Friday, September 24, 2010

Don't Let Your Cat PEE In Your PC!

And it's a mess! Big Antec case, and the cat did his business right through the top fan hole.
The video card was the first thing in the way and got soaked. A small amount of it ran into the connector on the motherboard, but I was able to clean it, and it looks OK, no corrosion or anything.
After that, the stream went to the bottom of the case, and soaked the power supply, which I pulled, and is going in the recycle bin along with the video card.
So far, those are the only two parts that got damaged, and there's no signs of the "liquid" getting on anything else.
I just rebuilt this for him about two months ago. I told him his 90-day warranty would NOT cover this, and he busted up.
Glad he's a good friend!

UPDATE 1
Man, is this turning out to be a PITA!
So far, I've had to junk the top fan (the "pee hole"), the power supply, the video card, the two cables and brackets that have a pair of USB ports and a pair of FireWire ports, and SCRUB the daylights out of the inside and outside of the case. I cleaned it with SimpleGreen to start, and then flushed it out with denatured alcohol. The case is now sitting out in the sun to bake (it's over 90* here today), and then I'll close it up with a couple of fabric softener sheets inside, and a bag of baking soda for good measure.
And I scrubbed the motherboard with Isopropyl Alcohol, including a lot of extra time cleaning out the PCI Express connector for the video card. After scrubbing it, I treated it with some Caig DeOxIT, which is about the best contact cleaner/preserver you can get.
Hopefully this thing will be OK, and power up. If not, well......I can save the hard-disk, optical disk, CPU, case, and memory. The only problem with that is that this is an AMD Socket 939 motherboard, and they're getting hard to find!
I've cleaned tons of cat hair out of some of the PC's I've repaired/rebuilt for people, but the next time somebody says their cat PEED in it, I'm going to turn the job down, and suggest they buy a new PC.
GAWD, does that stuff STINK!

UPDATE 2
Well, as carefully as I cleaned the connector on the motherboard, it shows some signs of degradation on the contacts inside the video card slot. *I* don't feel comfortable putting this all back together with a bunch of new parts, charging him $250 for parts and labor, and then having it go "POOF!" in 3 or 4 months. It might run forever, but then again it might not. And I'm still not sure if the case will stink or not even though I cleaned it quite wel.
Cat pee is really corrosive stuff!
On the upside, he has a nice HP Pavilion from his deceased brother that cans use the memory, CPU, and disks from this one as upgrades. His brother's PC really needs the drive to be wiped and the OS reinstalled, but he doesn't want to do wipe the drive as it has a ton of family photographs and documents from his brother. I'll check with him later and tell him what I think we should do.

6 comments:

  1. Sounds like it could have been worse, but I'm sure this was no fun, either.

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  2. Yeah, I have to do it outside until I get it clean. Besides my wife telling me "That will NOT come in this house until it's CLEAN!", the dogs are going NUTS trying to figure out where the cat is!

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  3. LOL- I'd have turned it down from the git-go...

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  4. I never had any idea that month old cat pee stunk so bad!

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  5. Ugh, good lord.

    All I had to do lately was replace my video card (and, along the way, convince Best Buy to sell me one that wasn't broken). Cleaning out cat piss, well... I'd bin the case and start afresh.

    (I can't help but comment on the cat's good taste: Antec cases are great pieces of kit.)

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  6. Bad kitty. Man that is awful. But cats are strange creaturs, and I would know, got four of them.

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Keep it civil, please....

For Phil......

 My buddy Phil from Bustednuckles brought up a good point on my previous post. Since I have things on the engine torn down this far: It wou...