DIY Life

Computers are good for many things -- I use mine mostly for listening to compact discs, playing that awesome pinball game, and checking the finishing times at NASCAR.com -- but did you know they can be just as useful when they're broken? In all, I think I've burned through eight computers over the last three years -- one got crushed when my prized moose head fell off the wall, and I spilled various liquids on the other seven. Typically when I bust up one of my PCs, I just toss it on the burn pile with everything else, but then I got to thinking, "I bet I could tear this sucker apart and use the various pieces in all sorts of different ways."

For instance, discarded keyboards make great dog toys, and you can use those little gray mouse balls to build a sweet miniature billiard set. Now, I bet you're thinking to yourself, "surely you can't do much else with a broken computer!" Au contraire, mon amie. Check out these other ingenious uses for discarded computer pieces:

CD/DVD drives sometimes misbehave. If you are laughing, you know that it's true. They also produce one of the common error messages your computer can give you that just doesn't make sense to most of us. What in the world is "buffer overrun error" for example? Geeks will tell you that this means the data didn't quite make it onto the CD because such-and-such, or thus-and-so happened, all you know is that it didn't work, plain and simple.

Fine, so now your drive is stuck in its ticked-off position, and you can't get the blasted disc out of the drive? If you just tried restarting your computer, congratulations, that is the best thing to try if your drive is acting up. If that doesn't fix it, there is an easy fix. It is time to get a little invasive.