Post your PC horror stories here

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RancidWAnnaRIot

EspantaPajaros
Joined
Feb 19, 2004
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This was inspired by the dude that's posting on the video card section of the forum. He's having a video card dillema..

Anyway, what are your worst PC horror stories? I guess i'll start with mine but it's probably not that horrific.

A friend of mine had one of those Pentium 2's that was a slot 1 . or slot A i don't remember. Anyway his CPU fan died. So i was going to replace it for him. I had to remove the processor to replace the fan. So i removed it. I was gonna take it to the balcony so that i could blow out some of the dust before i removed the fan. I thought the balcony door was open... it looked open. So i went ahead and tried to walk though onto the balcony. Little did i know there was a screen there!!!! so i stumbled got all the contacts on the processor to rub against the screen and dropped the damn thing pretty hard.. it was dead after that....

So i'm sure man peopel can beat that.... perfectly fine computer too
 
GeForce 4 Ti4200 fried
XP 1700+ fried
XP 2500+ fried

All due to a bad power supply.

Lesson learned? Don't go cheap on power supplies.
 
For some reason, my computer ALWAYS seems to do something wrong at my lans. I don't know why, and half the time it works fine when I plug it back in in my room. Weird stuff ranging from random reboots, to video card corruption to whatever.
 
Originally posted by _cashel
For some reason, my computer ALWAYS seems to do something wrong at my lans. I don't know why, and half the time it works fine when I plug it back in in my room. Weird stuff ranging from random reboots, to video card corruption to whatever.
Click to expand...

PSU likes stable power streams? Have it running off of a line conditioner maybe?
 
Hmm, well, last month I put together a full water cooling system for a friend and one afternoon he decided to redo some of the wiring for his fans... (can you see where this is going yet?) Anyway, while he was moving wires around, he managed to turn the blue plastic ring on his Hydor L30 which, in turn, opened up the pump's impeller housing. That caused the entire contents of his WC loop (~.7 liters of coolant) to be dumped into the bottom of his case and all over his floor. Luckily the computer was off and once everything was dry, and the loop refilled, the computer still worked fine.

Looking back, I probably should have warned him not to turn/bump that part of the pump...


*edit* Come to think of it, I've also had a bad PSU blow one of it's big capacitors while I was holding it... flash of light, loud pop, sparks, and lots of smoke. Scared the hell outta me at the time. Damn PSU's... :D
 
About a year ago, I was putting my burner in. I had to plug the floppy drive back in. I did it by feel since I was too lazy to get down there and look. Well, I bent over one of the pins on the floppy drive's power connector and shorted it out.

It fried my motherboard and PSU.

So to be even more stupid, I took another PSU, set it next the the PC and hooked it all up to the system. But I forgot to unhook the original fried PSU from my 2 month old Tyan Tachyon G9700-ProM that I forked out $380 for.

Hit the power button. Of course nothing happened except smoke coming from some components around the power connector on my G9700-ProM.

I just about cried. It didn't bother me that I was gonna have to replace my old Iwill KK-266-R board and it's 768MB PC133 RAM or the fact that all the porn :D I had collected on the two drives that were RAIDed on it's raid controller were gonna be lost, but the fact that I ruined my new $380 dollar card... that bothered me. I called my buddy, took the card over to his place plugged it in and holy shit, it still worked. Still using it today, a year later.

Morals of the story:
Don't do shit by "feel" alone.
Make sure you double check what it plugged into what..especially when you start dealing with two PSUs.
Purchase PSUs from Antec. Even after I told them what had happened, they still replaced it under warranty.
 
Slipped with a soldering iron and melted my fan controller. That was hell.

Building first computer I pushed too hard trying to put on the face plate, accidentally scratched the shit out of some poor ASUS board.. had to RMA.


Worst... powersupply surged when I just plugged it in the wall and my friend had his hand near the fan. Thank god it was only a flesh wound.
 
Back in 2001 I was rebuilding my 486 fileserver and I put the cpu in backwards and when I turned it on a spark caught fire and the mobo was in flames :eek: I had to get a wet rag to put it out.

Later that night I put the cpu in the right way and it booted right up. Indestructible AT&T globalyst 540 tower :D

Also, I was running a P166 tower at the grandparents and ants were eating away the sillicone and gold wires ruining the mobo.:(


I also have some Notebook horror stories.
 
Back in the 'olden' days where Intel vs AMD meant coppermine vs thunderbird and flames against both cpu's thrived in a section that abbreviated as GM instead of GH, I had a slocket coppermine system.

It was a p3-550cu running at 792mhz on a Soyo SY-6BA revision 3 motherboard (that's the BX chipset) using the stock HSF. I had 330 megs of ram, an overclocked GeForce 256 for primary video and an overclocked Voodoo3 (PCI) for secondary video and glide games.

The cpu/motherboard/video cards in combination made for one damned fast and well rounded system. I do recall, briefly, having one of the fastest gaming systems on the hardforum with that setup. Briefly :).

A friend of mine had a similiar system that I (if I recall correctly --I do this a lot) helped him build, except that he opted for a 600mhz coppermine instead of the 550, didn't bother with the GeForce 256 (had a Voodoo 3 only), and ran on a Via chipset motherboard instead of BX, and used an Asus slocket converter (like mine, with voltage adjustment) instead of an MSI slocket converter.

His system never overclocked impressively when he got it, and I don't recall that it broke 700mhz. We tried the CPU out in my rig in my slocket card and it fared much better, getting somewhere around 800mhz.

He wanted to diagnose the problem to see if it was the via motherboard or the asus slocket card that was holding him back, so he took my coppermine off it's MSI slocket card, put it in his Asus slocket card, and put that in my system.

And thouroughly cooked my lovely 792mhz capable pentium 3. I remember the sick feeling I had when my system didn't post --then didn't post more, then didn't post more, and... never posted again with that CPU.

The friend however was a good friend --having cooked my CPU, he bought me a replacement P3-700cu that overclocked to something around 880-890mhz.

But it was still pretty horrific. It's the only CPU I've owned that's been fried or busted. Glad I didn't do it :).

Erik
 
i had to work on a... eMachine once.

*shudders*


... i win for computer horror stories! yay!
 
Just 2 weeks ago, I took an old Abit KD7 that I had just discovered still worked to a LAN party to attempt to fix it.

I thought the Allied 450W power supply I brought with it was perfectly fine, since I had used it in the aforementioned motherboard for over a year already.

Needless to say, I had boot problems at the LAN and it pissed me off. The motherboard had power, the CPU fan was spinning, hard drives were spinning. Then, they all suddenly died. I pressed the power button again after a few seconds, not thinking twice about the fact that it probably shorted out. A capacitor in the PSU exploded, shooting searing hot sparks on my forearms while releasing a lot of smoke. Hurt like hell for a second, but it just made me laugh.

Moral of this story: I'm never investing in cheap power supplies again.

Dark Assassin
 
gfg I'm not buying a cheap psu again...

soyo kt333 board in my sig is pretty damned gay... rmaed it once for dead bios chip and then it came back with a bad ide port & perhaps even a bad raid chip.

Never did RMA the fucker again, don't really care, however I have list 4 HD's in the last 3 years... I dont know if it's because of the way I punish them or cause the mobo is dieing...

I hate VIA as well, their shitty chipsets caused me more driver problems than anything else in the history of problems in my life.

Weecam printer port camera won't work well at all in windows xp... woot for not being able to find good drivers.

~Adam
 
Took my rig apart to replace the stock cooler with something better. Undid the fasteners to the heat sink, and then tried to remove the heat sink. It was glued to the chip. Gave it a tug... Another tug... Then it came out... Pulling the processor out with it... With two broken pins. Scared me to death... Luckily, the processor (the one in my sig) still works to this day... But I guess it's no longer a socket 478. More like a socket 476. :D
 
Almost electrocuted myself at my old job. I was replacing one of those old AT power buttons, and was holding the button in my hand. However, the plastic protectors were not all the way on, so my fingers were touching the bare leads. Needless to say, when I pressed the power switch, I got quite a buzz. Luckily, I was able to turn it off.
 
Several years ago, when an 800 MHz duron was an ok CPU, and the abit KT7 was good:
(Ok, there's been some disagreements over that. It's all history :D)

Imagine, if you will, a working MB/CPU/PSU/vid.card combination lying on an antistatic bag on the floor, and two somewhat young people observing it.
None of the hardware, nor all the blame, is mine, btw.
So far, so good, we agreed, and put it in the case. Dead as a brick. Things spun up, but otherwise nothing.
Not being able to get anything out of it again, we return the MB.
FF a month or so.
Repeat.
FF a month or so.
I get a phone call that the replacement (of the replacement) has arrived, and finally suspecting that something in the case is killing them, immideately tells the other guy not to put it in the case, or even touch it, before I arrive.
Next day, he tells me he just wanted to test it to see if it worked. Sigh.
I arrive at his house, and go over everything. There is a brass standoff too much in his case.
*Sigh* (again).
FF a month or so.
It works.
 
I have not ruined any Computer Hardware yet.

Knock on Wood of course.

I have never used a Anti-Static Strap either, I think that sooner or later I should get around to that.
 
- lost two or three axia 1.2ghz t-birds to two shitty shuttle ak31 rev. 3.1 motherboards, which were known for either being great, cheap mobos or shitty mobos with non-existant power regulation. i've never had good luck with shuttle stuff, and i haven't bought or recommended any shuttle product since.

- one of my friends claimed to know more than i did in the hardware dept. and he had just gotten a new mobo, some gigabyte something-or-another. he wanted me to test his mobo with my good ram, video card, hdd, and cpu, since his other parts hadn't arrived yet. so while he's putting the mobo into my antec case, i notice he didn't use motherboard standoffs. my reaction was "are you crazy??? your mobo is going to fry my stuff!" "nonsense, mobos don't need standoffs," he says, and finishes screwing the board in. i told him again that it would fry, and he insisted it wouldn't.

so, the moment of truth arrives; he connects the power cord to the machine and powers it up. the fans start, the hard drive spins up, and the machine doesn't post. about 8 seconds later, i notice smoke coming from the motherboard and unplug the power. i was pretty fucking angry at this point, because i thought i just lost $600 worth of hardware. i pulled my stuff off of the mobo and pulled the mobo from my case; it had black burn marks on the bottom of the pcb. i swapped all my stuff back into my machine, and it all worked:D i was pretty happy that i had totally owned my friend, and he has stopped insisting that he knows more about computer hardware than myself.

those are the two most memorable comp related moments for me. i don't wear anti-static wrist straps, either.
 
Stupidest thing I ever did was plug in a Floppy power connector wrong. Turned on the comp a friend of mine and I were building, and it dosn't POST. A few seconds later a big puff of smoke comes out the back of the PSU. And we race to yank the plug.

I was off by one pin, which took the entire contents on the 12 v rail (550w PSU too) and grounded it thru the floppy drive. Those wires got so hot they burned right thru the plastic coating on them.

The floppy died, but the PSU still works. Just the lead that I fried doesn't work any more, but the rest still do.
 
Well, this is totally n00bish, but:

I was installing my first "mod" to my beige-cased FIC motherborad and axp1600 chip. It was a Thermaltake Volcano 9 that I bought at a computer show. I went to install it in "temp controled mode" and put the temp diode ON THE CORE. Needless to say somke started to rise and I pulled the plug. My dad (who did computers back in the 386 days) Said "try it w/o the HSF on to see if it's fried." (you can guess what happened) So I ordered another axp1700 and did the same thing. Then I thought it was the motherboard, and bought a 1700 and a a7n8x-deluxe (this was still the best amd board at the time) And used a retail HSF, and it worked fine.

Looking back now I laugh now but it was really stupid then.
 
Innovatek water cooling set up..
All working beautiful....
Decided that wasn't enough and added the extended reservoir tank on the pump, 2 weeks later the tank developed a hair line fracture and sprayed a nice beautiful mist of coolant all over my MB..
Fried MB, CPU, and Memory.
Needless to so say I was overwhelmed with joy.


New MB, CPU and Memory and eliminated the WC kit... Nothing like 2 deltas to make go deaf,or insane which ever comes first, but hey no more worries. lol
 
I think the worst thing I ever did was drop a screwdriver into a computer while it was on, sparks flew off the Sound card and the computer powered off. took out the screw driver powered it back on and it ran as if it never happened :D
 
Celeron 633@1.05GHz: fried
6GB Fujitsu HD: fried
Soundblaster Live! Value: rear channels dead and fronts intermittent
SMC NIC: fried
Voodoo3 2000 AGP: ok

Thanks to a vindictive generic PSU that wanted to take the rest of the system with it. Took so many car trips out of the city and purchases to troubleshoot the faulty components I almost lost it that summer.
 
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