Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community

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I started assembling XT clones in the late 80s and I'm still building PCs today and I've never ever heard of a earthing cable, nor have I've ever seen any kind of a ground strap inside a computer.

 
Back in the day of the 386s you had a separate math co-processor made by AMD. I had a customer order and buy a Motherboard, CPU, Math-CO, and all the rest to build a computer back in those days. The Hard drive and floppy controller, the IO card, The Floppy and hard drive...

Anyway 2 days later the same customer orders just the same math-Co again and nothing else. I ask what gives and he is trying to keep from laughing his ass off. So he tells me the end-user decided to assemble the all the parts himself. This back before ZIFs they had LIF sockets I think they were call for "Low Insertion Force". Anyway my customer said when the guy came in he had a red diamond welt on his forehead. Apparently he seated the Math-co wrong and when he fired it up on his work bench the math-co shot off the motherboard and hit the guy in the forehead. My customer was laughing so hard he was gasping for air. I've never ever heard of such a thing ever happening before or since. I would have loved to see the guy make his walk of shame back into the computer shop with that red mark on his forehead, lol!
 
Worst mistake? Replaced a dead Rad Shack floppy drive with a generic floppy drive not knowing that Rad Shack wired the cable differently. Zapped the motherboard connector. Luckily, the guy had a maint. agreement so every thing got fixed free of charge.
 
Why nowadays almost all the motherboards connectors became simpler and standardized (you never imagine the pain that was to setup a ISA Sound Blaster Board configuring the IRQs and adresses using jumpers), and the f***ing front panel connector still is the same complete mess from the 90's, with different layouts and needing a lot of small connectors, is beyond me.
 
Why nowadays almost all the motherboards connectors became simpler and standardized (you never imagine the pain that was to setup a ISA Sound Blaster Board configuring the IRQs and adresses using jumpers), and the f***ing front panel connector still is the same complete mess from the 90's, with different layouts and needing a lot of small connectors, is beyond me.
 

The SoundBlaster was easy to setup: on those I have had, all you needed was silkscreened on the board. On my 486's multi-IO controller though, there were ~25 jumpers in a row with no instructions to be found anywhere. I don't remember how I managed to get a configuration sheet for the thing back then.

As for why front panel connectors are a mess, it is simple: there is no standard requiring that all ATX cases must have a PC speaker, reset button, power button, HDD activity LED, etc., so these are left to their own individual wires and connectors to let PC case designers choose which features to include and how. The next best thing you usually get is a labeled interposer connector to make the task more convenient.
 
I was trying to free up space on the work computer (an XT) and decided to delete the . and .. directories, because i could see no use for them.
 
"Back when I was in middle school, I sawed an AMD K6-2 CPU in half using a Dremel."

Were you high?!?!? Why would anyone think that was a good idea.
 

The fan blades werent all that sharp -- the fan motor was seriously overpowered for the size of the fan. I think the fan was around 1.5 - 2 inches in diameter, with a motor capable of spinning a 120mm fan with ease.
In retrospect it probably would have clipped the end off my pencil and done other damage to the system.
 
I made a series of horrible decisions back when I was 15 and building my first computer, sometime around 2003ish. I made the decision that I was going to try water-cooling. I had purchased one of the top of the line AMD CPUs and a overclocking friendly motherboard and a water-cooling kit. Not the AIO popular kind you see today, those didn't exist. This had a pump/controller that sat in the 5.25" bay. I get everything assembled properly and decide to give it a test run. I turn her on and was greeted with the lovely smell of burning electronics.

After disassembling the PC and reading the manual for the water cooler I realized I had missed one extremely important part in bold on one of the pages. "DO NOT POWER ON THE PC WITH THE CPU INSALLED UNTIL COOLING LIQUID HAS BEEN FULLY CYCLED THROUGH THE PUMP". So it turns out I never actually installed the cooling liquid into the system and immediately fried the CPU.

I chalked it up to a beginners mistake and bought another CPU. Installed it into the motherboard with every installed properly including the liquid cooling. It wouldn't boot. It would turn on but it wouldn't give me any video. I thought, okay, maybe I damaged the motherboard and bought a new motherboard. Installed it with the previously newly bought CPU, same thing. Boots with no video.

Finally giving it up I took it to a professional PC repair place which told me that I had fried the CPU and motherboard the first time. When I replaced the CPU, the fried motherboard toasted the new CPU. So when I bought the replacement motherboard, installing the newer fried CPU also fried the motherboard.

