The Graveyard

[xane]

Another one bites the dust, the dead PSU sails over xane's shoulder to join the other four in the pile.

Running totals in my "graveyard":

PSU: 5
Mobo: 4*
CPU: 3
HDD: 3
FDD: 3
Monitor: 2
Video Card: 1
RAM: 1
CD-ROM: 1

* only two motherboards strictly classified as "dead", others are dead in parts; keyboard socket, on-board soundcard, etc.

Share your morgue statistics.

 

[Custodian]

What time period to collect that?
And what the hell do you do to kill it all?

I don't have any dead kit around, just a small pile of old kit that has no use, like PII CPU, couple of old vid boards (e.g. voodoo2 & TNT), that sorta thing.

 

[Xavier]

Another one bites the dust, the dead PSU sails over xane's shoulder to join the other four in the pile.

Running totals in my "graveyard":

PSU: 5
Mobo: 4*
CPU: 3
HDD: 3
FDD: 3
Monitor: 2
Video Card: 1
RAM: 1
CD-ROM: 1

* only two motherboards strictly classified as "dead", others are dead in parts; keyboard socket, on-board soundcard, etc.

Share your morgue statistics.

I've only had one piece of kit fail in my systems, more than anything else because I swap my spec around at an alarming rate... it too was a PSU, working fine one moment, then after a rather odd BSOD (first I've seen on that install of XP) the system refused to boot and the LEDs flickered ominously, so I ripped out the power cable and moved my drives into another system...

I think that it might have been down to the fact that I had watercooling + P4 with a stack of PCI cards, SCSI devices and storage all running off a lowly 350 watts, but i could be mistaken

 

[Ch3tan]

One mobo, two sticks of ram, an s3 virge (shudders) and two monitors -oh and a very old very small hard drive.

 

[tRoG]

Errr...

I've had a broken PSU.

Once.

This may have something to do with the very sparse amount of cash in my 'computing fund'.

 

[Jonty]

*Jonty starts a 'Xane's Hardware Fund'*

You poor thing, what happens to your hardware?! hehe. Do you have a somewhat eratic electric supply in your area? As I recall I've only ever had one piece of hardware die on me, a CRT monitor, and even that still functioned, albeit in a blurry manner.

Kind Regards

 

[Clown]

My graveyard? A GF4 fan that the makers replaced. How do you manage to break all that stuff?

 

[Xavier]

It might be a good idea to get yourself a UPS, on top of the obvious power cut benefits it will smooth out the power to your PC better than any surge protector...

5 PSUs failed is an alarmingly high number, over how long was that?

 

[Xavier]

Ooh, just remembered that we've got two graphcis cards which are fubar, think we're going to start building a stack of kit to shoot to pieces in the spring - anyone with any old dead gear they'd like to see blown to smithereens in the name of journalism PM myself or Wilier

 

[fatbusinessman]

All I've had break on me has been a hard disk.

And even then it didn't have any irrecoverable data on it

 

[old.user4556]

I have a dead:

GF4 Ti4400
Maxtor 20 Gb hard disk
A Creative Labs CD-RW 32x8x4 iirc
A Hitachi DVD drive
A Teac 48 speed CD-RW
Lots of floppy cables
Floppy drive

G

 

[Zephirus]

ooh christ.. 3 psu's, gf2 ultra (h/s fan died and card cooked) 5 mainboards (2 440bx boards, 3 kt133x boards ) 4 hard drives (2x40gb, 1x10, 1x60), and a couple of nic's. Oh and my linksys besfr41 thingy that gave up the ghost because linksys's latest firmware caused it to fall over every 3 mins, oh and 2 cable modem (curse crappy ntl suppliers)

 

[Xavier]

ooh christ.. 3 psu's, gf2 ultra (h/s fan died and card cooked) 5 mainboards (2 440bx boards, 3 kt133x boards ) 4 hard drives (2x40gb, 1x10, 1x60), and a couple of nic's. Oh and my linksys besfr41 thingy that gave up the ghost because linksys's latest firmware caused it to fall over every 3 mins, oh and 2 cable modem (curse crappy ntl suppliers)

actually, good point, my 54g router went flaky after installing a firmware... works fine for 5 minutes then dies on its ass and needs resetting- cool, more kit to blow up

 

[fatbusinessman]

Ok, it looks like I currently have a duff CDRW drive - and the place I bought it from isn't going to be open until Friday

 

[Xavier]

these should be standard issue... reckon CO2 should be powerful enough to shoot up a gamecube and assorted b0rked hardware in the name of 'research' - ho hum, Wilier and I will find out soon enough I guess

 

[xane]

The earliest tombstones are dated around 1990, hence the collection.

 

[Shovel]

I have a dead CD-ROM drive, actually, since 1996 we've been through about 3 (all supplied by TIME computers). That, however, is about it I think. There's a floppy drive that may/may not be wobbling, family have been complaining about it for months, but I created a perfectly good Linux boot disk off it yesterday, so I think they're just whinging.

 

[Xavier]

Apparently one of the team has two dead monitors... Reckon Wilier and I will be able to have a game of conkers with 'em?

 

[SawTooTH]

I was reading one of the problems in PCFORMAT and an electrical engineer wrote in saying that PSUs from DEER (235W) have a latent defect due to poorly specced capacitors,and as a result, tend to blow within 12-24 months taking most of the MoBo, cpu, ram & HD with it. They are doing a survey if you're interested as Luis couldn't find mention of this problem elsewhere..

 

[Zephirus]

a while ago at work we were hit by a problem in seagate/maxtor 10gb drives supplied by compaq, which (caused by crappy cirrus logic chips in them, i'm told) caused them to fail almost at random. We lost about 50 drives out of a batch of 250 machines. I wish it'd photocopied the returns sheet actually, we had it on the wall for a year or two.

Although, the new ones seem to have a different problem with the caps on the mainboard blowing. Always amusing

 

[Brynn]

2 Monitors
2 Gfx cards
2 Soundcards
1 HDD
1 Mobo
1 Case
1 Laptop
2 Keyboards
2 Network Cards
Goodness knows how many cables