[vmarks]

www.Brenthaven.com and the MacNN podcast are giving away the Brenthaven bag of your choosing, a Metro, Fusion MB, Profile, or Backpack!

Watch the podcast (Brenthaven Dropfest) through http://macnn.com/podcasts or http://podcasts.macnn.com/brenthaven.m4v

And then post your best broken laptop / bad laptop bag story below!

RULES CHANGE: You decide and we award the bag.

That's right. Post here to vote for the best story, even if you haven't got one of your own to tell.

[gnomexp]

Last Fall, I was enjoying my first computer when disaster struck. Being an old Titanium Powerbook, its hinges weren't exactly sturdy. When I opened the computer, the hinges groaned as usual but this time, they snapped. In my panic, I tried to set the monitor down, but moving it only cut its wires against the jagged edge, shorting the monitor. I knew that my computer needed both new hinges and a new screen, so I removed it hoping to find a deal to fix it soon.




Now, it's a very thin desktop because I found a newer computer for cheaper. The magnet forces the computer to think it's running in "closed-lid" mode. While I protected my baby as best I could, I'm sure the previous owner needed a better case.

[imitchellg5]

Well my PowerBook is very sad looking now. I will make a timeline about all of its accidents.
January 2003- My dad is deployed to Iraq and buys the PowerBook. It is left on the ramp in Eygpt for 2 days in a little Targus case.
May 2004- On a trip in Denver, the PowerBook is knocked off of the security bin for laptops, onto the floor, and recieves five dents and a dead hard drive.
December 2005- I trip walking up some stairs in our house while carrying the PowerBook. I land on the PowerBook and the case is now bent.
June 2006- The PowerBook slips out of its case while getting off a bus in Colorado Springs. The latch breaks, and the case is bent by the optical drive, so it doesn't take CDs. ( I've fixed that now)
These pictures show the bow. Notice how the battery doesn't fit right.

[vmarks]

editorial note: comments on the contest itself (spam, not spam, etc.) can be placed in the feedback forum, http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=300497

[harrisjamieh]

Edit: Nevermind, I see the mod started a thread in the feedback forum starting with my post.

[gnomexp]

RULES CHANGE: You decide and we award the bag.

That's right. Post here to vote for the best story, even if you haven't got one of your own to tell.

Um.... I vote for myself? It might be easier to accept entries until, say, Monday. On Tuesday, place the entries in a poll and then have users vote.

[imitchellg5]

I vote for my own.

[mubach]

I vote for Gnomexp's tale, his franken-powerbook deserves a bag to cover up its innards >.<

[sbender_ceo]

well lets see, I broke my ibook by dropping it down my driveway hard drive failed, logic board cracked(pics) my iPod 1st gen got devoured by my dog no hard drive now(pics), and my palm got a bb gun pellet through the sige and that broke the screen i donno how this happend(pics)


top left of iBook g4 screen


top right of ibook g4 screen


front view lid closed


front view lid open


left side


right side


ipod front


ipod top


ipod clickwheel closeup


palm


palm damage closeup

[gnomexp]

Wow.....

[vmarks]

I hope that the palm/handspring was not in your pocket at the time.

OUCH!

[mydog8mymac]

s_bender

I hope you are fully covered in health insurance!

Take care of yourself!

[amru]

Originally Posted by mydog8mymac

s_bender

I hope you are fully covered in health insurance!

Take care of yourself!

srsly! also should get a new sn like the above person. but change it to mydog8myipod

[medicineman]

Well, I didn't have a laptop until yesterday. Any damage that might have been sustained was avoided by not having a machine to damage. While it wasn't dropped and not caught, no noticable traces are apparant. A hot cup of coffee was accidently splashed where the laptop currently sits. Since it wasn't there at the time, even more damage was avoided.

All in all, I guess I've been pretty lucky.

[macuser810]

My best broken laptop was my first laptop, a used, several year old Apple with OS 8.6 on it. I bought it from a guy I worked with, and I didn't bother to test it too much because I trusted him.
Turned out the cd drive was completely busted, it was slower than the garbage Win95 machine I had kicking around, I was never able to connect it to the internet, and he left it preloaded with two things; Master of Orion and some very questionable 'adult content'. Neither was really my cup of tea and I dumped the laptop on my roommate.

Bad broken laptop!

[Dillon-K]

While I REALLY would enjoy having a Brenthaven Metro (black) my BlackBook shall be my first Mac, can we enter our crappy Windows laptops?

