# Your worst PC breakdown



## funky3000 (Dec 25, 2013)

We all get computer breakdowns from time to time, some minor, some bad. What is your worst breakdown to date?

Mine would be the time when I was using my computer at night, and it shut off by itself. Confused, I just turned it back on, and put it to sleep when I went to go to bed. The next morning, I use it for maybe an hour, and it does it again. So I turn it yet again, and 10-20 minutes later, boom. Down again. And this time, the power button isn't working. So I call my dad, and we bring it down to Staples. The next day they come back that the power supply had shorted. We get a new one, and upgrade from 500 Watts to 650 Watts, just in case my upgrades (4GB to 8GB RAM, 4 extra fans, and 512MB to 2GB video card) were sucking it dry of power. So, it still isn't working. They check it again, the motherboard had shorted as well. So, we think we can't get another of the same because we can't find the ID. Then I find the ID behind a cord and search it on Amazon. Sure enough, my exact motherboard. They put it in and everything works just fine and dandy like the day I got it. With the power upgrade and the new motherboard, it was a total repair cost of ~$250. The computer itself was a Walmart special for $550. So essentially I paid for half of the computer all over again.

I know they can get much worse, but that was one expensive train wreck.


----------



## amckwolf (Dec 25, 2013)

One of my worst was on my first laptop. I'd screwed the thing up so bad it was giving me a BSOD once a day. It was pretty bad.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 26, 2013)

Worst I've had was when one night back in 2009, my power supply fan decided to die, taking with it the power supply itself and my motherboard. Thankfully, ASUS RMA'd the motherboard, and I ended up getting it replaced for free. But the whole ordeal left me without a PC for months.


----------



## Inpw (Dec 26, 2013)

2010. Was running 2 hard drives on raid 0 and you can only guess what happened next. Untill today I don't know why I spanned the disks like that but I learned my lesson in redundancy.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 26, 2013)

Accretion said:


> 2010. Was running 2 hard drives on raid 0 and you can only guess what happened next. Untill today I don't know why I spanned the disks like that but I learned my lesson in redundancy.



I have that done for my Steam + games + downloads storage. Nothing permanent on there to lose if the array dies. If you're going RAID, use RAID 1, 5, 10 or 01 and never 0 unless you're putting non-critical data on there.


----------



## WolfsFang (Dec 27, 2013)

I was changing some overclock settings in my bios when by mistake i hit the overclock genie (my motherboard will overclock my cpu by itself only by alittle). It did its thing and once it boots to the desktop i start getting BSOD. Went back into my bios and saw that all my custom settings were changed, I started freaking out since these settings were all trial and error and hours of tuning. Forgot that i saved my settings so i just flashed back to my old settings and my heart attack went away.


----------



## Volkodav (Dec 28, 2013)

My desktop just failed one day but I can't remember why. My worst one with my laptop was Windows Recovery Virus  It gave me a panic attack.


----------



## Konotashi (Dec 28, 2013)

I remember I was drawing an anthro Mightyena girl. 

I was getting frustrated because it was lagging hardcore. Suddenly, it froze entirely. I was furious, because I hadn't saved in at least two hours. Reluctantly, I turned it off. 
Turned it on again and got a screen saying it couldn't boot up past the "Toshiba" screen. 
I ordered recovery discs for the stupid thing after trying a bunch of other crap to no avail. 
It couldn't even read the recovery discs. So at that point, I knew my laptop was fucked. 

Will also mention that about a year or so before that, it was stepped on by my ex and the screen cracked. Eventually pixels in the screen died until the entire screen was black and I had to use an external monitor. 
So I needed a new laptop anyway....


----------



## Lobar (Dec 28, 2013)

PSU failed and took the mobo with it.  Thankfully it was an old Gateway piece of shit, and not a decent box I'd built myself.


----------



## Sarcastic Coffeecup (Dec 28, 2013)

None of my parts have failed, or I think not.
My worst was when I lost the windows explorer. It just stopped working, and as a result I could not open any window, folder, file. I could do practically nothing. 
Every time after rebooting it would give me a minute window of opportunity to work normally. I reverted it to its previous state but still no joy.
Had to reinstall windows from the disk again.
After this incident my pc won't keep turned off. It always starts itself, which means if I want to turn it off, I need to flick the PSU switch in the back.
At least this has an ecological benefit, I save the standby power.


