QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

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Was building a PC with old crap and screws taken from electric applicances and when I turned it on the HDD shorted at one of these screws. It was awful.

On another old build, Pentium I, mobo gone in smoke... some part melted.

On another old build, computer started to smell burnt circuits... but no smoke. I removed the power supply, tested it alone and it sparked so much... it was insane. I think the computer even survived.

Old parts are so dangerous.
 
wow, wow, sooo much to read!

myself, of course working with computers I always have the cases open. one computer I had actually sitting on top of my desk (when I had a bigger desk) and I had, for whatever reason escapes me now, switched to a different hard drive but of course I just laid the hard drive upside down outside the case attached by the IDE cable and power cable(the IDE cable or the power one kinda lifted the attached end of the hard drive up so it sat at an angle). I had used it like this for a while because of course I didn't feel like messing with screwing the hard drive inside the case. one day my desktop freezes. a lock up. so of course I instinctly look at the hard drive (I guess it was instinct at least). everything looks fine but like in a second or two I noticed the biggest chip on the green silicon on the bottom of the hard drive, as I am looking mind you - it was like inches away from me, starts to discolor in a small non-perfect circle. it like became white then a small orange flame sprung up and just proceeded to burn for a few seconds before I reacted and blew it out! needless to say I kept that piece of silicon for a while (got lost in some moves). we tried swapping the silicon out with an exact hard drive match. was soo long ago I can't remember if it worked but I don't remember it not working. it definitely surprised me though. obviously electronics get hot!

second thing, one time I had a computer that kept locking up or not booting all the way like it had a short. everything was new though. I will be damned if I didn't try everything so I wouldn't have to take the whole computer apart. then when I finally relented and took the motherboard out there was a case screw that had been pinned up under the motherboard that was causing the short. computer worked without a hitch after the screw was gone. what a pain in the you know what that was.
 
worst thing was house struck by lightning.
this has happend more then once.
have surge protection from the mains so figured fine.
not so.

first time was a close hit and fried my video card and a VCR from induction through a long s-video cable.

second strike came in through the cable tv line. it fried the cable modem and every ethernet card/device attached.

the computer survived sort of.
the ethernet port was toast and the board would not boot with any ide devices attached. lucky i was on sata drives.
 
1. Shorted the fan controller on a asus 4870DK;a while later then shorted out something on my asus 4870DK because the computer was in sleep mode and a clip form the scythe MUGEN HSF fell on to the back of the Graphic Card
, so when ever it boots up, the bios states (please connect both power connecters even though they are) so the 4870 is effectively NFG (No Fu*king Good) but bought a 4890 to replace it.

2. while installing zalman zm-80c silent graphic card hsf I bent the circuit board of the 9800 AIW, causing corrupt in the screen, RMA'ed to ATI got a new one, but in my haste (and because that i didn't want to fetch a pair of pliers, the screwdriver slipped removing a SMD resistor, NFG(destroying) the card.

3. breaking a pin off of a 3200 athlon 64.(1MB cache)
4. Pushed off a capacitor near the agp release of a 9600 AIW wrecking it.
5. shorted the fan controller of the x800 aiw. (card still works.)
6. a screw fell into a enermax 650 infinity psu killing it.
7. mod'ing a 2002 pc power and cooling 400w psu overheating it and killing it.
 
Two stories:

1 -
Scraped my GF's mothboard with a screwdriver attempting to take off the Socket A heatsink. Took a few months to find such an old mothboard to replace it without having to reinstall XP (important information and program settings). I still get crap about that today (nearly 4 years later).

