Fed-up Colorado man takes 9mm PISTOL to vexing Dell PC A Colorado Springs man who decided he'd had just about enough of his cantankerous Dell PC took it into an alleyway and pumped eight 9mm rounds into its sorry case, according to the local Gazette. Lucas Hinch, 37, simply "got tired of fighting with his computer for the last several months", as the Colorado Springs Police …
Once, long ago, we had a SUN mouse die. I cut the tail off and put it into a mouse trap, then inside the case of a dead PC we were turning in.
I was worried when I saw the article. I know several people in the Springs who could have done it, so I was relieved to not see a familiar name.
Be careful. Some chiropracty body sued a journalist for libel for suggesting that they knew their treatments didn't work. It's OK to suggest somebody believes in pink unicorns, but not to suggest that they claim to but actually don't believe in them. Stupidity OK, cynicism not. Unless you're a politician.
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I just hope that not one new pence of that 200,000 pounds came from Simon Singh, but instead it all came from the British Chiropractic Association. Otherwise, there could be a chilling effect on physicians, skeptics, and others who seek to inform the public about dangerous quackery.
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It came installed with Windows and the hardware worked fine.
I was responsible for 250 Dell PC's on site, 2 had hardware issues (both mother board failures in Optiplex boxes) in 5 years and Dell responded promptly... This was 15-10 years ago, can't comment on the hardware quality nor Dell response now. Do Dell suck these days?
Their home kit (Inspiron, studio) isn't anything to write home about, but their business kit (OptiPlex, latitude) is pretty good: Reasonably priced, good reliability, and backed up by good servicing and parts options, especially if you spring for the NBD ProSupport.
Normally it's a straight fight between them and HP for our shop.
Thank you David, I am out of touch with business/corporate IT hardware matters these days.... HP? I remember getting very angry at Compaq Armada laptops in the late 90's, that was before HP bought Compaq out though... You just brought back memories nightmares ;-)
To be honest Dazed I have been building computers since the early nineties and 9 times out of ten it has been the software. Hardware does fail but that is so, so easy to diagnose. Software making it look like the hardware is faulty is something else entirely. But I agree I have wanted to kill hardware because that is what presents the results of faulty software to my perceptions and as such usually takes the brunt of my anger.
ARGH don't get me started on Gnome3 ARGH
Defaults to 1920x1200 desktop in VNC even when told to use 1280x1024 (OK, I'm a pixel junky and can run 1920x1200 windows on my desktop, but it isn't exactly common)
No option for a plain colour background, just over sized noise images, do these guys have the faintest idea what this does to the performance of screen painting when the server is 3000+ miles away?
Having to change settings using dconf-editor, where's the nice colour editor gone just as an example FFS
gnome-shell which likes to go into infinite loops and burn a CPU
ARGH
If this server was a nice safe 3000+ miles away it would be in grave danger of being hurled off the roof
Now please just don't get be started on systemd or it will be me hurling myself off the roof and I'm not a safe 3000+ miles away.
Having worked for a "small" dutch PC manufacturer in the past... Yes, we did..
Sometimes there were boxen that simply refused to work properly whichever part you switched out, batches of cards that were *just* inside of spec, etc.. And sometimes a sacrificial lamb was slaughtered to pay for its misbehaviour and to appease Murphy. We actually had a special suggestions box for it to see who could come up with the most original way to mangle the next sacrifice.
Anon as I'm ashamed.
One month ago, during a dense vid game session and a couple of boozes, the middle mouse wheel went itself blocked. As it's more or less the only way to navigate in this game, I got super ennoyed.
The mouse finshed under the chop literally. I chopped it in half with a small axe. I though it ridiculous for a gaming mouse (Logitec G302) to screw up so badly after what, a bit more than one year usage.
I now have a new one (Corsair).
Yes. A computer costs far too much money to be reckless with it like that. I don't have money to waste by destroying valuable items in a fit of temper. So I tend to be very suspicious of people who demonstrate that they do have a high capacity to go into destructive rages.
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It's an interesting difference of law between the US and the UK for firearms.
Depending on state the laws are much less about ownership, and much more about misuse. The UK made it hard to own firearms in the first place, the US lets you have them, but if you misbehave it doesn't end well for you.
So I can own a gun in the US without too much trouble at all, I can even carry it about unless the area is specified as a no-carry zone. But if I shoot it in an urban area that isn't at a range, wave it about and scare people or do something silly outside of city limits, it's not going to be a good day for me.