----------



## Art Vulpine (Dec 28, 2013)

Mine was when, of all things, the power button somehow didn't work. It took two weeks to get it shipped back to the company, fixed, and returned. Since then it's been working very well so I call it a fluke.


----------



## Inpw (Dec 28, 2013)

Runefox said:


> I have that done for my Steam + games + downloads storage. Nothing permanent on there to lose if the array dies. If you're going RAID, use RAID 1, 5, 10 or 01 and never 0 unless you're putting non-critical data on there.



Yes. Raid 1 is pretty redundant for normal desktop setups but 2 2TB HDD's will only give 2TB worth of storage. It kinda depends on what you want to do, how important the stuff is and how frequently you backup. Raid 0 offers boosted hdd performance but literally cuts the redundancy of what you would have had with one drive in half. It's not an option unless like you said steam games and stuff, load times will be faster reading from the disks and heck if one fails or something you just download it again.

But yeah, I learned the hard way.


----------



## Kalmor (Dec 28, 2013)

While changing my CPU I was a dumbass and accidentally didn't secure one of the CPU cooler's pin things to the motherboard (resulting in the heatsink not being in full contact with the chip). I wondered why it kept freezing while trying to re-install windows....


----------



## CaptainCool (Dec 28, 2013)

I got my first PC when I was 14 or 15. I don't quite remember anymore.
But what I do remember is browsing a shitload of porn sites without having antivirus software :B Within a week that thing was so full with nasty malware I couldn't even move the mouse anymore and had to reformate XD
That's about it though. I have yet to experience an anctual hardware failure.


----------



## Pantheros (Dec 28, 2013)

when i put in a wireless device backwards in the completely wrong plug and cooked the whole box like a chicken on a grill.
was a shity box anyways....


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 28, 2013)

Cat stepped on the red toggle switch on the power bar under my desk.  That somehow cooked out the 512MB or DDR1 memory in the motherboard.

Not really the 'worst' thing that could have happened, but sorta amazing considering that she managed to take out the RAM just by hitting the power switch on a power bar.


----------



## Zeitzbach (Dec 28, 2013)

I remember when I was 13 something, my PC had a very annoying power supply problem. 

And long story short, game, game, pc broke down at a very impotant moment, happened 5x, got pissed, KICK OF FURY. So instead of having to just repair the power supply, I ended up having to buy a whole new pc and a new case because the old one was smashed.


----------



## JerryFoxcoon (Dec 28, 2013)

Hardware-wise, the worst I've seen is a HDD failure on the POS Packard Bell computer I had in 2000-2006. Happened in 2003 on a Seagate, since then I've exclusively been using WD without a single fail. But that's another topic LOL.

Software-wise, being a former Win98 user, I've experienced the joys of the blue screen of death, especially with games, and pretty much every software that wasn't part of Windows. Each BSOD was a suspense.. Will it recover? Or freeze entirely? I wouldn't go back to that era... EVER.

But the worst I've had is a worm or virus or whatever the heck is was. It slowed my computer down and eventually entirely froze up. I couldn't do anything but kill the power. In fact the virus was destroying the drivers of everything. By shutting the power off I saved the USB controller! So I could save my data. But the moment the virus got in... it wasn't pretty.

There are a couple more, involving crap like LimeWire or myWebSearch...


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 28, 2013)

Oh wait.  I forgot my worst one.

I was overclocking an AMD A8-3870K, instead of doing it manually through the BIOS I decided to use the Gigabyte tool to do it that was 'safe'.  Clicked one thing, machine rebooted, it cooked out the whole CPU in that moment.  It was dead that fast and I'd only owned it a few hours.

...Returned it to the store for a direct exchange, claiming it arrived DOA. >_>;


----------



## SiLJinned (Dec 28, 2013)

Turning off the computer's mains too soon by accident when it was shutting down. I couldn't turn it on at all after that. It only lasted for a few months.


----------



## Echoshock (Dec 28, 2013)

I decided to check the reduced performance and the increased noise coming from the coolant pump. On opening the case I could see the coolant in the CPU waterblock was boiling violently O.O I had accidentally dislodged a quick disconnect pipe to the radiator, which had stopped the circulation of coolant.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 28, 2013)

Echoshock said:


> I decided to check the reduced performance and the increased noise coming from the coolant pump. On opening the case I could see the coolant in the CPU waterblock was boiling violently O.O I had accidentally dislodged a quick disconnect pipe to the radiator, which had stopped the circulation of coolant.



