I am sure a lot of us have done things that are not exactly recommended or proper when it comes to computer hardware. I think it would be fun to share them!
What is the worst sin I have done with computer repair? Believe it or not, Duct Tape!
Years ago had a very low income customer with an ancient obsolete machine, and he wanted to add a second hand CD drive to it. It was not a standard case design, so standard rails would not fit the case... we would have to special order them. He said no way.. he could not afford to order anything extra. So we improvised. I used about a mile of duct tape (carefully) to hold that CD drive into the case. I took the time to explain to him how bad a job it was, and to be very careful. I also showed him how to replace the tape should it come loose.
I have probably permanently ruined my reputation on here by sharing that, and to this day I cringe about it. (I was pretty unhappy with myself at the time too... )
So, what is the worst thing you have done do a computer?
Most Unique/Unusual (Not necessarily good) Computer Repairs
It was in 2003, and I had just got an AMD Athlon XP 2600 motherboard for a build I was doing. I got a really nice board for the time and plenty of RAM, but I had skimped on the power supply. I was already running three hard drives and a cd rom drive, and then I added a promise card and four more hard drives. I had a bunch of hard drives sitting around, and I figured I may as well get some use out of them, even if they were all pretty small. Altogether I think I had about 300GB in there. Well, I had a 400 watt power supply, and it wasn't getting the job done, but I was too broke to afford a bigger one. The case was completely full of hard drives, and there was no room in there for anything else. However, I did have an old 300 watt ATX that I wasn't using for anything. So I had the idea to take the old ATX power supply and mount it on the side of the tower. Then I'd run the cables in through another hole I drilled and power up the remaining hard drives. I drilled some holes in the case and attached it to the outside. It ended up looking like some sort of side-mounted missile launcher, but amazingly enough, it worked. It was only powering the spare hard drives on the promise card. I remember taking it to QuakeCon one year and getting into a debate with some electrical engineer guy who was standing in line with me trying to tell me there was no way the computer would actually power on. He wouldn't believe me that I'd already been using it for about a year. Then I powered it up and he just looked at me like I was crazy and wandered off. I called that thing "Frankenstein." It lasted about 5 years until I dismantled it to use a few bits of it for another build. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done on the cheap. I don't recommend doing that either by the way.
/// JimM /// /// Former Community Manager - Now Humble Internet Citizen/// /// Also Formerly a Technical Support Escalations Engineer ///
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OH wow.. I hadnt even thought about my old promise card in years... I wonder where I put the box it is stored in.....:D
I don't know about the worst thing, but the best thing I could do with my computer would be to throw it out! The amount of time I would save from not being online would allow me to get in 18 holes of golf every day! 😉
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Don't do that! Let Jim and I tinker with it.. Between his drills and my duct tape, i am sure we can come up with something.... well, just something!@ wrote:
I don't know about the worst thing, but the best thing I could do with my computer would be to throw it out! The amount of time I would save from not being online would allow me to get in 18 holes of golf every day! ;)
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About a year ago, I didn't ground myself out when installing a new graphics card and ram and I fried a mobo. I also ran my machine on a 400w power supply that couldn't quite cut it and the power supply went out and shortly after a mobo did as well (I replaced the mobo with a warranty both times luckily).
I have also bent the gold pins on the mobo when replacing a CPU... lol.
I have also bent the gold pins on the mobo when replacing a CPU... lol.
Mike R Social Media Manager
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I had a hard drive failing last year but it had some documents and programs on it that I wanted to salvage. Quick troubleshooting determined that the logic board was failing and a drive IC was overheating. As long as I could keep the IC cool I could make the drive run. So, nothing else to do, I pulled the drive out of the case keeping attached to the cables. I put some ice in a zip-lock bag and placed it on top of the logic board over the IC. I was able to pull out all of the data from the drive quite easily.
Ice, ice, baby!!!
Ice, ice, baby!!!
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Eeek! Watch out for condensation messing with ice around electronics.
Yep! Since I had the drive outside of the computer, and since the drive was failing anyway, I did not have much to lose.@ wrote:
Eeek! Watch out for condensation messing with ice around electronics.
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