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So my parents tell me of this story when I was like 2 years old or something, I put an egg into a DVD player. I cracked that egg and it got inside of the DVD player. When my parents took it apart and cleaned the egg out of the DVD player, it still worked. Thing is, the DVD player would only play homemade or pirated content. It would not play a DVD movie that you would buy from a store. The egg that I put in that DVD player must have fried some sort of DRM chips on the motherboard.
In my early teens I'd decided to thoroughly clean up the dust in my PC. I took off the CPU fan to clean the thing, then I noticed how much dust was lodged between the heatsink fins. So I take that off too and notice some dry, gray goop between the heatsink and what I knew was the CPU. So I cleaned wipe away the "chip of baked dust" and put everything back together. Months later a more experienced friend explains to me what I had done and realize why my games would suddenly lag terribly and only return to normal after minimizing them. That PC still worked for 9 years total!
You seriously just taught me why one of my computers has to sit plugged in forever before it will turn on. I guess it is a bad capacitor. However, I have no idea where the cap is, so I wouldn't know what to replace, not like I even have equipment to do it with. I assume it is in the PSU though so replacing the PSU would probably just be safer.
@@vectorjoe I mean. It could be done technically. However, I don't know the first thing about soldering so I would not feel comfortable replacing all of them.
Weatheronthe8s Most of the busted caps I’ve seen can be spotted by looking for slightly raised tops (pretty much anything that’s not “flat”) or visible corrosion around the legs. If you don’t see any and don’t have some that are covered by integrated heatsinks (or any that are difficult to remove), your guess about the PSU might be correct.
@@SquareOFortune Yeah, I have checked my motherboard and haven't noticed any raised caps. It's an old motherboard for a home version of an office system so I kinda doubt it has heatsinks on any caps. I have also tried to look into the PSU, but can't really see the caps because it's too compact to really see inside well. I might get a TFX PSU at some point as that is the kind it uses, or I could just live with it I guess. I keep it plugged into a UPS just so I don't have to worry about waiting forever to turn it on if the power ever goes out.
Weatheronthe8s Right on! Glad you haven’t tried to open the PSU; opening those or being around exposed CRTs (especially the anode cap) are two things I never recommend for home repair. 😅
Also: - If the magic smoke escapes - Thermal-cycles (Various things expand and contract at different rates and temperatures) - Bit-rot - Crashed drive arm
Thomas Backman Luckly my mom got a new phone not that long after (SE gen 2) and I already had (and still have) another 6s. Only differences between mine and hers is the software version and the color.
Epic Gamer The Sim Card tray has no sealant. If it did, the 6s would likely have a significant amount of water resistance (home button has water resistance I’ve spilled plenty of sodas and water on it and a raindrop once fell on it that covered the whole thing). As of now, it’s splash resistant (probs what it was designed for)
A minor correction, he says at 4:38 that a capacitor smooths out the flow of electric current, but this is not the case. It actually smooths out the voltage. An inductor smooths out electric current.
Capacitors are not like batteries or a bucket with a hole, as: 1. They stop conducting electricity when fully charged. 2. They may may remove DC portion of the signal, not only AC, as shown in the video. 3. Capacitors may zap you, which is always fun!
@@volo870 also dielectric fluid is not conductive, it's actually an insulator, it will not short out anything, what it will do is corrode some materials, Also correction the bucket analogy isn't really bad, the buckets full of water is splashes over and leaks out, the capacitor is full... And you keep trying to pump energy into it the extra energy goes into heat instead... Maybe it would have been slightly better to attributed more closely to a reservoir directly connected to the pipe instead but your statement that the bucket can keep filling after full isn't really correct either
Great video, seen my fair share of horror stories when restoring vintage computers. from NeXT slabs stored outdoors for 10 years to flood damaged retro computers. Those restorations are always some of my favorites to accomplish. Too bad they canceled the VCF in Chicago this year, maybe see you in 2021 there.
What about an old Mac IIfx stored for a few years in the office's bathroom, between the sink and the toilet? Restoring (but most of all, cleaning) that machine was a real nightmare.
Ken, you had a good opportunity for the “crack party” joke. Also, the Apple /// “drop” was legit. I recall that as an Apple Tech Note entry, back in the day when I was selling those computers. The purpose of the drop was to reseat chips. Fun times in the good old days. Great video, Ken!
I still have a 2001 Compaq laptop that still turns on, I had windows 2000 on it since it only had 256MB of ram, found more ram on ebay now its maxed out at 512MB of ram, then upgraded it to windows XP pro, then upgraded the CPU from 800Mhz Pentium 3 mobile to 1Ghz Pentium 3 mobile, 80GB hard drive, added a linksys wireless G pcmcia card, 100MB wired Ethernet port. firefox verson 52. RUclips videos run at 1 frame per second, i just use it as a joke to friends that come over and want to use a computer lol
I have an early 2005 Apple PowerBook G4 15" Aluminum (1.67GHz, 2GB RAM), that'll run RUclips videos at 360p, using TenFourTube. The app uses the mobile version of RUclips.
In my highschool, we had old Win XP Thinkpads in the physics room (in a storage room next to the physics room, but ya know, they were there to use them with different plug in light sensors and other sensors for class and also, we used excel on those things as we made a solar clock that is always accurate (mine gos 25 mins ahead as i measured our house wrong) and that was... a lot of numbers). I always told the teacher, that before they get thrown away (originally, they were supposed to be replaced by 2014), I want one or two. Two weeks ago, 1 year after i finished school... they finally got eplaced so I have two old thinkpad T42s to mess around with. They still work really well, considering the were used in a school for over 10 years, only the batteries... are a bid on the weak side^^
@@benjyfriedman I have an iMac G5... with leaking capacitors and a slightly broken mainboard due to leaking capacitors. Also, i have a 2005 PowerMac G5 dualcore... with leaking capacitors and about the same issues as the iMac. There is a rumor, that the capacitors Apple used in the G5s are rubbish. I tend to see where that is coming from^^
Once when I was around... eh, 7 or 8 years old, I spilled a glass of milk on a cable box. Amazingly enough after the milk dried up, it worked perfectly fine.
I went through 3 Surface devices in the span of a year. The first two surface laptops got orange dots on the screen and the surface book 2 had a bend in the clipboard from the factory and usb port that died after 6 months. After Microsoft refused to replace the surface with a new one (mind you we had microsoft complete) I ditched microsoft for lenovo and so far it's been working great. I loved microsoft's products, but their QC seems to be just horrible. Also idk how it's possible that that macbook that looked like it was shot wasn't the worst one.
Another fantastic video. I really enjoy your way of explaining things, great information without being too dumbed down. I only discovered your channel yesterday. Keep up the great work and videos. :)
My most humorous repair was for a major manufacturer. I worked in IT maintenance for a company. A user complained that anything he typed came up as random characters on screen. I went and retrieved the keyboard/computer for testing. His assessment was repeatable. There was no obvious reason. I swapped keyboards to see if that stopped the gibberish. It did. Keyboard problem. Went to plug the problem keyboard into another machine and noticed a switch on the bottom of the keyboard with three positions marked simply as reset/lock/map. I discovered in the service manual that if set to map, you would press a key and then the next key you pressed was assigned to the first. So if you pressed the A key then pressed the P key the A key acted as the P key. Worse, until the switch on the bottom was locked, this kept reassigning keys. So you would press the A key (nothing would be displayed), then the P key (displayed). They you would press the A key again (no display) and press another key, say J (displayed) and not that key was assigned to A. The mapping never ended until you locked the mapping. Fortunately, you could switch to reset, which used a ROM original key set and also copied it to the map. The keyboard did work, but it was decided that the switch was a user hazard not worth the trouble. My boss told me to set it to reset and super glue it there and then put a chassis seal over it. so that no one would seem curious. Problem solved.