2 -
Impatiently waiting for my locked up Pentium Pro 100mhz computer I lost my temper and kicked the side panel. This caused my 4.3GB hard drive to head crash losing everything, including 2.1GB of mp3s downloaded over a 28k modem. That was tragic.
 
curiosity got the better of me and I found that hard drive board. :) I did keep it - I'm such a packrat! I did remember slightly wrong though. it was not the biggest chip on the green silicon (there was 3 bigger chips - not counting the really small ones here) it was the smallest of the 3 bigger chips. anyways - I tried to take a pic of it with a cell phone. not the best quality but I will try to link it - the white-ish dot on the right chip (the smaller one) is where the fire sprung up. -

http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k26/tgguild/misc/2.jpg
 
Hmmm, accident or something that wasn't my fault?

For the second one, I once had finished loading up a terabyte of movies to a friends RAID setup of 4 320 gig Western Digital drives, only for the RAID controller to die (literally) right after the data finished transmitting. Mmmmm, RAID 0. When we finally got another controller, we found one of the HDD's had failed too. Later, after some testing we found that the power supply was putting off irregular voltage, which is what blew out the RAID controller and the one drive. About a days worth of work gone on that.

The worst accident I have had was when installing thermal paste. Yep, first time applying it and I made a mess. I got some down on the processor socket, which I tried cleaning off with a paper towel. I thought I had done a good job, but my P4 came bellowing back "YOU SUCK!"
 
My cat peed on my friends PS2 several years ago... (not a PC, but still..)

Recently i and the night prior to the move i had set everything out in my living room, including my comp. tower, which is black. I woke up in the middle of the night needing something to drink so i walked out to the living room and promptly tripped over the tower, which sadly for the tower was more like a kick, then trip. There is a nice dent on the side and it moved a good 2 feet across the floor before i fell on top of it.. still works good though =D
 
[citation][nom]lowguppy[/nom]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.[/citation]
Hehe, I did that with my very first build.....But I was very lucky, removed the board after my friend asked about them, and installed the standoffs and it worked on the first try, no damage. I may have also hit the reset button while formatting a drive....Maxtor RMA to the rescue.
 
Long back I was one of the privileged owners of a CD-writer(Sony 8X 😀). I used to remove my drive from the cabinet and take it to my friends place for their burning needs. On one such occasion here's what happened: I had a habit of turning off my CRT whenever my PC was on and I was downloading stuff and not near it. I had also shorted my Power and HD indicator LEDs on my PC a long time back.
I came back from my friends place with my cd-writer and tried to plug back the connectors to my motherboard. On connecting the 4 pin power connector to my writer, I suddenly saw sparks from the back end. I was literally 'shocked' to find out that my PC was running and I tried to plug in my drive without shutting down my PC. And the funny part: my cd-writer from that moment one failed to read any CDs however it could burn them successfully (no multi sessions though). Apparently the read lasers diodes had been fried while the write laser was still intact 😀
 
i was transferring my entire music collection once, then i got a phone call about something i can't remember. obviously it was distracting seeing as how i accidentally deleted the wrong music folder. Rather than trying to pull a data recovery on a dying drive I just said "f-it" and proceeded immediately to eat all of my bandwidth and optical drives to re-acquire my entire music collection. Didn't take as long as i thought to get most of it back on there.

in an incident that had nothing to do with fault of my own, i got a computer that was having problems, nobody that had it before me could figure out what was wrong... so it POSTs runs into full boot sometimes but after about two minutes it dies inexplicably. I was booting to a live cd, so i started pulling out hardware to run down hardware checks. finally i removed the motherboard to physically inspect it, as soon as i took out the last screw a large piece of aluminum fell out from behind it... burnt with fried solder stuck to it... HOW THE F**K DOES THAT HAPPEN?

anyway, that's pretty much it.
 
