Worst PC Build Screw Ups

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My worst screw up was actually a funny one, it wasn't even a screw-up on my part. My friend and I were both building comps with K6's (spare me the flaming, I didn't know back then) and when we powered up our comps they posted and then crashed, but there was this funny small. Well both of our CPUs had burned HOLES in them! Just HOLES! HSs were properly mounted and everything, but the CPUs just BURNED! Never bought AMD since then.
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One of the funnier ones i have heard so far. Nothing like something going wrong for absolutly no seemingly logical reason.
 
Ok Ill add my stories. BTW None of them are Computer related. But all electronics stories.

Ok my most recent and favorite one. You guys talk about blowing capacitors. BAH ha ha ha. Caps in a computer are less than an inch around and hold maybe a few watts of power. I was installing a 7 Channel NAD 200WPC 1400Watt Total Amplifier in a customers theatre. Well something was wrong with the power cord. I plugged it in and fired it up and it popped a fuse. So I replaced the fuse and tried again. Well it wouldnt fire up and was making a weird hissing sound. So being a dumbass I put my ear really close to the amp to try to hear the hissing. Then I powered it back up, with my ear an inch away from a huge power capacitor blowing up like a shotgun blast. It was awsome. Besides the fact that I couldnt hear for a few minutes out of one ear. Needless to say my boss wasnt happy and I was later fired from that job. :twisted:

Also I worked for a car audio department at a local chain electronics store. When we had a cosmetic problem with a product the company wouldnt fix it. IE a subwoofer cone was torn, or a cd player face was scratched. So what we would do was have some in it "blow". Howd we do this? You guessed it take a power cord, cut the end off, strip the wires, plug them into the sub and plug that sucker into the wall. You every want to buy a sub that can handle a high power system. 120Volts A/C into a voice coil is a great stress test. 9/10 subs blew within 2 seconds. But the Rockford Fosgate Power series 12" Played for 20 minutes! We even flipped it over so it was flopping on the ground. We finally gave up because it wouldnt die.

Well thats been my fun stories, hope you enjoyed.
 
Older Bose 901s could accept 120V AC...

plug em straight into the wall. 12 all range drivers per speaker.

Like all Bose great lows awesome Highs and next to NO mids..

Vocals, horns and guitar were horrible.
 
well I've actually never had a real computer accident like anything you guys have ever had. I can tell you of the two sort of mishaps that I had.

About two years ago, I found my aunts super uber old computer that had a pentium 1 or something. I know it had a turbo button that went from 66 to 133. Well we stripped it for all it was worth, and then we took off the cpu heatsink and fan and pressed the turbo button. 6 hours later, nothing, zilch, nadda. It was only mildly warm, and although the hard drive didn't work so we couldn't go into windows 95 and make some cpu activity, it should've gotten to more than 45 degrees or whatever it was without a cpu heatsink. I ended up putting a micro blowtorch to it for about 30 seconds with no avail. I still have that processor today.

The other thing just happened the other day as we were putting my brothers computer together. Now his computer is nothing special, sempron 3000, 512 ram, 160 gig hdd. Well his motherboard is an MSI, and for some reason it only has 2 ram slots. We put his single stick of ram in the slot closest to the cpu, and when we turned it on, there'd be no video signal or anything. It would show that the hard drive was always being used and all the fans were on max, and would not slow down. We screwed around for hours trouble shooting pretty much everything. Then we plugged the ram into the other slot and it worked. I just checked the motherboard manual, and it says that if you have one stick of ram, you need to have it in the other slot, which I find just stupid.
 
Since I haven't seen every motherboard, I can honestly say that I don't know.
But on the only board that i've put one RAM stick in, the 0 DIMM was the furthest away from the CPU.
What I do know is that the 0 DIMM must be filled first.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Having to occupy dim 0 is not always true. My Asus k8n-e deluxe does not require dim 0 to be occupied, however, quite a few motherboards do have this requirement or recomendation.
 
I haven't done anything bad myself (so far *knock on wood) but I do work part time as a computer repair tech so here are a couple of those stories:

A man brought his computer in, claiming that his network ard that we installed didn't work. I hooked it up to our network and it worked fine. I told him that it works and that it was either his cable or his network. He went home and came back, saying it still didn't work and that he brought the cable. Apparently, he had been using a phone cord and had made it fit into the ethernet slot using electrical tape

A woman brought in her computer saying the floppy drive we installed didn't work. She had had it for around 60 days and for the first 50 or so it worked fine. After throwing a huge fit, threatening to sue us and demanding her money back my manager told her that we would do the diagnostics for free. I put a floppy in the drive and sure enough it didn't work. Since floppy drives are cheap I was jusst going to take it out and replace it. While doing so, an extra large 2" paper clip fell out of the drive. I tried the drive again and sure enough it worked. When she came to pick it up I informed her that we are not responsible for the drives not working when forgein objects are inserted into them and we would not be offering her free services ever again for her mistakes.