A design 'horror' on a server: The HP ProLiant DL380 G4. The chipset heatsink was held down by a spring wire hooked into loops soldered to the mobo. After running at operating temps for several years, that solder softened enough that the spring wire chucked the loops to parts unknown. The chipset died in short order because of poor heatsink coupling, and it lacked a thermal cut-off.
One more thing I would add to your list, failed chips. It's true that sometimes old systems just stop powering up because one of the chips on the board just fails. I'm not sure why this happens but it happens fairly regularly with older systems. Would love to see a deep dive on what causes this.
Some early Atari STs also had issues where the recommended fix was to drop it from about 1 foot. Some of the system chips are in PLCC sockets and retention clips weren't used, so they could sometimes become slightly loose during shipping. If the drop fix didn't work, it would just require opening up and pushing down on the PLCC chips to reseat them. As soon as Atari became aware of the issue, they started putting retention clips on the PLCC sockets to hold the chips firmly in place.
Two quick things come to mind, one is tin solder whiskers. That is a major killer of older electronics. As the tin in the solder degrades from white tin to black or grey tin it crystallizes and forms threads or whiskers protruding from the surface of the solder joint or puddle. The whiskers are conductive and will short out components when they get long enough to arc over or when they break off and migrate to a spot where they can. Not good, Murray! Second thought, I’m surprised you didn’t get a hold of Fran from “Fran’s Lab”. With her work on the Apollo flight computer and such I kinda figured she would show up. Her main gig is historical electronics.
I used to work at a PC repair store. One time we got this monster tower, had like 200gb of RAM and everything, think they used it for research at the university. They also had a liquid cooler. I forgot what I had to do with it but the cooler was extremely horrifying. Not only did they have the radiator on the outside of the case, I think the fans were backwards inside the case too. Instead of letting the piping from the CPU to the radiator sit in the case like it's meant to, they literally ripped a hole in the top of the case to shove them through to the improperly mounted radiator. I did my best to fix this horrifying thing, but it was something to behold.
5 years ago, I found an old Packard Bell 850/607G computer, which was actually one of the later ones manufactured by NEC circa 1998, out at my grandparents farm. It had to of been sitting in their shed for almost 10 years, but I still wanted to see if it still worked. They said I could take it because it was junk. I got home, plugged it in, turned it on, and to my amazement it booted up perfectly fine🤯. The computer was incredibly dirty and had a lot of rust on some of the I/O ports, but still surprisingly worked! I ended up abandoning the restoration project and recycling it a couple years ago as the case was starting to fall apart and replacement parts were really hard to find.
I still have 2 NEC Packard Bell PCs, they are really built to last/ An NEC UTOW CAl one from 2003 that I was given because was being thrown away and had it been left out in the rain for a few days (it soon dried out) . I have an Easynote TS13 from 2012/2013 ish (I think that is an Acer made packard Bell with an I3), that is still my main laptop and I got it extremly cheap second hand. My favorite one though is a 2000/2001 Packard Bell La Diva all in one, which is ultra rare and totaly unique. It has a wireless keyboard, mouse and trackpad. It also has a modem built into its external PSU and a laptop PCIE slot (and laptop IDE) , it is running Windows ME and it only cost like 17.99 on ebay (I don't think I can get any spares at all for any price either) for it bar the , the HDD and the RAM and maybe the PSU Modem). Thankfully it still works like the day it was made, with all the original components (as far as I know, a sticker on the side says it was referbished in 2003 and may contain used parts!).
Recently I worked on someone's laptop that acted completely dead, no power at all- but there was a barely audible "click". Opened it up and found that a small rectangular ceramic capacitor had a crack in it, and every time you pushed the power button it would throw sparks. Started at one or two. Then it became a shower of sparks. Then the capacitor shattered and fell off. Best part, because there were multiple capacitors working in parallel in that part of the board...the laptop started working again and booted to Windows without so much as a hiccup.
Back in 2004-2005 I worked for an IT firm. We had sold a few local businesses some 17" LCD monitors made by "****". One of these companies had 12 monitors that no longer worked. The image was still there, but the backlight didn't work. They were still under warranty and "****" authorized that the monitors would be replaced and we were tasked with destroying the faulty units. We didn't destroy these monitors, but they were just placed into the boxes of the new monitors and tossed into the dumpster. (later that day) I dumpster dove for them and took 8 of the 12 monitors. I found that out of the capacitors on the board, 4 of them needed replacement. I purchased a bag of replacements for just this model monitor for about $6.00 on eBay. I replaced all the caps on the board on each of the monitors and 7 people that I knew got a 17" "****" monitor as a gift. The 8th monitor still works to this day and I use it as a spare.
Ken, fantastic video! I've been watching your videos for about two years now I guess (you showed my Macintosh SE some time ago), and they keep getting better and better. Keep it up, man, and thanks for the content!
I liked the video, glad to see you present topics like this to help others to learn. I'm a bit surprised that you didn't include static electricity in your list (but yes, I know you had to limit how many due to time). Static does not necessarily kill a device immediately, but it can weaken components, especially with repeated zaps, leading to potential shorter lifetimes. Fortunately once components and boards are installed into a device they are reasonably safe for the most part.
I’ll never forget one of my earliest PC repairs, It was in the 90’s from what I remember and this Customer’s PC which was either a 486 or early Pentium PC and it was behaving very quirky and in a strange manner, It kept doing random things constantly, It turns out that when the owner setup his Computer he didn’t push the Power Lead in all the way so it was loose & ready to fall out, I figured out that was the issue fairly quickly and the Computer worked fine after I plugged the Power Cable in all the way! Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
Touching morher board at random, neglects to even mention ESD, or electro static discharge. The human body can carry enough static charge to blow components that can blow at far lower voltage.
My unibody MacBook pro had a weird problem where the RAM would randomly stop working and the computer wouldn't boot, only to find it boot 10 minutes later when I've moved it to another room. Now it's becoming clear that my RAM joints have become disconnected. At least one slot still works!
Thanks for this awesome video. Though I already know most of the stuff such as the capacitors and leakage, there are some stuff that I didn't know of. Like the Capacitor gate between 1999 to 2007. I highly wondered why computers I fix from those era, capacitors are the common ground.
@@Handlethatwontbetaken i just noticed it from the sheer massive number of samsung tv repair guides on youtube that all they had to do was replace a few capacitors
the debunking carp episodes got me here, But @Computer clan, your clear translation of jargon to language has gotten me to poke that SUBSCRIBE button. Kudus to you dudes. thanks for educating me
Early production runs of the original Apple II also had a similar design flaws; no fan & no case vents. Later revisions added case vents. If you ran the monitor or TV on top of the system, the power supply burned itself up. Mine was covered under warranty & after replacing it I only ran it with the case cover off, with no problems. The good thing was the machine ran totally silent. A good example of rushing a product to market & letting the early end-users do the testing.
