How to kill a laptop

Dr Bolouswki

This may seem a strange request, but after months of hassle with a laptop and a commitment from the manufacturer that if it breaks again they'll upgrade it... I'm wondering how I can accelerate its demise without arousing suspicion?

I know it's not the nicest of things to do, but for real it's been constant problems and even now I get random lockups etc but nothing I can pin down. I'd be happy with a straight replacement but obviously happier with a reliable upgrade.

So, any ideas on how to kill it without it being obvious that it was, ahem, suicide?

phoenix2181

well a EM pulse would do it, but you might have difficulty find a small atomic bomb in Ireland (better luck in russia)

If you had strong enough magnets it might do some permanent damage.....shortcircuts are also an option

irishgeo

water and anything with a circuit board dont usually mix well.

sceptre

Originally posted by irishgeo
water and anything with a circuit board dont usually mix well.

I was thinking water myself but it's usually pretty obvious unless you dry the thing quickly. If you dry the thing quickly you run the risk of the thing working again. Probably worth a try though if you can be pretty precise about where you drop the dribble and be ready with a hair dryer right afterwards.

s8n

some hardcore skangers and a blowtorch????

Lemming

try ripping (not literally) the battery pack out whilst the machine is turned on. That's how I fried my Sony Vaio*


* Don't ask ...

po0k

Lemming is onto a winner there re: battery and electrical.

hook up the terminals of a car batter (while the car is rinnung (using jump leads - should proctect you form shock) to the terminals of the battery+laptop(while the battery is in place if possible, the burn marks should be on both making it look good ) and rev the engine.
Should fry something good.,

Failing that, hooking it into a step-up transformer between the house mains and the laptop terminals shoulod do some nice damage.
600ac

Or step-down transformer, should throw out more current @ lower voltage. More chance of melting though. One tip.
Use thick wire in all these things. Won't heat up as much, unlike thin wire.

Think of trying to pump a pile of water through a thick pipe or a thing pipe at a given pressure. The thin pipe won't be able to take it all at the same rate and could very well bust at the seams, while the thicker pipe will be able to accomodate the high pressure.

That's a rough approximation of what happens, but serves to explain.

Btw, what cpu is it?
Is it thermally-protected?
You could try blocking all ventilation ports on it while running 3DMax constantly....should eventually melt the cpu, or at least cause something unhealthy to occur.

Dr Bolouswki

PIII Ighz CPU....

I'm thinking of avoiding water for fear of it being evident that it was wet... I like the blocking the ports option and running 3Dmax - where would I get that app?

Stephen

Just run any process that will keep the CPU maxed out for hours... should have the same effect.

po0k

any chance you could possibly open it up without it being noticible?
And unplug cpu fan/remove the heatsink itself and run stuff...

But afaik, PIIIs and even more so mobile versions are thermally protected, they'll kill the power before they let themselves burn out.

Applying large voltage (12V dc at the same current as your battery throughs out would be enough I'd wager) to the battery terminals should do the trick enatly.
Shouldn't elave too much evidence of burning either.
Make sure the thing's in warrenty though, and taht you've backed stuff up off it - or at least deleted and scrubbed your Tulip porn.

Gerry

Firing a load of current through it will kill it ok, but it will look rather obvious when they open it up I think. Try pulling out the hard drive or memory while the laptop is on. Heating up the laptop, well you'd be suprised how resistant they are to heat. Or apply a little water, as the others have said. The fan on my laptop barely ever comes on, ( basically only on 100% cpu utilisation ), the rest of the time the components are being cooked at about 60c, with minimal ventilation, and its still working after a year. Must remember to wire up the fan to a switch actually. You could poke wires into the pcmcia slots.
Taking out the battery won't wreck it, more than likely. I've done that a few times, no effect.

l3rian

I remember when I was a kid, I was very interested in breaking all my toys. The most interesting way I found of killing anything was by rolling it off progressively higher steps of the stairs. Im guessing a laptop would make it to about 4-6 steps before it would it would die

l3rian

102 ways to kill your computer

Desperate Dan's Bugger the BIOS! looks like a good way to kill the labtop without leaving any evidence:

If a flash BIOS is "flashed" with the wrong data - preferably a BIOS for a completely different motherboard, or, if the flashing software will accept it, even some randomly selected file; an MP3 of William Shatner's "Mr Tambourine Man" is ideal - the motherboard will, upon restarting, utterly fail to do anything useful until its BIOS chip is physically removed and re-burned with correct data. Interrupting the flashing procedure will produce the same results.

ColinM

Oh lol at the Desperate Dan's Bugger the BIOS! Lol bigtime!
Cheers for that.

ToxicPaddy

I know someone who drove over their laptop.. accidentally of course..

Id hate to see the way they explained that to the IT guys in the company they worked in.. :rolleyes:

elexes

lol drove over the laptop classic

feck up a bios upgrade ?take out the ram and heat it up a lot ?

laptops do have a auto shutdown thing if they get to hot tho ? well mine do

ColinM

I'm still not sure if I agree with this sort of thing, but if you want to have the laptop at least appear as if there is a fundamental hardware fault, why not try pulling the battery out while flashing the motherboard bios? I'd say very little will happen when you try to power it on if you are successful in writing junk to the nvram.

