven

    "Television is the retina of the mind's eye."
    -From "Minds Eye", on the Tempest 2K soundtrack.


  • Crystal light? I found a much better way to destroy your computer is to turn it on end and spoon in oatmeal and honey. Once you think you can't get any more in, violently jab the spoon into your floppy drive. . .

    Josh
  • All i can say, Grin.

    heh

With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?

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