I mean.... yeah... if it is your only option you do whatever you have to to get where you want to be (for all we know he wants to go into content creation and he should have the right to do that, he may be an incredible dev someday.)
I would take the ram out (if you want to get really creative you can even leave it in and just have it poorly seated, had to fix that for a few people that tried home upgrades when I worked at staples). That way you can turn around and sell it once you have the new one.
Turn it off in the middle of a bios flash.
When you say "his parents say it will lower his grades" do they imagine he will play games on it all the time? Is that why he wants a 'new' laptop?
Bricking his laptop to get a new one will NOT alter their attitude.
I feel that is the real problem not that his laptop is 'old'(crappy).
Kill the hard drive.
Kill the RAM.
Step all over the screen.
Unplug the keyboard.
Kick it across the room.
Take it apart and have at the CPU DIE with a hammer.
Fill it up with solder.
Turn it on, then put it under running water.
Use it as a frisbee.
Re-Format the HDD.
Botch up the Bios.
Enter a state of depression and break the laptop.
>Warning: May cause adverse affects afterwards.
>>Source: Me. I'm asian.
>>>Result: Your family treats you like a king.
Get a pet to use it as a chew toy.
Leave it in the street and let it get run over.
Fill the thing with dust so that it shutsdown every 5 minutes.
I could keep going on, but I think you get the idea.
I think the problem your friend has is to create a small sense of divide and independence between him and his parents. I had the same issue. I could never have a computer in my room. I could never play more than half an hour of video games a day on the weekends. I would never own a portable electronic device with a screen. I think that my parents have somewhat given up their expectations of me now, though.
S-So m-many r-replies. @.@
Thanks for the suggestions guys, and yes, it's a stupid thing to do and I'm sorry I sickened all of you, but pretty much that is the only way of him getting a new PC, he wants a desktop this time. His parents are caring, but also restrictive...
Weird things about his parents though, they would buy him everything EXCEPT for a desktop... He has a bunch of Ps3 games, a couple of steam games and BF3(which lagged badly, please don't blame me for not advising him as I didn't know he was going to buy that gpu+cpu intensive game :c ) a PSvita, a Razer mouse(typical newbie PC gamer xD) etc.
But at the same time, they don't want their child to "lower his grade by PC gaming" [which of course makes no sense as you'd learn much more in PC gaming (e.g learning on building a PC) than playing on consoles]
Last note, he can only play games on weekends.
Anyways, thanks for your very helpful answers guys! ^-^ Never thought I'd receive this much replies, though. o.o"
What type of laptop is it? I can think of a few ways to give the appearance of bricked such as unplugging the power button, unplugging the power adapter from the motherboard etc.
I would tell him he needs to stress to his parents that there is a future in content creation and just in knowing how to mess around with technology in general, the second it becomes an academic tool in their eyes they will be all over it. If he starts leaning to code and doing some basic networking stuff it may be easier to convince them, also Linux will squeeze an extra few years out of a junk box.
easiest way: wipe the disk, if they don't know well in IT they will think it is bricked
or take an exacto knife, and cut the battery connector's traces on the mobo/ break the power connector
have a friend "accidentaly" push you and your computer falls off (works better if he has an insurance)
Yes, this method. please do this one. It is by far my favorites so far.
Just open it up and unplug the harddrive from it.
It will appear to be bricked, and then if the plan backfires and he cant get a new computer, at least then he can re-plug the harddrive back in and continue using it and still have a computer.
Just avoid letting them see its still working, for like a week or so then say you were fiddling around and got it working again.
tell them Video editing is what he is going into and that while trying to do it _______ happened. RAM failed, on-board video gave out. Whatever. This way, he looks like he has a legitimate need for the hardware he is getting. better yet, keep the laptop, getan old desktop case, and I mean looks like 1995 old, and turn it into a sleeper, a fast computer that looks like ass. This way, he can buy his graphics card on the sly and unless his parents take apart the old computer, they will just think it is an old computer with less hardware capability than the laptop.
just remove the cooling fan.
oh, i do remember that you can short out a laptop by sticking metal things into weird ports.
flash it with a random bios off the internet or install linux on it and tell your parents to use it :P
There was a guy on 4chan a while ago who documented himself installing every trogan, virus, and toolbar he could find. It basically turned into a clusterfuck with his computer regularly not booting and the viruses rewriting each others system control points. He actually ended up with less viruses than he installed. I think there were a couple bios exploiting viruses too.
Do you have a link to that? it sounds interesting
RAM in microwave for about 3 seconds. will be long enough to kill it bu no long enough to have that burning smell.
If it's unlikely to reach a PC repair shop you could just overwrite the boot sector. You can use Linux with dd: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1
You could a also botch a bios upgrade. Attempt to install a bios upgrade but pull the USB stick out halfway through - there's a good chance that a repair shop would just bin the device unless they have a board to replace the current one
Ive been looking for it the past few days and turned up nothing. Unfortunalty my brother who usually archives this stuff does not have it either. I will be trying to search for it on the wayback machine.
Here is an archive to a person buying winrar in the meantime.
http://dropcanvas.com/qrei6