I was aware of recapping old electronics. But watching TNT Amusements Pinball repair channel taught me all older circuit boards need to have every solder connection reflowed. Time consuming for sure but can eliminate many problems.
I was an electronics tech at my last job for 24 years. Our IT guy would bring me the various office computers that would no longer boot up and I would fix about 95% of them by just changing out all the electrolytic caps on the main board. I had bags and bags of various sizes of caps for just such eventualities! 🙂
Capacitors are also used to block DC and pass AC between circuits at different DC bias. For example between stages in a valve amp, where the anode (output) of the first stage can be biased to hundreds, maybe thousands of volts, but the grid (input) of the next stage needs to sit at a couple volts tops. When the dielectric begins breaking down, the capacitor starts to leak DC, which in a valve amp will bias the next stage to the point of drawing very heavy current and eventually burning out the valve. Typically the user just replaces the valve without replacing the leaky cap, which promptly burns out the new valve. Leaky smoothing capacitors in power supplies (or really, in any other smoothing role) cause the PSU to draw excessive power, not to mention the associated loss in capacitance making it very bad at filtering. To be clear, ALL caps leak DC (electrolytics most of all), but usually it's so little it doesn't matter. The other failure mode is high equivalent series resistance (ESR). That slows down the rate at which you can charge and discharge a cap, which creates lots of problems in circuits meant to take advantage of low ESR. Signal coupling suffers, but smoothing is affected even worse, especially if it's a big cap.
I had a custom built computer built by one of the many ads on the Computer Shopper Guide. Took 6 weeks. Plugged it, powered on, and blank screen. Fan was working. Called customer support. Says it would take weeks to repair. I opened up the case. Realized the eprom was in backwards. Flipped it and the computer booted up. I'm certain it never had a burn in test.
I used to be a service engineer and travelled to customer site to fix whatever issues they were having with their hardware at the time. One particular job really was troubling, what seemed like a failed hot swap SCSI drive, however rather than it just failing and going offline, it rebuilt to around 70% then failed the drive and started rebuilding again, but the rebuild was taking minutes rather than hours. So, not sure what to do, I checked with the senior consultants who told me to “just pull the drive”, which I did and the whole array went offline! Turned out the drive was fine, it was the backplane of the drive shelf that failed and took out the SCSI controller board! Sometimes things are not quite what they seem, ah the late 90’s, would have been so much better just to skip them sometimes!
Krazy Ken: i will just leave my computer on this shelf for eternity 8 Bit Guy: *i wrap my computers in aluminum foil and bubble wrap and still i know it will die*
The year is 2004 and I get a customer with an unusually heavy midi-tower AT chassis which was in need of a repair. He asked me to be so kind and lift it out of his trunk because it was that heavy. After getting out to the car I found out this PC was like 43 kilogramms! The user was asked to install some tools and promptly inserted half a toolbox into his PC. This shorted out almost everything so I had to rebuild his machine. My face must have been funny to look at as I saw, what exactly happend.
My hardware horror story? It involves the infamous note 7,a few years back my friends note 7 exploded (luckily he was upgrading to the note 8) and I had so many cuts and bruises, but luckily it exploded on a table so it only did that to my legs, and i still have scars today and they aren't light either, they are still so dark you could see them from a mile away
Here is a horror story my iMac caught on fire when I was editing a clip for someone no joke I think what happened was that the power supply failed or something because it was having issues a couple of days before the incident happened
Me playing Everybody Edits on my mother’s HP Pavilion with Win7 pre-installed during that game’s popularity was enough for that to smell like a barbecue and fry the motherboard. If I remember right, they took out the motherboard and the CPU just burnt itself and surrounding circuits.
For the humidity/moisture one, you should contact Louis Rossmann, he repairs Apple products (mostly Macbooks) at the component level and specializes in water damage.
I have a Series III Fairlight CMI, and the battery for the clock in it is notorious for leaking horrifically and destroying the card it's on. So much so, that it's pretty much the first thing you fix before you do anything else on them. Oh, and it won't go past 1999 on the clock! :D Nice channel.
As an interactive museum we encounter similar problems. I'd also like to add rubber to it, especially rubber bands for diskdrives. They won't kill your computer, but won't allow you to actually use it (most of the time). Second, heat. People underestimate the danger of overheating IC's. The internals of the chip break over the years due heat and there's no way you can fix an IC internally. Also, over or undervoltage of components (yes, looking at you Commodore 64) will kill them. These overvoltage is usually caused by bad capacitors, but still.
I remember I was troubleshooting an eVGA nForce 680i motherboard that was being a real PITA. I spent quite a bit of time on that sucker trying to figure out why it was throwing out seemingly random errors on various bootups. One moment it’s memory, next time a CPU error or hard drives not being detected properly. I was really scratching my head on this one and even used spare components to try figuring out what the heck was going on. Then I had a good look over the board and saw a few of the capacitors were bulging and just starting to leak. My soldering skills are non-existent and we ended up replacing the board as it was a couple years old anyways, but I never forgot about it.
when I started working in a computer store full-time back in 1997.. I never thought I'd still be fixing computers every single day.. but it is what it is haha
I service computers as a hobby and I've seen a lot of different ways a PC can die. From (mostly user caused) hard drive failures, bad capacitors, dead or faulty PSUs, to semi-cooked CPUs and toasted GPUs. My personal experiences: GPU in my first custom-built gaming rig, the 8800GTX, was killed by a single bad cap on the motherboard, near PCI-E slot. Funny thing is that none of the other caps on that board failed, only that single one. The PSU I've used for that build, the 600W FSP unit also developed bad capacitors at the end of it's service life. My first high-end smartphone, Galaxy S4, had it's power management IC cooked by a power spike from a dodgy car charger (fortunately, finding a smashed phone with a good mainboard was fairly easy). And finally, my cousin (who's a software developer) gave me his old laptop which had both a dead mainboard and a semi-cooked Core i7 processor with one faulty core. As for physical damage, |'ve cracked the screen on my old Asus T100 hybrid twice. First time by accidentally kicking the bag where it was stored. Second time by dropping the same bag down from about 1m height.
As a person that fixes computers for friends and family, I’ve encountered four 2009-2012 MacBook Pros with broken RAM slots, and six with broken SATA cables. They’re terribly unreliable computers in my experience. I’ve never seen these issues on retina MacBooks, where the only regular non-accidental damage problems are the anti-glare coating.
Decades of working on and with pc's, has me convinced that overheating is a major problem. I have seen too many machines that sat on the floor gathering dust and Fido hair with the fan so clogged that it could hardly turn. Also saw one computer used in a kitchen where the heat sink was covered with grease and it took automotive engine degreaser to clean it up! LOL! I have not done anything on a laptop beyond upgrading clubs, adding memory and replacing the battery. I only my limitations.
The first point reminds me of the time my wife's Lenovo Think{ad laptop fell down an entire flight of concrete stairs and came out completely unscathed. It was a wonder it didn't break! Thats awesome you got to visit the 8-bit guy and see his X16 prototype and collection. I know he was doing a video series on tech in texas recently, so I wonder if you'll be a special guest... 👀 In all seriousness, great episode, I learned a lot!
