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Have you ever purposely distroyed any computer hardware?

Ryan

Ryan

Lifer
I decided to distroy a old 386 last night 🙂 I was taking metal wire and just running it around certain parts of the motherboard - watching sparks fly, and I watched as windows was acting really funny. It was fun. I also distroyed the hard drive, removed all but to pieces of ram from the video card, put various substances on the electrical parts, and a bunch of other crap! Have you ever done it?

<------------------------BTW - ONLY 1 more post until 3000 🙂

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AnandTech Moderator

 
haha, nicely done. Sounds like a good evening of fun. I remember back when I was a computer noob, I tried to take the CD drive outta my Dell so I could stick a DVD drive in there. I thought there were screws on one side only, so I unscrewed them, and tried to pull that sucker out. For several hours I thought it was just wedged in and kept on tugging and tugging. So finally I decide to take a hammer and a screwdriver to this drive, and I rip it apart completely. Opened it up, snapped off the part that comes out, ripped out the board, the motor, and all that good stuff... but the metal casing STILL wouldn't budge. Then I looked on the dell website and found instructions on how to remove the other siding of the case, and saw 2 screws still in there. At least nobody was around to witness this hardware travesty. 😀
 


<< haha, nicely done. Sounds like a good evening of fun. I remember back when I was a computer noob, I tried to take the CD drive outta my Dell so I could stick a DVD drive in there. I thought there were screws on one side only, so I unscrewed them, and tried to pull that sucker out. For several hours I thought it was just wedged in and kept on tugging and tugging. So finally I decide to take a hammer and a screwdriver to this drive, and I rip it apart completely. Opened it up, snapped off the part that comes out, ripped out the board, the motor, and all that good stuff... but the metal casing STILL wouldn't budge. Then I looked on the dell website and found instructions on how to remove the other siding of the case, and saw 2 screws still in there. At least nobody was around to witness this hardware travesty. 😀 >>



LMAO!
 
Once I accidentally dropped a 1GB hard drive (only this summer...) I noticed after the fall that the vacuum seal had been broken quite badly.
It was obvious this drive would never work again, so I took it for a walk with me. 🙂
Every few feet I would toss it in the air and let it hit the sidewalk- pick it up, bash it against a brick wall, toss it again, kick it, whack it...
By the time I got to my wife's office to say hello, the thing was in total shambles and falling to pieces... rather amusing. 🙂
Then I went to Radio Shack, plunked it down on the counter and said, "This drive I bought doesn't work anymore!"
hee hee...
Then I went to MTS Telecommunications and plunked the drive down on the desk saying, "Your high speed access is so terrible THIS is what happened to my hard drive!!"

That was a fun way to put down a dead drive. 😀😀😀
 
I'll have to tear apart the the HD that way 🙂

<-------------BTW - I'm diamond now 🙂
 
i went officespace on a 486 last summer.

me some of my buddies and my bro took the entire pc to the park whipped out some baseball bats and beat the sh!t out of it it was fun as hell(we took my bro to videotape)
 
haha i have. after upgrading some parts once i had me an obsolete P200 motherboard lying around. me and a friend were board so we sprayed electrical contact cleaner all over it, and lit it. nothing was happening to fast so we used a deoderant can as a flamethrower. this fire became kinda out of control as we'd sprayed so much fuel onto there. we panicked as it was in my room on the carpet we were doing this 'cough cough' so we threw it out the window and it went out 🙂
 


<< Once I accidentally dropped a 1GB hard drive (only this summer...) I noticed after the fall that the vacuum seal had been broken quite badly.
It was obvious this drive would never work again, so I took it for a walk with me. 🙂
Every few feet I would toss it in the air and let it hit the sidewalk- pick it up, bash it against a brick wall, toss it again, kick it, whack it...
By the time I got to my wife's office to say hello, the thing was in total shambles and falling to pieces... rather amusing. 🙂
Then I went to Radio Shack, plunked it down on the counter and said, "This drive I bought doesn't work anymore!"
hee hee...
Then I went to MTS Telecommunications and plunked the drive down on the desk saying, "Your high speed access is so terrible THIS is what happened to my hard drive!!"

