One time I used AS5 (which is conductive) and even after I cleaned off the underside and edges of the CPU, I was worried about shorts so I went ahead and dabbed the socket pins with a piece of cotton soaked in alcohol. Assuming I wasn't enough of a retard then to bend a pin, I probably did it when I got worried about a few cotton fibres stuck between the pins and picked them out. Then shit went full retard when I tried to fix the pins myself with an x-acto knife. which fixed the pins as seen from atop but moved the bases around and just fucking destroyed the plastic.

HURRRRRRRRRR I'M A DURRRRRRRRRRR

OH BOY.

So, I was putting together some armatures that held these bad-ass high power IR LEDs. If we could see in IR these things would be like looking into car headlights. The LEDs were mounted on heatsinks and the whole thing was held together with some custom mounting hardware the instrument lab on campus made for me, and they were cooled by 40mm CPU fans. The whole thing's mounted on some gooseneck tubing.

This was maybe three or four weeks after I nearly killed myself changing a fluorescent lightbulb, so I was (and still am) very wary of electricity. I felt I had good reason to be, since those LEDs need about 800 mA to run. Even if I was cautious and backed down the current a bit, in order for the light source to be effective I needed to keep it at a level above the range that causes death if it goes across the chest.

ANYWAY. I get the armatures together, everything's tightened up, and I decide to check the thing with a multimeter. Turns out there's a short somewhere letting a couple volts out into the mounting plates and tubing. I was basically scared shitless that if I didn't fix it somebody would end up grabbing the whole setup and getting a shock (because these things were going to be mounted to a box frame made of quarter inch aluminum rods).

After one or two rounds of taking them apart and putting them back together, I discover the problem. See, the LED is an array of 60 elements mounted under an acrylic bubble, and the whole thing is on a mounting plate. The leads stick out the bottom of the mounting plate, so in order to mount the LEDs on the heatsinks I had to thread the leads with soldered-on wires through holes drilled in the heatsinks (which was more fun times; the heatsinks came from the people who made the LEDs, but the holes in the heatsinks weren't wide enough for the leads with wires soldered to them, and the heatsinks were twice as thick as the leads were long. I had to have them drilled wider).

So the problem was because I was a little too generous with the thermal compound. A tiny bit of compound had oozed into the tiny gap between the heatshrink tubing and the metal baseplate and was touching the lead itself. This was silver compound, so it was letting some of the current stray into the heatsink, LED plate, and the mounting plates.

The NEXT thing that nearly went wrong was that I almost melted $130 LEDs into goo. I knew I had to get the thermal compound off the contacts, but it was a pain in the ass because the leads were mounted through holes in the LED's plate, so there was a tiny recess filled with some sort of hardened plastic or epoxy at the bottom. My initial thought was, "Well, why don't I just stick the entire thing in isopropanol for an hour to soak it off?"

You can imagine what this would have done to the acrylic dome covering the LED array.

THANKFULLY I shot an email off to the manufacturers asking if this was wise, and then did some searching. Both the searching and a frantically worded email from the company told me this was a TERRIBLE IDEA.

Based on the instructions I got from the company, I ended up folding up a Kimwipe a bunch (they recommended Q-tips, but we didn't have any), soaking a corner of it in isopropanol, then picking inside the pit around the contact to clean it out. This cleaned it up pretty well, and after putting everything back together I was able to verify the stray charge had disappeared.

And that's how I avoided bad things.

I love my mother-in-law, she's a great fishing buddy. But she claims to share the same gadget lust as my spouse, totally not true.

Every 6 months we visit her, this is what happens:

MIL: I've been trying to check my email using my laptop, but it stopped working again! I have to use the old PC in the guest bedroom now. (said old PC is connected to her router, runs Windows 2000 and is at least 9 years old.)
Me: Really, that shouldn't be happening. We took care of this for you last time.
MIL: Yeah, well my connection was acting strange so I had to reset the router! And now I can't connect!
Spouse: Last time we were here we wrote down the router password. Don't you still have that sheet of paper? (Every time we write it down and tell her to NOT THROW AWAY THE PAPER)
MIL: I can't find the paper!
Me: Did you try calling SRT (their ISP) to fix it?
MIL: Yes, but it still isn't working.

3 hours of irritation ensues as we reconfigure her router and get her laptop connected wirelessly again.

Beyond all of that, it gets slightly irksome when relatives and coworkers assume that because I type fast on a keyboard and know how to google for my problems, I also know how to do MANY MYSTICAL COMPUTER THINGS that they can't be bothered to learn how to do. Then again, I'm probably preaching to the choir on that point.

Pic fucking related.

This one time, my buddy Keith and I (no, this isn't a L4D2 reference--well, not really) were talking on the phone. Now, he's not the most computer savvy (In fact, he barely knows the difference between a mouse and a bar of soap), but he gets by. He complained that he couldn't see his icons, his wallpaper; nothing at all.
>Keith: I don't see anything, Anon. I just wanna go back to my desktop.
Well, is the monitor plugged in and fastened securely?
>K+ Yes. And I'm getting tired off seeing these white dots move on my screen...
...
Try moving your mouse, bro.
>K: MY DESKTOP!
>fullretard.jpg

>"My laptop's making a rattling sound, could you have a look at it"
>"Sure."
>I open it up, there's two coins in the Express Card slot

My aunt spent an hour, years ago, insisting that it should be possible for her to send and receive email without having internet access. I said, "no, that isn't how it works" and she kept insisting to the contrary, like I were just misunderstanding her.

