Worst PC Build Screw Ups

Page 14 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Status
Not open for further replies.
I think they are the DORK squad....they do not deserve to be called geeks

So you think it's that easy to stereotype techs at hundreds of stores across North America? I've met some useless GS'ers and some very informed GS'ers.

I don't care how informed some of their employees are; the simple fact is that they rip you off. $150 to install an OS (OS not included :lol: )? Please!
 
I think they are the DORK squad....they do not deserve to be called geeks

So you think it's that easy to stereotype techs at hundreds of stores across North America? I've met some useless GS'ers and some very informed GS'ers.

I don't care how informed some of their employees are; the simple fact is that they rip you off. $150 to install an OS (OS not included :lol: )? Please!

You mean people PAY them to do stuff? I thought they were free consultants? Don't you people know how to work a guilt trip?
 
ive got a few nice screw ups. 1 wasnt completely my fault but i still consider it a screw up.on the first build i ever did myself about 3 years ago i made the mistake of buying a tower with a PSU already installed. of course within 2 weeks my pc just completely shutdown on me. i couldnt get it to respond at all. so when my dad came over later that day(he has alot of electronic experience) we started trying to troubleshoot the problem. within seconds we got the PSU to spark and smoke as well as getting the outlet from the power strip i was using at the time to spark. really quite interesting. luckily nothing else went bad. used that system until around march of this year until another screw up forced an upgrade.

i had purchased a x850xt through work for $270 when they were still going for $500 but hadnt realized that it took up a PCI slot for the fan and heatsink. anyway it worked fine until march when i started having heating problems and couldnt figure out what the problem was. decided to take out the video card to make sure the air flow was fine. the size of the card and the design of my asus board made it very tricky to get out. after a few minutes of trying to get it out without breaking it my hand slipped. ripped off a capacitor. the card came out of course though. after that i just upgraded to PCI-E and made sure to get a smaller card.

my favorite though is one i didnt do myself. i was in a A+ hardware class at school and we had to repeatedly teardown and rebuild the old towers in the room to get used to them. at this point i had 5 years of experience building PCs so i was fine with it but some of the people didnt know how to even right click. somehow 1 guy got a stick of pc133 ram in backwards and booted the system. got that sweet smell of burning electronics from the fans in the back. teacher named him smokey after that day.

and my favorite software screwup was with a program called astonshell. it worked similar to other skin programs but actual changes the windows shell out so everything can be customized. i went about my normal backup of new data before a format and had only begun when i accidently moved the folder containing the astonshell skins. of course i didnt realize this at first and lost everything on my desktop including my start menu and task bar. keyboard shortcuts didnt even want to work right. i had to do everything through task manager and the run cmd from there. including opening websites. luckily i was getting ready to reformat anyway so it wasnt to bad but still sucked for a few days using the task manager run command.

astonshell is a very nice program with alot of nice options just very picky when you want to uninstall or make a drastic change. finally got it to look like this though
my.php

all of the buttons on the top left linked to programs so no need for shortcuts
 
Mine's lame compared to others but, I feel your pain.

My brother-inlaw bought a 256mb PC100/133 memory chip to upgrade his family's HP 550mhz P3. I unknowingly installed the chip backwards, turned on the PC & it still said 64mb of ram. Turned it off, pulled out the chip & it was real warm. Like, had to hold it by the edges because the chips were too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. This is unknown to him. I'm thinking "S__T, it's fried!" I put it in the correct way, fire up the PC & it still says 64mb. I read the small manual that came with the PC & it says it only accepts PC100 not PC133. I goto the kids iMac & take out the 128mb chip & put it in the HP PC. Turn it on & it says 192mb. I put the 256mb chip in the iMac & it says 320mb. iMac still works w/o problems. I guess the iMac deserved the 256mb more than the HP PC because it has been replaced. Long live the 350mhz G3 iMac!
 
For me, it would have to be when I fried my brand new Athlon xp 1600+, back in 2001, when it had cost me 150 quid.

I was watching my mates playing GTA3 on my ps2 and I couldnt get the heatsink to go on, so without thinking, I spun the heatsink round and clipped it on easily. Then booted up and within 10 seconds i could smell burning, and that was that, bye bye xp 1600, hello 1Ghz Tbird again. I was so angry, just like lighting up 150 quid, arrgghhh.

