QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

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A coworker of mine had his Acer laptop sitting on a counter when the building maintenance guys were doing some work with the utilities in the ceiling. One of the guys accidentally left a valve open and rusty water poured all over his laptop. Amazingly the thing still worked once he let it dry for a few days, but the rust stained the screen. (btw he did get reimbursed for it). But I must say, Acer really has a spill resistant design or something.
 
I was building a RAID 1 array not an hour ago. I had an existing drive with 200GB of beloved media and I had bought an identical drive so I could mirror it. I was having trouble getting the RAID group set up and when I rebooted windows both drives showed up as not formatted in the Disk Management screen. Oops! It seems I destroyed the partition table, but I knew all the files were still there... Thank goodness for the program GetDataBack.
 
I have a great one! there was a bit broken in one of my ram sticks, and this bit just happened to be in the section windows allocates for its IO buffers, so when ever I copied stuff from one drive to another, or to/from the network, it would get a little corrupt, so 1 bit every 20meg or so, because it was so light, i never really noticed it. it corrupted about 1tb of data before i noticed.
 
oh wait, almost forgot.. years ago while i was playing an intense fps game, an alien broke into my house. he tried to steal my graphics card explaining he needed it to repair his navigational system so he could return home to planet morgafu.. well it was a brand new nvidia agp card and i wasn't about to let et take it without a fight. as we struggled i accidentally chopped off 2 of his 3 arms and green bubbly stuff shot out all over my mobo.. there was no discernible hardware damage but afterwards, every time i booted my computer up i got a this cryptic message saying i only had 3 days left to activate windows. it really suked.. i did give the one armed bandit an ati card and i think he made it to pittsburgh.
 
1. I once bent the pins of an 486 CPU beyond repair. Deliberately. I had a point to make (can't remember what it was, really).

2. Years later, working in a computer store. A customer saying his computer stopped working.
- "Did it go through something unusual lately?"
- "Not really, only spread new TIM."
- "A really thin layer covering the whole CPU? Really, really thin?"
- "Sure. I used the minimum amount required to cover all the pins."
- "..."
 
Our old PII 333Mhz Dell was killed in a Lightning storm. We didn't receive a huge surge, but the night before it was functioning fine and the morning after it wouldn't boot (looks like the PSU was fried).

It was actually the BEST thing to happen to our PC though, because my dad didn't like the idea of upgrading, even though it was a 333Mhz PC in an age of 2+ Ghz Pentium 4 processors.
 
HDD partition corrupted/lost, Folders Cut/Paste failed midway, HDD made slave in virus plagued PC. Win Repair setup zapped desktop/my docs and files in it. Watching porn on office PC and it freezes. A family etc person who is not supposed to be is on your PC.
 
Not hardware but same level of stupidity. My mate got some spy ware that took control of MSN, e-mail and a few other things... Nasty. He rang me in a panicking state explaining how he totally lost control of his computer, he was worried about his business so he changed all the passwords on his online banking before he rang me for advise. When I asked him if he used the same computer the spy ware was on to change the banking passwords... Silence is a heavy tone.
Nigeria 1, my mate 0.
 
My friend caused a power surge in his home which my computer was in at the time and I lost all data on ALL my hard drives. What fun. I punched him ... hard.... and... I cant really remember much after that , just when I knew what was going on he was curled up on the ground with lots of bruises , good thing he's big.
 
german shepard + room alone with a laptop = disaster dog bit the screen then took a victory piss on it. i didnt hit him because i got insurance on it and since they(asus) didnt make that model anymore they basically gave me the next model up. goes to show shit happens
 
I intalled a zalman chipset heatsink on my asus nforce 4 at automn, seems to work nice, but next summer on a hot day, nforce 4 chipset fried 🙁

And another strange one, I put a computer upside down to try a holding an AMD retail heat sink on a geforce 2 GTS and see if that seems to cool it. When I started it, my Antec power supply fried almost instantly... the rest of the system was fine.

p.s. I did try the AMD heatsink and damn it get boiling hot very fast without any actual 3d work.
 
Worst for me was to loose my 1 TB hard drive full of personal data - early digital videos with my daughter and father in law, that leave us last year, pictures, music, articles, old games with saves, and so on.
 
Well, I had a nice P2-300 (with a slight overclock), ATI all in wonder video card, 384MB of Ram and twin 80GB (largest you could get at the time) HDs get fried from a CanAm power supply which actually caught fire (the case contained everything but the smoke). The only internal part left was the cheap soundblaster pro sound card that I got from work for free.

I was so upset I had to go out and buy a new custom system (and a laptop since the custom system would take 10 days to get built, tested and shipped). Just glad I had an external tape drive with a 2hr old image to restore all the lost data (or I would have been job hunting as well).

Lesson: Never cheap out on the power supply on an $$$$ system.
 
Oh, another thing that happend to me , more recently. I was building my granfather a computer and got the DFI 790FX UT motherboard , it had tons of customizations for it which unfortunately also made it hard to put in the Antec case. After the case was nearly full I decided to try and put the custom chipset heatsink on and a few other things , like the "special" sound card it came with ,and in the end I came out finished with my hands haveing hundreds of little cuts on them , it caused my hand after a few minutes to be covered in blood. Those damn DFI boards run fucking awesome but they demand blood and when your done it takes a little of your soul with it. you die a little inside every time you put one together.


But seriously... ow.
 
I was playing starcraft on an old P3 166 mhz processor. When I was in middle school.. and didn't have the degree or the certs I have now. Anyway, I could have sworn she was hot and I took the side of the case off... one day I accidentally tipped my drink off the edge of my desk.
Suddenly the carriers ground to a halt.

She was done for.
 
Once I took off the old computer's heatsink, cleaned and when I monted it again, the computer wasn't booting. Then I discovered that somehow I cracked the CPU in 2 pieces.
 
Back when there were ATA power supplies I accidently put the power connected over by one pin, it ended up frying my CPU and motherboard, i think the ram survived but it was a big hit for me because I was only 16 and worked hard for the computer. It was a 486 i think and it was expensive back then.
 
In wintertime, I was adding more memory to the pc of my parents. Because of the cold I didn't feel the small cut in my finger. I bled all over the mobo wich went dead on power up. Nice 1. Guess what, my parents were pissed beyond belief 😉 :). Good times.
 
I had to format my HDD once because I put XP on it instead of my dad's.
No Idea how I did that though.
And when my brother was putting on a heatsink with a screwdriver he STABBED my mobo.
DD:
 
I had one old Dell where the HDD cannibalized itself one night. I woke up to the sound of metal on metal screeching and odd banging noises. Never have I hit the off button so fast.

The other was when I had just finished a fresh $1200 dollar build and some guy thinks it’s funny to chuck a water balloon at me while I'm at my desk. My screen shorted out and had to be replaced, though against all odds everything else still works.
 
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