I wonder if my college MacBook Pro suffered from that RAM slot soldering issue as well....It looks to be the same model, and I constantly would turn my computer on and be greeted with the three beeps....I sent it in to apple at one point and they said my third party RAM was to blame, but even using the stock RAM didn’t remedy the issue. I eventually just used packing tape to keep the bottom panel of the case on so I could easily reseat the RAM during lectures without needing a screwdriver XD
Yeah, I can confirm that the Late 2011 MacBook Pro was the worst MacBook that I’ve owned, reliability wise. It had the fabled discrete GPU chip that was poorly soldered to the MLB and subsequently died. I can’t, and probably won’t, be able to find someone to fix it. They all tell me to recycle it, which is a little difficult to do as it was my first brand new Mac, when it came out. Loved the collab, and a great video as usual!
Same MB here. If I had replaced the thermal paste a few years ago, I could have saved it. In the end, I just shut off the GPU (there's a resistor you have to desolder) and it still is my main computer. You might not need the hardware modification. The software solution is here: dosdude1.com/gpudisable/
il biggo thanks, I’ll be sure to take a look at it. Most of the problems, from what digging I did, fixed it until the system had a chance to enter S3 state, and subsequently kernel panic. There really haven’t been many solutions to this, other than use Lion, and I’ll also take a look at the hardware mods that may help as well
I used to work at a college tech helpdesk. Guy walked in and said "I have some water damage on my computer can you fix it", as it was one of our support computer we shruged, we said we'll see what we can do. Later we found out, he was drunk that prior night and thought it was a toilet.
12:00 best option while keeping the batteries in the board: flip the board so the batteries are above air, so if they rupture, no electronics are harmed.
I remember one of the worst things that happened to me when I was repairing a laptop that obviously was owned by a smoker, and it was a color of dark brown, that explained why it smelled like if a smoking lounge was a phone booth
These all will be most common for older electronics, but there is one major culprit missing in the video for the newer electronics - lead free solder. It basically guarantees that your high end electronics (especially laptops) stop working after few years of careful usage even if all the components are in a perfect state.
Letting cats rub up on me and I didn't use an ESD Wrist strap when I was trying to make a frankenstein project of taking two sub par computers and making a single great computer. The Cat's generated an ESD Charge on me that it caused the "Magic Smoke" followed by the sweet smell of death. So, I invested in an ESD Wrist strap and when I built this computer which I am watching the tube and what ever else I do on it, I was using the ESD Wrist strap as I was working building and even working on the inside with cleaning it.
I built a pc for my mother in law to replace her ancient dell. Worked out great for her for a while, and then one day she calls and says it wont stay on for more than 10 minutes or so. I figure it's overheating, and ask if anything happened to it. She says she isn't sure but one of her cats might have bumped it. So I go over to her house and take a look. Heat sink and fan have been knocked loose from the motherboard, hanging on by one pin and the power connector for the fan which is bent at a 45 degree angle. I remember thinking it was amazing it could operate for 10 minutes and safely shut off. I bent the pins on the power connector back and replaced the HSF and it works fine to the day.
amazing video, but there was one point I was surprised wasnt mentioned, HARD DRIVES! those guys can be very finicky and when they fail it makes everything suck as you both lose your data (if its not recoverable) and of course you lose the functioning of your computer. though I will say that its amazing how resilient they are especially in laptops as the tolerances are so tight the reader head can be destroyed from a fingerprint on the storage platter but can withstand being moved around while spinning.
Here's an odd one to add to your list: COCKROACHES!!! Back in 1980 I was stationed in Panama and I had brought my brand new TRS-80 Model 1 with me. Down there, cockroaches are running around by the millions and there's no way to keep them out of the open-sided buildings. Many times I found cockroaches scurrying from my computer when I turned the light on. One day the computer stopped working so I opened it up and found a good half inch of the circuit board eaten away. I had to jury rig some support to get the circuitry to work again, and then started regularly spraying the area around the computer with Raid to keep them from coming back. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to your marvelous channel!!!
Enjoy the new video, and thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring it! Want to try it for free? The first 1000 people who click the link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium: skl.sh/computerclan
thanks skillshare
th*a*nks trump
11th like and 4th comment
@@leiilo1458 your name gliched pass the edge of my screen!
@@v.r.technology ye thats the point, lol
So my parents tell me of this story when I was like 2 years old or something, I put an egg into a DVD player. I cracked that egg and it got inside of the DVD player. When my parents took it apart and cleaned the egg out of the DVD player, it still worked. Thing is, the DVD player would only play homemade or pirated content. It would not play a DVD movie that you would buy from a store.
The egg that I put in that DVD player must have fried some sort of DRM chips on the motherboard.
.....
lol
So we now know that eggs can be a culprit of a dead electronic
LOL
Quest complete! Anti-Piracy disabled!
Sometimes damage to computers is caused by anger ... In my country Colombia we usually call that type of damage as: “Ctrl + Alt + Kick”.
Lmao, good one dude.
@@richardjohnson8197 PA-PA-PA-PUNCH!
I lost some nice keyboards in my early days do to anger when a game wasn't being fair.
@@retroguy4139 rhythm heaven ds+ dsemume + lag= rage
mine was Sofa + MacBook Mid 2010 + ground, it was a shattered LCD as a result.
When I was younger I would pull capacitors off of an electronic, and see how many I could take off before the thing stopped working.
I was an idiot.
Thomas Andrew actually sounds interesting to do tbh. What was the most amount you got off?
Have you ever heard of Muntzing? That's basically the same but in a professional setting.
Thomas Andrew a whole 1/4? That’s actually pretty crazy.
In my early teens I'd decided to thoroughly clean up the dust in my PC. I took off the CPU fan to clean the thing, then I noticed how much dust was lodged between the heatsink fins. So I take that off too and notice some dry, gray goop between the heatsink and what I knew was the CPU. So I cleaned wipe away the "chip of baked dust" and put everything back together. Months later a more experienced friend explains to me what I had done and realize why my games would suddenly lag terribly and only return to normal after minimizing them. That PC still worked for 9 years total!
Bogdan8C that hurt to read lol
You seriously just taught me why one of my computers has to sit plugged in forever before it will turn on. I guess it is a bad capacitor. However, I have no idea where the cap is, so I wouldn't know what to replace, not like I even have equipment to do it with. I assume it is in the PSU though so replacing the PSU would probably just be safer.
Well...replace all the caps?
@@vectorjoe I mean. It could be done technically. However, I don't know the first thing about soldering so I would not feel comfortable replacing all of them.
Weatheronthe8s Most of the busted caps I’ve seen can be spotted by looking for slightly raised tops (pretty much anything that’s not “flat”) or visible corrosion around the legs. If you don’t see any and don’t have some that are covered by integrated heatsinks (or any that are difficult to remove), your guess about the PSU might be correct.
@@SquareOFortune Yeah, I have checked my motherboard and haven't noticed any raised caps. It's an old motherboard for a home version of an office system so I kinda doubt it has heatsinks on any caps. I have also tried to look into the PSU, but can't really see the caps because it's too compact to really see inside well. I might get a TFX PSU at some point as that is the kind it uses, or I could just live with it I guess. I keep it plugged into a UPS just so I don't have to worry about waiting forever to turn it on if the power ever goes out.
