Hardware back from the grave!

[Painman]

This is just damn strange. Almost 2 years ago now, in about April of 2003, I had my VisionTek GF4 Ti4600 card out of the system in order to clean the dust out of its HSF. When I put it back in, all it would do is display a solid baby blue screen. I tried a bunch of stuff, cleaned the edge contacts, reseated the HSF, put it into a different machine... nothing. It was dead, and so was the company that made it - VisionTek was in bankruptcy at the time. Even though it appeared to be my fault that it croaked (thought it must have been ESD), I couldn't RMA it even if I wanted to. It was a painful loss, but I sucked it up, opened the 'ol wallet and replaced it with a 9700 Pro.

So, the card has spent the last 2 years sitting up on the top of my computer desk as part of my little Dead Hardware gallery, until today... just for fun and games I stuck it into my legacy gaming box's AGP slot to see what would happen.

IT WORKS! :shocked:

I really have no idea why it stopped working 2 years ago, maybe I could have troubleshooted some more, not sure what else I shoulda done... it really acted like it was kaput... what might have changed in that time it spent gathering dust and acting as a conversation piece? I really haven't been particularly careful with it since its apparent demise. I suppose I'll leave it in the legacy gaming box... I have nowhere else to put it, and a card that good shouldn't sit collecting dust... it's way too much video card for that machine, so I guess I'll be playing some of the classics now with lots of AA and AF!

Has anyone else had something like this happen with their hardware?

 

[compusaguy]

Oh yeah. I have a laptop that acts like the ethernet port is dead. In a lightning storm, when the power goes off, it'll restart and I get the dreaded LAN disconnected taskbar icon notice. I turn it off and leave it alone for 8 hours, restart and it's back to normal. This happened like 5 times. Then once I unplugged the powerbrick directly from the machine, and the ethernet port wouldn't work for a month straight. I just used a USB ethernet adapter in place, if you were wondering. Anyway, one day I turn it on and lo and behold it works again.

 

[hemiram]

I had a friend's PC I was working on a couple of years ago. He was getting kind of a tic-tac-toe pattern on his monitor, and I swapped an old card I had and it fixed it, so I ordered him a new vid card, and he was all set. I tried the card in another PC and got the same thing, so I figured it was dead. I tossed it into a drawer, and forgot about it for a year.

One night, my vid card died, the board cracked near the monitor plug and it was trash. Nobody I knew that might have one was awake at 4am, and so I started looking for anything at all, just to get online to order a card at New Egg. All I had was the "junk" card, so I tried it, and it worked fine. I used it for 3 days until my new card came, and then tried it in a "backup PC" i had just in case of another problem like this, and it worked and kept working and still works in a friend's kid's PC.

A friend sold me a radio where the memory backup battery alert kept beeping, even after it was replaced. He sent it to the service place and they wanted 200 bucks to fix it. He just sold it to me for 50 instead. I figured I could find the right place and just disable the alert completely. I get it home, put a new battery in it, and fired it up, works great!
And 3 years later, it still does! He wasn't happy about that at all when I told him.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, That's usually a sign that the card wasn't the problem in the first place. Happens real often when you do a lot of repair work. Jim