Not sure if this counts, but I had a friend in high school who had lived through a home fire - twice. First time was faulty wiring, second time was a grass fire in the neighbor's property that got out of control.
He had an old Gateway 2000 desktop with massive burn marks down one side of the case that was in both fires and the damn thing still ran. We laughed every time he turned it on, like we were waiting for it to spontaneously explode or something.
Once I did an insurance report for a computer that had been flown in from the United Arab Emirates. The guy checked it in on his flight and when it came out the other end it had gone from a normal computer tower shape to some kind of abstract sculpture, kind of like a Picasso painting in 3D. It was one of those all-metal Lian Li cases so no plastic to shatter, it was just massively deformed.
Managed to get most of his data off the HDD but the rest was a write-off. The insurance company kept bugging us to see if any other parts could be salvaged.
Our company once received a computer from a Malaysian company that needed a small repair for some manufacturing they were doing with a Hard Drive lapping machine we manufactured. This was, oh, 1995 or so. They had shipped it to us, we cleaned it up, updated it, repaired it, and sent it back. Malaysian customs proceeded to "inspect" the computer upon arrival. Which essentially was pulling the metal case cover off and removing all the component cards ( four, I believe) without using tools. There' might have po
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The fire computer (Score:4, Interesting)
He had an old Gateway 2000 desktop with massive burn marks down one side of the case that was in both fires and the damn thing still ran. We laughed every time he turned it on, like we were waiting for it to spontaneously explode or something.
Re:The fire computer (Score:3)
Once I did an insurance report for a computer that had been flown in from the United Arab Emirates. The guy checked it in on his flight and when it came out the other end it had gone from a normal computer tower shape to some kind of abstract sculpture, kind of like a Picasso painting in 3D. It was one of those all-metal Lian Li cases so no plastic to shatter, it was just massively deformed.
Managed to get most of his data off the HDD but the rest was a write-off. The insurance company kept bugging us to see if any other parts could be salvaged.
Re: (Score:2)
Our company once received a computer from a Malaysian company that needed a small repair for some manufacturing they were doing with a Hard Drive lapping machine we manufactured. This was, oh, 1995 or so. They had shipped it to us, we cleaned it up, updated it, repaired it, and sent it back.
Malaysian customs proceeded to "inspect" the computer upon arrival. Which essentially was pulling the metal case cover off and removing all the component cards ( four, I believe) without using tools. There' might have po