Worst PC Build Screw Ups

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Did you read the link? I'm agreeing with you...

Godwin's law says "if anyone throws accusations of being a Nazi or Hitler around, the argument is over. Ended. No more discussion."

I was going "woohoo!" because, hey, no more people crapping on this funny thread (although maybe crapping inside funny computers).

Sorry for the misunderstanding!
 
i had an old p2 back in the day as my first pc, i new absolutely nothing, it was dirty inside so i took a hoover to it, i even opened up the psu and was cleaning it out and looking at it (discovering) for some strange reason i decided to touch the shiny soldered pice of metal, not remembering that i still had the psu plugged int, WOW did i get a shock and a half, been scared off psu's ever since 🙁
 
my worst screw up:
i tryed to remove the cpu heat sink on a gateway with a p4 2.0 so i could put in a p4 2.8.

The damned heatsink would not come off, so i pulled a little harder and it came out and to my supprise the processor was still attached to the heatsink. I tryed everything to get the processor off of the heatsink with no luck.

I decided to try to see if i could put it back in the socket.

Of course the little arm that locks the processor down was in the way so i snapped it off.

Then i spent about an hour trying to slide the processor socket into the locked possition while the processor and heat sink were in place, But it wouldnt work.

So i decided to just hold the processor and heat sink in place and power on the system. Just to see if it would work.

At this point i saw sparks shoot out of the side of the processor, followed by the nice blue smoke.

It burnt half of the pins off of the processor, and blew a good chunk of plastic out of the socket.
 
This is more of a maintenance screw up than a build but here goes. It started innocently enough as vacuuming out dust carpets inside the case. I noticed a thick layer of dust coating the two fans on my old Voodoo 5 so I took the vacuum to them as well. As I didn't know much about computers then I didn't see a problem with what I was doing. The fans were small enough that they fit perfectly one by one over the end of the vacuum hose. When I turned on the vacuum the first fan spun much quicker than it was ever intended to. With all the air being pulled through the fan and into the hose the little fan began emitting a noise identical to a kazoo. A normal person might have stopped at this point but I was so amused I did it again...and again....and again. I reinstalled that fan back onto the card....and then did the same thing to the other fan...again...again...and again. After I put everything back together and fired the computer back up I noticed my once completely silent Voodoo5 fans now hissed like a pair of baby snakes. I stay away from vacuums now and have discovered something I like to call common sense...and medication.

Mhome
 
Hey guys, this thread is supposed tobe about "worst PC build screw ups", not about "worst political screw ups".

Kindly leave politics, religion and sexual orientation to Yahoo or Myspace.
 
Hi guys,

Must say the worst I have ever seen was 2 friends of mine were busy migrating a server. They had the whole weekend to do so, after setting up the new server they realised that they had the new test server it only had 2 processors in, where the production server had 4 (I think it was some of the first gen XEON MP's, 1000$ - 1200$ at the time) Well no problem they are qualifies Compaq ACE's so...

All you do is take out the processors from the production server en put them in the test server and then the roles are reversed (both machines were the same spec except for the processors).

"smoke test" ... Houston we might have a problem... there was a deadly silence (Sorry no popping or smoke, but also no breathing or gasping until later) They checked and rechecked but still no power.

They decide the only thing that changed was the processors, so swap them back... this required taking out the 2 newly installed processors and replacing them with the MP blanks that came with the machine. Power on... and nothing... Back to the now test server... replace the 2 processors that originally came with the server... Power on... and nothing.

They the put the MP blanks into the test server and it powered up with no problem... It seemed like a couple of fried processors.

Then a round of musical processors ensued, they replaced one processor at a time in the test server that was working.

It turned out that they managed to fry 3 out of the 4 processors on the production server, needless to say the production server only ran on 2 cores for a couple of days until Compaq could RMA 4 ZEON MP processors.
 
If we go into the server's upgrade dance, here's one I took part in - forced and ordered because I smelled a rat, but it was my boss talking, so...

Here goes: there was a 3U server running 2K Advanced Server that was running MS SQL Server 7. It was a production server, but it was late in the evening so no one was using it any more - and anyway it had just been restored, if I remember well.

Well, the beast was using a pair of P3-733 (the server model, coming with their own VRMs on a daughter board) and 512 Mb of RAM. The boss wanted to make the SQL server faster (it was several Gb, accessed simultaneously and all the time by 50 employees) by adding more RAM, and since we had a couple of spare 256 Mb sticks...

I told him I had my doubts: at the time, having 1 Gb of RAM was not something anybody saw very often, and I thought making the attempt without preliminary tests (or even, reading some results on similar configs) was foolish. Boy, was I proven right.

