QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

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Never really had a bad hardware issue, but two interesting things happened at work.
I was in the datacenter and removing a machine that was being replaced, in the days before modular power cords. I unplugged the wrong cord, and took down a production system.
Another time, we had smoke coming out of one of the production communication servers. But the machine still worked! After hours, we took it down and found that one-half of a comms board had fried, but we were only using ports on the other half.
 
A few years ago my neighbor was having a bon fire in his backyard. The power utility to his house right over the fire. In their drunken stupidity they didn't notice it starting to hang lower and lower and insulation slowly falling off it. Finally it snapped giving them all a fright and my house a power surge from hell. My power supply surged so bad it blew flame out the back of the PC burning a hole in the wall.
 
There is no single worse thing ever ... and those worse things that are on my list happen to computers that where not actually mine.
I dropped the wrong jumpers on the wrong pins of a power mac G3 B&W which gave interesting effects.

Though the worse thing ever must have been upgrading a friend of my moms computer (adding a 36k modem).
Now this isn't exactly hard to do for a nerd however how do you explain that coincidental the hard drive of this poor lady died ?
She went to another expert to ask for a second opinion and they told her the repair was more expensive then it actually was and that by using the wrong brand of external modem i fried the hardrive something i should have known according to them their conclusion was that i msot likely tried to get more money out of it by killing the system.

The fun part the modem i was setting up was a spare (expensive in those days though why not let her use it if no one else uses it) and the installation was completely free. :S
 
I've had a few fun things happen with upgrades, or troubleshooting other peoples computers.

1. 1st time I ever attempted to perform a BIOS flash there was a power failure right in the middle of the process, in the middle of summer, on a clear day... Unfortunately, this was before companies started doubling up on the BIOS ROMs so that mobo was now a doorstop.

2. Bought several new pieces of hardware: P3 800 (coppermine), some gigabyte socket 370 mobo, 1.5 GB RAM and a 400 Watt PSU. Got home, assembled everything and hit the power, . opened everything up and verified all connections, tried to turn on the power with the case opened, .... Took a sniff of the PSU through the fan: smells burnt. Returned PSU and got replacement, plugged in power and turned on system; nothing happened... this PSU also smells burnt. returned to the store for the 3rd time and requested the PSU from a demo system (which was on at the time), plugged that in and it worked (and still does 8 or 9 years later)... Never went back to that store for a PSU.

3. Received 2 new IBM eSeries servers in pieces (because it would have taken 3 weeks for my supplier to assemble it vs. my 4 hours). 1 (out of 4) XEONs had a bent pin out of the box. I had to run a server on 1 CPU for over a month while waiting for the RMA process to run it's course.

4. About 15 years ago, my 2 year-old found an ATM receipt on the coffee table and played ATM with my floppy drive. After not being able to fit a disk in the drive I had to go out and buy long tweezers to remove the paper crumpled up in the back of the drive, and not leave papers lying around.

5. fell asleep at the computer one night while drunk, spilled any remaining beer into the keyboard somehow, and awoke to the system beeping at me (as it would when holding down a key during BIOS startup. Good thing keyboards are cheap.

6. When I got my first cable modem, installation was included in the setup cost (including a NIC if you didn't have one), so I allowed the tech to install my NIC (an old 10baseT RJ45/BNC D-Link card). Everything worked for 2 weeks, then stopped. I called them and confirmed my modem to be working, but my NIC was no longer in the device manager. So the tech came back 2 days later, installed a new card and left. this worked for 2 weeks then the same problem occurred, and again 2 days later a new NIC was installed. Which worked for 2 weeks... This time however, I recalled something the tech had said on his first visit 'this is the first time I've installed one of these in Windows 95'. I decided enough was enough, I loaded the D-Link setup floppy, changed the settings to PnP=yes and set IRQ=let system decide and reboot the system... the NIC worked until XP no longer supported the drivers (so it probably still works in Win98).



 
the worst thing that ever happened to my previous laptop was that it was built by HP.
they don't seem to realize that AMD CPU need more ventilation then intel cpu... stuffing them into the same box will cause the amd cpu to overheat more.. just add the damm kickstands to it!
 
[citation][nom]MetzMan007[/nom]The Hard Drive Carsh Of 2005 and the second hard drive crash of 2008. lost alot of music and photos that were not backed up.[/citation]

DOH! But this reinforces my present method: I buy a new hard disk every 3 years, whether I need one or not, mirror the older drive to the newer one, then use the older one for a second OS (and if Microsoft keeps their promised timetable, that's perfect timing to install a Beta or RC on the older drive as I have just done with Win7 in the past month)
 
This one is easy: Learning that RAID 0 sucks... the hard way.

