[tEckniks]

Post the worst thing that has happened to you PC, or done. I'll start first ...

My HD was acting really weird, making a grinding noise.. "grind, grind, grind.... grind grind grind" when i was trying to load some songs.. . Well it kept doing this for a week and i finally gave in and decided to reformat the whole computer with windows.

So i put my windows xp home in the dvd drive and thought everything was going smooth, then half way thru the install i hear a .. "KKKkkkkkkaachhhhh" from the dvd drive.. .

I tried to open my dvd drive but it was stuck... then i shut off my pc and got a flathead screwdriver and opened it.

My windows XP cd was in A MILLION PIECES!!! I had to lift up my tower and start shaking it up and down until every single last piece of cd was out. I just bought the windows xp home a week ago for $120 (last year)!!!!

My pc was fubared until i found another xp disc.

Anyone else?

[Ubergrendle]

Can't get IDE 0 to work on a new motherboard. Manual configurations w/ jumper overrides, BIOS changes, drive changes, master/slave/auto settings tweaked to no avail. Replace IDE cable. Test both hds in another rig, both work fine. I spend about 2 weeks looking up articles, checking newsgroups, etc.

Call motherboard tech line as last resort before RMAing...local ma'n'pa shop won't accept a return. Wait 45 mins, get some help...tech support INSISTS motherboard is working; diagnostics errors would detect an IDE 0 failure. I'm skeptical. He asks me to use the IDE cable from my working PC...I said I already replaced the IDE cable after testing the one shipped with the motherboard.. he insists I should test with a proven, working cable.

BINGO.

Apparently IDE ribbon cables are very prone to failure/damage (true), and that at the time (1997ish) even net-new OEM IDE ribbons were prone to be non-functional when leaving the factory.

This was the ONLY time a call centre provided useful technical advice to me. Now my rule of thumb is to test everything 3x when dealing with a failure, and to pre-test parts in a functioning machine beforehand.

[technonerd]

I have two hard-drive. I usally backup my stuff on my cd every saturday because I have very valueable software and files to use for my business presentation. All the valuable stuff is on second hard drive and OS is on first HD. In case my OS crash my second HD is okay.

So.......on friday afternoon my first HD with OS crash I had to reinstall the OS and what I find out is that I accidently reformat and install the OS on Second HD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The bad new is, I'm having a presentation for a company in two days. Which is worth 6 months of work. I lost half of my stuff because it suppose to back up on saturday but instead, on friday it crash and installed OS on wrong HD. Now it'll take me another 2 month to get the presentation ready. I had to call the company about what happen, they understand. The sad thing for me is that I need the presentation money and now I'm going to use credit card for christmas stuff. So no money this year, The presentation is my pay day. *WAH*

I can manage it anyways so no worries.

[sonofacpu]

This happened a long time ago. I had a AMD K6 133MHz PC and was downloading some music from Napster or something like that. Suddenly, a strange smell started to filll the room, until Windows gave me one of those blue screens saying that it couldn`t access the hard disk. Scared, I restarted the PC, and the hard disk wasn`t detected at all. I opened it up, and the hard disk was completely burned out. Luckily, it was the oportunity to change it for a bigger one (800 MB or something like that)

[BiGBrOwNPimpsta]

i bought 512 megs of ram, one HD failed, bought a new one, then mobo burnt out, had to get a temp comp for 1 month without my old baby 800 athlon

it was nearly 2 months of hell for me

[Warpy]

Taken from here

Sup,

I got some very sad news... it's been a hard day to get through... it all started around 14:00 today.

I had just fed the neighbours cat, as they are away on vaction and i thought I'd do them a favour and look after it! The cat had been pestering me all morning for attention, so I went into the kitchen to feed her, hoping to get some quiet time, I refilled my glass of coke, as it's been 37 degrees centigrade today here in South Australia and I was dehydrating as the air con as broke. I headed back to my pc which was in assembled out of the case on the desk as i was cleaning the motherboard, case and fans, I placed my glass of coke on the desk next to my mouse.

