Ants ate my laptop

[Frank James]

It was another lovely day in Chiang Mai. I was wasting time reading all the rants against my beloved Lady Yingluck, and getting ready to once again defend her honor, when suddenly my screen went IBM Blue, and for the first time since my last homemade 386 crashed, it was the Blue Screen of Death. There was a lot of gobbledegook on the screen about CHECKSUM not adding up, but before I could read it all, the screen went black. I tried rebooting several times, and all the machine would tell me was “BOOTMGR is missing”.

I took the poor beast down to Pantip Plaza where I had purchased the machine about sixteen months ago. It is a Lenovo Ideapad Y-470, which at the time was near the top of the range of Lenovo offerings. It worked fine, and took a few hard knocks traveling. They sent it to the authorized Lenovo Service Center. It came back this morning looking pretty beat, with a sprinkling of white ashy substance all over the screen and keyboard.

Verdict: Ants have destroyed the inner works! The attached pictures tell the grim tale. Until July we lived in a house that had a serious ant problem. There were several varieties around the place, and I enjoyed studying their ways. Every time I used the machine, at least one ant would crawl across the screen, and/or disappear below one of the keys. The “1” and “Q” keys seemed to be a popular port of entry. Little did I know that they were building an ant farm inside. The attached pictures tell the story.

Lenovo has no interest in cleaning up the machine, (they’ll do it for 14,000 baht, maybe) but I found a small indie shop upstairs that is willing to take a shot at it. All I’m hoping for is that they can extract my personal data from the hard drive, which is a sealed unit, and should be ant-free inside.

I bought a Samsung ATIV notebook, and already like it better than the more expensive Lenovo, but I really need to get that data back. I’ve only seen the occasional ant on my current desk, but if one hops onto this new machine, I will zap it quickly with a blast of canned air.

I have written this sad story to warn other TV members about the danger these noble little creatures can do to your computer. It seems that they might have been attracted to the adhesive on the tape inside. I was and am very careful not to eat at the keyboard, and I have always wiped down the keys and screen regularly. I hope this doesn’t happen to you. Thanks for reading.

[Double Deckers]

Send your story to Yingluck maybe she will send you a tablet.

[ExpatOilWorker]

These are NSA ants sent to infiltrate your HDD. Job well done!

[jackr]

Whip out your HDD, bung it in a case and USB it into another machine... data will doubtless still be there.

[chuckd]

I read your topic title and thought..."Damn, how big are the ants where he lives?"

Then I read your report, so I put my gun away and stopped looking for very large ants.

[Totster]

I had a desktop keyboard go the same way once, moral of the story is stop eating cakes and drinking pop while sat at your laptop.

totster

[robblok]

Its an act of god, for defending YL

[ExpatOilWorker]

I had a desktop keyboard go the same way once, moral of the story is stop eating cakes and drinking pop while sat at your laptop.

totster

There is one more activity we need to add to your list....just saying.

[losworld]

not necessarilly for some reason ants are attracted to electricity...

[CharlieH]

Bummer !

[Crossy]

not necessarilly for some reason ants are attracted to electricity...

Indeed, it's the tiny microscopic ones that cause the trouble (they bite too).

They've fried 1 TV and bunged up the water pump pressure switch several times as well as assorted light switches. The ants have avoided any of my PCs (so far)

To our OP, if you (or your shop) clean off all the crap and dead ants it's possible it will recover, no big voltages inside.

[Frank James]

The ants in question are the small black fellows, which seem to be the most common variety that one finds in homes here. At that location we had at least four distinct groups: the large-bodied reddish ones; the equally large bodied blacks; these small black guys (the most numerous); and worst of all, the almost sub-visible reddish-transparent ones, that have a nasty sting.

It really is interesting to watch these little guys as they do their work. I could have done without their work on my machine, though!

[JulesMad]

The ants are going at the rants

But seriously, good luck! Ants did destroy my speaker system and 1 computer as well. Now I am watching very carefully for ants around anything electronic/electric. They were probably small ants, and not the big ones...

