QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

Page 8 - 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 had a Demon Power Supply. It looked awesome but ended up popping, smoking and then fried part of my P1 connector on my mobo. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
 
[citation][nom]Belardo[/nom]My Personal Worst thing to happen to my computer: Difficult (in no order)- Installed Windows ME (Kinda worse than Win95)- A retarded company ran the Amiga into the ground. From within, not Apple or Microsoft. Even thou I've been using "PCs" since the 486/DX2 80 days w/ Windows3.1... Win9x was halfway there and when the PC world wet its pants over WinXP. Its like... yeah, took MS long enough.- When doing a repair job on my C=128 PSU, it "lit up" in my face. Just a bright light then smoke. Spent $50 to replace it.- Lending a fellow student my Commodore +4 computer and never got it back. (stupid stupid)None of my own PCs have been broken, drowned or fried spectacularly.The closest was on my A1000 when after a thunderstorm blew past, I powered up my Amiga1000 and was using it for about 15mins when a huge thunderclap hit my home. The Amiga was freaked-out, but a power recycle resolved it... thats the only time I sweated.Things I've seen people do when I worked at a PC shop:- Split 486 CPU. Customer had mobo on 5volt, rather than 3.3. Boss blamed us for selling non intel CPUs. But we've never had a PC returned because of a non-CPU failure. His stupidity was to replace the CPU for free before I could explain to him why it split... User Error.- Countless times of having fingers touch spinning fans (ouch, but never blood) or accidentally removing cards while theres still power (never fried).- Customer killed system when he attached mobo to case while still attached to the foam bottom.- Boss makes deal to buy dozens of Pentium1 class CPUs for a deal. But neither the seller or himself knows anything. I check them out, more than half are the P60/66 types. Not compatible with Socket 7 used in P75~266Mhz. The CPUs weren't worth much. I left that company fairly soon afterwards.Horror story I heard, a favorite: Guy goes on site to check an old lady's PC at her home. It has a shot-gun blast to the side. He leaves, quickly.[/citation]
[citation][nom]Ahslan[/nom]LOL! ...the job that I work at STILL uses Netware for their file server...WTF!!!!...[/citation]
[citation][nom]Ahslan[/nom]LOL! ...the job that I work at STILL uses Netware for their file server...WTF!!!!...[/citation]

Installing Windows ME? I think that counts. LOL. Here's a joke my friend's Dad told me. Microsoft has come out With Windows ME. Then cover mobile devices, Windows CE. Then Came Windows NT. You know what Microsoft just tricked you into buying? A block of CEMENT!
 
I think just pulling out a athlon 1.6ghz when I tried taking off the heatsink... Must have ruined one of the pins, and doesnt work. Not a big deal however, as I only used it as a dvd player.
 
I had a PC mounted in the roof space of an OB van start blowing smoke once, alot of smoke. The PCI card responsible for the graphics overlay for live sports broadcasts had melted, chips twisted up off the board. There was another OB scheduled for the next day, and there was a 2 week delay on a replacement, so we just slapped it back in and it worked fine :)
 
First PC I ever built (back in 02) I put in a green cold cathode light in my case.
It worked fine for a few days then just stopped one morning. Took it back to the shop and funnily enough the guy infront of me was there for the same reason. However unfortunately for him the light he had didn't just stop working, it melted and took parts of his case with it!

Blew two PSU's on that same computer. Never found out why, as the third one worked fine. All 3 weren't cheap either 🙁

Recently I had a range of problems, most annoying of which was my PC refusing to boot. After detecting hard drives it would reboot. 30 minutes later and I finally got it to show an I/O error prompt. Another hour later and I managed to "fix" Windows 7 and boot back into Windows, only to find that one of my drives had lost all of its permissions!
Not able to fully set permissions on the drive I decided to copy everything off it (was games only) and format it.
Windows wouldn't let me format it because of permission errors, so I booted into W7 install, jumped into command prompt and formatted away.
Turns out boot information was kept on that disk for both my W7 and Vista install...

Gave up and went to bed.

When I was having the IO errors I had the side off my case and was unplugging/plugging things in, taking cards out, etc.
The morning after formatting the drive I reinstalled Windows 7. That took about 30 minutes. At the end of the 30 minutes my PC resets to finalise the install, and just as it resets the song that was playing behind me changes. In the silence that followed I could hear a crackling noise, kind of like something electrical about to short out.
Quickly turning my PC off I duck behind my desk to feel a massive amount of heat and a slightly burny smell.