That... Isn't possible.   The highest thermal junction max on commercial CPUs is 105'C, and many come in lower than that.  Once the CPU reaches 105 (Or whatever it's TJMax is) it'll throttle down to cool down.  That is BARELY above the boiling point.  Add in the volume of water in the cooler, and the energy would dissipate from the water before getting hot enough to boil.  And yeah, a great any CPUs will throttle before they reach 100'C so they couldn't boil anything.


----------



## Kitsune Cross (Dec 28, 2013)

Something in my friend's new pc exploted while playing dota, there was a bang and lights


----------



## Runefox (Dec 28, 2013)

Kitsune Cross said:


> Something in my friend's new pc exploted while playing dota, there was a bang and lights



That's always fun. We had that happen at my school back in the day. One time, a coworker at my old job was putting together a computer with a "Solar Energy" branded motherboard. Hadn't even turned it on yet, just plugged it in. BANG. Motherboard popped like three caps.


----------



## Gnarl (Dec 28, 2013)

The weirdest was a while back, when the 486 was a new thing. had a laptop, bulky thing, and the power unit for the battery charger (internal) went south. 
The screen started in the middle and like an explosion turned all funny colors in an arc going outwards in all directions. the key board where the little heat exchanger thing was just sort of caved in as the whole thing melted into itself and then there was a loud bang and smoke came out! total failure took maybe 8 to 10 seconds. 
Since the power button was right where the plastic had melted for the keyboard there was nothing to do but watch. It was in a docking station and I had no idea where the latches were.


----------



## Lone Wolf 98 (Dec 28, 2013)

My apple computers kept having blue error screens and making stupid noises and them the mother board died :"""( OH WELL


----------



## kayfox (Dec 29, 2013)

I had a 4TB raid kick a good drive out for a timeout when I was logging in to kick a failing drive out.  This caused the array to fail.  Good job 3ware.


----------



## Rouge Artist (Dec 29, 2013)

The only hardware failure that I've experienced was with my Lenovo laptop. A few months after I got it it would slow up to the point of freezing if I left it alone for too long. I would have to hard reboot it whenever this would happen, but every time I did this I would hear a click. six months later I'm in the middle of some midterm papers and it just powers off. turning it back on it sends me to a windows files scan prompt and after freaking out for about an hour or so it tells me it might be better to recover the system to a earlier state and that it might take about eight hours. I come back to it the next night and it's still scanning for files, frozen. lets just say that after it BSOD'd on me about a dozen times I kind of figured that the HD failed on me so I took it down to the campus IT center to see what they could do. I told them about the clicking noise and they told me that was a sign of a soon to fail HD... this just happened a week after my warranty expired. but since I was in the graphic design program at my college I took the opportunity to upgrade to a segate fusion drive that had a higher rpm. a month later my laptop was running better than ever. They where able to get everything off of my old hard drive and loaded everything back on.  


The only other problem that I've had was with Skype 6.1. every time I would turn my laptop on, it would automatically sign me in and lock windows explorer out for me. what windows i had open still worked, but anything else was frozen. stayed up for about three days strait trying to figure out why windows.exe would keep freezing up on me just to find out it was Skype. After I figured that out I disabled updates for skype and changed the settings until I found an earlier version of skype. but my system did end up getting cleaned out because of it because I thought that it was some sort of malware.


----------



## Duality Jack (Dec 29, 2013)

I overclocked mine, did calibrations in the winter, (like a dumbass) so when it got hot as fuck it burned out, Took the CPU and the graphics card with it, it was an all out smokeout, had to unplug the thing just to stop the smoldering. Was years ago. New rig now, with much more cooling.


----------



## CaptainCool (Dec 29, 2013)

My soundcard wasn't working this morning... I almost shat myself, that thing is the most expensive thing in my PC XD


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 29, 2013)

CaptainCool said:


> My soundcard wasn't working this morning... I almost shat myself, that thing is the most expensive thing in my PC XD



People actually still buy discrete audio cards???


