QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
I used to work for the silly black and orange people. One day we had a customer try to return an BFG 6800 GT OC (at the time the fastest card the big blue and yellow store sold)... he had an AGP motherboard, but it was PCI-e... well since it didn't fit his AGP slot, he had taken tin snips, cut off a bit of the wafer with the PCI-e pins, and jammed it in his AGP slot... after we showed the card to everyone behind the counter, and got our good laughs, we told him there was no way he could return it and he was out his $400 bucks, he couldn't understand how tin snips violated our return policy and made a scene...
 
When I first got a Gigabyte GA-965-DQ6, which I still run, I paired it with a Tuniq Tower 120. Unfortunately Gigabyte put some ridiculous piece of copper coated aluminum to act as a PCB-sink right under the CPU socket, and it connected to the Northbridge. Figuring the northbridge / MCH was glued to the heatpipe, I removed this PCB-sink. After a little while, I kept getting memory errors and blue screens, other lockups.

Figured it was shitty RAM, after all it failed memory tests. So I replaced the RAM, which in early 2007 was still spendy. No luck... so I RMA'd the board after putting the PCB-sink back on (and never testing it like this). When I went to remove the Tuniq backplate I scratched the crap out of the traces going to the CPU, killing the board. Luckily the PCB-sink covered this up!

To finish the story, I figured out it was the northbridge overheating before the RMA arrived. So I knew I had to simply cut off the side preventing the backplate from fitting with a hacksaw, and allow the two screws holding the northbridge heatsink in place to still function. Worked out well. Didn't have a need for 4GB at the time, so I built an HTPC with the old but good RAM.
 
[citation][nom]haze4peace[/nom]I've had one of the ICs on a hard drive light up in flames. It was really bright too. Nothing smells worse than a burnt computer part.[/citation]
I will say burnt ballasts on florescent lighting smell pretty bad i change out many of them at work. Magnetics worse than electronic ones.
 
I had an accident in my car: It dropped into a river, and my laptop was inside it. It was inmersed for about 1 hour. The best part is that it finally worked... I had only to replace the battery. It was a HP laptop!
PD: Please Excuse my bad grammar, I dont speak english 😛
 
Well pretty boring stuff really. Had a hard drive fail, and a motherboard that just gave up the ghost one day.
Worst thing by far was losing my password and being locked out of my computer. I didn't know of a workaround at that time, ended up putting in another bootable drive and doing a backup, reinstall.

I have however had lots of mishaps while modding. I tried to rewire a fan with a cannabalized thermaltake controller. Nice smoke and burning smell, that I somehow found fascinating, then scary when I started seeing sparks and killed the power.
Foolishly attempting to reach into my case while running, the fan took the tip of my finger off. Broke the fan too.

Bought a $50 fan controller dual bay device with an led readout, sposed to be really cool. Couldn't get it to work and after the attempted mods, could not return.
 
The first water-cooled, very overclocked, Athlon computer I built. Cost me about $2500 to build, and one day the pump failed. CPU and GPU heated up too quickly to be caught by the overheat protection in the motherboard. Lost everything, except for ironically, the case itself.
 
[citation][nom]asc3po[/nom]I used to work for the silly black and orange people. One day we had a customer try to return an BFG 6800 GT OC (at the time the fastest card the big blue and yellow store sold)... he had an AGP motherboard, but it was PCI-e... well since it didn't fit his AGP slot, he had taken tin snips, cut off a bit of the wafer with the PCI-e pins, and jammed it in his AGP slot... after we showed the card to everyone behind the counter, and got our good laughs, we told him there was no way he could return it and he was out his $400 bucks, he couldn't understand how tin snips violated our return policy and made a scene...[/citation]
That's priceless... like killing a gtx295 today lol
 
While working at a computer repair place a customer brought in a laptop that they just bought the night before. Apparently they opened it up turned it on and just loaded some pictures. They then went to bed with the computer on the desk next to a candle... The next morning they bring their Toshiba with half the case melted off down to the metal casing. Amazingly the computer booted and even more amazingly when it was hooked up to a secondary monitor I was able to get the data off of it. They where really nice and knew it was stupid and then just bought another one.
 
I do computer repair and I had a customer come in one time whose PC fell off a 10ft loft. Funny thing was the whole computer still worked fine after we replaced the hard drive, the case just looked like it got hit by a truck
 
I retardedly spilled milk on my newish tablet notebook while trying to sit down next to my laptop with a bowl cereal...consequently, I lost the ability to use the : key, the ' key, the [ key and the / key...*sigh*...I hate myself for doing that...
 
I had a customer come in with his computer (an eMachine) and it didn't work, I open the case only to find the SouthBridge had melted...I have no ideea how that happened.

My old CRT monitor's flyback fractured causing a loud sparking noise and the most god awful smell I ever smelled.

