ChipLog

Various stuff from some guy.

Everything breaks :(

15 Comments Posted by on November 16, 2007

So.. My Wii stopped reading discs. Just as I came home with Mario Galaxy. It makes some pretty sad clicking noises and then informs me that I should join in on its sadness.

I can’t say I’m at all surprised. I’m pretty good to my electronics. They just don’t return the favor. Let’s take a journey through the past.

  • 11 dead Palm PDAs (one right after the other until I got one that worked).
  • 7 dead harddrives in the past four years (latest 2 months ago).
  • Various fan problems, motherboard problems, display problems and keyboard problems across two different ThinkPads in the past two years.
  • 2 dead motherboards on two desktop computer (both mid-2006).
  • 1 dead LCD (a few months ago).
  • 1 dead DVD player (just a few months ago).
  • 1 dead MP3 player (just gave out one day).
  • 1 dead UPS (earlier this year, just stopped one day).
  • 1 dead car radio (a few months ago, just weeks after buying the car, which has always been in great condition).
  • 1 defective gear shift brake circuit (same car, couple weeks after the radio).
  • 1 dead Wii.

There’s more. I just can’t remember off-hand. Either the quality of everything sucks these days or anything electronic just commits suicide in my presence. I’m not sure which.

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15 Responses to Everything breaks :(

  1. Tom November 16, 2007 at 2:01 AM

    Get an electrician to check your mains supply, I once lived in a cursed house where any and everything I plugged it would end up frying or failing. The most spectacular event was a surge (or something) causing my entire PC to catch fire, the PSU failed to protect the system and so my motherboard, gfx card, soundcard and harddrive all blew components and filled my room with acrid white smoke.

    Not saying this is the cause of your problems but worth checking out.

  2. ChipX86 November 16, 2007 at 2:03 AM

    Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, these deaths took place at various locations (old home, new home, work). Many of the things that have died came that way or slowly became dead after some use.

  3. fraggle November 16, 2007 at 4:54 AM

    … and a partridge in a pear tree!

  4. Paweł Kondzior November 16, 2007 at 5:32 AM

    Maybe your body is emitting some electrostatic/electromagnetic fields/charges, and it have a bad influence of hardware that you are using, 11 pda’s is pretty dramatic number. 7 hard drives.. ygh, it’s mysterious teory.

    Or maybe you should start playing lotteries :) if you have so [bad in this example] luck ;-)

  5. Dan Mitchell November 16, 2007 at 6:39 AM

    Have you tried not using a hammer as a stylus?

    But seriously, my parents had the same problem. It has to do with not just surges, but drops in current (brownouts). UPS’s won’t protect against it, because UPS’s require a certain delta in current to kick in.

    They sell a unit that lets you maintain current — it’s targeted toward high-end stereo owners, but works for computer equipment as well. You should consider getting one for your electronics. I had my parents invest when they got their Plasma TV.

    The other possibility that has personally cost me 5 DVD players is heat. I had everything in an entertainment center, and the DVD player was always toward the top.

    Hope you’re able to find a solution! A good start might just be to get yourself an inexpensive multimeter, and leave it connected to house current when you’re sitting there working on your PC. You might notice a correlation with either time or event and voltage drops.

    -Dan

  6. Robin November 16, 2007 at 7:20 AM

    Well, I’ve had to return my Wii twice now, but on the bright side, their customer service was top notch both times. It took about a week to get it back, they paid for shipping both ways, and replaced the discs that got damaged by the defected drive. Under warranty, of course. Not sure what the cost is for out-of-warranty.

  7. Karl Lattimer November 16, 2007 at 7:21 AM

    I know someone who kills electronics like this too, 6 mobile phones in a year to name but one instance of failure. Turns out when she goes near radios they hum, so it might be that you’re just some kind of statically charged guy with a built in EMP mode :)

  8. Preston L. Bannister November 16, 2007 at 7:44 AM

    Put everything electronic that you care about on a UPS.

    Used to have luck not far from yours, then bought a UPS for each computer. All I expected from this was protection against the (I thought) rare power interruption. I did not think there was anything wrong with the power (newish house in a newish neighborhood). What I did *not* expect was both hardware and software became a *lot* more reliable. Mysterious Windows crashes? Gone. (So much for blaming Microsoft.) The usual crop of dead power supplies, motherboards, disks, monitors (kids all have computers, and I have a few)? Gone. Now I have too much working but obsolete gear.

    Guess maybe there was something wrong with the line power. :)

  9. Dylan November 16, 2007 at 8:39 AM

    Quit wearing wool and polyester together :)

  10. Stefan November 16, 2007 at 10:30 AM

    Woah, that’s quite a long list. Did you try for a GUINNES Record? ;-)

  11. Dawn November 20, 2007 at 4:54 PM

    It’s your magnetic personality ;-)

  12. Marinna December 11, 2007 at 12:51 PM

    I think you forgot to mention wrist watches. :P

  13. mixmagtmb February 15, 2008 at 7:40 AM

    Quit wearing wool and polyester together :)

  14. Jack April 12, 2008 at 3:41 AM

    WOW! 7 dead HDD?!?!? What are you doing with them? I have an old PC with a 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax9 IDE drive and it still works perfectly and has no bad sectors though I have used it at least 12 hours/day for the last 5 years. Before that I had a PC with a 3GB HDD that still works perfectly… If it would have been one HDD I would have said you had bad luck with it but 7… don’t know what to say. Anyway, good luck in the future, I hope your stuff won’t break at this rate :(

    Oh and BTW, I can join the club unfortunatelly because the fan on my new video card stopped working after just 2 weeks (Gainward GT8600 Golden Sample). Now I’m using a case fan on it :)

  15. James July 21, 2008 at 4:42 AM

    My theories – either you’ve poltergeists or your house is turning into a money pit! Personally, I prefer the poltergeist option, at least you can have them exorcised for free! :)

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