The phone rang and I got up to answer it, this phone call should not have been answered...

As I was on the phone the cat walzed into my study were the computer lives. She knows to stay out - it's a no cat zone, the door is always kept closed, but on this one occasion I closed it too with my foot as I walked out to answer the phone. I kept my eye on the cat, but before I could react she ran into the study, I quickly put the phone down and as I entered the room my heart sank... she had jumped onto the desk and knocked over the glass of coke, which which fell on my mobo and cpu.

The cat looked at me and ran, it's almost as if they know that their end is drawing nigh too.

I sat around for an hour pondering if I should turn it on to see if its ok, in the end I did.

For the first second, it all powered up , and then there was a small puck sound and a burning plastic smell. My pc screen turned off and the room went deadly silent. I could hear my heart beat though like a jack hammer . The fans inside my case still work, but the CPU fan and hard drives wont power-on.

I feel numb, cold and very lonely. The girlfriend is not very understanding as she hates my PC. She probably trained that evil cat to knock off my PC.

P.S If anyone has a way of fixing my CPU and mobo I shall donate my ATI 9800 PRO as a gesture of thanks.

Here is a pic of the little shit:




So we have a dog next door called "Bruno" he is a boxer dog, now this dog is sick in the head: He will try and have sex with anything that moves, many a time he has tried to mate with my leg . I even caught him peep'n over the fence checking out my gf

He once had a friend that was taken away from him cause he was trying to rape it - yes another male dog. So the owners removed that dog as Bruno was there first pet. Pffft

Anywaz I am tempted to lob this cat over the fence if it causes me any more headaches. The thing is "bruno" wont try and eat her, and the cat knows that too i bet!!!

[GutterPunk]

I was in 7th grade computers, we were doing typing... A space B space C space ETC... Well yeah this intesnse Word Processing caused the computer to heat up! Seconds later I get the smell of burning plastic and moments after that smoke starts rising from the computer! Funny day it was

I also had a disc that shattered in a drive b4

[Frodo301]

I once fixed a computer for a lady friend that was having video corruption on screen. She had little pink and purple pixels while in Windows and games would not boot at all. Just from looking at what was going on I figured it was a severe driver problem or more likely her video card had bitten the dust. She also complained of a foul odor that came from the fan in the pwr supply, said it had the smell of rotten bacon. The computer itself was a older Dell model, well out of warranty at the time and had never been opened by the owner up to this point. I carefully removed the screws to the case and opened it up and to my surprise setting on the TNT vid card was a *nasty* half eaten blt sandwich with a heaping spread of mayo in a ziplock bag. The bread was old and moldy, but I guess from the heat of the vid card and computer the meat, veggies and mayo still had a little life left in them. It looked like over time the heat had caused the mayo and veggies to break down creating a vile smelling greasy liquid which had leaked just a tiny bit on the card completely "toasting" it . I went ahead and called the lady telling her of my find, she said not to touch anything as she had problems with this system since she had purchased it and from this point she called Dell. Now I don't know what this lady said, threatened, or promised Dell but to my surprise they made good and replaced the system for her. I think she ended up paying the shipping/ return of old computer and prehaps half or less on a new system, but she was pretty happy.

[dj_stick]

mmm opened my disc drive because it was making strange noises, and my Starcraft CD actually flies out and smashes against the wall

[Dark Lord]

i just had my brand new system put together, AMD64 3200+, X800pro, 2x512 kingston hyper-x. turn it on and it doesnt post. i go through everything and nothing works on this rig... i end up RMA the cpu which turned out to be fine. after that i rma'd the mobo. after i got the replacement back everything started up just fine.

that was 2 very very long weeks that i never want to go through again. it probably wouldnt have been so bad had i not been eagerly awaiting a new comp for the last 2 years....