See, 32-bit OSes in the NT family can't address more than 4 Gb of physical RAM - accessing the rest via paging. Since at the time having 4 Gb of RAM was a distant dream, it was more or less understood that anything over 4 Gb would be swap space. Add to it a 512 Mb addressing range dedicated to the OS, and only 3.5 Gb can be accessed by apps. Since it is difficult to take into account without a performance impact, many apps merely expect to encounter at most 2 Gb of RAM - thus do any 'internal' addressing on 31-bit. Now then, add 1 bit for parity (just to do it 'old-school'): 30 bit addressing means 1 Gb of RAM max. Well, if this wasn't the explanation for this exact problem, it must have been really close: as soon as I was done installing the extra RAM and rebooted, I noticed extreme sluggishness once the SQL server process had restarted: it was eating up all CPU resources, making the server unuseable.

The boss wanted me to reinstall the server OS. Knowing that it was a very bad solution to a very strange problem, I decided we'd better call a colleague, who told me 'parity' - I was then sure that all we had to do was remove a RAM stick and be done with it. And we did - with tremendous success.

Not my screw-up, but imagine how smug I felt after my boss had sent me a black look meaning 'what did you do to my server?!' after the 'upgrade', and I was proved right?
 
As a matter of fact, he was the IT department boss - but was soon replaced.

Incidentally, I had the new boss running out of my office very soon once he arrived when, after one of the staff got a screwed up laptop, I used several spares, my own laptop and some kniknack to build a 'laptop stack' (I needed to get the HD from one laptop, the ethernet card from another, a new laptop that could accomodate both at the same time to clone the fourth anew - I stacked them all one over the other to save on desk real estate).

Sometimes it's good to be me 😀
 
One of my PC that I built many many years ago, can't remember, a Cyrix 166MHz setup. When I was flashing my motherboard, the weather outside was raining cats and dogs, then lightning zapped, my whole house's electric supply was tripped, and guess what? My motherboard gone, back then, that stupid motherboard cost me a whole $120, and my motherboard was only 2 days old. Brought it back to the shop, they won't replace, coz they claimed that warranty would be void once I flash the bios. What a bull shit.
 
the little fan began emitting a noise identical to a kazoo.
I did it again...and again....and again. I then did the same thing to the other fan...again...again...and again.
Mhome
Click to expand...
😛 :lol: I don;t know what's funnier, The Kazoo sound or ...again...again...and again!
 
One of my PC that I built many many years ago, can't remember, a Cyrix 166MHz setup. When I was flashing my motherboard, the weather outside was raining cats and dogs, then lightning zapped, my whole house's electric supply was tripped, and guess what? My motherboard gone, back then, that stupid motherboard cost me a whole $120, and my motherboard was only 2 days old. Brought it back to the shop, they won't replace, coz they claimed that warranty would be void once I flash the bios. What a bull ****.
Click to expand...

That brings new meaning to 'flashing your bios'.

:lol:

Bad luck dude, but also it's not good to handle the electronics during a natural build up of static electricity at any rate.
 
i think the worst case i ever did was putting in a REALLY cheap CD drive in my 486 sx 25 the side was for some reason made of aluminium :/
any way the cd inside shattered and sent pices through thin casing of the rear of the cd drive what ever the shards broke the PC didn't like it and the whole PC went bye bye! fortunatly for me the PC was an old one my dad was letting me play with!
still my fist wiff of blue smoke!
 
The worst thing me and a mate done (we decided after a few vodkas) that we'd have a little look inside his PC, this was not a common thing to look in a PC (have built systems myself) but while drunk it's not such a good idea. So we had a look at his PC and wanted to look at his CPU, unknown to us that they have things such as a heat sink and a fan, but thet didn't stop us...We decided to 'help' it come off with a screwdriver...That really wasn't clever. Managed to force the CPU out and rip half the pins off. But still this still didn't stop us...So we then proceded to super glue the CPU onto the motherboard (this really isn't clever...Never do this, not even wen you're sober)

IT still works...Somehow, not sure, somewhere this should of broken when we managed to rip out the CPU, fan and heatsink in one go. Managed to damage the motherboard a bit too...
 
The worst thing me and a mate done (we decided after a few vodkas) that we'd have a little look inside his PC, this was not a common thing to look in a PC (have built systems myself) but while drunk it's not such a good idea. So we had a look at his PC and wanted to look at his CPU, unknown to us that they have things such as a heat sink and a fan, but thet didn't stop us...We decided to 'help' it come off with a screwdriver...That really wasn't clever. Managed to force the CPU out and rip half the pins off. But still this still didn't stop us...So we then proceded to super glue the CPU onto the motherboard (this really isn't clever...Never do this, not even wen you're sober)

IT still works...Somehow, not sure, somewhere this should of broken when we managed to rip out the CPU, fan and heatsink in one go. Managed to damage the motherboard a bit too...
Click to expand...

wait it still works?!?!?! you ripped the cpu out leaving the pins in the board so you just put the cpu back, i cant beleive that, amazing. even when your drunk!
 
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