Because I'd spun the heatsink round 180 degrees, the lip was on the wrong side and it meant that only half of the core was in contact with the heatsink, whoops!
 
My worst screwup was back in the time when win95 was 'cool' (it never actually was, but still).
I had one of those hybrid AT/ATX cards (a Shuttle 569 iTX, if I'm not mistaken) that I had used to update my Pentium 75 (from socket 5 to socket 7). It was first in an AT case, but one day I decided to upgrade the thing and I got it:
- a new, ATX case
- a 6.4 Gb, UDMA-capable Quantum Fireball HD (to replace the aging PIO-3 Maxtor 1 Gb)
- 64 Mb of RAM in a single PC66 SDRAM stick to replace the four 8 Mb FPM DRAM sticks I had then
- a P133 to replace the P75 and Cyrix P150+
- a 3dfx Voodoo 1 to extend the 2 MB S3 Trio 64 video card.

I managed to set up the board correctly on the PSU (needed a few jumpers), install and overclock the P133 (at 2x 83 MHz, it was blazing fast), install the Voodoo, but...
the SDRAM actually went without a hitch in its socket, but when I powered up I got sparks and white smoke: it had gone in reversed, securities locked on and all!

The mobo's RAM socket was burnt, and the RAM rendered nonfunctional (a bit of scrub allowed me to replace it with the warranty still intact).
Lucky for me, since 430TX chipsets couldn't support more than 64 Mb of RAM (it could, but L2 cache was then disabled on RAM >64) I just fit the new 64 Mb stick in the other RAM socket and never looked back.
 
Well I've been pretty lucky, nothing major ever happened to me. I think I was bitten by a nasty dose of the static deamon. I'd bought my 2000+ and an MSI k7N2-L I think it was, anyway installed everything booted it up nothing happened, stripped it out built out side of the box, nothing happened. Rma'd it got a new MB in a couple of days, rebuilt perfectly fine.

At my last place I was on a cisco helpdesk as 2nd/3rd Line, we also did RSA tokens for a large international corporation. The database was held on a machine in London Docklands that we could access via PC anywhere and update....now in my time as IT support/Helpdesk I've done this a thousand times (I'm only 23 mind) CTRL+ALT+Delete and enter, or windows key + L....locks the machine right? For some reason on that perticular day I was trying to be extra sensible and Really think things through before I did them.....anyway so I'm on this box in docklands finshed what I'm doing CTRL+ALT+Delete, move mouse over, click 'shut down' click OK, close the box then 10 seconds later.......I realise what I'd just done, now I only use windows key + L to lock machines :)

Also, thankgod for paper clips and the CDrom unlock switch on the facia, never.....never....build a server for a company that are due to collect it 1hr before they're supposed to arrive and then get a packet of posit notes stuck in the CDrom drive.

What about "Most Lucky Saves?" You know that feeling you get when something you think has blown up but actually hasn't it's the best feeling in the world.

I had to a head office move, there was 3 of us doing it and as I was tearing down the equipment in the old comms room ready for loading into the van, I pick up the DC server and get the worse static shock I've ever had, even though I knew the internals would be ok, I couldn't stop myself from getting really worried about it, when we down in the pub for a quick drink before installing all the equipment I though i was going to be sick for the worry, anyway install everything, hook my laptop, login into the domain. Machine autorised and Account authenicated, Phew.
 
I've never had a lucky save... it either blew up or didn't.
To all the newbies out there, I implore you, especially if you have new and expensive hardware, don't do anything stupid so you can end up here. when we give you advice on the forums, please listen to us. We've had the benefits of screwing up massively. We want to spare you this. So if we seem harsh after repeating the same thing over and over, its not because we are pissed at you per say, but we can't stand to see good hardware go out so soon after you've gotten it.
 
Software screw ups? Avast was a damn pain, I had to disable it before i could configure my router & ap. I had to translate some obscure page on some random website before i nfound that out. Beforehand, I thought the router was broken.
Nero InCD + windows cd burning enabled = blue screen every time i tried to shut down. Great way to kill data.