[Sargentwhitey]

I'd have to say mine was when my 9700 Pro overheated the hell out of itself and burnt up one of the chips on the back... then the next day a fan blade on my processor heatsink broke off.. I was stuck using a 233mhz IBM Laptop, but hey, I could still play Duke Nukem

[VuLLs]

my story is the most evilest... so evil that i cannot tell it for the details would make you vomit blood.

this happened along time ago like 1-2 years back.

lets just say i had to buy new hard drives and other components, and then start over from scratch, because of a gay ass virus that over clocked and destroyed everything without me knowing. dont ever download anything... ever. i lost everything and had to spend hours/days redownloading updates and software then installing games.

even with firewall, router, anti-virus softwares, adware destroyers, spyware destroyers... the evil virus still got through... goes to show you that ass holes exist to be a pain in your ass, sitting there making new virus's just to fuck peoples computers up so they dont have to face them in games. pussy shits no skill.

i think i got the virus from some faggot on mirc32 when i owned this noob ass clan in counter strike 1.6 cal-m... guess im just to trusting in strangers... poser gave me a virus i guess. anywayz... i found a better way of virus repairs, i just got another computer that has 300 gig hard drives C and D drives and i just backup all my shit to it and when ever i get a prob i just reinstall xp then reinstall my shit from other harddrive and gg im back up and running virus free in mere seconds. heh

i got another better story though... my cousins computer chasis has hydraulics... lol.
either that or its possessed... um it shakes and rumbles all over the wooden floor and because so it makes cd's skip and hard drive crash and its constantly rebooting LOL.

it shakes i think because he has water cooling system, like 10 HUGE fans, some generator engine things... and like when you turn it on it goes BRRRMMMMMM hahahaha... needs to fix that crap cuz all its doing is messing up hard drive by skipping.

[CDsDontBurn]

back when i was a n00b and built my first system, i had everything installed, and went to POST my system. turned on the power button, and no post. everything powered up, but didn't hear that magical beep saying everything works fine. I started to freak out cuz i had just spent $400 on my system which to me back then was a crap load of money i had saved up. I didn't know what to do. The next day i took it in to a computer shop, and all the guy did was just re-seat my video card and everything started working fine. I got owned by the tech.

[Warpy]

Originally Posted by CDsDontBurn

back when i was a n00b

Ummmm you sure things have improved?! J/K!

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by Funky Monkey

Ummmm you sure things have improved?! J/K!

HAHAHAAHAH.......how mean! I've come a long way since i first started all my comuter stuff.

[ZzzombieBunny]

Originally Posted by another-user

i just had my brand new system put together, AMD64 3200+, X800pro, 2x512 kingston hyper-x. turn it on and it doesnt post. i go through everything and nothing works on this rig... i end up RMA the cpu which turned out to be fine. after that i rma'd the mobo. after i got the replacement back everything started up just fine.

that was 2 very very long weeks that i never want to go through again. it probably wouldnt have been so bad had i not been eagerly awaiting a new comp for the last 2 years....

heh my littlebrother bought a similar system and had a couple friends plug it in for him. then when they booted it up it just went beep and shutdown itself after 2 seconds. They couldnt figure out what the hell was the issue so they unplugged different parts to check what was wrong and kept trying to boot it up for hours. Finaly someone suggested perhaps it was the cpu, so they took it out and noticed one of the pins were broken. They had somehow put it in wrong, which seemed like a total mystery since they had put it in correctly and youd have to be a blind man to not be able to put it the cpu in correctly. Later on they realized there was nothing wrong with the cpu and that one of the pins went off when they removed it to try and check if it was broken in the first place :P ouch.

Anyway, they coughed up enough cash for a new cpu and I put it in this time... just to find out the damn computer wouldnt boot. I had double checked everything and was 100% sure there was nothing wrong with the cpu or anything else. All I could do was surrender and tell my brother to take the computer to a techstore for a checkup.