All together I had killed two motherboard and two processors. Eventually I bought both a new CPU and motherboard and got it running, but that was an extremely costly series of mistakes...
 


how'd you manage to fry $2K worth of hardware!? #checkallcomponentsbeforeinstallingsomethingnewandcostly
 
It’s not exactly a failure, but…

When I was 15/16 I started to take an interest in computer hardware and had been dumpster diving for components to familiarize myself without spending money on stuff I would likely trash. (I knew that I knew nothing) I had plucked a couple of Pentium 3 systems and two AMD Athlons before I started dissecting them. Eventually I pulled the Pentium 3 systems entirely apart to clean and rebuild into one better system than the three separate ones were on their own. The thing though… I was building it outside of a computer case, on carpet, with no regard for ESD… But to my joy at the time and utter astonishment these days, I didn’t kill anything! I even eventually got it to boot with everything lying open on carpet, no case to be found, installed windows and ran RollerCoaster Tycoon. Latter on I moved the hardware it into a computer case for storing and still have it on the rack of computer carcasses. I should see if it still boots.

edit for clarification...
the motherboard was laying bare on the carpet.
 

People build systems without a case all the time, it is called "breadboarding" and is not really a problem as long as you take minimal precaution to avoid zapping the components. Simply walking bare-feet or in cotton socks instead of slippers with synthetic soles or shoes can be enough to negate most of the risk.

Extra precautions don't hurt but handling components without knowing what you are doing won't systematically kill everything you touch.
 
I was building a PC for a buddy, and when I was done with it all I tried to power it on with the case power switch. Wouldn't turn on at all. Start wondering about the issue, whether its the PSU, an issue with the case wiring, etc. when all of a sudden my buddy accidentally hits the reset button. Turns out I had swapped the F.Panel inputs for power and reset accidentally. Whoops!
 
My biggest mistake is ... back then I had an Ahtlon XP 1600+ build. I swapped out the cooler, putting a tiny bit of thermal compound, and place a new one on it. The system turns off almost immediately after I turned it on. The die area on the chip turned green, indicating that I've fried my cpu.

The store I bought the cpu was kind enough to get this chip covered by the warranty (which they don't have to), I got a new one. Place it on the MB, put the compound one, and ... yes I fried another chip.

I went back to the store, one more time, and get another chip!!! This time I realized that when people say "put the compound on it as small as possible" does not mean you can just put it too small. I put an adequate amount of comppund, and my system is working again!

I've became very loyal to that store for more than a decade. Even now I pay them a visit a few times a year (they are located in the area that's not easy to go from my place).

And yes I learned that, those cpu are much more sensitive than the ones I use before (AMD 386, Pentium MMX 166, which can withstand more abuse than most cpu nowadays). And also putting too thin compound can fry the cpu easily. Putting a thin layer is good, too thin it fries, too thick it become hot. Not that it matters nowaday anyway
 

Modern CPUs don't fry that easily thanks to the IHS adding enough thermal mass directly attached to the CPU for thermal throttling and thermal shutdown to kick in before the CPU fries itself. IIRC, the Pentium 4 was the first desktop CPU with fast enough thermal throttling to keep running at reduced clock frequencies without heatsink.

Here's an old THG video about exactly that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxNUK3U73SI

Intel's CPUs (P3 and P4) survive, AMD's go up in smoke, along with their motherboards.
 

Heat damage to the socket and the pins is quite possible - back then, most sockets were still through-hole and not designed to handle surface-mount reflow temperatures in the neighborhood of 260C required by lead-free solder. The VRM may also have fried from excess current due to the CPU shorting out while failing. The excess current along the way can also mess up the socket's contacts: if the contact exceed a certain temperature, they lose their mechanical memory and lose their springiness. They can also tarnish/corrode and no longer be able to make reliable contact.
 
I used to do shift-del all the time to permanently delete files and bypass the recycle bin. When techno retards would call me for tech support I'd be on the phone for hours saying click here, and get a response like "left click or right click or double click" I'd respond "It's always left click unless I say right click" They'd still ask every time. A 5 minutes fix would last 2 hours. Techono retards!!!!! Anyways while bored and frustrated as hell on the phone I'd play with the mouse highlighting stuff in windows explorer. One time I accidentally hit shift-del as an automatic reflex while playing with the mouse and wiped out 2 GB of data on a storage drive.
 
Another stupid thing I did once was liquid cool my PC in the 90's before it was popular. I but a bowl of antifreeze in the freezer compartment of a bar fridge, put a landscape fountain pump inside and ran the hoses out the fridge to the water block. I cut a slot in the magnet on the door to pass the hoses out.

I knew condensation could occur but didn't insulate the CPU and didn't care. What happened was the pump is not rated to handle -18'C liquid. It died within a day. Good thing one day I looked at the hoses and noticed the green antifreeze didn't look like it was flowing through the hoses. I touched the waterblock and sizzled my finger pretty bad. I caught it just in time and no damage was done.

All in the name to get a dual socket Abit Celeron from 400Mhz to 500Mhz. Abit was the only company to have a dual socket Celeron board and the goal was to try and get 500Mhz out of it. I did run at idle around 2'C for a day or 2.
 
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