----------



## CaptainCool (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> People actually still buy discrete audio cards???



I wanted something a little more decent when I put together my PC 3 years ago and got a Soundblaster Titanium.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> People actually still buy discrete audio cards???



If you did any recording work or had high end headphones, you would, too.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 29, 2013)

Runefox said:


> If you did any recording work.



If you do real recording work, you use dedicated breakout hardware instead of sound cards.


----------



## CaptainCool (Dec 29, 2013)

Runefox said:


> If you did any recording work or had high end headphones, you would, too.



I do have some nice Sony headphones but nothing too amazing. Onboard sound is decent enough these days but I had some extra cash lying around so I wanted to treat myself to something a little better  I don't even remember how much I paid for it.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> If you do real recording work, you use dedicated breakout hardware instead of sound cards.


If you're in a studio.


----------



## Echoshock (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> That... Isn't possible.   The highest thermal junction max on commercial CPUs is 105'C, and many come in lower than that.  Once the CPU reaches 105 (Or whatever it's TJMax is) it'll throttle down to cool down.  That is BARELY above the boiling point.  Add in the volume of water in the cooler, and the energy would dissipate from the water before getting hot enough to boil.  And yeah, a great any CPUs will throttle before they reach 100'C so they couldn't boil anything.



Oh yes it was, the pipes had become floppy from the heat. the water block was only half full of coolant, It was boiling hard. CPU was an AMD AM2 something. It would have boiled dry if the system wasn't sealed. I don't think AMDs worry about overheating like Intels.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 29, 2013)

Echoshock said:


> I don't think AMDs worry about overheating like Intels.



Actually, of that era, AMD CPUs had TJMax's of 90'C at most. It'd throttle before it even reached the boiling point.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 29, 2013)

Ahh, this whole thing reminds me of

[video=youtube;y39D4529FM4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39D4529FM4[/video]


----------



## Echoshock (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> Actually, of that era, AMD CPUs had TJMax's of 90'C at most. It'd throttle before it even reached the boiling point.



I'm going to have to dig the MB out of the loft set it up and show you aren't I. There is a fault with the MB I'm sure, but hopefully I can get it going well enough for a video.


----------



## Matt Conner (Dec 29, 2013)

I haven't had anything too bad luckily. I think the worst breakdown was my newest desktop, what had been making this hideous grinding noise on startup (I assumed it was the fan, since it was pretty choked with dust), I never got around to looking into it, and then one day it just started freezing within five minutes of startup, completely and utterly so that all I could do was kill the power and try to turn it back on. It always starts up OK, but never stays that way for more than half an hour.

I had a buddy who actually had his computer burst into flames, but only because he didn't ground it when he was fucking around with the insides


----------



## Inpw (Dec 29, 2013)

Runefox said:


> If you're in a studio.



Or if you just love proper audio quality and the ability to record on condenser mics. Focusrite has some nice 2 channel interfaces for just this reason.

I don't think I've used my home pc's internal sound card for 5 years.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 29, 2013)

Accretion said:


> Or if you just love proper audio quality and the ability to record on condenser mics. Focusrite has some nice 2 channel interfaces for just this reason.


This is what I've used in the field.  Sorta older, but works.
http://www.sounddevices.com/products/744t/

As you can see here, I'm highly professional while operating it: https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1424579_10152073110344292_688967563_n.jpg


----------



## Inpw (Dec 29, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> This is what I've used in the field.  Sorta older, but works.
> http://www.sounddevices.com/products/744t/
> 
> As you can see here, I'm highly professional while operating it: https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1424579_10152073110344292_688967563_n.jpg



Hehe tired or serious?

here's me, tired and serious: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q204/dj-djphoto/GOPR9916_zpscf1f8543.jpg
On the far side a allen and heath xone 4D 20 channel mixer (not for recording). Where the blue cables plug in is a focusrite 8 channel audio interface on top of a added 8 channels known as the octopri. The thing on top on the left is just a headphone amp.

Anywho on topic. This is what happens when a power surge decide's to kill my sound card: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/...10151713360171388_282440175_o_zpsa7f10df3.jpg


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 29, 2013)

Accretion said:


> Hehe tired or serious?



Tired and cold.   Filming in a Toronto sound stage in December.  Obviously you can't have the heating system turned on in the glorified warehouse because it'll make all sorts of noise from the fans to metal expanding due to temperature change, that you'd pick it up on the mics.

