OT: Ever had your computer destroyed?

You lucked out twice - once in that the fault did not ruin your laptop, again in that the fault was not in a lift station (sewage).

I had a pneumatically conveyed flour pipe connection fail, filling the air with flour dust and depositing a hefty layer of flour my laptop.




I considered myself lucky that there was not a dust fire/explosion bringing the walls and roof down on me; none of the equipment was Class 2, Div 1 or Div 2 rated.

I blew up a couple. One in Georgia, when a lightning strike hit the pole transformer outside the blower room. Cooked my panel and my laptop.

Another in Kansas when a 300 hp motor started on an autotransformer starter. When it went across the line the surge let all the smoke out of my laptop. Funny thing: the next week I entered one of those business cards in the fishbowl drawings at a trade show and won a brand new laptop!

I have killed a couple laptops.
One working in a computer room with it on the floor. One of the floor tiles was not seated properly and I tripped over it and smashed it with my foot, slipped and it shot across the room hitting a server rack. Of course it was on at the time.
Second I was working on a mezzanine 30' high. Had it on a little table there. Turned around to quick and over the edge it went. Landed right on the corner and flew into all of its many parts. Broke my DH+ cable too.

A couple years ago I left mine connected to Ethernet port of the machine as I pushed my toolbox away. Pulled it off the top and it opened up completely as it fell to the floor face first. Picked it up and screen had all kinds of rainbow colored lines through it. Cycle power and still running strong today.

Sort of. It was a Lenovo (massive, massive resolution on that thing), fell from one of those portable field tables everyone seems to have now and it broke off a bunch of pieces.



I managed to put it together, some bits with glue and others with tape and it lasted me close to an year more until the company decided to move back to Dell.

I filled a top of the line Macbook Pro with curry while away commissioning once. Spent a couple of hours with a hair dryer but all seemed lost.

Went to the nearest Apple store, got a new one. Had my office air freight my backup drive from the office. Up and running as normal the next day.

Three days later the curry filled laptop came back to life and still works to this day, except for one of the USB ports. I took it to the Apple store to see if they could do anything for the USB port. They opened it up, had a look, and refused to touch it. They said that they have a heap of indicators internally that tell them if the surrounding components have been exposed to water. 100% of them had tripped. Understandably, they had no desire to end up "owning" it by trying to fix anything.

ASF said:

Three days later the curry filled laptop came back to life and still works to this day, except for one of the USB ports. I took it to the Apple store to see if they could do anything for the USB port. They opened it up, had a look, and refused to touch it. They said that they have a heap of indicators internally that tell them if the surrounding components have been exposed to water. 100% of them had tripped. Understandably, they had no desire to end up "owning" it by trying to fix anything.

Click to expand...

Why would they "own" it because of that ? All they had to do was to state that they could not say if it was fixable, and if it got fixed there would be no guarantee on the machine.
Sounds to me like they have a policy of pushing a new sale even if the customer just want a repair.

JesperMP said:

Why would they "own" it because of that ? All they had to do was to state that they could not say if it was fixable, and if it got fixed there would be no guarantee on the machine.
Sounds to me like they have a policy of pushing a new sale even if the customer just want a repair.

Click to expand...

Standard Apple procedure. Check out Louis Rossman or Jessa Jones on youtube. With apple products you basically have to use 3rd party repair.

Now for a semi success story. I've destroyed my share of laptops from crushing them to submerging them in water to dousing them chemicals, but last fall we forgot to put the latches back on some bag filters and managed to dump about 30 gallons of highly conductive water on my Dell Inspiron 15 7000 series laptop in about 2 seconds.

I was never particularly a fan of this laptop because you couldn't pop the keyboard out to clean the grit from underneath it, no easily removable batteries or hard drive, not that I had needed to do any of these to it...yet. I blew what water I could out of it and figured I might as well try to finish the job. The screen was a bright as normal, the keys didn't stick, and apparently that solid state hard drive was water "resistant". For the next week it would leave a dirty wet spot near the vents but 6 months later it's still ticking.

It will probably die today for me bragging on it but apparently this is a decently sealed laptop.

I had my laptop set up in the shop working on a machine and there was a hydraulic hose that was bent in half in the trash nearby. A coworker pulled it out to measure it and it sprung open and spewed hydraulic oil all over the laptop. No saving that one. Apparently laptops do not need to be lubed....

A colleague once had his laptop struck by lightning. Indoors.

We were commissioning a bakery line, and testing the flour delivery system. Flour is transported by use of a rotary airlock at the bottom of the silo, and blowing air through it -- transporting it as flour dust.

Well, flour dust in stainless steel pipes creates a bit of static, much like rubbing a balloon on felt. The piping was SUPPOSED to be grounded. But this was start-up....

Fortunately, my co-worker was several feet away at the HMI. He knew something was wrong when his hair was *literally* rising on the back of his neck when there was a sudden, loud CRAAACK!!

The lightning bolt struck his laptop, on a stainless steel drum, went out the serial port and into the PLC (AB PLC-5).

The PLC survived (those old PLCs were almost impossible to kill). His laptop worked, too, but the serial port was fried.

JesperMP said:

Why would they "own" it because of that ? All they had to do was to state that they could not say if it was fixable, and if it got fixed there would be no guarantee on the machine.
Sounds to me like they have a policy of pushing a new sale even if the customer just want a repair.

Click to expand...

Apple policy is that all repairs come with a three month guarantee. They were (quite reasonably) not at all confident that they could give a three month guarantee on a laptop that gave off a nice curry smell every time you worked it hard enough to run slightly warm

ASF said:

a laptop that gave off a nice curry smell every time you worked it hard enough to run slightly warm

Click to expand...

I'd have to stop for a lunch break all the time with such a delicious piece of hardware!

ASF said:

Apple policy is that all repairs come with a three month guarantee. They were (quite reasonably) not at all confident that they could give a three month guarantee on a laptop that gave off a nice curry smell every time you worked it hard enough to run slightly warm

Click to expand...

Then they should just state that they wont give any guarantee on the repaired laptop. As simple as that.
edit: The "policy" of allways providing 3 months guarantee, and "having" to refuse repairs on stuff that cannot be guaranteed to work is just a clever way to force a new sale on you.

Had a similar experience with curry, filled mine working on a sauce MFG plant.
Got it working again but after a few months it died, when I looked inside the curry had corroded the board it was growing fur on it, luckily, I had just replaced it with a same model as existing model had a broken 232 pin on the port, removed hard drive, repaired the port and back up & running again.