Got a shipment of PCs all banged up, luckily, only the case was damaged and nothing else (some shipping companies are the worst).

We had a thunderstorm a while back and after one very close lightning strike, my PC shut down. I couldn't start it and thought that lightning had hit it...luckily, I switched the PSU's switch Off and back On and it booted right up.

Had a person come to the store with an Athlon XP that had all its pins bent, he tried to put it into his Socket 370 mobo...after I went away to laugh it off, I slowly bent all the pins back as straight as possible and put it into a Socket A mobo and saw it was working; I came back to the guy and told him that he was lucky and to never try putting an AMD chip in an Intel mobo again or I will not unbend the pins back...the guy paid turned around in shame and never returned to the store again.

Oh, and mobos with bad caps, I got a nice (big) collection, mostly are VIa mobos, but I've got some Epox and Abit mobos in there also.

I got this other customer that came into the store and he said his computer was acting weird, so I took a look inside and bad caps all around...luckily, I had in hand some mobos from a company that used good caps and had the exact same chipset and peripherals, so I dismantled his PC, built it up and to my unpleasant surprise, his HD died on me (those damn 60GB HDs, you can put a functional 60GB HD on a counter for a month then put it into a PC and its dead).
 
Oh...cant believe I forgot about the time my dad threw my computer (which I had made when I was about 15) off the second story of our house...we got into a huge fight because he thought I played video games too much( (totally not true btw)...I'll never forgive that SOB for doing that...wow, just realized this is sort of a personal post...lol...oh well...w/e
 
Not to the computer itself so much as something that was on it.

Started going on-line back in the summer of '96.

Didn't really start to e-mail until around 2000. Four years later, thousands of archived messages from friends, family, newsletters, pics, etc., I accidentally deleted it all. Tried getting it back, nada.

Four years of memories down the drain. I was a hair's breadth away from putting a shot through my monitor.
 
Not me but a good friend of mine use to ride his motorcycle to school when the weather was nice to save gas. He would put his books and laptop in the saddle bags. One day he went over a hill too fast and everything came out of the bags and got ran over by the car behind him. I don't think he saved enough money in gas to pay for his new laptop.
 
I had an Acer Ferrari 4005 that was a little over a year old. I took the thing apart just to look at it(I did have a service guide to follow). When I finished putting it back together at 3:00 in the morning I turned it on and XP began to load. Then I saw that dreaded puff of smoke coming through the keyboard followed by the smell of burnt electronics. I immediately pulled the power and took it back apart looking for the problem. Turns out I had bent a tiny pin in a connector going to the side usb ports and internal bluetooth module. That cause a transistor on the mobo to burn. I was so nervous that I may have destroyed my $2000 laptop, that I could hardly fall asleep. The next day I put it back together w/o attaching the cable and everything was good.

About six months later I took it back apart and examined the cable wiring and determined that I shorted the switched power to the BT module. So I straightened up the pins and disconnected the BT power wire. All the usb ports now work again but the BT was fried. The laptop is still going now(4 years old). So lesson is don't put stuff back together at 3 in the morning, you will overlook something simple.
 
Our main family PC was apparently operating too slow for my youngest. This was likely due to the 600 instances of IE that he opened. I told him that the computer had a limited amount of memory, and if you opened too many programs, it would get confused and slow. I was proud of my parental guidance.

Until the next evening, when I came home to two plumbers trucks in the driveway. I knew this was bad.

Apparently, our son decided to tune the PC. In his perspective, the limitations of memory were clearly related to physical space - which could be increased by clearing out some case dust. He grabbed the hand vac, stuck it in an open drive bay, and fired it up. But the dust tray wasnt attached and all the dust (it was an old computer) shot out across the carpet. This excited our dog, who then chased the cat under the kitchen sink. My son wasnt concerned about the cat, only cleaning up. He ran to the same kitchen sink to fill a bowl up with water (to clean I suppose). But he was not aware that the cat had dislodged the PVC drain pipe from under the sink. Once he turned the water on, it immediately began to pour into the cabinetry, and eventually onto the floor. Not understanding the true cause and effect, he left the water running while grabbing all the towels he could muster. The water poured.

Then my daughter comes home. Jerry is on the floor with his towels, the computer has puked prehistoric dust onto the living room floor, and the water has now moved into the carpeted living room. Obviously, she knows that the precious computer - with all of her precious pictures - cannot survive flood damage. She turned the water off, and decided to carry the computer and to higher ground. Sadly, she only took the monitor.

Thats when space aliens came and fed my dog carrot cake.

 
Our cat knocked over a vase on the kitchen table where my wife's laptop was sitting. It sat in a puddle of water for a few hours and didn't work quite right after that. She had the accidental damage warranty so no big deal. She got a brand new computer out of the deal.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom