How about this for a motherboard burn.

Yeah. You see what you have there is the classic Ebay/Amazon "refurbished" laptop. Nothing out of the ordinary there at all. :-D

Years ago, I recall someone at TV Centre, plugging a mains live connector into the video input of a TV monitor. After the first monitor failed, he tried with two morem before somebody stopped him.

I love the term 'refurbished'.

It plainly means many different things to many different people.

Probably Dave Plowman after a few too many lunchtime bevvies. ;-)

Plug compatible, was it?

The plug to the monitor was right - but the other end of the cable had managed to get into an open mains socket. This was before the days of shutter sockets everywhere

How do you get coax cable into a mains socket though, shuttered or not ?.

The connector was one we called F&E. Centre conductor could stand well proud of the outer ring.

In the early days of TC, the mains would have been an EP4, the video an EP3. Later mains a D&S, then Walsall gauge. Taking us up to about 40 years ago. Zero idea what they'd use now - Powercon?

Refurbished if you don't need the docking connection obviously. There used to be a systems test program for Dell hardware, updated for each version that should have spotted this on test, surely? Brian

To furbish something means to take something, usually something old and shabby, and give it a polish. I'm sure that this Dell laptop was shined up a bit before being sold, so what's the problem? ;)

I expect the major fault existed previously and they just got it working, but over the time of 2 years it deteriorated.