[vmarks]

I'll allow windows laptop stories. Go for it!

[Dillon-K]

All right, well my dad's friend had a Toshiba Sattelite from a few years back and it was given to me at no cost because the tehcnology was crap. I was carrying it down the hall, and I tripped, sending the device soaring 3 feet in the air for about 8 feet, causing it to land ON the display and topple over as if it were a book someone had left open and sat down... on further invistigation, one side of the screen had popped off the bottom of the case entirely and had sharp metal-ness pointing out of it =/... then I also noticed the case was broken and when I tried to turn it on after that, it had a very odd little twitch in the screen before it died dramatically and has sit in the closet since. My story sucks, I know. I vote for the guy whose iBook got screwed up earlier in this thread.

EDIT: the person I'm referring to is "sbender_ceo."
EDIT #2: I have pictures I can get of this however it has been repaired a little bit without my knowledge... so it obviously won't look as bad as it had before my dad tried to help a hopeless case. . Coming Soon.

[goMac]

I work in a school district that has a one to one laptop deployment. Needless to say, I see a lot of crazy stuff, and get a lot of crazy excuses. I've seen a kid claim a basketball broke his iBook in half, and had kids throw their iBook across the room at another kid. Needless to say the repair rate is high.

However, there is one case that stands out in my mind. Actually, we have a printout of the case report hung on the wall at work. I'll scan it in Monday, but here is roughly what the case report says:

"Kids were playing and tweaking each other's nipples. Laptop was dropped and student heard a crunching noise and knew right away the laptop was broken."

We get a lot of stuff, but this is the only nipple tweaking case we have.

[Dillon-K]

*stifles giggle* ha... hahahahahha... AHAHAHAHHAHAH!

[xjm716]

Back when I was a windows geek, I had an HP laptop. I picked up my back one day getting out of my car, the laptop slipped out, and shattered the screen. I'd love to show you what it looks like, but I spent almost $300 on a new screen, and am now a proud iBook owner. I double and triple check my bag before I pick it up, and would love one of these new bags.

Vote for me!

[xjm716]

Oh, and I vote for XJM716.

[fox-orian]

My first laptop was a Thinkpad T21. It had an 800 MHz PIII, 256 MB's PC133, and a 20GB hard drive. It lasted me a few years until I decided I needed an upgrade.

The upgrade was to a 2000 model Gateway 400SD4 laptop with a 2.0GHz P4, 30GB HDD, 256MB DDR, 14.1" screen, an ATi Mobility GPU, DVD-ROM and one of the first versions of Windows XP.
At the time, the thing was pretty good. It was fast, played alot of the recent games, and was aceeptable in portability. Granted, the thing had two fans that could rival a vacuum cleaner and a hefty weight that could kill a man if tossed, but I was content.


A few years later, problems begin to surface. First, I couldn't help but notice that the battery life had gotten horrifically short -- about 10 minutes off of a full hour-and-a-half charge. A quick battery diagnostic had told me that my battery had decayed to a mere 810mAh from the original 4180 mAh. By the time, the laptop had gone discontinued and battery prices sky rocketed to almost $200 for a new one. Thinking, "Screw this," right off the bat I thought I'd just stick to using AC power for the rest of the laptops life.

But alas, god has a sense of humor. Days later, the power jack in my poor gateway had begun to wobble loose and a power connection to the machine could not be maintained. Just shifting in my seat could cause the jack to disconnect. Living with this problem for a few months, I had become much too accustomed to 'find a position with the laptop and STAY THERE.' -- fearing that slouching down or sitting up could force me to fiddle with the jack for 10 more minutes before I find a "safe-spot."

Enough was enough. I grabbed my repair kit and proceeded to dismantle the entire casing, removing the bezels, fans and heatsinks to get all the way down to the power jack. I used a conducting meter to find where the connection was loose in the jack. Turns out the center-pin in the jack was broken loose and needes to be resoldered to the jack. No problem. About 15 minutes of work later, the power jack was sturdy and good as new. I plugged in the power, and success! The laptop powers on without need of fiddling! I put the parts back together and begin to joyously use it whichever way I like.

Weeks pass, and I decide its finally time to move my entire music library over to my laptop over the network. I set it up, leave the lapop on the couch's arm, and let it spend a good half hour transferring.

While continuing normal work on my desktop, I noticed the fans kicked in unusually early on the laptop and, well, I thought nothing of it.

