heh, I almost had you there. But seriously, here is a very long story below:

My computer died last night, it was very sad. At approximately 10:40PM, while reading email, my computer suffered some sort of nerve damage and went crazy. Firefox went full screen, and random numbers and letters flooded my email box. I thought I was hacked.

"Impossible!" I thought, as I scrambled to hit the kill switch. "My security is enough to keep out a blackhat!" (and no, its probably not)

Flipping the switch, the power went dead as the dimmed lights in my room flickered. Gaining my confidence, I blamed it on a bug in Gran Paradiso, the Firefox 3.0 alpha I recently installed. But as I powered up the computer, I learned it was a much much worse than a simple program bug.

My computer started clicking. I mean, like the sound a harddrive makes when all hell breaks loose. I start panicing, and immediately hit the switch again.

"Oh ****" I mumble, as a I hoped that my main HD wasnt dead. If it was, then the last 2 months of code go with it. (no, I dont use SVN). As I looked into the computer, I saw no bumping fans. I unplugged my speakers and one harddrive and tried again (i wasnt sure which one). Clicking continued.

I unplugged the second hard drive....

clicking continued. I sighed in relief, my data was probably still there. But then I realized that it would have been better if it was a hard drive than a motherboard or processor problem. This was because I uploaded half my code to the backup server a half an hour before, and I happen to be quite poor (no job). If I lost a hard drive, even my main one, I can pull one out of my other... 3 computers laying around. If I lose my processor/motherboard, I would have to revert to a 1 ghz iBook running ubuntu which I have to return to my job in a month, or my 600mhz batterieless, cd rom less, floppyless, ethernet less, HP laptop which I got for a very good price many years ago.

I frantically began pulling out my PCI cards (much like that computer guy in Goldeneye), until I only had my video, RAM, and processor. Keyboard and mouse were still plugged in. I flipped the switch.

Click, Click, Click... Clickity, Clickity, Click.

"Noooooooooo" bad news for me.

At this point in time, It was already 11 PM, and I spent the whole day writing even more essays, and the night before I only got 5 hours of sleep. And to top it off, my room was around 80-85 degrees due to it being the damn summer, and the air conditioner not being on. And im on the top story.

I leave it, and decide my sleep is worth more. I pull out my Zune, to listen to the radio. Like a gift, the radio station just began playing the whole new Linkin Park CD from start to finish, two days before release! I was ecstatic. Great CD, btw.

--

anyway, to make a long story short, I spilled a water/sprite mixture (I like sprite very cold, thus lots of ice) on my keyboard a half an hour before this incident. I pulled the keys out, and dried it, and it seemed to work fine. I forgot the incident.

Little did I know, that a half an hour later, the water seeped into the circuit board. Thus, firefox going crazy, and lots of weird text. In the morning, it dried, so when I turned on my computer half awake, it didn't click. At all.

So it seems like the keyboard was sending crazy signals to the motherboard, which was reading them as "oh no, send kill!" Once it dried, no more kill, no more click.

Anyway, the moral of the story is to not be poor, backup your files, and dont place a glass of ice/sprite on top of a pile of papers ontop of your xbox, which is on your desk next to your keyboard. Bad things could happen.

I just knew reading your post that your HD and bit its last byte.

I keep absolutely every working document of mine organized neatly in one grand set of folders and, every couple days during a semester or every week otherwise, carry out the simple task of right clicking, Add to Archive, typing in Document Backup xx-xx-xx, make sure it's set to 'Best', 'Add Recovery Record' (5%), and 'Test Archive', go read a few emails or play some EVE, come back, and then copy ther resultant Backup of Life to every hard-drive I have access to -- and once a month, I remove the pictures from the archive and stick it on a USB key, which goes in to the safe in the closet (when I say it's got documents, that includes important ones).

Why? Cause I've been screwed in much the same way you thought you were.

I've only had to invoke a backup once, but it was a life-saver. There are probably much more elaborate or secure methods of getting it done, but good ol' WinRAR hasn't let me down so far...

Source control FTW!

LOL, backup DVDs FTW aswell, i would have a stroke if i lost all my Uni work.

I wonder if a sports drink with electrolytes would make a better conductor for shorting out your PC.

So that' where things have been going wrong! I'll remember that in future!

this woul soo not have happened to me though. I wouldn't have pulle dout stuff from my computer because A) it's wires and eckltricity and heart attacks as you get zapped by a million volts of lightning, and B) I pay a fiver a month so PC World can fix it for me.

