Lifelong Learning - Hardware Assembly

[mr.mark]

Seeing that everyone trudging through the forums are on a journey of seeking an answer to their problems. I'd like to add something to lighten the mood and make it a more pleasant journey.

In the process of learning about computers, I've made a lot of mistakes. Often devastating or hilarious blunders. Through those errors, I learned what to look out for, what works and what doesn't, and best of all, stories to tell others.

So I'd like to extend the invitation of telling your own interesting experiences with computer hardware.

Let me begin with a story of mine...

[mr.mark]

Floppy Burnout

Back in 2001, when floppy drives were on every computer, power supplies also had floppy power connectors. They had 4 pins, but horribly designed safety mechanisms.

They looked like this:


It was in high school, and my friend bought a new power supply, so he invited me over to help him switch out the power supply. I had more experience with hardware than he did. It's an easy task, just unplug everything, unmount the power supply brick, mount the new power supply brick, and replug everything.

I demonstrated the first two molex plugs and the motherboard power. I let him do the rest.

Knowing he was the careless type, I should have double checked his work. When he was finished, we put the casing back on (back then, it was those upside down U-shaped enclosures), and turned on the power. The PC hummed, the fans whined, but the screen remained dark. Suddenly...

SMOKE!!

We freaked out and he frantically pressed the power button. I circled around and pulled the plug out from the socket.

We opened the case back up and the plastic on the black/red/yellow wire with the floppy power connector was melted. Turned out he rotated the power connector 180 degrees and made contact with only 3 pins, with the 4th pin left on either side.

It was supposed to be:
1 - 1
2 - 2
3 - 3
4 - 4

But he plugged it like:

1 - _
2 - 4
3 - 3
4 - 2
_ - 1

It caused a short circuit, overheated the wires, melted the plastic that caused the smoke. >_<

Within the hour, we made another trip (second of the day) to CompUSA (back when it was still around) and bought another new power supply. This time we made sure the floppy was correctly connected.

[Britton30]

I fried a floppy drive when I puled the power connector while powered on. I accidentally touched a hot lead to ground or something and hear a tiny spark. Odd thing is I never had any use for the floppy after I got a new one and it now resides in a box in an dark closet.

I currently have a test setup on my desk along with a complete PC. The complete one is powered off. I sometimes use an external drive and it doesn't work, so I go through a bunch of restarts, check if drives are hidden, etc. I finally figuered out I was plugging the drive into the OTHER PC.

[Tradesman]

And who hasn't put a PC together, went to turn it on and ....nothing....only to find the power switch on the PSU was OFF.

[Britton30]

LOL, I haven't done that...yet. I was helping a woman on another forum whose laptop wouldn't stay on. Her battery was run down so I told her to check if it was plugged in. You can guess the rest of the story.

[mr.mark]

Haha... yeah, been there. XD Back when I didn't know whether I or O was on/off, I had trouble powering on my power supply.

When I got my first computer, my dad helped me set it up. Since he had some experience with early 486 and 586 computers, he thought it was a cinch.

However, when it came to turning on the computer, all we got was a crackle on the CRT monitor. We called tech support and waited two hours for the guy to come by our house.

Turned out my dad bent a pin on the VGA plug when he was connecting the monitor. We had to carefully bend the pin back (with quite a bit of strength, since it was a thick pin connector).

From then on, I was careful with any pins, on any socket. Soft wiggle and reinsertion is key. >_<

[Tradesman]

Think my favorite story concerns my oldest son and my ex. He was interested in computers from very young and I'd often take both my boys out to where I worked on weekends, put them in different offices and let them play Doom on the network to stress it a little, this was back in the early nineties when he was about 6-7. Then they both learned to build computers. Believe shortly before he turned 9, his mother ordered a new computer, when it was delivered he called her and asked if he could open the boxes and take a look. She said sure, he called a short while later and said it was working fine. Good so far. Then after she got home, she called me yelling and screaming to get my butt over there and put it back together.....apparently on her arrival home, he told her it needed more memory and led her to the dining room, where he had completely taken it apart and had all the parts, (except the CPU) laid out neatly on the table. Had her put him on the phone, told him to put it back together, and by the time I got there (with the additional RAM he asked for, it was all together (probably neater than when it arrived as he had cable tied the power cable out of the way), and waiting fo the extra ram. My ex had calmed down by then, so all ended well.

[Britton30]

Kids are just amazing aren't they? My son solve Rubik's Cube on his own, I never did.

[mr.mark]

Wow, disassembling and assembling a computer system at the age of 8? That's amazing. I think I was only learning how to ride my bike. =P

In which is another story. My dad taught me how to ride a bike by holding it steady, while I pedaled. Seeing that I'm comfortable pedaling by my third attempt, he releases his hold and I sailed forward, all the while I thought he was still holding onto my bike from behind. When I looked back, he was GONE. I panicked and rode over a speed bump (this was at an empty parking lot). I flew ten feet and crash landed. XD

Kept me off a bike for a week. Haha...

[Tradesman]

We're talking back in the mid nineties, when just about everyone was scared to get into the box, (example my ex was a systems administrator for the Air Force (civilian side) and didn't want anything to do with hardware), I started with mainframes in the early eighties and progressed to minis and PCs. At the time, with the Park Service, I started building our systems because it was cheaper than buying in a box and could get more for my (the Park services money), that was back with the 386/486 CPUs.