Also, fun fact, the district where Toronto's east end sound stages mostly are, lie under the glide slope of a commercial airport. >_<


----------



## UnburntDaenerys (Dec 30, 2013)

Had a laptop hard drive die and lost 7 pages of a 10 page paper and that was due in 6 hours.  It seemed like the worst thing ever at the time.



AshleyAshes said:


> Cat stepped on the red toggle switch on the power bar under my desk.  That somehow cooked out the 512MB or DDR1 memory in the motherboard.
> 
> Not really the 'worst' thing that could have happened, but sorta amazing considering that she managed to take out the RAM just by hitting the power switch on a power bar.



A friend of mine had a cat puke on his motherboard, fried the whole thing.


----------



## Duality Jack (Dec 30, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> People actually still buy discrete audio cards???


I do. But I need many ports for audio equipment and soundboards as I dabble with audio tech. Some for amps, some for keyboards etc, allot of my gear is old, but very reliable and warm sounding. 

But UNLESS you do recording/mixing/other audio work, who knows why one would do as such.


----------



## Tailmon1 (Dec 30, 2013)

Having worked at Dell in the referb area the nuked computers arrived on skids for the engineers to check and then we handled them or tossed them into the dumpster. Found them burned to ashes from internal fires and others half melted and the best one was the perfect looking one that said "Making strange noises" LOL! Found mice inside it!


----------



## Dreaming (Dec 30, 2013)

My old HP was really trippy, there was something wrong with the power supply. Like, it refused to charge up. Seriously, it was plugged in and everything, but it refused to accept the mains supply. It was such a pain in the fucking ass, I've never figured out if that was a software or hardware failure 

If we shouted at it loud enough, it would eventually give in and switch the mains supply... so that thing was pretty much anchored to the socket


----------



## ArielMT (Dec 30, 2013)

Oh, the tales I have.

A customer brought in an early-2000s Dell desktop with a dead power supply.  It looked like a standard ATX form factor PSU fitting into a Dell special BTX form factor motherboard, but fortunately I researched the model before replacing the PSU.  It turns out Dell did a bit of fireworks-worthy vendor lock-in: Despite having perfectly compatible connectors, Dell mobos and PSUs of that era had wiring so radically off standard that replacing either one with off-brand units would fry the motherboard as soon as the PSU was plugged in.  But the service tale for that was worse than the damage.  TLDR: Four weeks and two reorders to replace one PSU.

Bestec PSUs were known for taking out motherboards with alarming frequency when they failed, and I got one in an OEM special before learning that.  An expensive lesson, that one was.

And then there was the brand new Dell pizza box, shiny and dust-free and so new it was still in warranty, that started shutting down after a few minutes of use.  To preserve the warranty, all I did was diagnose whether it was hardware or software.  It was hardware, and when I gave it back to its unfortunate owner, something rattled.  We removed the cover, and it was the northbridge heat sink, completely free of the northbridge chip.

And then in just the last week, I won the failed hard drive lottery.  Not a single PC came to me with a problem that didn't involve total hard drive failure completing in the shop.  One of them was a SanDisk SSD barely 18 months old, failing so quickly that it nearly beat my workstation's IBM Deathstar a few years ago.

But the worst PC breakdowns I ever had were PEBKACs.

One brought a PC to me that wouldn't turn on.  Diagnosing down to the accessible CPU, I removed it and discovered that one of its pins had bent flat against the die and two more were completely missing, broken off.  The customer had removed the heat sink and somehow lifted the CPU out without moving the ZIF socket lever.

Another PC's owner had tried to remove the heat sink by lifting straight up away from the motherboard with all his might, instead of gently shearing the thermal compound to unglue it from the CPU die.  The CPU's pins and a few of the socket's motherboard connections gave before the thermal compound did, and he wanted me to reattach them.  I offered to, but I warned him that my labor alone would exceed the price of two computers' worth of replacement parts and came with zero guarantee of working.


----------



## Runefox (Dec 30, 2013)

Oh man, Ariel, that stuff reminds me of all the wonderful things that I used to see...

First was a guy who had bought an expensive ($300) motherboard and built the PC himself, then brought it in to us because it wasn't working. Turns out, he'd screwed the board into the case with out any standoffs, to the point where the board was flexed violently at the back panel. Whole thing was fried.