Picture this, I built a top-of-the line system with a pair of Raptor 10K 150GB drives in RAID 0, with another 740GB in a JBOD array. For six months I used this system for both work and play and had accumulated TONS of important work-related applications (many with hardware-tied DRM schemes). Unfortunately, backing up this system to a 1GB WD extrenal HD took over 24 hours! That meant that all day, every day, the backup was running. This became untenable during a work project where I was working 90+ hours a week on the computer. Suddenly, it happened. A Raptor failed. Being RAID 0, the OS was toast, unless I could restore the backup. But first, I had to get another Raptor to rebuild the array. Unable to wait for WD to get around to sending me a new drive, I order one from New Egg with next day delivery. I get the drive the next day and start to rebuild the system. Uh, oh. The external 1GB drive had run out of space and the last 3 backups were toast. Problem was, 3 was to number of backups that I had space for and thus ALL backups were toast.

So, I decided no more RAID 0. I order another Raptor from WD, giving me 3. I set up the three drives in a RAID 5 and reinstall Vista, and then spending DAYS reinstalling software, including many hours of waiting on hold to get authorization to re-register software. And let's not count the time it takes to configure said software. All-in-all I lost an entire week to this.

But it's not over. The day after getting the system back up to workable specs, the second of the original Raptors died. Having learned my lesson and going with RAID 5, this wasn't a tragedy, but I had yet to receive my RMA on the original failed drive, so back to New Egg I go. I repair the array and send back the second failed drive to WD. A couple of days later I get a replacement drive from WD. Murphy, who has been laughing at me for weeks now, took the opportunity to kill one of the new drives. Back to repairing the RAID 5, this time with the RMA drive. So, I send yet another drive to WD for RMA. By this time I know am the proud owner of five Raptors. When the other drive finally come back via RMA I put it aside as a spare. Everything was fine, for about six months, then the first RMA drive died, and my spare goes into the RAID 5. The RMA drive gets RMA'd, and I am back up to 1 spare drive. This process has repeated itself EVERY SIX MONTHS since then. Last time was in January 2009. Uh oh, it's almost July. 🙁

This was an expensive lesson, another $600 in additional drives, plus the discovery that I needed an enterprise level backup solution. This precipitated the purchase and configuration of a quad-core file server with it's own RAID 5 array of four 750 GB drive yielding a 2 TB storage array. It also required upgrading all my switches to 1 GB so that backups could complete in a reasonable amount of time (although it still takes about 18 hours for the weekly full backup). Total tally, $3000 and at least 2 weeks of lost work time.
 
I've had a PSU and HDD die on me. I had a friend though, when we were first getting into building systems, who installed his new MoBo without the standoffs. He called me telling me it was smoking and sparking. Fortunately he screwed that thing on so tight to the case that short didn't damage anything but the board and the PSU.
 
I had an old P4 that was always running pretty warm--especially in the summertime. So I popped the side panel off and that remedied the problem--temps stayed normal while I played games on it. Then one day I tapped the power button on, and nothing happened. Checked the power cord in back, everything okay--but nothing turned on!

So I looked inside the case and found the stupid cat had chewed through most of the wires connecting the front panel headers to the mobo!! A little wire crimping was needed, but it worked just fine afterwards. That's what convinced me to upgrade my system (with a much nicer case), and my 5-year old now uses the old P4 for her games on PBS.org. At least it had a decent retirement compared to some of the horror stories here.
 
Bolt of lighting stuck our house. In fact was a direct strike right to the nice little green box full of breakers. Blew it right off the wall. The power company showed up with two trucks in 30 minutes time cause they said we literally just disappeared right off the grid. Anyway that wiped at two of my systems along with several others.
 
I ordered a PSU to replace one that recently died...Why, I don't know, but the PSU was shipped with the 230/240V setting...Needless to say my assumption got the best of me and a nice fury of sparks came flying out the fanhole of the PSU. It was awesome yet obviously terrifying at the same time.
 
My old Athalon XP PC had an ATI Radeon 9800 that kept overheating. I decided the cooler was too weak, so I purchased an Arctic Cooling heat sink for it. After I removed the stock heat sink, I found the source of the heat problem - ATI forgot to put on a thermal pad or thermal grease, and a layer of dust had collected between the heat sink and the GPU.
 
Haha one time this guy brought his machine to my shop to get fixed, i kid you not he had the same fingers as E.T, for a fan error he was getting before boot. We open the machine up, and seriously there was a whole can of spaghetti O's spilled on the mother board and fans. The powersupply had CHEESE stuffed into it.... Needless to say we didnt fix the machine, but sold him a new one.
 