Weatheronthe8s Right on! Glad you haven’t tried to open the PSU; opening those or being around exposed CRTs (especially the anode cap) are two things I never recommend for home repair. 😅
Also:
- If the magic smoke escapes
- Thermal-cycles (Various things expand and contract at different rates and temperatures)
- Bit-rot
- Crashed drive arm
Nope, you're wrong; it's gnomes, it is always the gnomes....
Underpants Gnomes!
Or if you let the magical blue smoke come out like I did
Not GNOME tho
@@lettuce7378 that thing also kills computers, especially low-end ones
@@ondrejbrandejsky5592 no?
My mom dropped her old iPhone 6s in the toilet. It was working immediately after that incident. Then she washed it with WATER. That killed it.
Thomas Backman Did that. Water was already in the phone. I’ve opened it up, and the logic board was practically toast.
Thomas Backman Luckly my mom got a new phone not that long after (SE gen 2) and I already had (and still have) another 6s. Only differences between mine and hers is the software version and the color.
Epic Gamer The Sim Card tray has no sealant. If it did, the 6s would likely have a significant amount of water resistance (home button has water resistance I’ve spilled plenty of sodas and water on it and a raindrop once fell on it that covered the whole thing). As of now, it’s splash resistant (probs what it was designed for)
@@thomasbackman3599 Rice doesn't do anything.
,-_-,
This was the best explanation of how a capacitor works I have ever seen!
A minor correction, he says at 4:38 that a capacitor smooths out the flow of electric current, but this is not the case. It actually smooths out the voltage. An inductor smooths out electric current.
Capacitors are not like batteries or a bucket with a hole, as:
1. They stop conducting electricity when fully charged.
2. They may may remove DC portion of the signal, not only AC, as shown in the video.
3. Capacitors may zap you, which is always fun!
@@volo870 also dielectric fluid is not conductive, it's actually an insulator, it will not short out anything, what it will do is corrode some materials,
Also correction the bucket analogy isn't really bad, the buckets full of water is splashes over and leaks out, the capacitor is full... And you keep trying to pump energy into it the extra energy goes into heat instead...
Maybe it would have been slightly better to attributed more closely to a reservoir directly connected to the pipe instead but your statement that the bucket can keep filling after full isn't really correct either
The 8-Bit Guy himself now counts as a computer killer.
I was about to say the same thing
@@MaoTao now that might break the universe.
Looking for this comment.
You just lost a subscriber
@@S0N1Cua oh well
This content is so amazing dude, always catching my eyes. It's amazing how you could collaborate with The 8-Bit Guy!
Keep it up!
That's a collab we didn't know we wanted!
A collaboration that we didn't want ... but that we needed.
I believe you missed water damage!
Well, technically speaking not technical problems but I would say it is the #1 killer for electronics.
ok then don't store your pc next to the water heater, pool, or bathtub problem solved
Yup, water can kill anything with electricity if they are long enough to break
Dont get drunk and spill beer in laptop keyboard!!! Most expensive beer ever.
Electrostatic discharge and power surges too.
Computer enthusiasts sometimes soak their computer components in a water bath to clean them, and then air dry for weeks
8-Bit guy: **collabs with Ken**
*_6 hours ago before this video uploaded_*
8-Bit guy: **uploads video about mouse**
Here the video: ruclips.net/video/xWB9dP1AtDU/видео.html
Thanks but who asked?
And what does this have to do with this video? Just asking.
@@userthatcantthinkofagoodna1440 *collabs with Ken*
Great video, seen my fair share of horror stories when restoring vintage computers. from NeXT slabs stored outdoors for 10 years to flood damaged retro computers. Those restorations are always some of my favorites to accomplish. Too bad they canceled the VCF in Chicago this year, maybe see you in 2021 there.
Yeah, I'm bummed (but not surprised). Hopefully 2021 is a better year. haha
What about an old Mac IIfx stored for a few years in the office's bathroom, between the sink and the toilet? Restoring (but most of all, cleaning) that machine was a real nightmare.
Ken, you had a good opportunity for the “crack party” joke. Also, the Apple /// “drop” was legit. I recall that as an Apple Tech Note entry, back in the day when I was selling those computers. The purpose of the drop was to reseat chips. Fun times in the good old days. Great video, Ken!
Also the repair method of "dropping it" was used on the Atari 2600.
I still have a 2001 Compaq laptop that still turns on, I had windows 2000 on it since it only had 256MB of ram, found more ram on ebay now its maxed out at 512MB of ram, then upgraded it to windows XP pro, then upgraded the CPU from 800Mhz Pentium 3 mobile to 1Ghz Pentium 3 mobile, 80GB hard drive, added a linksys wireless G pcmcia card, 100MB wired Ethernet port. firefox verson 52. RUclips videos run at 1 frame per second, i just use it as a joke to friends that come over and want to use a computer lol
try h.264ify to give it a chance of running youtube
I have an early 2005 Apple PowerBook G4 15" Aluminum (1.67GHz, 2GB RAM), that'll run RUclips videos at 360p, using TenFourTube. The app uses the mobile version of RUclips.
Sounds really useful
In my highschool, we had old Win XP Thinkpads in the physics room (in a storage room next to the physics room, but ya know, they were there to use them with different plug in light sensors and other sensors for class and also, we used excel on those things as we made a solar clock that is always accurate (mine gos 25 mins ahead as i measured our house wrong) and that was... a lot of numbers).
I always told the teacher, that before they get thrown away (originally, they were supposed to be replaced by 2014), I want one or two. Two weeks ago, 1 year after i finished school... they finally got eplaced so I have two old thinkpad T42s to mess around with. They still work really well, considering the were used in a school for over 10 years, only the batteries... are a bid on the weak side^^
@@benjyfriedman I have an iMac G5... with leaking capacitors and a slightly broken mainboard due to leaking capacitors. Also, i have a 2005 PowerMac G5 dualcore... with leaking capacitors and about the same issues as the iMac. There is a rumor, that the capacitors Apple used in the G5s are rubbish. I tend to see where that is coming from^^
A expired battery once leaked on to my hand but nothing happend because i immediatly washed it with water
Once when I was around... eh, 7 or 8 years old, I spilled a glass of milk on a cable box.
Amazingly enough after the milk dried up, it worked perfectly fine.
But, the smell. How bad was it?
wait cant i just recap my board once? isn't that enough?
WHY ABILLIOLN!!!
Amazing video, you always entertain me. Thanks for the awesome content.
I went through 3 Surface devices in the span of a year. The first two surface laptops got orange dots on the screen and the surface book 2 had a bend in the clipboard from the factory and usb port that died after 6 months. After Microsoft refused to replace the surface with a new one (mind you we had microsoft complete) I ditched microsoft for lenovo and so far it's been working great. I loved microsoft's products, but their QC seems to be just horrible. Also idk how it's possible that that macbook that looked like it was shot wasn't the worst one.
Another fantastic video. I really enjoy your way of explaining things, great information without being too dumbed down. I only discovered your channel yesterday. Keep up the great work and videos. :)
Hugh: I fixed this Macbook and now it's very nice
Ken: Well that was truly horrifying
Maybe he put Mint on it.
I was starting to think it was only me who was confused by that
Aww, you missed a bathroom joke with the teleportation button.
Well, The Krazy Ken Curse let The Computer Clan have a break for one video.