I have also found a craker with peanut butter shoved in a vacuum drive (darn kids) and a CompaqFlash Card shoved through the CF card slot and into the reader casing, someone who cut (yes actually cut) a paralell port to try to make a serial cable fit, IDE cables duct taped to the motherboard to 'keep them out of the way', additional slots filed or cut into DDR or SD RAM to make them fit into a different standard mobo........
 
Well, I guess it’s my time to add a story or two.

Well there is the one about the old laptop I was converting into a digital picture frame, I had received the laptop because no one knew why it wouldn't run, so I took it completely apart examining everything, and came up with nothing. So, I tried checking the CPU fan with a dc source I had, well, burnt that right out, then I tried an old hard drive, silly me, forgot to turn it off taking the hard drive out after finding it wouldn't boot, and fried that. Lastly, I was mounting the motherboard to the back of a piece of wood and found that it would boot fine lying flat on a table but once mounted, it wouldn't boot any more. Turns out that when I took everything apart, I took a protective cover off that prevented the memory from touching the motherboard when it got moved or twisted at all, so my memory was shorting out the circuit. Luckily, it didn't fry anything that time.

No, my main pc, I have been lucky, I have plugged and unplugged in my video card while the computer was running, no problem, I shorted out my motherboard causing it to restart while putting in a pci bracket blank, hot plugged many a fan, including the power supply fan monitor to the motherboard, it wouldn't reboot however until I unplugged it again. Side note, has anyone ever got a computer to boot when the power supply fan monitor was plugged into the motherboard? Anything else almost burnt my fingers on a set of 3 SCSI drives because they ran so hot, put a blank cd with a clear cover cd that comes on top of spindles into my burner, that sounded terrible, but only ended up scratching the cd.

Oh, back when we had a Pentium 1, we were having problems with the computer getting slower and slower each day, turns out that the bearing in the cpu fan had died about a month prior when the problems started. Burned a finger determining the temperature.

In terms of hard drive fun, I was trying to partition a 250 GB hard drive, ended up turning it into a 160 GB, so I tried unpartitioning and re partitioning, turned it into a 120 GB, this continued to a 32 GB. I finally took it out of the computer, put it in another and repartitioned once more, and finally got it to realize that is was a 250 GB drive and recovered the "lost" sectors.

Hope you guys enjoy my futile endeavors.

-Dewey
 
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I've been building and upgrading computers since my Apple II plus days (gives you an idea of how old I am). I'm actually surprised at how few major screw ups I've had. I have though have had a few, one of which I'll share now and maybe pass along a lesson or two.

Back about 1996 or so, I had just built a brand new blazing Pentium 133MHz system. At the time I lived in Albuquerque, NM which is very dry and in the winter time I was shocking myself on anything I touched. Thus I was very careful about static charges when I worked on my machines. I wore wrist straps regiously. I made sure I was grounded to the motherboard case prior to messing around...etc etc.

Well my computer was in one of these cases with the keyboard lock thingy on the front which I hooked up to allow my to 'lock' my computer. (Why I did that, I haven't a clue as I lived alone at the time and had no reason to lock the computer). Well one day, I was reaching for the 5.24" floppy drive (remember those?) either to insert or remove a disk and one of my fingers brushed the keyboard lock on the case and I felt a shock. The computer was on and appartely did not seem to phase it but the keyboard no longer worked. Turned out the static charge went from my fingers, through the keyboard lock , through the wires, straight to the circuit on the MB that controls the keyboard lock and shorted it out.

I ended up replacing the MB but from then on I never hooked up the keyboard lock feature on any MB or case that has it.

I've done other stupid things like try to unplug a slot one CPU from a computer while it was running, but thats a future story....
 
fortunately I have never "touchwood" had anything go wrong with any of my builds.

My tale is about a guy from uni.

He got a brand new Pentium 4 PC was top of the line at the time and wanted to OC i. He bought a massive heatsink which weighed more than the Titanic.

The instructions on the box of the heatsink said "Remove cooling unit when transporting PC to avoid damage to other componants"

Needless to say when the year was up and he was moving home he forgot to remove it from the CPU. Next day i got a email with pictures showing the cpu ripped our leaving a huge hole in the mobo.

his mum wasnt happy in spending £300 on a replacement CPU and Mobo.

great topic, best for a long time 😀
 
I've been building and upgrading computers since my Apple II plus days (gives you an idea of how old I am).
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Hey, speaking of the Old Days: I returned my Commodore 64 (to Target!) three times, getting a replacement C64 each time, because the sound had stopped working. Turns out you're not supposed to plug or unplug the cassette drive while the C64 is on. I kept blowing a fuse in the system, a fuse that, for some strange reason, only affected the sound chip.

Well my computer was in one of these cases with the keyboard lock thingy on the front which I hooked up to allow my to 'lock' my computer.
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Awesome. My stepfather's XT had a keylock switch. They used to lock me out of it. I opened the case and wired a reed switch across the keylock switch, so if I stuck a small magnet on just the right spot on the [thick steel] case, it would trip the reed switch and unlock the PC.

That XT also had EGA graphics---glorious sixteen colors!---and a 20MB hard drive. Yes, you read that right, kids: twenty megabytes. And it never got more than half-full.
 
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