Coming from the so wacko it may or may not be true department, Mike Strickland sends over this little ditty, where he describes how Carl Lovern saw one of his collegues put some broken drives through the wash and to his surprised they worked afterwards! He originally saw this over at the langa list. Heres the skinny:
I've worked in the small and desktop computer service industry for over 20 years (I started 2 years before IBM built the first PC!) Over all that time, I've seen just about every problem a floppy drive can have. In recent years, drive prices have fallen to such ridiculously low prices that no technician even tries to diagnose a bad drive these days. Onsite, I check the bios settings, look at Windows Device Manager, change the cable and then, if the drive still malfunctions, replace the drive. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. At $100/hr for service, you don't want your hired gun tech guy spending much time on a $20 drive. As you can imagine, this creates quite a pile of bad drives back at the shop.
Our shop has a kitchenette with a dishwasher. Imagine my surprise when I opened the dishwasher one day to find a whole load of floppy drives in it! One of the senior techs had taken all the covers off of the defective drives and washed them in the dishwasher. I watched in fascination as he carefully removed them and placed them all in the OVEN...... Three hours at 200 degrees!
Almost every one of them worked after a cycle in the dishwasher. I was flabbergasted! We gave free drives away for months to anyone who wanted one - I think I gave more of them away than I did business cards!
Over time, the senior tech applied this bizarre procedure to CD-ROM drives, power supplies motherboards (sans batteries!) and printer parts of all types. I've seen completely disassembled Ink Jet printers in the dishwasher. Interestingly, this ridiculous procedure fixes more than half of these devices, and almost ALL of the Ink Jet printers.
Three secrets were learned over time:
1.) Granulated dish washing detergent is the only way to go - liquid doesn't wash out of all the cracks
2.) That liquid no-spot rinse stuff messes up the works
3.) The oven must be electric and digitally controlled. 200 degrees is the perfect temp - less and the circuit boards do not get dry and more temp makes the plastics melt.
For those who adventure into this at home I recommend having a camera ready before proceeding. It's fun to photograph your spouse the first time they open the dishwasher to find a load of computer parts..... --- Carl W. Lovern
Sounds pretty whack to me, if i were you kiddies, i would try this at home with your thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment :P
I've worked in the small and desktop computer service industry for over 20 years (I started 2 years before IBM built the first PC!) Over all that time, I've seen just about every problem a floppy drive can have. In recent years, drive prices have fallen to such ridiculously low prices that no technician even tries to diagnose a bad drive these days. Onsite, I check the bios settings, look at Windows Device Manager, change the cable and then, if the drive still malfunctions, replace the drive. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. At $100/hr for service, you don't want your hired gun tech guy spending much time on a $20 drive. As you can imagine, this creates quite a pile of bad drives back at the shop.
Our shop has a kitchenette with a dishwasher. Imagine my surprise when I opened the dishwasher one day to find a whole load of floppy drives in it! One of the senior techs had taken all the covers off of the defective drives and washed them in the dishwasher. I watched in fascination as he carefully removed them and placed them all in the OVEN...... Three hours at 200 degrees!
Almost every one of them worked after a cycle in the dishwasher. I was flabbergasted! We gave free drives away for months to anyone who wanted one - I think I gave more of them away than I did business cards!
Over time, the senior tech applied this bizarre procedure to CD-ROM drives, power supplies motherboards (sans batteries!) and printer parts of all types. I've seen completely disassembled Ink Jet printers in the dishwasher. Interestingly, this ridiculous procedure fixes more than half of these devices, and almost ALL of the Ink Jet printers.
Three secrets were learned over time:
1.) Granulated dish washing detergent is the only way to go - liquid doesn't wash out of all the cracks
2.) That liquid no-spot rinse stuff messes up the works
3.) The oven must be electric and digitally controlled. 200 degrees is the perfect temp - less and the circuit boards do not get dry and more temp makes the plastics melt.
For those who adventure into this at home I recommend having a camera ready before proceeding. It's fun to photograph your spouse the first time they open the dishwasher to find a load of computer parts..... --- Carl W. Lovern
Sounds pretty whack to me, if i were you kiddies, i would try this at home with your thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment :P
Changes in version 1.0.9.4:
General:
- Raised the damage caused by hitting a Queen in the head.
- Fixed a bug where toggling your vision mode turned on the Environment Chrome display setting.
Multiplayer:
- Added the Queen and the Exosuit to multiplayer. The host can set these in the "Advanced" Host screen.
- Aliens may be set to molt into Queens after getting 1-10 kills in a row. Only kills made as an adult alien count as molt kills: kills made while playing as a facehugger or chestburster in Alien Lifecycle mode will not add to the player's total Queen Molting Kills. Dying resets the player's molting kills to zero.
- There may be 0-10 Exosuits in a level, though certain levels may support less than ten. Humans can enter or exit Exosuits by pressing the Use key. The Exosuit must be standing and have a little clearance behind it in order for the player to exit.
- Made several changes to smooth out player movement in multiplayer.
- Improved multiplayer respawn time.
- Added a new option to the "Advanced" Host screen: "Show Pop-up Names." When this is set to "Off" players will only see pop-up names when aiming at members of their own team.
- Added chat-line commands for the server controller to change some of the game's Advanced Host settings. The player who has entered the correct password with the " control [password]" command can now use the following commands in the chat window, which will take effect after the next level change.
- Added the display of the server's bandwidth setting to the Server Info screens. Note that this only shows the game setting chosen by the server's operator, and does not necessarily reflect the speed of their actual Internet connection.
- Removed the crosshair from the zoomed-out railgun.
- Removed the CD-key display from the Multiplayer Internet screen.
- Removed space bar level-end confirmation.
- Blocked a hack which allowed players to make themselves un-bootable by using special characters in their player name.
- Blocked a hack utility which allowed a player to move at accelerated speeds by changing their Windows system timer.
- Made it so that optional updates will not force the Sierra update notification window to appear.
- Fixed an occasional crash when refreshing the server list.
- Fixed a crash when displaying info screens at 1600x1200 resolution.
- Fixed a bug where only the first 32 start points were being considered when evaluating start points in MP; this could cause people to spawn at the same spot in leadworks, for instance. The code now limits the number of start points that will be evaluated to 100.
- Aliens can no longer get multiple headbites from a facehugged player.
- Aliens can no longer get health from a fading body.
- Fixed a bug where you would sometimes get a repeating pickup sound when running over certain pickup items.
- Fixed a bug where players might hear certain firing sounds continuing after the other player had stopped firing that weapon.
- Fixed a bug where your volume level would reset to the previous value when you respawned if you had changed it while playing multiplayer.
- Fixed a bug where the predator shoulder cannon could do double damage if fired in specific sequence.
- Fixed bug which prevented custom levels from showing up if they were in a .rez file. To display levels in the "Single Player--> Custom Level" menu, double-click avp2.exe, click the "Options" button, enter "+enableretaillevels 1" in the Command-Line field, hit "OK" to close the Options window and then hit "Play" to launch the game.
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