Turns out that I had managed to slightly unplug the power to my after market GPU cooler, so for about 30 minutes (thankfully not graphically intensive work) my GPU was being cooled solely by its heatsink and the case fans.
I've never shut a PC down and had a card out that fast before...
Plugged the fan back in, unplugged power to the motherboard and started up the case/GPU fans and left the card to cool for a while. I honestly think it got to around 100 degrees celsius, but thankfully the little tank is still chugging along!


My partners PC was pretty much an exact replica of mine, except I put things like aftermarket coolers on mine. Her GPU started to show artefacts for no real reason. Same card (8800gts), both of us used to use Rivatuner to compensate for the piss poor fan controller by Nvidia, but still ... mine cooks and her's dies. Go figure :)
 
Desktop Pc got stolen when they broke into my house a year ago. Went to the polise and made a case got the pc back a week later. they found it in the veld on the ground and full of mud. cleaned it and reseted the cpu and it started up! Still working this very day!!
 
Using my Dad's angle grinder on the rear I/O panel so I could fit a new expansion card that wouldn't quite fit, while using a vacuum cleaner to suck up all the bits of hot, charged metal flying around the case.
 
Got stuck in flood in my car and had computer in back seat. Had to send it out the window to another driver in middle of rain storm. But it worked fine, no damage at all.
 
Had a PC that became difficult to turn on. At first I thought it was the MoBo. At first pushing the power button rapidly would turn it on. Then that stopped working but I found a solution. If I jumper the green wire to the black ground wire on the main harness with a paper clip the power supply would come on, but you had to rapidly press the power button at the right time to get it to boot, this usually took several attempts and was getting progressivly worse with each shut down. At this point I decided I would just leave it running since it would restart just fine off the reset button or through windows. Over the course of almost a year I may have shut it down maybe 5 times and btw it is a water cooled rig. Now the funny part I was going on vacation for several days and was catching flak from my roommate for leaving my unattended high powered computer running up the electrical bill. So I decided to shut it down while I was gone. When I got home from my Vacation and walked into my room and it smelled like an electrical fire and I mean it smelled real bad. When I went to turn on the PC I noticed the little light on the MoBo wasn't lit. It turns out It wasn't the MoBo going bad but the PSU. It had actually burned up while in STAND BY while I was gone! I was just glad it didn't burn the house down. I put a new PSU in it and it worked fine.
 
The worst thing to ever happen to my computer was probably having world of warcrack on it.

in contrast its happiest moment was when wow went away.
 
I was working on my PC over a few days and had unplugged it. On day two, I was pulling out my video card to swap it's heatsink. Someone plugged the power cord back in for some reason and has never fessed up. The PC turned on with the card half inserted and fried the motherboard and card.

I also knew a girl who tried adding a second IDE hard drive. She plugged the middle (slave) connector into the motherboard and a hard drive on each end. Both controller cards on the drives smoked and some of the chips actually blew up. Motherboard fried too.
 
well, I peed on my vaio laptop a few years ago. I didn't know i did it until the next day... let's just say i was very VERY drunk --like blind drunk-- and I believe I had intended to get up and A) go to the restroom, and B) check email. Well I can't really remember the act itself, but in hindsight I think I mistook my laptop display for a toilet lid.

The next day I couldn't figure out what had spilled all over my desk and why my computer wouldn't power on. Never got fixed.
 
Happened in 1999, working on my old Pentium Pro server, was reinstalling Windows NT4 and the CD exploded, a nice chunk of it shot out the back of the drive and hit the PSU.

Everything but the drive works now.
 
Buying computers from best buy

i had a computer from best buy
q6600, 3gb ram, p965 mobo, 8400gs

that card was NEVER EVER EVER meant to play crysis

I tried to make it play crysis at 1920x1200 16AAx16AF
(somewhat settings like that ) 0.4fps

Looked BEAUTIFUL, then I heard some noise. like a loud crack, and my computer crashed....
I never booted again
the card fried itself... with my HP case.... the case was black where it was supposed to be white......

thankfully my processor survived
 
The time was during Windows 98's last days.... It was just before XP came out, that day my wife for some unknown reason was digging threw my file system and managed to find the .inf files for my motherboard... since she could not make heads nor tails of them she then decided they where useless.... It was at this time that I found out that hardware could actually fry somehow if you deleted those INF files 🙁 (well it didn't totally fry but it was so unstable after the reinstall that I had to build a new machine)
after that she promised never to do that again, and so far she has been true to her word lol although it could be that I also hide system files...
 
[citation][nom]ravewulf[/nom]I've accidentally reformatted my hard drive with all my stuff on it quite a few times. Each time I was able to get everything back using free software (although getting back a few hundred GB's of data took a long time). That's about the worst that's ever happened to me.[/citation]
A few times you made the same mistake? WTF!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom