Five Ways to Trash your PC

We proudly present the masochist’s guide to completely unproductive PC usage.

The very idea of a PC running perfectly, with nary a sign of a glitch, is anathema to most people (which is why Windows is so popular, I guess), so here’s our five-point guide to making the very least of your expensive beige box:

1. Never run a Firewall or Anti-Virus

If you want to trash your PC, just make sure you’ve got an AOL Unlimited connection and leave it running 24/7 with no personal firewall and no anti-virus measures. Recent research shows that your PC will be targeted by undesirables within 48 hours and trashed within 72 – and you have to do absolutely nothing! What could be easier? This has to be the lazy man’s way to PC Trashdom.

If you want to make it a little quicker, just post a few messages to one or two Newsgroups announcing your intentions – they’ll latch onto your IP address quicker than Tony Blair can do a U-turn, and your PC will begin its journey into oblivion that much sooner. You’ll be re-installing Windows in no time! Trashed!

2. The Java’sCrypt Method

Take the case off your PC – all the real geeks do that anyway, it makes it easier to tinker – and be sure to perch your coffee cup on that automatic coffee cup holder that slides out when you press the button thingy on the front of it. Give it some time – the wait will be worth it – and just brush against the coffee cup holder as you rise from your seat. Watch in amazement as it slides back in, and your full cup of coffee spills over the contents of the PC’s case.

Marvel as a cloud of blue smoke and sparks completely covers the case, filling the room with acrid smells. Your PC will not only be in need of a new Windows install – you’ll be in need of a new PC! Trashed!

3. Surgical Strike

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, right? Your Mum always told you to keep your room tidy, your Dad always complained about your empty Coke cans and KFC buckets littering the place, didn’t they? Now you can prove you’re a tidy person, in the most spectacular fashion.

All it takes is a vacuum cleaner and a screwdriver and little of your time. Remove that case cover (you’ll need the screwdriver) and gaze in wonderment at the little dust bunnies that inhabit the interior of the PC. They’re dead meat (and so’s your machine). Grab that Vax or Dyson or Hoover or whatever, and get the hose attached. Set the vacuum cleaner to the highest level of suction possible and get in there, right into the corners – get that dirt out.

What? No! Don’t switch the PC off first! You might want to loosen a few socketed chips while you’re on, though, just to be sure.

There you go! A perfectly clean and pristine PC – as clean as an operating theatre table, in fact, and just as likely to be able to run Doom or anything else. Trashed!

4. Incremental Upgrade Trashmeister Course

This one’s not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a long time, but follow the course and you’ll have a completely trashed machine inside two or three years.

Start with a bog-standard PC from new, preferably running Windows 95. Now, when you install a new peripheral, be sure you don’t get the right driver for it – use one that nearly right, but not quite. As soon as the beta version of a new operating system comes out of Redmond, get a hacked and pirated copy of it, and install it straight away. Do not back up first.

Keep on doing this, always following an “upgrade path” – ie installing over the your current operating system, and never, ever change your drivers for the correct ones. If you get a message saying that the drivers you have are not certified for use, dismiss it with the contempt that all PC Trashers ought to have for it.

As time goes by, your PC will get progressively slower, and more and more crashes will occur, until it becomes entirely useless, incapable of  running for more than a couple of minutes without error messages popping up – and, with a bit of luck, you’ll pick up a virus or two from the hooky copies of the beta versions you’ve installed! Trashed!

5. Built to Trash

This is really only for certified PC Trashers on a budget, but, what the heck – have a go!

Gather together all the bits of PCs that you’ve got lying around, or obtain all the bits that people you know are throwing out. Keep a lookout particularly for ages-old cases – you really want something circa 1985 or 1986 with a 100 watt power supply in it. Be sure that the motherboard you’ve rescued from the skip is an ATX job, so the power connector sockets don’t match the power supply’s plugs.

You’ll need 66MHz memory (the ATX board will want PC100 or PC133). Don’t screw the board in – use blu-tac or even chewing gum (the mark of the true professional trasher). Force the RAM chips into the slots, and be sure you haven’t discharged any static electricity – wearing rubber soled shoes helps here.

Make sure that the processor you’ve got is right at the very edge of performance for the motherboard – it ought to suck the life out of your power supply in no time flat - and don’t bother with a heat sink or fan – this baby won’t be running that long anyway.

You should have no trouble in finding a 2 ½” drive to hot-glue to floor of the case (cos it won’t fit anywhere else) and don’t bother screwing anything else in, either, unless you can guarantee to use the wrong sized screw and cross-thread it.

Carry on building your PC like this. If it powers up at all, it’ll be a miracle. Trashed before it’s off the launch pad!

Warning!

Just in case you think nobody would ever do anything like this, be warned. The author has been called out to PCs similar in every way to the five examples presented for your entertainment in this article. It can happen – and it can happen to you!

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David Dorn