it's a matter of how well it runs not what the case looks like or any of that crap.

Not computer hardware, but the worst thing I ever got off a blind internet purchase was when I won an auction for an "As Is" Capcom Play System 2 (CPS2) arcade board for Marvel Vs Capcom 1.

CPS2 boards are 2 part boards contained in plastic chasis, and they're fairly large. Like, bigger than two-three keyboards stacked on each other.

Anyway, these boards have encryption on them and the keys to it are stored in battery backed SRAM. These are known as "suicide batteries".
The batteries are 1/2AA lithium cells, and have been running for 20+ years.

I think you can guess what happens when they get that old.

The board I had won was a spectacular mess. The battery had exploded, and coated a third of the board in acid. It was a horror show.

The moral of the story is to ALWAYS check your batteries, no matter what hardware it is!

I could only salvage 4 of 21 rom chips, the rest had most of their pins dissolved by the battery juices, and many of the SMD components were off the board entirely.

clueless1 wrote:

FaSMaN--is that lizard dead? It looks so, but not 100% sure. 😀

Hahaha , yes it's dead, it was mummified by the time I found it, rock solid and dried out

I bought a PC and found out half of it was a laserdisc player.

As for roaches, there was a curbside EMAX 1000 that was.....oh my god, the roaches inside that thing......

I contacted the seller. He refunded the entire purchase cost of the SC-55. I ordered the buttons from Digikey (based on my measurements it should be the exact same ones).

Should be here in a few days. $20 for new buttons and new main power cap.

leonk-nice! You deserved a refund for going through that.

As for me, this is not a PC, but does involve a circuitboard. At a previous home I owned, it came with a hottub built into a raised deck. All of it was old, and when we bought the house we were told we'd be lucky if we got a few years out of it. Well, they were right. Within a few years it all stopped working. We almost never used it when it did work, so just forgot about it. When it came time to sell the house, we had to tear the deck and tub out. That was when I saw the little service door that opened to a circuitboard that I never knew existed. 🤣. Fried across the board was a BBQ mouse.