How to smash a home computer

Rabies

Have you ever wrecked your computer beyond repair. I have heard of people spilling coffee or tea on top of a laptop or keyboard, thats all fairly tame compared to what was mentioned on the site :eek:

news.bbc.co.uk

One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware

When tidying up his computer folders, one user inadvertently deleted the ones he meant to keep. He only realised he'd made the mistake after emptying the recycle bin and defragging the hard drive

While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.

A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off

mp3guy

well, once i let a screw slip behind the mother board when installing a harddrive, but aother than that, nothing much.

Cake Fiend

Rabies wrote:

One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware

I've used this trick successfully several times.

mp3guy

does it work?

JackKelly

when i was younger, and liked to mess around with the inside of computers without knowing what really was going on, i switched the voltage on the PSU and blew the whole thing up.Apart from that nothing major.

seamus

mp3guy wrote:

does it work?

A person needs to know what they're doing. I'm pretty sure this exec just threw it on top of his frozen peas and ice cream.

That trick saved a chunk of boards.ie's data not too long ago.

ixoy

I installed a CD drive in my old PC once, made redundant from my newer PC. The PC didn't switch on immediately so I thought that the kill switch had been turned on the back. So I flicked it over. Only it wasn't the kill switch...

BANG

*smoke and buring smell*

Me... sad...

Creamy Goodness

seamus wrote:

A person needs to know what they're doing. I'm pretty sure this exec just threw it on top of his frozen peas and ice cream.

That trick saved a chunk of boards.ie's data not too long ago.

how does freezing it save the data?

paddy

It's to do with internal expansion/contraction of components within the disk controller/physical internal discs, due to change in temperature.i.e. once the disk returns to room temp or higher the fault will return, so you have to retrieve your data quite quickly

HTH

FranknFurter

Well, i once saw, a guy in an office block throw his laptop from about the 10th floor in london, nearly killed a street performer dressed as a clown who was in the process of juggling three mobile fones.....an no, i wasnt high at the time lolol

That has to have been one of the strangest things iv ever seen, and one of the most ironic lol.

Hobbes

A neighbour once had me look at his machine that had stopped working. Back in 98/95 days.

He basically did this.
1) remove hard drive from machine (a) and put into machine (b)
2) Copied all of one drive to the other (his data) *
3) Put drive back in machine (a) and formatted machine (b)

* The problem was he did "Copy as shortcut" (I don't know how) and had a machine full of shortcuts to non-existant files.

MrVestek

Lol ohh god that has to be the most moronic thing ever. I once heard of a girl that managed to install linux on her system, completely wiping the hard disk and her operating system and stuff in the process. Think i read this from a magazine like PCFormat where the guy had left a debian cd in it by accident and it booted from the post. She just kept clicking next as she thought there was an error in the system and that this was some kind of backup program. Ahh.... noobs are fun.

KdjaCL

Mate in denamrk was making his laptop faster and deleted Reg Key
Hkey /lots o junk / fonts

How i do not know as he is a noob but tru Windows remote control i seen the only font he had on his PC was Wingdings every thing Start bar the lot all in wingdings.

Altho for future ****ing about with people i membered the reg key needed to do it

kdjac

ToxicPaddy

Rabies wrote:

A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off

A person I know of , took their laptop out of the boot of their car, left it on the
ground in the bag behind the car, got back into the car and reversed over it..
all by mistake of course.. :rolleyes:

The freezer thing works.. Ive done it.. but ya have to make sure to wrap it
tightly in a plastic bag to stop moisture getting into it before putting it into
the freezer..

Tox

MrVestek

Christ i'd kill to be able to afford a laptop. How the hell can anybody be so careless?!

seamus

Achilles wrote:

Christ i'd kill to be able to afford a laptop. How the hell can anybody be so careless?!

Work in a coporate environment where the majority of users are on laptops. The wanton destruction would make you sick. n00bs + tippex + laptops are a bad mix. Not because they are trying to correct their errors, but because they are so bored in training, they revert to schoolchildren and set about "decorating" a €2k piece of equipment in tippex.

:rolleyes:

mayordenis

i have no idea , but i think its moronity more than carelessness

stevenmu

I was working in a bit IT department a few years back. The time came around to "throw out" the out of date stuff so we took turns keeping an eye out for the Guards while the rest of us threw it out a 3rd floor window into a skip. That was the most fun I've ever had with PCs

LegacyUser

left a cappacino on top of a monitor, of course it got knocked over and poured into the back of the monitor, it didn't survive but it smelled nice

MrVestek

Mmmmm roasted cathode tubes...