If you find thin, flat objects put in strange places “some asshole” is almost certainly a young kid haha

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-06, 02:03:

If you find thin, flat objects put in strange places “some asshole” is almost certainly a young kid haha

Honestly, I hadn't thought of that. Although this does mean that the eBay seller either was lying about having tested it to power on or he put the floppies *back* after he'd tested it.

JoyfulTechnology wrote on 2026-02-06, 02:14:

Honestly, I hadn't thought of that. Although this does mean that the eBay seller either was lying about having tested it to power on or he put the floppies *back* after he'd tested it.

I would speculate that the disks moved into a position which blocked the door during shipping, or the ebay seller did lie which isn't that uncommon tbh.

Oh geez, sounds like a mess. The worst thing I've run into was on a Pentium II Northgate system I was fixing. I had to replace a broken CMOS battery socket, and when I went to unplug the LED's for HDD, Power, Ect.... I found that some doofus thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to hot glue the connectors onto the motherboard. Upon further inspection I found that the molex connectors were hot glued to the drives as well....smh

Some folks should not be allowed inside of a computer in my opinion 🤣.

I've got a recent one, I bought a MK1869 XTREME (basically a ESS 1869 with a InterWave onboard, in the same vein as the original GUS Extreme) for my ALR EISA system, it worked fine for a bit, same system unfortunately would throw hissy fits with an Orpheus II, to this day I still am clueless as to why. But that's besides the point.

The MK1869 worked fine and dandy for a couple of weeks, so I put away the system for a while (mental health struggles, won't get into specifics), one day, I decide to boot that thing up again and...

Gone.

The ESS side of the MK1869 just died (UniSound wouldn't detect it anymore), cue in hours of troubleshooting, trying to reflash the EEPROM, no dice. I wind up having to send back the card, after waiting anxiously for days, I receive it back, I put it back in the ALR, whew, it works.

I have no clue what happened but something tells me this system hates sound cards, I tried multiple cards and not one of them besides the MK1869 XTREME would behave correctly.

2nd one isn't as bad but still dumb and simple... Picture this, a Macintosh LC II, recapped (macs of that era being, if you know, you know... Leaky caps). Nothing new.

It worked fine for a bit, till one day it just died. No boot, just a solid grey screen, no chimes or chimes of death. If I flexed the board a bit I could get it to boot, right... I looked everywhere, besides a few crooked caps (my friend and I aren't the best when it comes to soldering SMD caps), I see one cap that is a bit crooked, I try and resolder it... Fire back the LC II aaaand it works.

Just one tiny cap on the sound chip was enough to cause the whole thing to crash and burn.

3rd one, also on a Mac, my Power Macintosh 7500/100, I've got a PC Compatibility card in it (basically a PC on a PCI card), not really much of a big issue but... The software on the Mac Side needs you to click while holding the command key down to make a right click on the windows side of things... And since I've got an ADB trackball that allows me to bind it's buttons to a key combination, I've set one of the buttons to "command+mouse click", yet the card software doesn't even recognize this. A mild annoyance, but still a very dumb problem among many such as, how the card would sometimes lock up solid (needed to reseat the RAM on the card), and the software constantly bugging me to add a printer (not going to happen).

On one of my PCJrs someone cut big messy shaped holes in the side of the case to get to the screws of the floppy drive when the floppy drive sits in a tray that easily pops out of the chassis.

The dumbest thing I frequently encounter is people smoking indoors and basically ruining their entire home with fine cigarette glaze.
Computers from such homes are always clogged with moist dusty tar that's sitting on every single part, emitting that lovely sweet aroma of decaying lung tissue and disease. Cleaning it off completely is next to impossible so I usually just harvest the CPU, RAM, cards and maybe the board if it's something special and throw the rest in e-waste. I hate dealing with smoker rigs but it's more common that people would think.
The worst one was a nice IBM PS/2 with the damn 110/220 switch flipped, the PSU exploded instantly and getting a replacement for that was basically hopeless. Auction photos prove that the PC was tested and working before and I never found out why the switch was in the wrong position. I ended up cannibalizing another PSU that I installed in the IBM PSU's case with a rewired pinout. Hate those 110/220 switches with a passion and check them religiously now.

JoyfulTechnology wrote on 2026-02-06, 02:14:

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-06, 02:03:

If you find thin, flat objects put in strange places “some asshole” is almost certainly a young kid haha

Honestly, I hadn't thought of that. Although this does mean that the eBay seller either was lying about having tested it to power on or he put the floppies *back* after he'd tested it.

Some ebay seller lied?! I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked! 😅

If you don’t see photos about the thing working, the safe assumption is that it isn’t. And if someone sells untested vintage electronics, it is safe to assume that it is tested and it doesn’t work.

I’ve had good luck with ebay purchases, but I have always avoided those with ambiguous descriptions and went with sellers with high positive feedback and who specialize in selling vintage computers parts. They often include photos about testing the system or component too.

Two of the bumbest things I came across:

- Sound of (some/all?) PCI Soundcards are muted in DOS (Window/Fullscreen) on Win95 with AlladinV chipset.
- AD1980 sound routing is different on some mainboards. Severeal fixes for Linux-Kernels available, but none for 2.19 which is used in Amithlon. So even if there is driversupport, the soundoutput is "somewhere" but not on anything I can make use of.

Doc

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-02-06, 03:48:

Oh geez, sounds like a mess. The worst thing I've run into was on a Pentium II Northgate system I was fixing. I had to replace a broken CMOS battery socket, and when I went to unplug the LED's for HDD, Power, Ect.... I found that some doofus thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to hot glue the connectors onto the motherboard. Upon further inspection I found that the molex connectors were hot glued to the drives as well....smh

Some folks should not be allowed inside of a computer in my opinion 🤣.