Another time, a guy I used to know in high school dropped by and asked us to assemble his PC for him. He'd already done some of the work (motherboard, CPU and RAM were installed) so I figured it would be pretty quick and easy. When I went to put it together, however, I noticed several things...


The top of each RAM module was glistening at me. They were pins. The RAM was installed upside down. Every module.
The board was flexed rather violently at the far end. Upon further inspection, they had doubled up the standoffs there.
When these problems were fixed and everything was assembled, I powered on the PC; Nothing. Thing was dead.
I removed the CPU heat sink and noticed that the (LGA-775) CPU latch was tight. With some effort, I opened the latch and it pinged open with so much force that the CPU flew at me. Turning it over, the protective plastic backing was still on the CPU.
*Miraculously*, the thing actually worked after all that; Despite mashing the motherboard's LGA, none of the pins had been damaged

And that's nothing compared to the huge volumes of eMachines computers from the 2006-2007 era that came in, each with identical failures of motherboard and power supply, both of which were proprietary and required essentially a whole new machine to fix (case was proprietary, so replacing the mobo + PSU alone was out of the question too; Often no parts were available because these machines used older RAM and CPU types (usually socket A, which by then was antiquated by socket 754 and 939)).


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 30, 2013)

Wait... Was the RAM installed backwards or upsidedown?  Like... Against the keying... Or were the pins facing upward? :O


----------



## Runefox (Dec 30, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> Wait... Was the RAM installed backwards or upsidedown?  Like... Against the keying... Or were the pins facing upward? :O



Pins up.


----------



## ArielMT (Dec 30, 2013)

How could I forget the story of ADP?  Not the company.  Before the US Navy established the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), each command had its own IT department called Automated Data Processing, or ADP.

At my command in San Diego, ADP was completing a move out of a cramped cinder-block office into a more spacious cube farm one floor up.  I wasn't there for IT work, my assigned specialty being radio system field maintenance as an ET, but my experience in PC repair was known.  One day, late in the move, they came to me asking if I could find out what was wrong with their lieutenant's PC.  The baby tower wouldn't boot up, stopping instead at the famous "Keyboard error or not present, press [F1] to continue" message.  But there was a keyboard there, and F1 didn't do anything.  However, it was a Sun type 5 keyboard designed for SPARCstations, with a 9-pin mini-DIN connector, and they plugged it in to a PS/2 jack, with a 6-pin keyed mini-DIN connector.  Two of the keyboard's pins were crushed, pushed all the way through the connector's back and into the housing, so the keyboard was a goner.  But the entire department didn't notice that the reason the PC wouldn't boot was because it didn't have a PC-compatible keyboard.


----------



## CaptainCool (Dec 30, 2013)

Runefox said:


> Pins up.





ArielMT said:


> How could I forget the story of ADP?  Not the company.  Before the US Navy established the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), each command had its own IT department called Automated Data Processing, or ADP.
> 
> At my command in San Diego, ADP was completing a move out of a cramped cinder-block office into a more spacious cube farm one floor up.  I wasn't there for IT work, my assigned specialty being radio system field maintenance as an ET, but my experience in PC repair was known.  One day, late in the move, they came to me asking if I could find out what was wrong with their lieutenant's PC.  The baby tower wouldn't boot up, stopping instead at the famous "Keyboard error or not present, press [F1] to continue" message.  But there was a keyboard there, and F1 didn't do anything.  However, it was a Sun type 5 keyboard designed for SPARCstations, with a 9-pin mini-DIN connector, and they plugged it in to a PS/2 jack, with a 6-pin keyed mini-DIN connector.  Two of the keyboard's pins were crushed, pushed all the way through the connector's back and into the housing, so the keyboard was a goner.  But the entire department didn't notice that the reason the PC wouldn't boot was because it didn't have a PC-compatible keyboard.



Clearly these people never played with Legos before. Because putting together a PC is pretty much not different from playing with Legos.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Dec 30, 2013)

CaptainCool said:


> Clearly these people never played with Legos before. Because putting together a PC is pretty much not different from playing with Legos.