Half an hour passes. I start to smell something funny. I go to check on the laptop, and upon lifting it,
HOLY SWEET ZOMBIE JEZUS,
I drop it immediately in fear of LOSING MY HANDS.
The laptop's lower bezel -- this includes the keyboard, trackpad, bottom cover, disc drives, everywhere -- was BOILING HOT. Not just hot, but SERIOUSLY HOT. In fear the laptop was about to fuse itself to my couch and catch fire, I quickly force it to shut down and unplug it, hearing a rather loud "Pop!" as I do so.

The laptop sits there, dead, radiating intense heat. I carefully pick the laptop up with some paper napkins to avoid burning myself, and inspect the damage more closely. The battery, in specific, was the hottest component, easily hot enough to cause burns to open skin. Pokng it, the plastic felt soft and malleable. For a lithium-ion polymer battery, this was not very comforting. -- Looking at my couch, there is now a small ever-so-slightly discolored patch of fabric where the battery was resting.

I set the laptop down, bottom facing up, to let it cool for about an hour. Once it was room temperature again, I decided to open it up once more to inspect if something had gone wrong.

I removed the motherboard and was rather horrified to find....


The words of Adam Savage could not express my reaction any clearer.

There were a few small capacitors in the laptop. One of them, as seen above, did not agree with the rest of the system and almost blew a hole straight through the board.

A little amazed at the events, I decided to call the laptop a lost cause, and officially dead. I started to dismantle the entire machine part by part to sell as repair components.

Here's a photo of the orderly carnage!


I was salvaging every sellable part within the machine. Nothing goes to waste!



Finallly, after gutting the laptop of all its innard logic parts, I reassembled the case ready to be sold for cosmetic/functional repair. I was a little sad for my loss, so I took this last photo of its deprived, gaping screen-hole...


So: I made up my mind after this. After taking out an emergency student-loan, I went forward and bought myself a MacBook. Now officially being a mac-convert with this purchase, I feel I won't be fearing power issues like the ones described above with my trusty magsafe.

That was my story.

[Zang]

It would be nice if the weekly audio files actually appeared in the podcast feed, but seemingly they don't. The last podcast in the feed is from March 24th. The whole point of a feed is so that people don't have to constantly visit the site in order to download the latest episode.

[vmarks]

Working on the feed issue. Problem: Apple is pulling the feed from a very old rss file.
The correct rss file to subscribe to is http://podcasts.macnn.com/macnn.rss . Thank you for asking!

[Dillon-K]

you *do* know that you can put the < itunes:new-feed-url > tag into the feed Apple is picking up... right?

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by Dillon-K

you *do* know that you can put the < itunes:new-feed-url > tag into the feed Apple is picking up... right?

Not if you no longer have access to the server the very old feed resides on, you can't.

[Dillon-K]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Not if you no longer have access to the server the very old feed resides on, you can't.

Mmm, I seeee .

[Drew]

I used to have an old 12" averatec laptop. I can't remember the specs, and I don't have any pictures. Anyways, we noticed after a while that the power cord wouldn't charge the laptop unless it was in just the right spot, kind of like fox-orian. Then after a while, the power cord just stopped working. So futureshop gave us another one. It worked for about....20 minutes. Then the cord lit on fire.

So, we figured the battery was faulty, and it was frying the cords on the inside. So we sent it back to averatec.

-----4 MONTHS LATER-----
Still no news from Averatec.
We complain to futuershop, they give us a discounted Toshiba Satellite, which to this day overheats every few hours, since it has a back heat grating. Oh, and since people like stories with pictures, I'll show you the heat grating.


Back heat grating

The newer laptop itself

[vmarks]

Voting is over!

I'd like to thank you all for participating, and the winner will be contacted via private message.

[demosthenes2]

I know the contest is over, but I would really like to share my story, so here goes :

I was on my way to school (I bicycle) for a make up test, one evening. I requested the night off, and just assumed I got it off. well, I'm heading to the college, on my brand new specialized, with a brand new toshiba satelite in my bag, and out of nowhere this Mercedes suv sideswipes me, sending me, my backpack, my brand new bike, and my brand new laptop eight feet into the air. I sewed the bag back together, and saved up for my iBook. Then I got a call from the restaurant asking me why I wasn't there.

I passed that math test, though

[vmarks]

More importantly, you seem to have survived- be careful!