I have ran across this as well. People are strange.

BITD, I was a benchmonkey for a mom&pop computer store.

A customer brought in a computer that they needed fixed. Software still was routinely shipped on diskettes then, and they NEEDED their floppy drive to work, but they could not get disks to go in. Inspection revealed "Foreign objects" inside.

I removed 2 casino tokens, and a rolled up 100$ bill, using a pair of hemostats. Tested the drive for alignment afterward, and it came out rosy. I placed the removed objects in a ziploc bag, and stuck it to the side of the system.

Strangely enough, the person told me to keep the 100$, and was shocked that I wanted to return it to them.

People truly are strange.

As for-- "Some people should not be allowed inside a computer"...

ANOTHER customer came to us, angry that we had sold them a defective CDRom drive. They claimed that the drive immediately let out the magic smoke when they turned it on, after installing it themselves. After a short bit of Q and A with the person, we learned that they had attached the 5V power line that was MEANT for their LED display badge on the front of their case, to the SPDIF connector on the CDRom, thinking it was "Secondary Power".

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-02-06, 03:48:

Oh geez, sounds like a mess. The worst thing I've run into was on a Pentium II Northgate system I was fixing. I had to replace a broken CMOS battery socket, and when I went to unplug the LED's for HDD, Power, Ect.... I found that some doofus thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to hot glue the connectors onto the motherboard. Upon further inspection I found that the molex connectors were hot glued to the drives as well....sm

I've seen this before on a couple industrial boards where there was hot glue on the serial connections on the board. I figure it's just something certain system builders did, especially if the systems were being transported.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-02-06, 16:10:

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-02-06, 03:48:

Oh geez, sounds like a mess. The worst thing I've run into was on a Pentium II Northgate system I was fixing. I had to replace a broken CMOS battery socket, and when I went to unplug the LED's for HDD, Power, Ect.... I found that some doofus thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to hot glue the connectors onto the motherboard. Upon further inspection I found that the molex connectors were hot glued to the drives as well....sm

I've seen this before on a couple industrial boards where there was hot glue on the serial connections on the board. I figure it's just something certain system builders did, especially if the systems were being transported.

There are system builders that still do that so yep..

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2026-02-06, 09:18:

Some ebay seller lied?! I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked! 😅

If you don’t see photos about the thing working, the safe assumption is that it isn’t. And if someone sells untested vintage electronics, it is safe to assume that it is tested and it doesn’t work.

I’ve had good luck with ebay purchases, but I have always avoided those with ambiguous descriptions and went with sellers with high positive feedback and who specialize in selling vintage computers parts. They often include photos about testing the system or component too.

To be fair, I figured the description was pretty worthless, since "powers on" could be as little as the fan running, and on the Compaq Portable the fan is powered by AC so the fan running means absolutely nothing about whether the system works. It was cheap, and I was looking for a project fixing a junk system.

Hot glue comes right off with some isopropyl alcohol.

Dumbest thing I've done lately was trying to install USB drivers on windows 98 while using a USB keyboard and mouse and then staring blankly for a minute wondering why I couldn't click Next.

Dumbest hardware problem is probably the disintegrating plastic mounts on an AVC s775 heatsink. They're fine until you move the computer around and then one side snaps and you wonder why the CPU is sitting at 70c. They could have attached the mounting screws directly to the aluminum casting but no, had to use 1mm of plastic that goes brittle with heat, under tension.

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-02-06, 03:48:

Oh geez, sounds like a mess. The worst thing I've run into was on a Pentium II Northgate system I was fixing. I had to replace a broken CMOS battery socket, and when I went to unplug the LED's for HDD, Power, Ect.... I found that some doofus thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to hot glue the connectors onto the motherboard. Upon further inspection I found that the molex connectors were hot glued to the drives as well....smh

Some folks should not be allowed inside of a computer in my opinion 🤣.

I've had PC's direct from the factory that had hot-glue on the cables - presumably to stop them coming loose in shipping. They must have had a bunch of tech support queries/returns for trivial problems like loose cables? Luckily it tends to come off easily with a flat bladed screwdriver - just be careful what's on the other side in case you slip.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-06, 02:03:

If you find thin, flat objects put in strange places “some asshole” is almost certainly a young kid haha

Further argument that the culprit was a kid: both floppy drives ended up having disks in them, both sideways. I was wondering why the drives were sounding like a freaking washing machine.

But hey, the system works, and it actually boots off the hardcard. I'm like 99% sure that the guy lied about powering it on, since why the heck would you not advertise the fact that the machine actually boots if he had?

Is this a rare IDE hardcard, or is this an MFM/RLL hardcard?

This sounds very familiar. Slightly less retro but very much in the same line: last week at the repair cafe I volunteer at someone brought in an inkjet printer. We hate those things - usually they are gunked up with ink and after coating us and everything around it with mess, some very proprietary and no longer made component turns out to be bent or broken. Success rate is very low. But we always try. This time though the problem was in the paper feed, not the - remarkably clean - printing section. The printer powered on and gave an error code that suggested trying to remove foreign objects. Uhuh. Still, while trying to figure out what was blocking the paper something did seem out of place. Silvery and... was that an Apple logo?

Long story short, somehow the remote of an Apple TV had gotten stuck in the paper feed, and Canon in all their wisdom had designed it without a back door to clear stuff out. We had to disassemble nearly the whole device to get it out. But it worked. And they had their long lost remote back. Apparently they had a 4-year old who liked hiding things. They're still looking for an iPhone 😉