My most humorous repair was for a major manufacturer. I worked in IT maintenance for a company. A user complained that anything he typed came up as random characters on screen. I went and retrieved the keyboard/computer for testing. His assessment was repeatable. There was no obvious reason. I swapped keyboards to see if that stopped the gibberish. It did. Keyboard problem. Went to plug the problem keyboard into another machine and noticed a switch on the bottom of the keyboard with three positions marked simply as reset/lock/map. I discovered in the service manual that if set to map, you would press a key and then the next key you pressed was assigned to the first. So if you pressed the A key then pressed the P key the A key acted as the P key. Worse, until the switch on the bottom was locked, this kept reassigning keys. So you would press the A key (nothing would be displayed), then the P key (displayed). They you would press the A key again (no display) and press another key, say J (displayed) and not that key was assigned to A. The mapping never ended until you locked the mapping. Fortunately, you could switch to reset, which used a ROM original key set and also copied it to the map. The keyboard did work, but it was decided that the switch was a user hazard not worth the trouble. My boss told me to set it to reset and super glue it there and then put a chassis seal over it. so that no one would seem curious. Problem solved.
A design 'horror' on a server: The HP ProLiant DL380 G4. The chipset heatsink was held down by a spring wire hooked into loops soldered to the mobo. After running at operating temps for several years, that solder softened enough that the spring wire chucked the loops to parts unknown. The chipset died in short order because of poor heatsink coupling, and it lacked a thermal cut-off.
This happened at my school!
One more thing I would add to your list, failed chips. It's true that sometimes old systems just stop powering up because one of the chips on the board just fails. I'm not sure why this happens but it happens fairly regularly with older systems. Would love to see a deep dive on what causes this.
Some early Atari STs also had issues where the recommended fix was to drop it from about 1 foot. Some of the system chips are in PLCC sockets and retention clips weren't used, so they could sometimes become slightly loose during shipping. If the drop fix didn't work, it would just require opening up and pushing down on the PLCC chips to reseat them. As soon as Atari became aware of the issue, they started putting retention clips on the PLCC sockets to hold the chips firmly in place.
Two quick things come to mind, one is tin solder whiskers. That is a major killer of older electronics. As the tin in the solder degrades from white tin to black or grey tin it crystallizes and forms threads or whiskers protruding from the surface of the solder joint or puddle. The whiskers are conductive and will short out components when they get long enough to arc over or when they break off and migrate to a spot where they can. Not good, Murray! Second thought, I’m surprised you didn’t get a hold of Fran from “Fran’s Lab”. With her work on the Apollo flight computer and such I kinda figured she would show up. Her main gig is historical electronics.
I used to work at a PC repair store. One time we got this monster tower, had like 200gb of RAM and everything, think they used it for research at the university.
They also had a liquid cooler. I forgot what I had to do with it but the cooler was extremely horrifying. Not only did they have the radiator on the outside of the case, I think the fans were backwards inside the case too. Instead of letting the piping from the CPU to the radiator sit in the case like it's meant to, they literally ripped a hole in the top of the case to shove them through to the improperly mounted radiator.
I did my best to fix this horrifying thing, but it was something to behold.
5 years ago, I found an old Packard Bell 850/607G computer, which was actually one of the later ones manufactured by NEC circa 1998, out at my grandparents farm. It had to of been sitting in their shed for almost 10 years, but I still wanted to see if it still worked. They said I could take it because it was junk. I got home, plugged it in, turned it on, and to my amazement it booted up perfectly fine🤯. The computer was incredibly dirty and had a lot of rust on some of the I/O ports, but still surprisingly worked! I ended up abandoning the restoration project and recycling it a couple years ago as the case was starting to fall apart and replacement parts were really hard to find.
I still have 2 NEC Packard Bell PCs, they are really built to last/ An NEC UTOW CAl one from 2003 that I was given because was being thrown away and had it been left out in the rain for a few days (it soon dried out) . I have an Easynote TS13 from 2012/2013 ish (I think that is an Acer made packard Bell with an I3), that is still my main laptop and I got it extremly cheap second hand. My favorite one though is a 2000/2001 Packard Bell La Diva all in one, which is ultra rare and totaly unique. It has a wireless keyboard, mouse and trackpad. It also has a modem built into its external PSU and a laptop PCIE slot (and laptop IDE) , it is running Windows ME and it only cost like 17.99 on ebay (I don't think I can get any spares at all for any price either) for it bar the , the HDD and the RAM and maybe the PSU Modem). Thankfully it still works like the day it was made, with all the original components (as far as I know, a sticker on the side says it was referbished in 2003 and may contain used parts!).
Recently I worked on someone's laptop that acted completely dead, no power at all- but there was a barely audible "click". Opened it up and found that a small rectangular ceramic capacitor had a crack in it, and every time you pushed the power button it would throw sparks. Started at one or two. Then it became a shower of sparks. Then the capacitor shattered and fell off. Best part, because there were multiple capacitors working in parallel in that part of the board...the laptop started working again and booted to Windows without so much as a hiccup.
Back in 2004-2005 I worked for an IT firm. We had sold a few local businesses some 17" LCD monitors made by "****". One of these companies had 12 monitors that no longer worked. The image was still there, but the backlight didn't work. They were still under warranty and "****" authorized that the monitors would be replaced and we were tasked with destroying the faulty units. We didn't destroy these monitors, but they were just placed into the boxes of the new monitors and tossed into the dumpster. (later that day) I dumpster dove for them and took 8 of the 12 monitors.
I found that out of the capacitors on the board, 4 of them needed replacement. I purchased a bag of replacements for just this model monitor for about $6.00 on eBay.
I replaced all the caps on the board on each of the monitors and 7 people that I knew got a 17" "****" monitor as a gift. The 8th monitor still works to this day and I use it as a spare.
Ken, fantastic video! I've been watching your videos for about two years now I guess (you showed my Macintosh SE some time ago), and they keep getting better and better. Keep it up, man, and thanks for the content!
Oh yeah! I remember that from Vintage Apple Vault. : ) Thanks for sticking around.
@@ComputerClan Absolutely!
Hi
I liked the video, glad to see you present topics like this to help others to learn.
I'm a bit surprised that you didn't include static electricity in your list (but yes, I know you had to limit how many due to time). Static does not necessarily kill a device immediately, but it can weaken components, especially with repeated zaps, leading to potential shorter lifetimes. Fortunately once components and boards are installed into a device they are reasonably safe for the most part.
I’ll never forget one of my earliest PC repairs, It was in the 90’s from what I remember and this Customer’s PC which was either a 486 or early Pentium PC and it was behaving very quirky and in a strange manner, It kept doing random things constantly, It turns out that when the owner setup his Computer he didn’t push the Power Lead in all the way so it was loose & ready to fall out, I figured out that was the issue fairly quickly and the Computer worked fine after I plugged the Power Cable in all the way! Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
This is a fantastic video. Well done Ken, love the channel.
Touching morher board at random, neglects to even mention ESD, or electro static discharge. The human body can carry enough static charge to blow components that can blow at far lower voltage.
My unibody MacBook pro had a weird problem where the RAM would randomly stop working and the computer wouldn't boot, only to find it boot 10 minutes later when I've moved it to another room. Now it's becoming clear that my RAM joints have become disconnected. At least one slot still works!
Thanks for this awesome video. Though I already know most of the stuff such as the capacitors and leakage, there are some stuff that I didn't know of. Like the Capacitor gate between 1999 to 2007. I highly wondered why computers I fix from those era, capacitors are the common ground.