A few hours later my brother found out what was wrong, after consulting the mobo manual. *cough* seems I forgot to put in the additional powersupply cable for the mobo :P

From what I can tell the other guys did the same mistake.

Ive built together several custom computers and taken them apart several times before without any issues, so forgetting something as simple as a power cable is kinda embarassing...

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by ZzzombieBunny

Ive built together several custom computers and taken them apart several times before without any issues, so forgetting something as simple as a power cable is kinda embarassing...

LOL.....that is pretty embarrasing. so what did your brother do w/the original CPU? Did it actually have a broken pin or not?

[reno]

I have many horror stories, but my most incredible story is a happy story. About my trusty Duron 750 and the trials it has gone through...

As a massive upgrade to my aging 233MMx Pentium PC, I scrounged up the money to buy a Duron based AMD system, crappy motherboard, 256 megs of ram...geforce fricking 256 bitch...anyway...so I get this system together, and for years that was my lifeblood. Games, internet, half-life, what have you.

Well, being curious about computers at a young age, I found myself CONSTANTLY reseating the CPU heatsink. I don't know why, maybe I was just "checking" the thermal paste or something. But boy, that thing just kept working like a charm.

Until I left for college. I had long before replaced my computer with an earlier, 1.7Ghz Geforce 3 based iteration of the PC I have now (same case, same WD harddrive, same soundcard, same speakers, same floppy disk, heh) but this 750 Duron was my brother's lifeblood. One day, I came back from college and booted up ol' faithful on a nostalgic whim...played Elite Force for a bit, then the computer went black.

Ah, just overheated, no biggy. I power down the computer and restart it after 10 minutes...hmm...5 seconds, then black. Ooops, something may be more wrong than I thought. To make a long story short, I crack open the case and begin inspecting things...everything looks fine, no burning smells, take of the CPU heatsink - no problems! Well, I boot up again...5 seconds then nothing. Hmmmm...maybe if I watch the computer as it's booting up?

Well, I found that the motor for the CPU fan remained stationary on boot up, and it was plugged in. I tried moving it with my finger, it wouldn't budge! I broke out a flashlight and "holy crap" the fan actually melted the motor and onto the heatsink (whether from the heat of the heatsink, or the motor jamming...I'm not certain). Hmm...well, the CPU seemed to still work though...but what to do...

I ripped off the fan assembly and forced a screw through a 80mm fan into the crack between two fins on the crappy aluminum heatsink. Hmm...but it couldn't stay where I want it. Hmm. Ah! I can use the ATX power cable to support the fan, as it runs across the ECS K7VZA motherboard! Viola! Turn the computer on, and except for a massive upgrade to a GeForce 2 GTS, the thing has been running untouched for two years, and I still enjoy the occasional game of Warcraft 3 or Icewind Dale 2 on it.

Ah...that trusty, 3 year old Duron/Frankenstein PC...how I love you the most out of them all. Except for my current system, I love you too.

*closes the door*

[MythicaL]

Well same damn problem still happens with me. Ever since I got a replacement Asus A7N8X-E for my old A7N8X, the damn computer won't POST if I remove the power cord from the back of the PSU.

Yes, and it's very strange, even when I plug the cord back in, it still won't POST. The solution: turn the power on and off, on and off, on and off about 20 times until it finally POSTs...

This scared the crap out of me at first, because I thought the CPU might have fried of the GPU bad or god knows what. Thank god I managed to figure the problem out. But now, I have 512mb of RAM instead of the 1GB I used to have, and with higher timings : |

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by MythicaL

Well same damn problem still happens with me. Ever since I got a replacement Asus A7N8X-E for my old A7N8X, the damn computer won't POST if I remove the power cord from the back of the PSU.

Yes, and it's very strange, even when I plug the cord back in, it still won't POST. The solution: turn the power on and off, on and off, on and off about 20 times until it finally POSTs...