@DropBear
Elvis had the luxury of shooting his televisions in the privacy of his own home, and could afford repairing any collateral damage. Our homeopathic practitioner, who probably couldn't afford collateral to repair collateral damage, decided to play with guns in the alley. Big NO NO in the city limits in the land of guns.
My (least) favourites were anything with a PC Chips motherboard. Promptly renamed PC Chimps. Runner-up, Foxconn boards for apparently little driver support on website.
Generally, manufacturer whose drivers don't work with OEM versions otherwise identical to branded retail versions and who deny any knowledge of OEM products clearly manufactured by them.
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I'm writing this on a similar boxed Dell and the Disk Drives lie side by side flat on the bottom of the case.. Obviously they were expecting a homeo-cidal maniac packing a 9mm. Judging by the hole pattern they may well have survived, so a bit of T-Cut and it'll be good to go...
It took me a while to find it, but here it is!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/10/it_bloke_shoots_daughters_laptop/
Basically, a dad gets narked at his daughter's rant on FaceBook, so he takes the laptop that he prepped for her out the back and puts about 6 bullets into it. Youtube video included!
My one and only Dell computer ever was nearly thrown out of the second floor window on a number of occasions, were it not for the safety of those below. After ten service calls where everything was replaced (but the case) without it being fixed, I took it to the local dump and then built my own PC from the ground up. Now, if I had had a gun at the time...
I once went to a fault call where the customer showed me the reports sheets proving that the HDD, MB, PSU, RAM, data cables, FDD (showing it's age!) and even the CPU had all been replaced, except the case, and it still was faulty. It WAS the case. The motherboard was shorting out to a slight bend/kink in the case once it warmed up.
A man walks into the computer shop and says to the chap behind the counter...
"My computer keeps playing the same sounds, over and over"
Computer man asks
"what kind of sounds?"
Man says
"Rolling in the Deep, and Someone like you"
Computer man says
"i think that's because its, Adele"
Adele, get it, A, Dell......A.....Dell
Thank you, i'm here all week.
There is a local company that will "chew" my hardrives to bits (I imagine it to be a shredder of some sorts).
Other friendly IT folks have shown me hard drives with various types of bullets used.
A hollow-point is perhaps the most graphic example of "design destruction" imaginable when used in the context of a Human being. The entry site is as smooth as a drill bit, the exit is a snapshot of an explosion in progress.
There was a mythbusters where they used a very fast machine gun to cut something solid in half - scary but beautiful in a "black hole event horizon" sort of way...
P.
"The XPS 410 was current in 2007. I doubt his warranty was eight years. Which makes me wonder why he was so angry that such an old piece of kit was on the blink?"
I run Ubuntu so I don't get pissed off enough at my computers to want to shoot them. But, the hardware problems of an older PC are generally fan failures, when you can hear those fans grind and stop spinning it's annoying but also obvious something's going wrong (the "numerous blown cap" Dells were GX270s, several years older). Elderly-Windows-install related misbehaviors, crashes, slowdowns, viruses and spyware, mystery popups, and so on? Those would piss anybody off. I guess the flip side of this all is, though, if the computer was on it's last legs, there was really no harm in shooting it (other than having the plod show up).
<snip> "But, the hardware problems of an older PC are generally fan failures, when you can hear those fans grind and stop spinning it's annoying but also obvious something's going wrong (the "numerous blown cap" Dells were GX270s, several years older). " </snip>
<rant>
Add "Browngluedammerung" to that list, more equipment I have repaired had this "feature" than actual verifiable bad capacitors.
I recently repaired a very nice combo unit that had a switch failure, upon reassembling noticed that the display no longer worked. Hours of troubleshooting later, traced the fault back to a small can crystal liberally encrusted with brown conductive glue. Took off PCB, cleaned and replaced, Hello Bozo!
Needless to say this glue can also cause power supplies to "leak", or power amplifiers etc to just take off into never-never land at RF frequencies or just catch on fire when you least expect it.
Did I mention that this can occur on PCBs stored for decades as well, so when someone goes to swap out a standby power supply to a main the chances of it blowing up are not zero.
I now have a policy of writing off on the spot any equipment that has glue of this type in, no matter how "minor" the fault because it also corrodes tracks INSIDE the frelling PCB as if it couldn't get any worse.
</rant>
Clicka BOOM ... HEADSHOT!!!
The worrying thing is I have the exact machine featured, 2400 running XP, P4 768MB RAM, 7200RPM HDD. Needless to say about the only original parts are the power supply and motherboard, sucky though it is.
Can anyone suggest a creative way to put it out of its misery when it does finally expire?
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