Oh, and BTW, have you SEEN the insane shit that goes into making modern lego sets?  That stuff is bonkers.  It makes PCs look EASY.  Lego didn't have SNOT or SNIR techniques when I was a kid.  Now whole sets use them!  Anyone who says 'Oh, it's as easy as Lego' hasn't looked at Lego in a long time!


----------



## Saga (Dec 30, 2013)

Had a PC years ago, and by years, I mean it had a pentium 2 cpu. I ended up corrupting System 32, and the worst part was that I didnt know what I did to cause it. I literally started it up and windows was gone.


----------



## Draconas (Jan 3, 2014)

Had some cleaning software on my old laptop that ran windows XP, ran it and the registery was nuked, it took several mp3 players to store my important shit after I had ubuntu running off a disc, why mp3 players? flashdrives were voodoo in our house at the time, but a magical music player with flash storage? a-okay.

Also did something stupid on the family desktop (im cringing right now at the thought of that), I messed with power settings and found some magical UPS settings, whatever I did in there never made the thing get passed windows startup, extra points for using system restore and it DELETED EVERY DAMN THING.


----------



## funky3000 (Jan 5, 2014)

AshleyAshes said:


> People actually still buy discrete audio cards???


I kinda had to with my current system. For some unknown reason, the on-board system, which was already pretty crappy and sensitive, just stopped working. Plug something in, it wouldn't even detect it, or if it did, it wouldn't play any audio. Mic setups didn't work, I could only hear myself, blah blah. Got a sound card, wired it up more cleanly than just calling it good with a bad setup, tweaked settings on all my programs, and now I have a flawless auto system. Everything defaults to my headset mic, except Skype, which uses the webcam for a mic if I turn the speakers on or have multiple people in my room. My TV is picked up as a display and as an audio device, so I use a splitter from the TV to a nice speaker system and to my headset. The perfect system is definitely better than hoping something works and finding out it fails miserably.


----------



## SixtyfourTehLeet (Jan 6, 2014)

Once upon a time, I had a Hackintosh. It ran Lion.

It was so incredibly unstable, I could close the thing's frickin' lid, just to find it kernel panicked when I open it. Weird green and black flickering artifacts sometimes appeared all over the screen in random places at random times. I had to replace half the kexts (drivers) just to boot the thing, and as you can see it was complete and utter crap. 

But then one day, after installing more kexts...

It decided to kernel panic before it completed its boot. On every boot. So I had to get rid of poor ol' OS X Lion from my PC, and restore it back to Linux. 

Though as of now, my PC runs OS X Mountain Lion on an SSD with most everything working like a charm.


----------



## JerryFoxcoon (Jan 6, 2014)

Runefox said:


> Pins up.



How is it possible?  They shouldn't even lock in place upside down, nor should they backwards.

And I thought RAM modules were idiot-proof... xD


----------



## Cutiecat (Jan 6, 2014)

Mine was when my smart-ass friend decided to switch around a jumper on my motherboard back when I was at college. After 3 hours of pulling everything out, putting each card, hdd etc in one by one, cursing, swearing he finally put me out of my misery and owned up. Boy was I pissed at the time


----------



## ArielMT (Jan 6, 2014)

JerryFoxcoon said:


> How is it possible?  They shouldn't even lock in place upside down, nor should they backwards.
> 
> And I thought RAM modules were idiot-proof... xD



The first rule of computer tech support is that nothing is absolutely idiot-proof.


----------



## draco806 (Jan 12, 2014)

My wroset one is my current issue my computer wont work cant find the source so i need to buy all new parts


----------



## Antronach (Jan 12, 2014)

The display driver on my last laptop crapped out. It sounds like it starts up and all, but I can't even connect it to my tv. So technically it's fine, you just can't see anything. :l


----------



## Muffinz the Fox (Jan 13, 2014)

We'll a rubber fan wire was glued to a metal heat sink, and unfortunately that heat sink got hot causing the fan wire to melt and the graphics card to catch on fire. 

Fire is bad for computers.  Luckily nothing but the graphics card was damaged.  (Magic)


----------



## Spazzyabstract (Feb 12, 2014)

well my friend had a really bad one He was going cheap on the case and his cardboard box computer after a year and a half of working flawlessly caught fire XD the only thing i can think of that is even close to that bad is when I put my sta raid into a raid 5 config and than pulled out the hard drive and turned it on XD lost everything stupidity at its best XD


----------