Gerry

I considered saying "flash the bios" but I thought it would be easily discovered. But on second thought, they wouldn't really be expecting it. There is the difficulty of flashing a laptop with the wrong bios, they don't use standard flashing programs, so it will probably be quite difficult to force the wrong bios onto it.

ColinM

I don't mean flash it with the wrong bios, I mean flash it with the correct bios downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Just remember to remove the power source while it's actually programming the bios chip! "Job's a good 'un!", as (Bugger the Bios's) Desperate Dan would probably say.
The result ought to be totally indistinguishable from a dead-as-a-dodo motherboard. The only way they could figure it out would be to take out the bios chip and put it in a reader (if it is removable, or else find some other way to examine the contents of the chip) to discover that there is junk firware stored there. It's unlikely that anyone would think of doing this anyway, or bother doing anything much more than a cursory examination on return. Returned parts are more than likely separated on a "appears to work" or "appears not to work" basis.

Fabre

Sometimes the simplest things can work the best:

I would just shake it hard while operating

if that failed try covering the aerations holes.

irishguy

wouldnt it be funny if you really fecked up your laptop and then they wouldnt give you a new one

po0k

try the stairs.

Lots

Shold feck the hard drive at least.

but they might decide to just replace that.

This is actually a slightly harder problem when you want it done, isn't it?

Could go to a secondary school, fire on the Van der Graaf generator for a while and try appling an electrode to the ram expansion module port. ESD-goodness

Dr Bolouswki

Maaan - this thread is really kicking it!!

Ok - things are looking mighty fine... at the moment I'm figuring flashing the bios and removing power mid flash - sounds tasty... syxpak:D keep it coming man... I'm afraid of electricity but I like your style... the more outlandish the better!

The warranty is a definite and the promise to replace is a definite - all documented so I pretty much think I'm laughing as long as I do this wrong thing right...

Fnniest suggestion gets a prize from this guy...

http://maddox.xmission.com/

nadir

CombatCow

A real nasty way of killin a mobo is iron filings,let the intake fan suck some up and boom.:eek:

CombatCow

Barry Aldwell

Yeah, because everybody has little piles of iron fillings lieing around.

Michael Collins

Em, lets hope your not trying to destroy someone else's laptop here...

But anyway...the pluging the power while flashing the BIOS thing would surely be detected, no? Like irishguy said, you could end up with no laptop...

GRAHAM2002

Just flash the bios with the wrong update.


There u go max destruction no physical damage and mess:D

Jim

mate of mine works in tech support for compaq. someone rang in once complaing that their laptop was broken. it turned out that the person thought the laptop was getting too hot when they used it on their lap so they drilled a few "airholes" into the bottom of it.

just claim ignorence.

fatmander

What about "hard drive killer pro 5",
An extract from www.hackology.com

The Hard Drive Killer Pro series of programs offer one the ability to fully and permanently destroy all data on any given Dos or Win3.x/9x/NT/2000 based system. In other words, 90% of the computers world wide.

The program, once executed, will start eating up the hard drive, and/or infect and reboot the hard drive within a few seconds. After rebooting, all hard drives attached to the system would be formatted (in an unrecoverable manner) within only 1 to 2 seconds, irregardless of the size of the hard drive. The program has reported to have caused physical damage to some hard drives (on many occasions). However, the program was not in any way designed to cause physical damage, only data. The outcome of the program depends on the version you download. We suggest you download the full HDKP 4.0 version. Then, once you are familiar with HDKP, you may experiment with HDKP 5.0 Beta.

At least you could learn how to use it at someones else expense ,
I wont post a link in case anyone downloads it by accident,
you will prob need to turn off Anti-Virus for it to work aswell as the hdkp virus was contained in the last sub-seven trojan
Let me know how you get on if you try it

dazberry

Originally posted by Combatcow
A real nasty way of killin a mobo is iron filings,let the intake fan suck some up and boom.:eek:

CombatCow

Happened to a friend of mine, but not with Iron Filings mind - with a cup of tea

D.

Dr Bolouswki

fatmander - that sounds like genius!

Combatcow - I like your style kid - always have... always will...:cool:

po0k

iron filings might be a it obvious when they open it up.
Dripping mercury into th vents would have a similar effect.
salt water will really futhings up, as it's ionised and so will conduct electricy far better then pure water.

Michael Collins

Originally posted by SyxPak
salt water will really futhings up, as it's ionised and so will conduct electricy far better then pure water.

Lol. Either you've got an unusal fetish for destroying things with electricity or you're an electrical engineer.

Victor

Leave it out in the sun on a hot day? In another country?

po0k

Originally posted by Michael Collins
Lol. Either you've got an unusal fetish for destroying things with electricity or you're an electrical engineer.

well...electronic eng stdent, but lets not split hairs

The fetish has only a small part to play...

dregin

One piece of household equipment is required:

The microwave, for all your destruction fetish needs.

Dregin

po0k

You will destroy the microwave and leave yourself with growths on your testicles.