After a few dozen times of her reiterating like I were an idiot, I explained what she wanted was impossible. But being of the generation of crazy middle aged white bitches that think because they want something the universe will rearrange itself around their whims, she still kept trying to insist I knew how to do what she wanted done, I just wasn't comprehending her.

Bitch, I know what you're asking. You want internet and you don't want to pay for it.

So back in the day, we got a second computer for the office. I know, right? TWO COMPUTERS? WHAT CRAZY FUTURISTIC FANTASY WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN? And we needed to share files between them, and (somewhat less importantly) they both should have an internet connection (which was still not a HURR DURR obvious thing in those days). All this of course, fell to me.

From memory, the new computer was a Dell laptop running Windows 98 (or maybe XP, it's kind of hazy). The old computer, which housed the 56.6k modem that constituted the offices sole internet connection, was, well, I can't really remember what it was. What I distinctly remember thinking was why didn't the put a Celeron 300a in this? So it must have been something really, really crummy. The 32 MB of RAM was in SIMMs. For reasons that I've never full understood, the person who set up the computer originally had partitioned the single HDD into three. And it was running Windows 95.

Now, I'm not sure if you guys are old enough (well, plainly you're old enough, but maybe you did not into computers when you were wee kids) to remember they pure, unmitigated joy of trying to get anything whatsoever to work (or work as intended) under Windows 95. Have you ever had to worry about having enough free IRQs or DMA channels? If not, rejoice. You see, there was a network card that had come with the computer, that lived in a box, under the kitchen sink out back (and I use the terms "kitchen" and "back" loosely). And I had to get it to work.

The thing was large enough that to modern eyes it could probably pass as a mid-range graphics card, except for the presence of all kinds of big, old capacitors , diodes and (what I think were) transistors. The kind that you just don't see in large numbers on modern consumer hardware. There was a conspicuous EPROM socket, which I looked at with a strange feeling that in hindsight I recognise as foreboding.

So I plugged the network card into the vacant ISA slot (remember those?) and booted the computer that- for reasons that should be entirely obvious- I had dubbed "Hatebox." Post made it's beep (mental note to disconnect infernal speaker), BIOS found all the hardware, so far so good. Then Windows booted, and completely failed to recognise that yes, there was a network card in this system. I started with the obvious: drivers. The 300 KB download didn't take too long, even then, even in Australia. But no, the new drivers fixed nothing. No big I thought, because this sort of shit happened all the time back then. I'll just check CONFIG.SYS for IRQ conflicts. Sure enough there was one. IIRC, the network card was trying to use IRQ 12 or something. After fixing that, I rebooted the system hopefully.

Now the Windows could see the network card, but for some reason could not see the other computer. I tried fiddling settings. I tried fiddling setting like you would not believe. After about an hour of that, my boss went home and it was just me sitting alone in the office making vague, grunted threats at Hatebox. I had another cigarette and fiddle setting for what must have been another hour. By this time it was getting dark and I was getting tired. I ordered a pizza and ate it while half-heartedly fiddling with the Windows, BIOS, and eventually the cards firmware. That's when it struck me: the EPROM. The motherfucking EPROM. I was going to have to flash the EPROM. Now, I didn't even know if I could flash the EPROM while it was on-board. By the time I'd figured out that yes, I could, it was getting on for midnight, and by the time I'd found the software it was about three in the morning.

But it worked! Hahahaha! Hatebox, fuck you!

>>3565
hahhahaha

Last time the family PC got infected, I ran a scan. When I told my mother I'd run a scan, she yelled at me for "messing with the computer again".

Time before that, I tried explaining the situation to my dad, and he kind of threatened to hit me if I didn't shut up.

They've given up and just gotten their own laptop. It doesn't connect to the internet, because they've been too lazy to ring the guy who fixes their technology.

>>3565
Holy fuck I laughed so hard at that, thanks for sharing.

>>2554
>I love my mother-in-law, she's a great fishing buddy.
You should feel honored, I don't think that's a phrase that has ever been uttered before in human history.

Well, I have a horror story, though not mine. I have a friend named Al. Al and I went to the same tech school for Computer Sciences before I rage quit the course.

He works for a decent software firm now. A guy from said company (No doubt someone from Marketing) told him he needed PC Help at home and he'd pay him $50 to fix his machine.

Hey, that's a video game, so fuck yeah, I say.

So, here are the symptoms of the machine as Al described to me:
1) It had a habit of overheating VERY quickly and produces an audible grinding and buzzing sound.
2) The buzzing noise does not cease, even after the computer had be shut off and continues for several minutes.

That had me stumped. I immediately thought: "Well dust, of course! Blow out the dust and it should be fine." Then Number 2... what in the fuck could number 2 be. I mulled over those one for a good 10 minutes. I mostly thought "Maybe the PSU or something?" Or something else? Maybe someone was shorting? I hadn't the foggiest. Now, software somewhat mystifies me, but hardware is damn simple.

I couldn't figure it out. When he told me what it was, I was mentally frozen trying to process the entire idea.

The guy frequently leaves his computer room windows open and when Al opened the case, several wasps flew out of the case

I think the worst I've personally experience was an idiot secretary who, when told what RAM was, responded "They shouldn't make it so random, I bet that's why computers are so dodgy!"

>>3584
They're both watching porn on it

>>3586
I've actually heard of this happening before. I guess most people leave their cases on for the entire life of their computers, which although conducive to Al's problem, does stop certain other problems. Like possums climbing in an open window and shitting in the case.

>>3606
The best way to prevent that last bit is to leave the cover on the case.

>>3614
What a novel solution. I'll have to try that.