Destroying my computer in a not so obvious way?
 

Ok I bought my Sony Vaio back in 2003 from circuit city, and well their warranty policy is that if it has to be serviced 3 times, you get a brand new model in exchange. Till now my computer hasn't been serviced, next week some one from the warranty place is comming down here to fix my computer (that will be the first time). Now since I'm greedy and trying to get the newer model computer for free, I was wondering is there any thing I can do so my computer will stop working? But something in a way where they wouldn't know that something has been done to it.

I was thinking of pouring water but that's a little risky...

Any tips?

Render something in Maya / .rar your C drive / rip a CD to .ape format / encode the matrix trilogy ALL AT ONCE.

put your laptop in the microwave for like A SECOND. It might actually work a little bit still. Happened with my alarm clock.

Let my sisters or my mother use your computer for 10 minutes or more, it is guaranteed to have problems afterwards.

Or give it a bit more power than you would normally get from its transformer.

stick little pieces of metal in your cpu socket to link pins together. i did this to overclock my athlon xp, but if you put it in the wrong sockets, i'm sure you can short something out :) then remove the bits of metal wire. (80pin IDE cable wires work well for this)

Turn off temperature shutdown in bios, stick it next to a warm air heater and cover up the fan outake ;)

Opening it up automatically voids the warranty and usually they can tell when its been opened.

Do not take a blow torch to the chipset. THAT definitely will not negatively affect its performance.

Delete ntoskrnl.exe.

=D

Bit of advice: Anything you try will have been tried many times before. These companies aren't dumb. They KNOW customers will try and pull this crap. I'm quite certain trying any of this permanently invalidates your warranty, and changes are better than not that whatever you try they WILL catch you. They know their crap.

I would bet on them trying to weasel out of their warranty if something legitimate happened. So the risk is not work the potential reward.

or the infamous NTLDR. Does the same damage. Then again, I think he needs damage hardware, not software-wise. If you can access the CPU somehow someway, bend a few of the pins, call it in.

Do you have any young cousins or siblings that you can blame? If so, look into the terms of the warranty to see if those sorts of accidents are covered.

No one will ever believe them.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...milies/ed4.gif

I'm just hoping some thing will happen to it what happened to my moms laptop. Her laptops hard drive burned out. I was thinking of bending a few pins but that's a little obvious. I was thinking of taking my computer to the car wash place in the apartments we live and spraying some wating in it and turning it on, but is there a way I would get shocked doing that?

You'd be shocked that you wouldn't be getting a new computer, otherwise you should be fine.

I'm assuming he's got an Intel CPU. In which case trying to overheat the system is futile, as the CPU probably has clock-throttling capability. Now, he COULD try and overheat the hard disc but then he would need to make a backup before trying that.

Water Damage is blatantly obvious and is certainly not covered by your warranty. Give it up and buy a new system. What the fuck is up with people and not taking responsibility?

Maybe there are no good jobs in his area. He could always learn how to repair water-damaged computers, since so many people are looking to exploit it.

You're not going to destroy your computer without making it fairly obvious to any half-competent tech.

Even if you did jam the fans on your system, the heatsink alone would provide enough cooling to keep the processor from dying. The system would eventually crash, and then it would just sit there and do very little. Removing the heatsink outright would do the trick if you have an AMD processor, but it'd be pretty obvious. Hard drives have sensors that detect impacts and falls, and a serious impact will invalidate your warranty, and it's not hard to spot damage from water or user-created electrical shorts, since CPU and drive pins don't magically bend theirselves.

Feel free to try to defraud your dealer, but all you're going to do is wind up at least a few hundred dollars poorer.

He could always buy a surge protector that insures up to a certain amount against damage, then zap the shit out of his system.

I don't think that would work, either.

You'd have to zap the surge protector to the point that it fails and sends the surge through to the computer. If the UPS isn't damaged along with the system, than the surge protector's guarantor isn't going to believe that the UPS's failure was at fault for the damage.

Who says it has to be a UPS? I've seen regular 6-plug strips with $1,500 in insurance against power surges.

Simple, remove your heatsync and fan then overclock your CPU by 100%. If you don't cause a fire, that'll ruin your PC.

Here's much easier (and safer way) to ruin your PC. Turn it off, unlpug everything from the outside and release a static shock on every component you want to kill. Use it on the CPU, mootherboard, RAM, videocard, if it's goign to be replaced, shock the shit out of it. Wear wool shocks and shuffle your feet, then make contact with these parts without your body touching anything else. The electrostatic discharge will ruin the RAM for sure, making your PC unbootable. Wikipedia article.