There's one thing that I notice people haven't mentioned though...Nemitor was never born...

but he did appear to die...that's all that matters....

jk Nem

About that Linkin Park CD too, I've been listening to it for a few weeks and, though I try, I just can't seem to like it. I don't know, maybe it's because I've been really into metal lately.

All That Remains, Trivium, God Forbid, Atreyu, and Opeth FTW!!

I'm building a Tesla Coil

and I have shocked myself on accident a few times (with other stuff, not the coil)



Well for one, its been under lock and key in a safe for the last many months. ANY COPY you got before sunday (when the radio stations got the prerelease), is a FAKE.

The copies that are floating around are from some crap band.

The real cd is actually pretty mellow. It was just released to the public... 16 hours ago, and I got my copy a few minutes ago. It is amazing. Much better with high quality.

NOOOO, you'ved sold yourself to the devil young Faust. Why oh Why? there policy of repair is to reformt your harddrive and charge you for the privaledge


"There's one thing that I notice people haven't mentioned though...Nemitor was never born..."

Of course,.. GODs are not born they just "are" that is it simply "are!!"



Regards WOlfe

Actually they have a new policy - send you a new hard drive so that YOU can fix it! The instructions they send are actually pretty good, AND it means you don't have to wait to book an appointment for them to see your computer in store.

It's the closest i'll ever get to messing round with the insides of a computer though. I honestly can't understand why people try to do complex stuff like this themselves without help.

Oh, and don't bother trying to get the quote tags to work - it's easier to quote the text then manually type in the "quote by" bit, then bold and italicise it. That's what I always do. You AN get them to work but they don't work in the way you expect them to so I don't bother trying anymore.

LOL i didnt, i was to lazy to bother putting tags around them so i just put normal qoutation marks rather then use the tags

Regards Wolfe

heh, I am honored!

I've got every assignment I've ever done on a computer dating back to Middle School... well, 7th grade anyway.

------


Moe, you need better geek friends around where you live. I do several times a year all sorts of stuff for people; couple years ago I probably built a dozen computers from scratch for a few neighbors. I don't have any certification like the Geek Squad people but I don't know what they possibly know that I don't know about how to swap a hard drive, etc. Even if I got a wild error message, if Google doesn't return what that message means then the answer just plain doesn't exist.

If fixing your computer problems didnt involve a trans-atlantic flight I'd do it for free.

I just applied to be one of them

but what you are talking about is exactly what I do. A few days back my friend brought me and said "I got thousands of viruses, can you take a look at it?"

the final kill count was:

nemitor: 7650
Virus: 3

The viri felt my wrath.

I got twenty bucks for it though. If he brought it to Geeksquad, they would have charged him a few hundred. I mean, this computer was MESSED up. Worst I've seen in a long time - damn smart virus kept locking me out.

I'm sure GeekSquad guys know what they're doing well enough, just saying it's nothing the traditional geek friend can't do.

Though, that friend of yours, first thing I'd of done is kicked them. WTF kind of nasty pr0n were they looking at to get +7k virii?! Then I'd of taken aforementioned pr0n "for safe keeping and careful analysis." Then kick them again for not having an AV in use like NOD32 that inspects in-bound web traffic before letting the rest of the OS have the data.

heh, it actually started with a few dozen viruses. The only problem, is that one of them spreads like rabbits.

If it detects an attack, the virus will spread to EVERY .exe file on the whole system, and if it detects you trying to remove it, it will DESTROY your windows executable files. Very bad.

I have no idea if he had any pr0n, and he had no antivirus. The virus would also kill any installation or attempted startup of ANY antivirus/spyware/adaware software.

It was a hell of a fight.

I assumed it was porn, as that's the only sort of material I'm aware of that's pretty prone to trying to sneak aboard a virus... I suppose a google for "warez" and "<insert application/game> crack" might be a good way to snatch one up, too. BitTorrent is perhaps the absolute cleanest P2P community I've ever experienced -- especially if you only use somewhat exclusive membership-only sites, like Demonoid. Downloading "An_Inconvenient_Truth.exe" from an aggregator site though is asking for it. Not sure how else to get one, though.


I know of several people that run primarily F@H or other special-purposed machines without AV, but always sounds risky to me..

I used to not run antivirus. I download stuff almost non-stop, and yet in 6 months without antivirus software, i have gotten 0 viruses. If you use your brains, there is NO reason to get a virus. Ever.

Spyware sure, but not a virus.

I checked with command line scanner in a bootable OS.

Since I have been online (way back in 1995) I have never used virus protection in any of my systems. Of course I am very cvareful as to what gets downloaded into my system and I also do a spyware check once a week or so.

I think I'm just lucky that I ahve not gotten anything.!