Here’s a story that’s an new twist on a familiar news story, but instead of “dog,” think “motherboard,”, replace “man” with “jjohn” and “bites” with “destroys.” That’s right after years of replacing my own computer hardware, I have destroyed my main Windows PC. I lay the blame for this incident on a power supply with a soft switch. The bastard sprang to life as I was removing a video card. You say “why didn’t you unplug the machine before opening the box?” To which I reply, I did the other 99 times. Actually, I thought I had unplugged it that time. I was very surprised to see the CPU fan start moving!
Anyway, now I need to decide what I’m going to do about this. My Window’s box was both my gaming platform and my TV. I will try to use one of my linux boxes for TV and I might have to content myself with Atari 2600 games, which is ok by me. Should I replace that box with a MacOS X box? A new Linux box? Another Windows box?
Have you got a really bone-headed hardware story? Do share!
[update: This incident forced me to finally get one of my TV tuner cards to work under Linux. I’m using xawtv and it works ok. It’s unstable in a completely different way than the W2K version, so that’s new. I think I can live with this for a while. At least until Farscape comes back on the air.]