R.i.p.

[monday90]

Alas,
the Ethernet port on my laptop died today. She served me well and was a faithful and trusted friend for the last four years. Without her my laptop is now doomed to be shackled to a PCMCIA Ethernet card for the remainder of its days.

I would like to take this moment to remember her in all her former glory.

Without her I feel as though I am standing alone (quite literally).

I guess the point of this thread is that I had come to take my NIC for granted. Don't get me wrong I have lost hardware before (hard drives, memory, even motherboards). The effects were usually immediately apparent. Not so this time after a couple of hours of head scratching re-configuring network settings and booting to live media I finally concluded my NIC is indeed dead. At this point it suddenly hit home how useless my laptop is to me without it.

Has anyone else lost any hardware that they had started to take for granted? Or even lost hardware in catastrophic or amusing ways?

[questio verum]

I hate losing any hardware. But I especially hate losing a hard drive though. Anything not backed up... gone forever.

The funniest one happened to a customer though. (It's automatically funnier if it's someone else!)

This lady called in when I was working tech support. She's crying her eyes out. I mean so bad I could hardly understand her at the beginning of the call. Turns out she was sitting on her bed, cleaning her .357 and it went off, blasting a crater in the lappie, killing it dead. Hdd, proc, lcd, mobo (of course), you name it. All dead. 2 weeks later I was working triage in asset recovery and this lappie wrapped in plastic shows up on my bench. Yup, you guessed it. The gunshot victim.

Amazing, the damage one bullet can do to a lappie.

qv

[Dapper Dan]

Amazing, the damage one bullet can do to a lappie.

Any idiot who would clean a .357 without making extra sure it wasn't loaded couldn't have been very bright to begin with! As a wheel gun, all one has to do is simply look to make sure no rounds are in the chamber. I'm also surprised she could even hear your part of the conversation as the .357 is the most ear splitting hand gun made. The noise at close range without ear protection is mighty unforgiving, usually leaving the victim with a ringing in the ears that overwhelms attempts of receiving vocal communication. I suspect the real story is that she purposely shot the lappy in a fit of rage. On the "bright side," If she'd shot it with a .45 (acp) there wouldn't have been anything left to send. Lol...

[Artesia]

I'm surprised that she so readily admitted to a negligent discharge. I'd be embarrassed as hell. Why call at all? It's not like tech support will be able to fix a computer with a giant hole in it...

[bigtomrodney]

I broke the cup holder on my PC. I'm just all broken up as I'm afraid I might spill it on my keyboard.