1) Rear cooling fans spindle broke, causing remains of fan to fly all over the insides of the case.

2) 200Gb HDD, head crash. It made all sorts of interesting noises, before it finally died.

3) While building my current system, I hadn't cleaned up the nest of wires before first boot. Result? A loud, "CRACK!!" and alot of smoke. An extra molex connector had fallen in just the wrong place and shorted out against a rivet. Luck was with me, I didn't fry anything. Lesson learned? Tie off the wires, first.

4) Firmware failure on a certain brands 500Gb HDD. Flashed Firmware update, bricking the drive. (Thanks, guys). RMA'd drive. Firmware failed on new drive. Switched to different brand of HDD.

5) A friend was over with his computer, that he was having problems with. I opened the case and have never seen a computer with that much dust in it. Literally took it apart, washed out the case with a garden hose, let everything dry out and put it back together. Computer was taking 15mins to boot. Disk Defrag. wouldn't work, so I took a look at the drives. All 4 were 98% full.

6) Nephew spilled a can of soda into my printer. He took the printer outside and washed it out with a pressure washer.



 
This was me fixing a friends second hand computer about 15 years ago:
he need an upgrade (can't remember what). I was in the process of disassembling the pc when i came to the hard drive and noticed the power connect was missing it plastic shell and that the pins had been soldered back on. Not thinking much of it, I continued with the disassemble. Upon reassembly I came back to the harddrive and had a brain fart, which way does the power connector go back on? I figured I had a 50/50 chance of getting it right and hooked it back up, left the HD upside down on the case and hit the power....

once I could see again, I could see that the HD was missing every IC on the bottom and my friend had a shocked look on his face.
 
Years ago, I had purchased an Athlon processor, I think it was a 1600 or something. The fan and heatsink for it were huge and a couple days later, it became too much for the socket, broke off and fried the processor. This would be the worst thing to happen to a machine of mine...
 
Well, this was a friend's PC... an old Athlon 1400+ back in the day. We'd moved everything over into a new case and I just wanted to make sure it passed POST before screwing it all back together. I just wanted to see the video from the BIOS... that's it. Instead of properly fastening the heatsink/fan to the process, I sat it on top of the CPU... the idea was that I'd power off the PC LONG before it got too hot. Looking back, I don't believe the heatsink had ANY contact with the CPU. Again, I just wanted to see video. Well, I saw video... and then it went black and I smelled something burning. That was the end of that CPU and motherboard.
 
In my overclocking days with my Pentium 166 MMX i had it overclocked to 225Mhz and it ran great until the summer. Then I custom ordered a thermoelectric peltier that matched the cpu power output and put it on there. Worked great during the summer overclocked now. Even had a big blower fan on top of the heatsink to keep it cool.
Then I played with a piece of software called CPUIDLE which does what modern day OS's do automatically for windows 98...sleeps the CPU during the idle process. Well...my peltier didn't have a thermostat and the next day was extremely humid. I came back from class with water in the bottom of my case and a fried motherboard. The pins were desoldered from the CPU as well.
Oh well...
 
1. I was working on my old 133 MHz which happened to be a Compaq. I was holding my big foot hard drive will running the machine. The drive shocked me, so I dropped the drive and it fell right on the mother board which shorted out. It left me quite freaked out as it burned my hand pretty good.
2. My friend did this one to me. He brought his system over for a small party and was barrowing my CRT monitor. We passed out and he left in the morning to go on about his day. He left the monitor on while the VGA connection was disconnected. The cable slid and hit the metal heater at the base of the wall and sparks shot out. I happened to be sleeping about a foot away so my clothes, blanket, and arm were burned.
3. I worked at a computer repair place. This guy spilled orange juice into his Apple Power book. The acid pretty much ate everything in about 2 day before he brought it to us.
4. This one makes me laugh just thinking about it. Some guy asked me how to install a hard drive. I told him you can’t screw this up just plug it in with a SATA cable and power. I should have known better to give advice. The guy brings back the system a day later mad as he11. He plugged in the SATA cable upside down and the power cable correctly. Then he proceeded to stick a floppy power molex into the jumpers of the hard drive. I busted out laughing when he showed this to me. It completely blew the drive up and the PSU.
 
Lol..Fear 2 killed my last PSU. Overheated and popped loudly.

The worst thing was my sister in-law tried to charge her phone through the front USB port. When she removed the charger she ripped it up, bending and shorting the USB internal connections together. I started smelling something. PC was SMOKING. Wires were all burnt and melted. MB was a little fried. The MB kept on ticking tho. I had to rewire the on button and reset switch.
 
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