Weekly Brain Dump 2017-08-25

Welcome to the Weekly Brain Dump, where we explore humor, horror and strange news from around the interwebs.

If you have a contribution to the madness, feel free to use the contact form to let us know.

Sound Advice

Don't Drink and Prime

Percussive Maintenance

I do some work for friends and family on the side, and sometimes fix up old computers and give them away to people who need them, or donate to charities, etc. so I've got quite a lot of old systems and parts piled up around the basement.

Working on a friend's computer. It completely froze up on him - won't boot, nothing. So I set it up on the end of my desk with a spare monitor and keyboard and turn it on to see what's (not) happening. I get the dreaded "No boot device found" error, and I notice that I didn't hear a hard drive starting up.

Before I got into it, I rolled my chair over to my PC to look up something, and the arm of my chair caught the power cord plugged into the dead PC and yanked it off the edge of the desk, onto the concrete floor. A loud crunch - the plastic face of the case took the brunt, breaking into a few pieces, but then there's the faint whine of a hard drive spinning up.

I picked the PC up, put it back on the desk, hit the reset button (or what was left of it) and was greeted by the Windows startup screen. I managed to clone the drive to a spare, transferred everything to a case that I'd salvaged from another dead machine, and gave it back.

I think I got a case of beer for that recovery job.