That was a fun way to put down a dead drive. 😀😀😀 >>




LOOOLLLLLL 🙂)))

 
Thanks guys 😉 I had fun with that drive... it took my mind off the fact I was stupid enough to drop a drive I actually wanted to use in a 486 I was going to make a workstation out of. 🙁
Edit: I wish you could have seen the guy's face when I brought it to the desk at Radio Shack... hee hee 😀
 
I used an old 386 motherboard as a series of golf tees. Watching the capacitors fly off was most cathartic.
 
Yes, I destoyed a dead motherboard. Simply beat the sh!t out of it with a hammer, I thought the most fun part was squishing the capacitors out of existence.

I felt much better afterwards for having done it too. 😀
 
I had a harddrive with important information on it, and rather than do something stupid like get rid of the data the easy way, i unscrewed it, wrapped it in a towel, and took a hammer to it repeatedly. I understand that you could still get data off such a harddrive, but it would take a helluvalot of effort 🙂
 
No, but I can think of a few pieces of hardware that I'd LOVE to smash to bits. Sometimes computers are that frustrating.

It's really a terrible, terrible addiction - they should have twelve step plans for hardware junkies...
 
2 laptop hard drives, an IDE hard drive, a keyboard (we tired to blow traces off the PCB), an ancient mac laptop, a dell 17" trinitron, a few fans, and some power supplies.
 
I think the most fun i had destroying hardware was a mac classic, took it, painted the mac dead face on it with white out (if you dont know what that is its when a mac fails to boot properly) loaded it with powder from fireworks, set it in the middle of the road and lit it 😀. Though it didnt blow up right away it made quite a light show. After this one of my friends picked it up by the handle and chunked it down the road smashing it, after several more rounds of fireworks, digital photography and smoke bombs we had one dead mac and alot of fun. Ill email my friend with the camera and see if he still has all of the pics!

🙂
 
I built a computer for a lady and she gave me her old non working 386 with keyboard, monitor, speakers, and mouse. Me and 5 buddies of mine then went to the range with 5 .22's (4 rifles and one pistol), 9mm ruger pistol, .30-06, 7mm mag, and .257 Roberts (the last three for those who don't know are high powered rifles). We probably shot close to 3000 rounds that night at the computer. It was EXTREMELY fun. The computer looked so bad, swiss cheese looked 100 times better than the computer. I took tons of pictures and video clips but lost all of them b/c I didn't save them when I f disked last time 🙁 I will do it again soon though, I have two broken printers and some trigger hapy friends on stand by 😀
 


<< painted the mac dead face on it with white out >>



Veeery nice touch... lends a bit of class to the whole operation.
 
Good grief, I thought I was demented... I have a tv tuner card sitting here that would still work in a 9x or Me machine but I've upgraded to XP and now it doesn't work and Avermedia doesn't make XP drivers for it cuz its so old. And I lost the cables and the company wants 20 bucks for a new set - f that. I think I'll have some fun with a dremel...
 
Well, I did hit my power switch on my AT case with a screwdriver once - it fell apart internally, the contacts bridged, and it went pop - nice shower of sparks, melted the corner off a 400mb HDD I had...

I've blown a modem apart (ie; traces came off PCB, components literally shattering) with a faulty AC adaptor that just put 240v AC striaght thru to a 9v DC device...

Ummm - I took the cover off an old 3000RPM 600mb Full-Height SCSI drive while it was spinning, and drew nice patterns on the platters with 2 wires coming off a car battery...

And I turned an old Cyrix system into a coaster of sorts;

I took a PR200+, de-clocked it to 133, covered the rest of the mainboard in plastic, leaving only the CPU exposed, took the heatsink off, soldered a platter from an old Bigfoot HDD onto the top of the CPU, and used the whole thing as a desktop coffee cup coaster/warmer.

Useful if you're like me and get engrossed in what you're doing - leaving your coffee to go cold... well no longer!

(BTW; I did leave the system operational initially, it only took an hour or so before it was unstable, after that I just had the board on my desk with only power to it - judging by the colour of the PCB under the chip i'd say it's not really operational anymore. But it still powers the chip...)
 
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