This scared the crap out of me at first, because I thought the CPU might have fried of the GPU bad or god knows what. Thank god I managed to figure the problem out. But now, I have 512mb of RAM instead of the 1GB I used to have, and with higher timings : |

Maybe it's your PSU that's causing you your troubles?

[MythicaL]

Possibly

[CDsDontBurn]

look into it. Also check your MoBo.....maybe it has some blown caps.

[ZzzombieBunny]

Originally Posted by CDsDontBurn

LOL.....that is pretty embarrasing. so what did your brother do w/the original CPU? Did it actually have a broken pin or not?

sent it for RMA hoping to get a refund (it cost nearly 300$)... not much hope there though. One of the pins must have snapped broken when they removed the heatsink to check if the cpu was placed correctly. (well obviously it must have been placed correctly since theres just one way to put it in...)



That reminds me, I had a lighting related incident with one of my computers a few years back. People say your supposed to turn of your tv, computer etc when theres a lightingstorm. But ive never listened, thinking being hit by lighting is kinda like winning the lottery. Anyway all I remember was a zap sound burnt plastic smell and then I saw a mushroom looking cloud come out of the monitor before the computer went down. Thats the last thing I got out of that thing, did manage to save my old Radeon 8500 and the HD though, but everything else got toasted. So nowdays I always pull the plug out of the wall when im not using my computer, just incase.

[Dexsal]

This happened a long time ago....mmm..... turned the power off to check sd ram sticks walked away. returned turned power back on,.....turned PC on, turned PC off...went to place ram back in " ZAP BANG " did it to two ram sticks

And also i went to check second drive, removed & returned with power on ZAP again

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

Personally?

My 9500 pro died while loading a driver... reason unkown
a bios modification I flashed in didn't take and i hosed it hosed the bios...
a bios that just up an died on it own (was a mfg problem)
that about it for seroius problems at home

Professionally? god the stories I could tell...

I've seen a CPU EXPLODE! literally the core pop! chunks all over....

I've seen system were the PSU' had exploded...
killed every pice of hardware in the customers system

I've seen had a motherboard catch fire....

the funniest would be the one desktop we got with a huge RATS nest (like a birds nest only much much larger) in it and they had a cooling issue LOL I bet with a family of rats liveing in your machine

[MythicaL]

Ok Neon, that just scares the crap out of me

[CDsDontBurn]

unless the side panel were always removed, how the hell can there be a rat's nest in a system?

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

Originally Posted by CDsDontBurn

unless the side panel were always removed, how the hell can there be a rat's nest in a system?

easy he had a slot cover pulled....
plus this was a desktop not a tower so the upgrade slots are vertical

you didn't know that mice and rats can amazingly fit thew very tiny spaces!

I asume it's rats the nest was way to big for mice,
unless we talking about several generations

the pc was totally packed with misc / looked like a giant birds neast cramed in a case

[Geminiwave]

ahem...

Visiting my aunt's house, her PC wouldnt turn on anymore. This was distressing her greatly. SO I decide "hey why dont I fix this!" so I crack it open...the case seemed awefully discolored in a few places but no biggie. Anyway I take the side off...and....

the power supply had exploded and taken most of the computer with it...and it now had a roach nest inside of it. It was so discusting. The video card, sound card, and a large chunk of the mobo were blown off. The CPU socket, CPU, and heatsink were on the bottom of the computer ripped clean off(but still held togeather and surprizingly the CPU lived through that experience. I guess the heatsink protected it.)

uhg it was discusting.

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by The_Neon_Cowboy

easy he had a slot cover pulled....
plus this was a desktop not a tower so the upgrade slots are vertical

you didn't know that mice and rats can amazingly fit thew very tiny spaces!

I asume it's rats the nest was way to big for mice,
unless we talking about several generations

the pc was totally packed with misc / looked like a giant birds neast cramed in a case

You mean the PCI cover or the I/O panel? And mice/rats can go through anything that their head can fit through.