Yo my 4k samsung tv broke down and when i took it apart, all i needed to replace was 3 out of the capacitor and it worked
what is it with samsung TV and capacitor failure
Red Stoner never had one but i knew pepole who had that problem. I agree ALOT with you
@@Handlethatwontbetaken i just noticed it from the sheer massive number of samsung tv repair guides on youtube that all they had to do was replace a few capacitors
@@virtualtools_3021 Planned obsolescence perhaps.
the debunking carp episodes got me here,
But @Computer clan, your clear translation of jargon to language has gotten me to poke that SUBSCRIBE button. Kudus to you dudes. thanks for educating me
Stopped the video at 3:16, because I am pretty sure the main Computer and/or Console killer will not be mentioned here: Cats.
They did make a movie. It was called
_Frantic (1988),_ staring Harrison Ford and directed by Roman Polanski.
6:06 I remember CD caddy's. It was a great idea when you really think about it.
Hugh Jeffrey's and 8 Bit Guy is my most fav youtuber...and this video make me happy
Early production runs of the original Apple II also had a similar design flaws; no fan & no case vents. Later revisions added case vents. If you ran the monitor or TV on top of the system, the power supply burned itself up. Mine was covered under warranty & after replacing it I only ran it with the case cover off, with no problems. The good thing was the machine ran totally silent. A good example of rushing a product to market & letting the early end-users do the testing.
I was aware of recapping old electronics. But watching TNT Amusements Pinball repair channel taught me all older circuit boards need to have every solder connection reflowed. Time consuming for sure but can eliminate many problems.
Are they gonna talk about the flowing of computer chips? After 50+ years.
What about raging? Does that break things?
Yes. In my country Colombia, we call that as: “Ctrl + Alt + Kick”
@@Nolroa Underated Comment!!!
Kills every electronic
Yes. See Office Space: ruclips.net/video/N9wsjroVlu8/видео.html
I was an electronics tech at my last job for 24 years. Our IT guy would bring me the various office computers that would no longer boot up and I would fix about 95% of them by just changing out all the electrolytic caps on the main board. I had bags and bags of various sizes of caps for just such eventualities! 🙂
Worked at Mouser? I love how David Murray always just casually drops some cool fact about himself every now and then.
Love you both! This is epic! Do more colabs like this!
8:40 "Somehow ended up in Taiwan..."
Magically skipped over CHINA.
15:00
I imagine that was owned by Plainrock124
Capacitors are also used to block DC and pass AC between circuits at different DC bias. For example between stages in a valve amp, where the anode (output) of the first stage can be biased to hundreds, maybe thousands of volts, but the grid (input) of the next stage needs to sit at a couple volts tops.
When the dielectric begins breaking down, the capacitor starts to leak DC, which in a valve amp will bias the next stage to the point of drawing very heavy current and eventually burning out the valve. Typically the user just replaces the valve without replacing the leaky cap, which promptly burns out the new valve.
Leaky smoothing capacitors in power supplies (or really, in any other smoothing role) cause the PSU to draw excessive power, not to mention the associated loss in capacitance making it very bad at filtering.
To be clear, ALL caps leak DC (electrolytics most of all), but usually it's so little it doesn't matter.
The other failure mode is high equivalent series resistance (ESR). That slows down the rate at which you can charge and discharge a cap, which creates lots of problems in circuits meant to take advantage of low ESR. Signal coupling suffers, but smoothing is affected even worse, especially if it's a big cap.
I had a custom built computer built by one of the many ads on the Computer Shopper Guide. Took 6 weeks. Plugged it, powered on, and blank screen. Fan was working. Called customer support. Says it would take weeks to repair. I opened up the case. Realized the eprom was in backwards. Flipped it and the computer booted up. I'm certain it never had a burn in test.
I used to be a service engineer and travelled to customer site to fix whatever issues they were having with their hardware at the time.
One particular job really was troubling, what seemed like a failed hot swap SCSI drive, however rather than it just failing and going offline, it rebuilt to around 70% then failed the drive and started rebuilding again, but the rebuild was taking minutes rather than hours. So, not sure what to do, I checked with the senior consultants who told me to “just pull the drive”, which I did and the whole array went offline!
Turned out the drive was fine, it was the backplane of the drive shelf that failed and took out the SCSI controller board!
Sometimes things are not quite what they seem, ah the late 90’s, would have been so much better just to skip them sometimes!
Krazy Ken: i will just leave my computer on this shelf for eternity
8 Bit Guy: *i wrap my computers in aluminum foil and bubble wrap and still i know it will die*
The year is 2004 and I get a customer with an unusually heavy midi-tower AT chassis which was in need of a repair. He asked me to be so kind and lift it out of his trunk because it was that heavy. After getting out to the car I found out this PC was like 43 kilogramms!
The user was asked to install some tools and promptly inserted half a toolbox into his PC. This shorted out almost everything so I had to rebuild his machine.
My face must have been funny to look at as I saw, what exactly happend.
Great vid. Horror story was... weak? Anyway, found this channel today, loving it so far. Cheers!
My hardware horror story? It involves the infamous note 7,a few years back my friends note 7 exploded (luckily he was upgrading to the note 8) and I had so many cuts and bruises, but luckily it exploded on a table so it only did that to my legs, and i still have scars today and they aren't light either, they are still so dark you could see them from a mile away
Very nice overview of the common failures for computer hardware!!
Thanks for posting it!!
Glad you liked it : )
Here is a horror story my iMac caught on fire when I was editing a clip for someone no joke I think what happened was that the power supply failed or something because it was having issues a couple of days before the incident happened
Me playing Everybody Edits on my mother’s HP Pavilion with Win7 pre-installed during that game’s popularity was enough for that to smell like a barbecue and fry the motherboard. If I remember right, they took out the motherboard and the CPU just burnt itself and surrounding circuits.
For the humidity/moisture one, you should contact Louis Rossmann, he repairs Apple products (mostly Macbooks) at the component level and specializes in water damage.
I have a Series III Fairlight CMI, and the battery for the clock in it is notorious for leaking horrifically and destroying the card it's on. So much so, that it's pretty much the first thing you fix before you do anything else on them. Oh, and it won't go past 1999 on the clock! :D Nice channel.
The *8-Bit Guy is how I know about this channel here in the fist place! Thanks, David!
As an interactive museum we encounter similar problems. I'd also like to add rubber to it, especially rubber bands for diskdrives. They won't kill your computer, but won't allow you to actually use it (most of the time). Second, heat. People underestimate the danger of overheating IC's. The internals of the chip break over the years due heat and there's no way you can fix an IC internally. Also, over or undervoltage of components (yes, looking at you Commodore 64) will kill them. These overvoltage is usually caused by bad capacitors, but still.
I remember I was troubleshooting an eVGA nForce 680i motherboard that was being a real PITA. I spent quite a bit of time on that sucker trying to figure out why it was throwing out seemingly random errors on various bootups. One moment it’s memory, next time a CPU error or hard drives not being detected properly.
I was really scratching my head on this one and even used spare components to try figuring out what the heck was going on. Then I had a good look over the board and saw a few of the capacitors were bulging and just starting to leak. My soldering skills are non-existent and we ended up replacing the board as it was a couple years old anyways, but I never forgot about it.
Title: Why do computers die?