Hardware screw ups? Within a month of getting a fecal-matter-like-acer (I was a noob then ) I broke something messing around in the bios. Sent in back, got it replaced, no questions.
On my first ever computer, a 33mhz 386 (this was 5 years ago), i attached full size stereo speakers to the onboard sound header. Killed the hard drive.

The other day I had this computer smoking when I was messing around with wires on my homebuilt fan controller. The switches i'm using have built in lamps. I wired them up so the lamps would work. This went fine, until i switched one of the fans off, at which point, the computer would die. I switched it back on, and tried switching some of the other fans off... The computer started smoking 8O
I couldn't find any burn marks though, and its working fine 😱


As for doing stupid things, about a week ago, i painted the entire interior of my case uv reactive green. Looks awesome. I'm suprised it still works.
 
I just forgot to use the standoffs when I was attaching the board to the case.

How can one ever forget something like that. Give your "forgetfullness" the righteous name and admit that you didn't know you need standoffs :lol:
 
Hey no need to get all worked up 😀
One can't know everything at that age.

Let me tell you my story. I had to fix an old overheating Athlon XP. I turned it off, opened the case and put it on the side. Then I removed heatsink, cleaned it and the CPU, and I tightened the spring which holds the heatsink with pliers because it was lose (poor contact was the cause for overheating).

After remounting heatsink (which went with one slip of a flat screwdriver right into the board) and turning it on it wouldn't post.

I was afraid that I damaged some SMD component with a screwdriver on the mainboard and I took it to the qualified service where a friend of mine there told me that it was PSU.

You can imagine my surprise when he told me that I killed it even before I started working on it when I moved the case to the side because capacitors in the PSU were all f.cked up (cheap chinese 300w trash costing around $10) and caused a short circuit when I turned it back on.

That el cheapo PSU took the RAM and the mainboard with it so it cost around $100 to get a working computer again.

That was my worst and completely unintentional screwup and it wasn't even my fault. Luckily I didn't have to pay for it.

A close friend of mine broke plastic retention mechanism for S478 cooler two times. I managed to find him a replacement first time he did it but second time I told him to go forth and multiply.

Another close friend of mine was attaching friends HDD on a live machine (his own), basically a thing I did numerous times without any problem, and he managed to short-circuit the PSU when he plugged the molex.

It turned off so he turned it back on and BLAM!!!. His HDD (not the added one) went up in smoke.

That wouldn't happen if:

- he knew that he should unplug the PSU from the outlet and let it sit for a few minutes to discharge

- if the PSU had protective circuit requiring you to reset it (by unplugiing it or by flipping the 1-0 switch) before allowing you to power it on again
 
My first system I ever built: I installed everything, tried to turn on. power goes on, turns right back off with a beep. Tried many things. Finally took the HSF off the CPU... HSF had a thin plastic shield on its contact surface that said "please remove before installing"
lol

everything worked fine once I fixed that and reapplied the TIM
 
Probably the best one was on one of my very first builds. It was a Micro ATX build using a AMD Thunderbird. Can't rememeber the MB brand. But I ordered the CPU & MB as a combo. The company claimed they test all combos before shipping them. Recieved everything and put it together. The Tbird was already seated in the socket and had a QC tested sticker on it. So I put the HSF on it and fired everything up. System just kept beebing. Shut it down and checked the CPU, It was HOT! VERY HOT! Then I noticed that the arrows didn't line up for the socket and processor. QC tested my ass! Guess it was my fault for not checking it out first. I should have caught it but didn't even pay attention. Needless to say, My T-bird 1200 was smoked! They refused to replace it and I never did business with them again. :evil:
 
Here is my story:
1. I was being a noob with my multi boot setup with 2x xp's and a 98 (which i installed after xp) and used fixmbr when i didn't really know what it did. I somehow hid all my ntfs partitions from windows 98. It took me 10 hours to diagnose the problem and 10 minutes to fix. I left the 98 drive alone after that.
BTW, if you cop the one crap computer in the class and you have a dumb teacher, pull out the network cable. It works out a treat if you logon using a network.
Has anyone tried to overclock a computer at school and screwed it up?
 
bought a pic express 4x motherboard with out knowing, for a week my new pic express system was getting our paced by an old 9600xt
 
Status
Not open for further replies.