Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005
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I never put a lid on my tower. I had it on the floor under the desk and I hardly saw it except to feel around for the power switch for a while. My sound went out.
I hardly ever saw anything, but the sound went out because of mouse shit on my soundcard. It also somehow screwed up the BIOS. It still ran but had some quirks.
Mouse poop !
I'm in the TV business and a bit resourceful. A long time ago they had these five foot TVs that were all the rage. They had the screen on top, a mirror sticking out front and the box on the floor projected. I had the only one in the world with perfect alignment I might add. I kept it for about four years and broke even on it, sold it for what I payed for it.
Well I had access to the factory service manual and inside was a list of common defects. The VERY first one, the most common was "Mouse corpse across HV tripler terminals causing failure of HOT". I am not kidding. It was an Advent 60" and you can probably confirm this somewhere if necessary.
See there was about seven thousand volts of high frequency AC fed to the tripler and the poor little meeses just couldn't handle the "shock" of the experience. I've been burned, it burnt through my skin and made a hole in my finger, literally. No bleeding, it was cauterized on the fly, so to speak. I bet it was alot of fun for a mouse.
Sorry if you consider this a hijack, but I even have one more. When I lived upstairs I had my speaker wires under the carpet. Not that I am neat or anything, I just got sick of people tripping over them and yakning them out. Well I also used to play alot of guitar, electric guitar and I have this style, well you could put a mike two houses away and get good effects and sustain to say the least. I pounded those strings hard and frequently broke them. Don't get me wrong, it sounded good but almost every week I was at the music store to get more strings.
Well I had the speaker wires spliced, but being so smart with my almost tenth grade education, I cut the wires of the zip cord to stagger the actual places where the wires were twisted. The rest was insulated and for a time I was quite happy with my plan, which worked and did not require any tape or anything. I was so smug until one day.
One channel goes out. This is not good, this is a low impedance amp and I just can't go buy one like it at the drop of a hat. I am checking it out and the right side is out. But the left is fine. When I turn the balance to the right the lights in the house dim. I am serious. Yes they would dim when I cranked it up, but now they dimmed more. I reasoned that it was indeed putting out the power, which ruled out the input wires, setting on the source (my main PC) or anything else.
I discovered that a stray guitar string had found it's way under the carpet and shorted the wires out, despit the fact they were staggered. The guitar string ran paral;ell to the wire just long enogh to do it. What's more it had WELDED itself to the wires !. I mean the wires would pull apart, they were only twisted, but not I have what, nickel plated stainless steel welding it together ? Yes, that is exactly what I had.
This is not just one of those you heard it here first, it's more of a you heard it here only. I have never heard of anything like this happening before, to anyone, and I am not holding my breath waiting for the next time.
I actually sometimes get a laught out of some of the off the wall shit at work, but it is too technical to really go into. But I have more that have to do with cars. If it has a wierd problem, I probably bought it. Don't get me wrong, solving these problems can be very fruitful. My Dad bought me my first car for $225, if I hadn't wrecked it it would be worth about $20,000 today. I found out things, many things during those days.
In a PC you can find times when a MODEM can fry the BIOS in a mobo so bad there is no coming back. One bad connection on a RAM receptacle can wipe out a hardddrive permanently. That is a playground which I do not frequent anyomre.
That is why I no longer work on PCs. Of all the shit that can happen, it can happen to PCs the worst. People get pissed and it is all my fault, no matter what they did. Fuck all that. What I do now is bad enough.
What I do at work would blow your mind. It's like a mechanic finding out that a bad radiator cap is knocking the radio out of alignment and that's why the reception is so bad. I am serious, it has been that far fetched.
All in all, technology has gotten way out of hand. We don't really need all this. It is all nice and cool when it works, but when it stops, you might as well shoot yourself these days.
T
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