Optimus Prime: *_DO AS I COMMAND!!!!_*
when I started working in a computer store full-time back in 1997.. I never thought I'd still be fixing computers every single day.. but it is what it is haha
4:18 subtle back to the future reference
Love your content Ken, I really like you
I service computers as a hobby and I've seen a lot of different ways a PC can die. From (mostly user caused) hard drive failures, bad capacitors, dead or faulty PSUs, to semi-cooked CPUs and toasted GPUs.
My personal experiences:
GPU in my first custom-built gaming rig, the 8800GTX, was killed by a single bad cap on the motherboard, near PCI-E slot. Funny thing is that none of the other caps on that board failed, only that single one. The PSU I've used for that build, the 600W FSP unit also developed bad capacitors at the end of it's service life.
My first high-end smartphone, Galaxy S4, had it's power management IC cooked by a power spike from a dodgy car charger (fortunately, finding a smashed phone with a good mainboard was fairly easy).
And finally, my cousin (who's a software developer) gave me his old laptop which had both a dead mainboard and a semi-cooked Core i7 processor with one faulty core.
As for physical damage, |'ve cracked the screen on my old Asus T100 hybrid twice. First time by accidentally kicking the bag where it was stored. Second time by dropping the same bag down from about 1m height.
Two of my favorite youtubers doing a colab
Great video. I enjoyed it very much keep up posting such interesting videos. Will be back to watch more in the future
As a person that fixes computers for friends and family, I’ve encountered four 2009-2012 MacBook Pros with broken RAM slots, and six with broken SATA cables. They’re terribly unreliable computers in my experience. I’ve never seen these issues on retina MacBooks, where the only regular non-accidental damage problems are the anti-glare coating.
Decades of working on and with pc's, has me convinced that overheating is a major problem. I have seen too many machines that sat on the floor gathering dust and Fido hair with the fan so clogged that it could hardly turn.
Also saw one computer used in a kitchen where the heat sink was covered with grease and it took automotive engine degreaser to clean it up! LOL!
I have not done anything on a laptop beyond upgrading clubs, adding memory and replacing the battery. I only my limitations.
15:00 That MacBook looks like it was used as a target in a firing range.
If so, it would be in better shape ... It looked like the MacBook had been in a blasting range.
That “Q U A C K” at 8:52 really got me XD
The first point reminds me of the time my wife's Lenovo Think{ad laptop fell down an entire flight of concrete stairs and came out completely unscathed. It was a wonder it didn't break! Thats awesome you got to visit the 8-bit guy and see his X16 prototype and collection. I know he was doing a video series on tech in texas recently, so I wonder if you'll be a special guest... 👀
In all seriousness, great episode, I learned a lot!
1:48 lol I was painting a picture of my Teddy Ruxpin when I first watched this video. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised haha
I wonder if my college MacBook Pro suffered from that RAM slot soldering issue as well....It looks to be the same model, and I constantly would turn my computer on and be greeted with the three beeps....I sent it in to apple at one point and they said my third party RAM was to blame, but even using the stock RAM didn’t remedy the issue. I eventually just used packing tape to keep the bottom panel of the case on so I could easily reseat the RAM during lectures without needing a screwdriver XD
Yeah, I can confirm that the Late 2011 MacBook Pro was the worst MacBook that I’ve owned, reliability wise. It had the fabled discrete GPU chip that was poorly soldered to the MLB and subsequently died. I can’t, and probably won’t, be able to find someone to fix it. They all tell me to recycle it, which is a little difficult to do as it was my first brand new Mac, when it came out. Loved the collab, and a great video as usual!
Same MB here. If I had replaced the thermal paste a few years ago, I could have saved it. In the end, I just shut off the GPU (there's a resistor you have to desolder) and it still is my main computer.
You might not need the hardware modification. The software solution is here: dosdude1.com/gpudisable/
il biggo thanks, I’ll be sure to take a look at it. Most of the problems, from what digging I did, fixed it until the system had a chance to enter S3 state, and subsequently kernel panic. There really haven’t been many solutions to this, other than use Lion, and I’ll also take a look at the hardware mods that may help as well
How are Hugh's eyes not turning to dust?
most people: 11-15 blinks in 44 seconds
Hugh Jeffreys: 3 ...
Most ambitious RUclips reviewer crossover.
I used to work at a college tech helpdesk. Guy walked in and said "I have some water damage on my computer can you fix it", as it was one of our support computer we shruged, we said we'll see what we can do. Later we found out, he was drunk that prior night and thought it was a toilet.
FATHER: Hey, son! Don't throw that 1999 Macbook to the walll!!!!
SON: I thought it was an Etch-A-Sketch
12:00 best option while keeping the batteries in the board: flip the board so the batteries are above air, so if they rupture, no electronics are harmed.
Well that's a collaboration I didn't expect.
I remember one of the worst things that happened to me when I was repairing a laptop that obviously was owned by a smoker, and it was a color of dark brown, that explained why it smelled like if a smoking lounge was a phone booth
These all will be most common for older electronics, but there is one major culprit missing in the video for the newer electronics - lead free solder. It basically guarantees that your high end electronics (especially laptops) stop working after few years of careful usage even if all the components are in a perfect state.
Letting cats rub up on me and I didn't use an ESD Wrist strap when I was trying to make a frankenstein project of taking two sub par computers and making a single great computer. The Cat's generated an ESD Charge on me that it caused the "Magic Smoke" followed by the sweet smell of death. So, I invested in an ESD Wrist strap and when I built this computer which I am watching the tube and what ever else I do on it, I was using the ESD Wrist strap as I was working building and even working on the inside with cleaning it.
your explanation of capacitors was great!
I built a pc for my mother in law to replace her ancient dell. Worked out great for her for a while, and then one day she calls and says it wont stay on for more than 10 minutes or so. I figure it's overheating, and ask if anything happened to it. She says she isn't sure but one of her cats might have bumped it. So I go over to her house and take a look. Heat sink and fan have been knocked loose from the motherboard, hanging on by one pin and the power connector for the fan which is bent at a 45 degree angle. I remember thinking it was amazing it could operate for 10 minutes and safely shut off. I bent the pins on the power connector back and replaced the HSF and it works fine to the day.
amazing video, but there was one point I was surprised wasnt mentioned, HARD DRIVES! those guys can be very finicky and when they fail it makes everything suck as you both lose your data (if its not recoverable) and of course you lose the functioning of your computer. though I will say that its amazing how resilient they are especially in laptops as the tolerances are so tight the reader head can be destroyed from a fingerprint on the storage platter but can withstand being moved around while spinning.
TFW you did a collab with THE 8-Bit Guy, in his attic, with him lying in very sedentary positions.
Here's an odd one to add to your list: COCKROACHES!!! Back in 1980 I was stationed in Panama and I had brought my brand new TRS-80 Model 1 with me. Down there, cockroaches are running around by the millions and there's no way to keep them out of the open-sided buildings. Many times I found cockroaches scurrying from my computer when I turned the light on. One day the computer stopped working so I opened it up and found a good half inch of the circuit board eaten away. I had to jury rig some support to get the circuitry to work again, and then started regularly spraying the area around the computer with Raid to keep them from coming back. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to your marvelous channel!!!
9:10 Now I'm going to do some research and write a corporate espionage action novel about the capacitor plague on Wattpad.
Okay send it to me if you are done