True, but that doesn't change the fact that you would need some way to feed a really nasty voltage through the surge protector...enough power to blow it and the computer up.

Plus, I can't say that I have much faith in the insurance on a $10 power strip. Even if they do give you money, they'll probably only pay you for the current market value of the computer, which isn't going to be a whole lot.

And Kaiten, a smoked Athlon is pretty easy to spot and would never come about unintentionally, and Pentium 4s can't be fried to death without some serious effort. A pattern of ESD damage is going to set off warning bells, too.

You'd be surprised what you can do with simple high school tech class supplies. Granted, the unit my friend Eric built was only used to blow up small wildlife (Large toads, rats, racoons, etc). But that's hardly the difficult part. And it *would* be cheaper than buying a new system.

Granted, since the guy is asking for help on how to do this sort of thing he's probably not smart enough to not get himself killed.

In this case, I fail to see why we are not being more encouraging.

The Way I got mine to be replaced was a couple of things, busted the speakers thrice, then after they wouldn't replace it after telling them what needed to be done, called BBB

It's quite pathetic to see how people are actually helping this guy.

Well...I don't think trying to say "why not F--K the floppy drive or cd drive" would be very nice.

Don't worry, we can fucking swear here.

Go search for the Bastard Operator From Hell series and read a few. Simon is the master of destroying hardware in hilarious ways, then worming his way out of it.

And as funny (for geeks) as BOFH can be, it's not usually a good idea to base your real life actions on a piece of comedic fiction. But really, I'm routing for the OP to try something and get busted on it.

The CDROM destroying thing works. Circuit City just dumped 1900 US Dollars onto a gift card for one of my friends bc they had to replace the CD drive 3 times in his PC.(they couldnt find an equal valued laptop with a P4 in it, im sure you all know they quit making them) They DID however, try to get out of it by saying one of the times he got it serviced wasnt on record, but keeping all his work reciepts and a quick lawyer threat took care of that problem. So you could try that....

Best Buy tried to do the same thing to me but instead said that it had to be three different problems when they couldn't even fix the first one right the first time.

Me keeping all my reciepts, 2 calls to corprate and the BBB made Best Buy call me very fast. Got a very nice Laptop out of it too. P4, 120 G HD and 512.

Not to mentiona whole bunch of random media crap too

Same with him, it OBVIOUSLY wasnt the drive that had the problem. As soon as he brought it home EVERY TIME it had the same problem. So after 2 new drives AND the infamous overheating issues you get from the p4 in a laptop, they finally dumped it into a gift card. So for 13 out-of-pocket dollars, he now has a very nice toshiba satalite with the intel core duo, a fingerprint reader etc....nice tradeoff for 13 bucks id say.

Not if you base ALL your life on it. You eventually get the hang of this whole blackmail thing.

Well, you may be stretching it a bit to try and go for this. But you may be worrying too much as well. Whether or not they notice may just depend on the circumstances, e.g. who exactly inspects it at the company.

I've broken a dvd drive "void warranty" seal and stripped a radeon down to its core. The radeon was genuinely busted before I did so (it had overheated, as I found out), but the drive, as I later discovered, had nothing wrong with it at all. Both were replaced, and nothing more was heard.

Would I try to deliberately bust something, though? Probably not. Especially if the offer includes newer and better hardware.. I wouldn't go for it. But godspeed if you do, let us know how it turns out.

If your like me, and I'm really unlucky, your laptop will be working fine and then all of a sudden, POOF!

Your laptop will now think its trying to boot windows 3.1 when it finds the boot file, which has been knocked upside the head by some bastard program. *COUGH* roxio *COUGH*

Well I havn't tried anything yet. I phoned them up and they replaced my mother board twice. I had the same problem last night, well turns out my computer had a virus, so the two times they replaced my mother board was a waste, cause the technicians didn't bother doing a diagnostics test, God bless them. So today I phone them up making some stuff up, they said they would send a guy again but to check the computer this time and not replace anything. So I might do the static shock thing, on the ram so when the guy come's he see's theres a problem with the computer.

Yes I know this is stupid, but circuit city the damned bastards they are, they told me to buy a recovery disk since they told me the one I have has a defect in it even tho it didn't, and when I did buy the recovery disk for 27$ that didn't help since the problem wasn't the recovery disk. Circuit City stole 27$ from me, so in a way this is revenge. No, actually I just have big eyes and want whats new, it comes cheaper this way than upgrading my computer.