My Rottweiler came over to me one evening while I was doing a gaming session. My thought was that he needed to go out to use the bathroom. However I did not realize how bad he really needed to go. As I was rounding out the map, I heard man's best friend let out a man-sized gastric outlet. As I turned to tell him he was a disgusting animal (in a joking manner), I saw my best friend had a mishap on the floor... and my pc. He was looking back over his shoulder as to say "Did I do that?" and all I could do between gagging was laugh (which was an odd combination to say the least). I wanted to be mad at him but I knew it was my fault and his whole attitude of "Ummm.... I didn't know I could cause that kind of mess!" was quite hilarious. I went and let him out, got the wetvac, a bunch of paper towels and began cleaning.
It was nothing catastrophic to my PC, but it has been the worst thing to happen to it.
I know, I know, it's a crappy story. 😀
 
Back when floppy drive connectors didn't have the notches to make sure you don't plug it in backwards. My roomate plugged in the cable backwards and it started a fire in my PC. My roomate immedately turned it off. Thankfully the only thing that melted/burnt was the cable itself. My PC was litterally smoking.
 
Two days ago I was sitting in my History and Systems psychology class and we started to smell smoke.

My laptop power adapter was ON FIRE!! I unplugged it and it went out instantly, but the burn marks are there and I don't dare plug it in.

Good news is, I convinced my wife we need a new laptop. Yay!
 
The power connector on my motherboard overheated and melted, fusing it to the PSU power connector. The 8kha+ was known for problems with its 5v lines, and I had a cheapo PSU at the time. Had to replace both.
 
Back in my novice days of PC building, before I knew about quality components, the worst thing that happened to one of my PCs was the installation of a cheap power supply. It ran well and fine for probably close to a year.

Then one night I smelled something odd as if something was burning. I thought the neighbor was perhaps burning wood or something to that effect, but didn't understand how it could smell so badly. I looked out the windows and went outside to check, but saw nothing alarming. I came back inside to find my PC billowing smoke from the rear exhaust fans and shooting sparks out of it! I flipped the surge protector off immediately and popped open the case to find my motherboard smoldering and burning. I had to hit it with a fire extinguisher to put it out.

Damn strange thing too, PC was on and running the entire time. It didn't make any noticeable noises and I didn't notice any smoke until I came back in to find my mid-towering inferno.

Moral of the story: Buy a quality PSU--It might just save your life!
 
Craziest thing that ever happened to me was this:

My monitor was displaying some issues, so I took it to a friend's shop to have it repaired. When he turned it on, there was a sizzling sound and it promptly died. My friend and I were quiet, and he said he had a second-hand he could give me to bide me until I got a new one. I gratefully accepted, and took the monitor home and hooked it up. I explained the incredible stroke of bad luck to my girlfriend as I did this. No sooner had I turned on the replacement, when a loud series of pops and cracks came out from the machine, followed by orange flames *literally* coming through the ventilation cracks at the top. I had never seen or heard anything like it.

My friend was an incredibly good sport about it, especially when he saw the huge black spot and slightly melted plastic, and gave me a second replacement.
 
I had an old USB 1.0 connection that when attached for the 1st time to the motherboard short-circuited and bust into flames, causing the house to smell like burned rubber for the next week. The motherboard was fine, but I never tried to use the USB port again.

I had a similar indecent with a Serial Port Mouse that, when attached to the serial port-minidin5 adapter, burst into flames. Same result.
 
I had absent mindedly left my psu on while spraying canned air on the mobo to clean out my case. It must've gotten some dust on my storage HDD and when I went to boot it couldn't find it, even in bios. Had to order a new drive and replace most of the lost data the hard way. Lesson learned. I'm avoiding canned air as much as possible, even when everything is uplugged.
 
[citation][nom]zgqp5su[/nom]Being taken by the feds[/citation]
I actually had a client who worked for the government, and this exact scenario is what caused him to be my client...
 
A former manager had insisted that we place a PC running TrackIT under the floor tiles of the data center "so that corporate won't find it". This was a sunken floor in the building's concrete slab floor, so the condensate drain was the lowest plumbing fixture in the building. Needless to say, it was just a matter of time before one too many feminine items were flushed before there was a backup of raw sewage to that lowest point. The rest is horrid disgusting history.
 
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