When you first get your hands on an old piece of equipment, regardless of whether it’s an old PC or some lab equipment, there is often the temptation to stick a power lead into it and see what the happy electrons make it do. Although often this will work out fine, there are many reasons why this is a terrible idea. As many people have found out by now, you can be met by the wonderful smell of a Rifa capacitor blowing smoke in the power supply, or by fascinatingly dangly damaged power wires, as the [Retro Hack Shack] on YouTube found recently in an old Gateway PC.
Fortunately, this video is a public service announcement and a demonstration of why you should always follow the sage advice of “Don’t turn it on, take it apart”. Inside this Gateway 2000 PC from 1999 lurked a cut audio cable, which wasn’t terribly concerning. The problem was also a Molex connector that had at some point been violently ripped off, leaving exposed wiring inside the case. The connector and the rest of the wiring were still found in the HDD.
Other wires were also damaged, making it clear that the previous owner had tried and failed to remove some connectors, including the front panel I/O wiring. Thankfully, this PC was first torn apart so that the damage could be repaired, but it shows just how easily a ‘quick power-on check’ can turn into something very unpleasant and smelly.
You know you’re getting older when the power supply of your childhood PC is no longer safe to plug in.
Heck, a lot of the stuff I built in my childhood was not safe to plug in in my childhood.
Ah. My childhood was standalone and did not need to be plugged in.
The classic “two nails, one board, and one power cord” hot dog cooker was a notable standout for me. I can’t believe I actually got that one out of a book.
There was, later, a commercialized version, but it was fully enclosed. Big babies. ;-)
KISS
Just tin the end of the power cord wires with silver solder and done.
Best to make hook shape with the wire, so the sausages don’t fall off when cooking.
A bit more fun in 220 nations.
Go for it you fuzzy little foreigners.
Na, we keep hot dogs for … dogs, and no need to cook them.
They have longer wieners, offering more resistance. :)
Two words: Series connection.
@ono You don’t like eating pig butt holes? 🤤
The Hotdogger!
Yup I made that one too. I had to pry pages apart from the library book. Apparently the library staff deemed it too dangerous so they glued the pages together to supposedly stop some young fool from electrocuting themselves. Ha they didn’t fool me.
The power supply of my childhood (well high school) PC has long ago been cannibalized and turned into a power supply for an art installation. I think it’s still going? Maybe, it’s hard to determine which one of my ATX supplies went where
Get off my lawn with your ATX PSU from your childhood! 😉. AT class PSUs have live phase at the power switch inside the case even when switched off!
Get off my lawn with your AT power supplies.
Some TI 99 wall warts were electrocution hazards when brand new.
My original Apple2+ is gathering dust, waiting for me to do the capacitor thing to it’s power supply.
Amiga (no #, they were just Amigas), same.
Not sure if I’ll ever get to it.
After the 64.5 mustang in any case.
Which is after the 60 mopar land yacht.
Which is after the new garage/shop (current foreground project).
Then there’s the GT that won’t smog…I’m kind of over a car that tries to kill you when revved past 3.5kRPM anyhow.
But not so over it as to buy a car with traction control or a slush box.
I’m not dead!
? There was no Amiga model that was ever “just Amiga”, although the A1000 didn’t always get referred to by that name until after the A500 and the A2000 were released. But it was, at least officially, the Amiga 1000 right from launch.
I take that back, the earliest models were referred to just as “the Amiga”. Shows what I know. You must have really gotten in on that early!
You know you’re getting old when … You remember spending two years reading store literature, trying to decide if an Apple II was what you wanted to buy for your 4 year old daughter.
An open cover inspection is always worth it, there can be other bugs inside. Roaches etc. or mouse business as well as dust bunnies.
Same is true for any crap made in Chain a today.
FIRST, open up, do a inspection.
Yep. The last bench power supply I got had line and neutral reversed inside the chassis, with the power switch in the neutral line, and the ground lead not connected. Yeesh.
Mmm.. it must be a bad PSU, a good PSU uses to have quality control, and switch AC main poles might rise the level of AC leaking from the filtering Y caps.
If all the computers I found from that era were so clean as this ….
Don’t ask people who’ve been inside 1000s about the worst they’ve seen.
It will be a laptop, ‘The horror!’
I walked into a site once and could hear the hard drive bearing screaming from 50 feet away.
Didn’t know which bearing it was, but knew I had to down the network, get a backup and down the server before it did it to itself.
That drive never spun again, seized like a fiat motor at shutdown.
