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.