Funny stories (hardware related).

[BTGBullseye]

If you own a Gateway FX model, you may know about this:

 

My particular model has an interesting feature: there's a compartment for you to slot in extra hard drives. The way this works is that you put the hard drives on these plastic carrier-things, and then you push them into slots. Basically, it allows you to put in extra hard drives without having to open up the case, which is neat, but it seems like something that could have been invented years ago.

Been around since the 80's... They used to use it frequently for SAS drives for corporate mainframes/servers.

[RocketDude]

Huh...guess I'm just new to the concept of pushing hard drives in like a keycard, then, or something.

 

I suppose civilian use is more recent, then?

[Humin]

External Hard Drive Bays.

[Obsidian]

I just went through a box of old electronic boards I used to use as decoration back when I cared about hanging stuff on my wall, and found an old old old Visontek ATi x1950 256mb and a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2.

 

Funny enough, even after being out of use and in a box for several years, both cards worked when I plugged them in LOL.

[ProHypster]

Once, my brother dropped my laptop down the stairs. That is all.

 

Did it survive?

 

No, but miraculously the HDD was still intact, so I was able to plug it into another PC and get my stuff off of it.

Not miraculously but for the same reason black boxes survive on planes. The Hard Drive is usually the last thing that goes on a computer, it's name doesn't lie, it is "hard",the worst problem a Hard Drive can give is usually the infamous blue screen.

 

Anyway around a week ago I spilled water with sugar on my ergonomic keyboard. Like a retard I decided not to unplug it and just wipe the top off. Initailly everything was still working and I was happy, about 2 hours later 50 % of my keyboard died.

 

Unplug keyboard when you spill something on it people.

[Obsidian]

No, but miraculously the HDD was still intact, so I was able to plug it into another PC and get my stuff off of it.

Not miraculously but for the same reason black boxes survive on planes. The Hard Drive is usually the last thing that goes on a computer, it's name doesn't lie, it is "hard",the worst problem a Hard Drive can give is usually the infamous blue screen.

 

Black boxes on air planes don't use hard disk drives, though... And, while I've never had a problem with them, hard drives are susceptible to damage through drops of small distances when not in an case of some kind. Even in a case, they aren't always fully protected.

[ProHypster]

Unintentionally, it is very hard to break a Hard Drive.

 

"Most 3.5" hard disk drives can only withstand shocks of 250 G to 350 G, the smaller 2.5" hard disk drives used in laptops are more robust and can take up to 900 G."

 

One thing that will never brake though is an old Nokia phone, my friend threw one on the ground as hard as he could several times to prove to me that one <_<

[Obsidian]

The iPhone 5 scratches more easily than the iPhone 4/4s.

 

Okay, but seriously, my non-tech savvy friend (who I'm close to calling a tech idiot) thought a Firewire 800 connection was the same as an Ethernet Port. He was so convinced of this that he forced the Firewire 800 plug into the Ethernet port and damaged the male end of the FW cable and possibly the Ethernet port. I probably won't find out if his Ethernet survived since he never uses a hardwire connection for network access. Now, here's the funny part. The enclosure he has is one of those Seagate goflex ones with the swuappable interfaces... he bought it with eSATA... his laptop has eSATA... yet he spent the extra money to get the FW800 adapter that he can't even use without an express card! Doh!

[Humin]

1 year later and I just learn today that my laptop's WiFi/WiMax card can make my laptop into a PAN (personal area network). But it won't be of much use unless I'm anywhere where there's a WiMax tower (which I have never encountered). Seriously, selling a laptop that has a WiMax card where there isn't any WiMax towers around is like, I don't know, selling snow shovels in Florida.

[BTGBullseye]

selling snow shovels in Florida.

Ah, but snow shovels are still used for moving large quantities of sand, or for picking up horse shit during parades in Florida...

[Humin]

So my ipod screen finally cracked, but it's in one of the most benign places possible. Actually it's not even on the screen, it's on the low left corner.

[BTGBullseye]

I just manually forced on 4x Supersampling and highest quality SSAO for Windows Explorer and Waterfox, (a version of Firefox designed and optimized specifically for x64 Windows) and now Accursed Farms loads faster, and all the scrolling goes significantly smoother...

[Humin]

I had waterfox, but it wouldn't stop crashing.

[BTGBullseye]

What version of Waterfox?

[Humin]

Beats me, but it was about 6 months ago.

[BTGBullseye]

Ah, might've been the time when they rolled back an update because it had been improperly compiled...

[Obsidian]

As much as I love it, Ubuntu can be a weird pain in the ass sometimes. I've been putting off upgrading from 12.04 LTS hoping that the 13.04 (or whatever number it'll have) LTS would be out before long, and recently I noticed a weird bug in 12.04. When playing audio through my bluetooth headphones, audio playback and input works just fine. But when I tried playing audio through the physical headphone jacks and HDMI connections on my box, nothing. Not a pop or hiss. I haven't minded this much, since I usually work with the wireless headphones anyway, but today I got an itch to tackle this issue. After hours of rummaging through troubleshooting documents, manually changing config files, uninstalling and installings drivers and applications, I had nearly given up. So, I threw my arms up and decided to see if the issue would magically disappear if I was running 12.10 instead. Two hours later, and I have sound.

[BTGBullseye]

You run Ubuntu, I run Fedora... I've actually never tried Ubuntu.

[Obsidian]

Yeah, lately I've been trying to get into Arch, but I don't have the time to devote to learning it right now.

[BTGBullseye]

I'm still just an absolute beginner, but I can do amazing things with DOS, so it should be fairly easy to move over... (been trying to find decent learning systems that don't force me to listen to the selling points for making businesses want to run Linux, (or the overly technical descriptions of what an operating system is) and that usually takes up a dozen lessons or more)