On topic of case filth, there was an inch of dust inside the case.
No fans were spinning.
This was, IIRC, a 386 running netmare with a whopping big 80MByte drive.
I shot all the drives I owned that were suspected of containing netmare 2.
Felt as good as burning my Latin books at the end of that waste of time.
When I was stationed in the desert, we had our machines on a 10 day rotation.
Every 10 days we swapped out their machines to clean the old ones and rotate them back in.
I had 4 troops who’s only job was to DUMP the dust out of the machines, blow them out wih compressed air, check if any hardware needed replacing, then re-image them.
That’s 4 people working 12s to clean less than 800 machines.
It was madness.
Have you ever seen a PC fan fail from dust damage?
No, I don’t mean getting clogged up and seizing.
I mean the blades getting worn down until one snapped, or at least getting so out of balance that it vibrates itself to death.
Never really had time to do a forensic analysis of why the $4 fan was broken.
Beyond ‘The site is filthy w dust and nobody is paid enough to care.’
I have seen fans running fine for years w a missing blade.
Never seen a jet engine style super worn fishhook fan blade.
Dust? Pftt…
I had an old laptop once in a past apartment that I kept running on my counter for music and stuff. A colony of ants decided to quickly move in one day and make it home. I still have trauma from dealing with that.
Someone took it to a service center and they sabotaged it to get the owner to buy a new computer, I hate people like that!
The IBM desktops (like Pentium era) the case edges were so freaking sharp, you could close it and have it slice through wires easily (no resistance to tell you you’re cutting through anything… I can’t stress how sharp the case edges are) and then they are shorted against the case. If you turn it on then flames shoot out the power supply. Ask me how I know? (I worked at U of Iowa surplus refurbishing computers and actually had this happen twice. One, after it kept burning rather than flaming out after I unplugged it, I went to get the fire extnguisher only to find it was missing. So I threw the burning computer off a second story balcony into the parking lot. Good times.)
“Don’t turn it on, take it apart” EEVBlog style.
I got a great deal on a huge UPS from an old server room. It used 64 regular 9v UPS batteries. I had to pay an electrician to wire it up because it needed a 220v 70 amp breaker with 4 separate 2 gauge wires, which is beyond my amateur wiring abilities.
Get it all hooked up, turn it on, and hear quite a loud pop. I took it apart a short time later hoping that I could replace whatever part blew…
It turns out that 220v@70amp makes it tricky to do failure analysis… Instead of releasing the magic smoke, many scorched craters marked spots where important looking pieces turned completely into magic smoke.
Fortunately the device has a battery bypass switch to send power directly to the outlets, so now it’s just a very expensive and VERY heavy power strip.
Sure you don’t mean 12 volts? Lead acid wouldn’t be 9V anyway. The failure rate times 64 isn’t safe it seems. Should be real wet cell like truck batteries. SLA’s seem to fail in 3 years regardless of duty used or not.
Inspecting before turning on his a good idea even with recent equipment. A PC we shipped to SIGGRAPH got bounced in route and had one of its boards shake free, resulting in a rather catastrophic short circuit when it was in cautiously turned on. I got the fun job of doing a rush configuration of a replacement machine and hand-carrying it on a flight.
(TSA asked me to turn it on. Despite my having no display with me. I plugged it in, I pushed the button, the green light came on, after a few seconds they declared themselves satisfied. I presumed this was more about examining my behavior then examining the machine.)
I had a customer who complained about a hard drive failure on her 6 month old pc. When opened it I noticed quite a bit of cat fur. When I pulled the hard drive I noticed some fur sticking out between the hard drive and the PCB on the back of it…. So as one does I voided the warranty and removed the PCB to find a mat of cat fur in-between the drive and the PCB…. Called the owner and asked if she had a cat…. The lady said yes and her cat really like the sound of the computer running so she put a shoe behind the PC for the cat to lay on. The power supply eventually would have burned if the hard drive didn’t die first
Early 90s I went on a PC service call in a dry cleaning company on a POS with intermittent mouse. Get there and find, no air conditioning in the whole building, 286 machine is in a warehouse with dry cleaning machines of various types spraying chemicals and steam everywhere. This is deep east Texas in mid summer, 110 degrees outside, higher in this building. New mouse, same problem. Open the case… everything inside is solid rust — cards, motherboard, chassis, everything not painted has rust so thick it’s flaking off. Tell the owner this is shot, miracle it works at all, need new computer. No can do, no money. So I plugged in a different expansion card and same mouse… working fine. It still worked when I moved away 5 years later.