[chrisinth]

As jackr said, remove the hard drive, put it in a 2.5" case and USB it to your new computer. The data should be accessible to transfer directly over.

Sigh, it appears the days of the internet spiders are gone................

[davofromoz]

Sure it's not an apple?

[richard_smith237]

My router started playing up.. we called the TOT guy, when he opened it up there were 1000's of tiny Ants inside...

I suspect that they are somehow attracted to the electrical frequencies of some electrical components.

[Chicog]

It's not quite up there with "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" though.

[Crossy]

A troll post so far off topic it was in a parallel universe has been removed.

[LUSHGOAT]

You can buy what they call a sata box take out your hard-drive but it in the box and make sure you get the usb lead with it as they normally come with the lead

[rozand]

same here. Twice. Leave it in sleep-mode, not turn it off. Helped here: obviously they do not like electricity after all.

[little mary sunshine]

OMG....How do you live in a place with ants like this....Spray, chalk, spray for you own good.

[ikbenhet]

HD's are sealed airtight so your data should be save.

You should check if your new machine has place for an secondary hd.

It might be you can just plug it in your new machine.

[Frank James]

OMG....How do you live in a place with ants like this....Spray, chalk, spray for you own good.

We don't live there any more. Where we live now has very few ants. I doubt if there's any home in Chiang Mai that doesn't have at least a few ants, even the brand new condo developments that are sprouting all over like mushrooms. The slums of tomorrow. Ants are here to stay. It's a perfect environment for them.

[Shiver]

I've witnessed this also. I've seen piles of dead ants under the desktop screen, and watched them killing themselves in wall electrical sockets. After reading James Surowieki's book on Crowd intelligence (which features a story about ants following each other in the jungle in a multi-kilometre circle, and meeting the start of their own journey, only to walk in a circle until they died, it is my hypothesis (not necessarily fact), that they leave a scent trail, and other ants may follow, and if enough follow the scent trail it may become strong enough that there could be hoards of them all crawling in there and killing themselves. I don't think it's the electricity that attracts them, just their wandering nature and the simple rules that certain ants follow. For example, some species if you smack your hand near them, they run off. Other species seem oblivious to this, even if you are 1mm away from splatting them.

The original computer term of 'a bug in the system' I believe also originated from things getting into old style electronics and screwing up the hardware.

[jayceenik]

In my Pattaya room I had ants disabling a light switch (there were so many of them all of a sudden), establishing a colony overnight in my desk PC keyboard (caught them in the act in the morning !!) and, worse of all, having colonized the back of my expensive but not often used HP laptop monitor (right behind the protective clear glass).

Switched the laptop on, it still worked and I could see the little devils moving about on the picture background.

I took the laptop to ITCity at TukCom and they cleaned the menagerie for 1,000b.

No problems with the laptop since.

[KRaymond]

I'm sorry for what happened to your computer but the story is funny and the pictures that shows ants stuck on your pc just made it hilarious.

lol

Can you pull out the HDD and put it into a external hard drive and copy it onto another computer?

[maybefitz]

I had a Sony Handycam tape video machine that I hadn't used for a while. Picked it up one day, and could see ants through the viewfinder. Strange,thought I; can't recall videoing ants. On exploration,the whole machine was infested with them. I took it to Sony and the cost of repair was more than it was worth. So I ditched it and bought a basic digital one, much smaller, handier and works well. In that respect the little devils did me good. Is it just me, or has this year seen an increase in Ant activity?; they seem to be everywhere, in the house, garden and out buildings.

[Andre0720]

And that is why I consider the Geckos my friends.

And I try to make my apartment a nice habitat for them...

[BruceSmith]

You are not alone:

https://www.google.no/#q=ants+in+Laptop

and just in case:

https://www.google.no/#q=ants+in+pants

[BB1950]

And that is why I consider the Geckos my friends.

And I try to make my apartment a nice habitat for them...

Geckos have shorted out three of my TV's, and one Microwave. You can't win!