Craziest CPU problem you've run across?

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Craigmandu

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Feb 14, 2006
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This happened to me about 2 or 3 months ago and I thought I'd share.

A friend of my son was complaining that he couldn't play "World of Warcraft" on his computer, it was a pentium III 1.2Ghz machine (which isn't great but should at least run the game) so we got to troubleshooting.

His complaint was lockups and reboots. We first replaced his junk radeon 9000 series video card with a newer (not real expensive, cause he's a teenager with NO money) Gforce 6600 (non GT).

It looked much better but would still lockup for no reason at odd times. So after some time back and forth with it I ended up having him drop it off at my house for a weekend long troubleshooting session.

I took everything but the harddrive, video card, mboard, cpu, ram NIC card out of the machine and played around with it and "World of Warcraft" and after a while (couple of hrs) it started to randomly lockup or completely reboot. I changed out the memory with some that I had already to make sure he didn't have some freaky ram problem. Nothing, same problem.

I then went to dinner. Came back and tried it again and it was working fine. So I closed up the case, left it on for a bit and whamo spontaneous reboots. Ok, now I figured we got some kind of overheating problem here.

So to my amazement, when I pulled the CPU fan off the processor what I discovered what the PLASTIC film that fan makers put on some fans so that the thermal paste doesn't get all smeared and rubbed off was STILL ON THE FAN. I pulled it off, machine has never had a single issue since.

That's about the worst CPU install issue I think I've run across.
 
LOL, I've heard of that happening so many times too man.

I think one of the craziest things that ever happened was a friend of mine, who is also a computer enthusiast could not figure out for the life of him what was wrong with a new build. He took it apart three or four times and just could not figure out what was wrong. I had asked him to bring the machine over so we could troubleshoot together.

After spending about an hour troubleshooting, I figured out what it was but I didn't tell him. I asked him to go grab me a beer and he went to the fridge, I got the machine running. What was wrong you ask? The power supply voltage switch was set for 220V instead of 120. I slid it to the correct setting and the machine fired right up. I told him when he came back into the room what it was and he about fainted.
 
thats nothin luminaris with my current build(athlon xp 3200)started to reboot for no reason i reinstalled windows flashed the bios and same problem you know what was wrong? the reset button was stuck!
 
I'll take the idiot award

im pretty good at PC's. ya know. build them

i spent about 2 hours trying to figure out why the computer wasnt even powering up.

it wasnt plugged in

i cried
 
Not exactly a CPU problem, but it’s a crazy one. I would let you guys guess, but its probably impossible without being there. I figured it out after two days – I was charging $60 an hour at that time.

It was a Novell server, after setting it up within an hour all the workstations would crash. New users could not log in. When I went to the server everything was gone. OS, data, ALL GONE!

No, no one erased it. I sat watching server #2 and watched each folder just disappear as people worked on them. Nothing in the network trash, nada, they were just gone. Server #3, again, they were gone. I made all sorts of adjustments, changed security rights, and only let two people use the server. Server #4 crashed hard drives gone.

Server #5 I got an idea. And did searches for the missing folders as they disappeared. Well, they had jumped into other folders. After watching and doing searches each folder would jump into another fold until the directory file tree looked like a bamboo pole with all the folders stacked 4000+ deep!!! Then, the very last folder, the one in root, disappeared taking all the other folders away with it.

Anyone guess what the problem was??? No? It was a medical office, they used MRI’s and other big equipment… The building had no true grounds! The problem was due to very large magnetic fields! I moved the server to a back office, used shielded network wire, charged 2,800 for two days of work and they were happy because they had been down for four weeks and unable to make insurance claims and the doctors were paying staff out of pocket.
 
Not a CPU problem,
had an old 386DX40 motherboard and CPU. One of the traces was cracked. If I tightened up the case too much the screen went green with a message in purple "Thats not Right".
I laught my head off when it happened.
 
holy crap i just remembered a dell fixed a while ago my freinds called the tech to fix it said it was bad ram replaced it took very long(took 2 weeks!) came installed and away he went turned on the pc wouldnt boot they called me over guess what the tech forgot to put the atx plug back in!(took me 20 minutes to figure it out cause i did'nt open the case first lol)
 
I had an interesting one happen a while back too.

I was building a PC for a guys business, and since it was 3x the power of my current system, I jsut HAD to take it home to "test"

Friend came over and we spent the nite 'testing' it doing school work and then the obligitory LAN games. Then suddenly the new PC rebooted and mine locked up.
rebooted both again, and checked for problems. seemed ok. so we resumed our game. The new PC was very very slow when running games.
Eventually I took the PC back to the place I bought it for diagnostics.

The problem?

a power surge had fried the math coprocessor (this was a 486DX system).
it floored me that the thing still worked. My own PC ran fine for the remainder of college.
 
I built a computer the other day for my friend, and well to sum it up, I slap all the parts in there connected everything up, plugged it in *cough*mpasternak*cough* and pushed the power button and... nothing happened. Turns out I had the power switch connect upside down hehe (had the + & - backwards)

Was really funny when it didnt boot up, but friend didnt think it was so funny... :lol:
 
My freakiest experience was with Opteron 175 when I overclocked it at 4.5 GHz. All Intel fanboys freaked out back then. Well my Opty didn't like it that much and wanted to burn down the house. I lit him a cigarette we laughed and we are good buddies since then.

,,
 
On my first copmuter build it was around 2 am and my computer's power switch wouldn't do anything. I needed to use the switch on the back of the power supply, and that only worked after a few minutes of the computer being off. I later realized that I actually plugged the power switch connectors into the USB pins on the motherboard. After that everything worked fine.
 
Ok here is one problem that i havent been able to solve...have thrown the pc in the thrash...but worth telling u all...

I had a friends machine he brought to my shop for maintainance...it was a tower P3 800MHz...

After formatting and installing windows... (the machine lying flat) i than raised the tower back in standing position...the computer restarted...

i left it standing...and had frequent restarts .... as soon as i put it back in lying position.. it would work fine...

I replace PSU, RAM, Processor, removed all cards and changed the HD...

Still no luck...eventually my friend ended up buying a new P4 and i enjoyed thrashing the old one....
 
Just so you know, those guys are not fanboys. They made videos of both AMD and Intel chips blowing up.
The Amd chip was a duron (800?) that was OCed to 3ghz, suposedly.
You may have noticed that the cherry bomb they used in the Intel system had a rather long wick.
 
I guess.. if you wanna know my real craziest. not really stupid

but my first AMD Athlon i ever got. a 1400mhz (Pre XP). it was running about 50 - 60c with the box cooler. i went to the comp store to buy an aftermarket cooler.

got home and the fan was makin weird noise. figured time to replace it NOW. shut off the computer and reached in to unconnect the power for the fan, and the back of my finger brushed aginst the cooler....

2nd degree burns to the back of my finger. my hand flew out of the case and i jumped back. pulling the cooler off the CPU and then somehow knocking the power back on.... Frying the CPU

so now. I have a dead AThlon CPU. 2nd degree burns on my finger and a bruised ass

i wasnt happy
 
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