Worst PC Build Screw Ups

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I worked at IBM many years back in the UK for their European Helpdesk supporting desktop/servers/OS/2 etc etc ... One day a guy from the Italian line came over to work on the UK line as we were short staffed. A customer phoned up to say that he brought his Aptiva PC from the US to the UK & plugged it in & was having a problem in windows. The Italian guy asked if the customer had changed the power switch from 110V to 220 V on the back of the PSU (there was a wee red switch you could move so it worked on either back then). Customer said nom it's still at 11V, Italian guy said that wouldn't work, customer said it does, so italian guy .. wait for it ... goes up to our test PC's, switches it off & changed the voltage on the back to 110V. He then switches it on, there is a loud bang & funnily enough that PC got completely fried. I haven't laughed so much in a long long time ....

..I personally once snapped a DX2-66 chip in half whilst trying to get it into the old sockets ... OMG ... Those chips were like £200 back then ($320) .. ooops.
 
haha that reminds me of the time we pranked my roomate. We used the old desktop snapshot: alt+print screen to take a shot of his desktop with no apps open. We cut the start menu off and freezed his start bar to visible right? Then we moved all of his desktop icons to a folder and replaced his wallpaper with the screen shot. He thought something was wrong because he couldnt use any of the desktop "icons" but everything in the start menu worked. After letting him freak out believing it was a virus, we finally let him off the hook.
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That reminds me of a similar work prank... My other half did a similar thing to one of the guys she worked with... alt+print screen desktop... hide icons/hide and lock start menu....etc

Anyways, normally he would come to her for computer help so she figured it was harmless and a bit of fun... not this time... the n00b rebooted the pc.. which came up the same way... so he rang our companies helpdesk for support... they remote desktopped to the machine, couldnt figure it out, so they send site support... site support have a quick look, have no idea either and re-image the whole PC.... Says alot for the calibre of some of the people we employ....
 
i have a few motherboards lying around and decided to do up one of them

while playing around with a socket 7 mobo, fitted an AMD K6-2-400 that i got off ebay, layed the board on newspaper, conect the cpu, mem, hard drive and psu, and used a flatblade screwdriver to short the power pins to switch on and sat back waiting for the post screen, while staring at the blank screen for 20-30 secs, then SHIT, unplugged the power cord from the psu - in all this time, i had forgotten to install the heatsink/fan. D'OH! fitted the hsf, and powered on, nothing. works fine with a p1-200, but can run at 366 with the right chip(K6-2)
 
In high school, some 8 years ago, i used to take a quick screenshot like you said and replace the wallpaper. I usually kept the icons there but I would collapse the start menu bar. It was fun seeing our teacher try and figure it out.
 
noobishly huh? who are you to be the judge of that. Are you the "Print screen wallpaper Prank" expert?

I have done that many time, hardly ever the same way.

After applying this "Prank", I have seen people screw everything up. I think it applies here. Close enough anyway, I as just replying to a previous post.
 
Yes. The printscreen wallpaper prank is a very basic yet effective way to prank someone. It does get old though, as its one of the most common and well known pranks out there. Most people just drag their mouse over to the edge to reveal the real start-bar and change their background... all is well... boring!


If you would like to step up your pranks, next time you do that trick, don’t bother hiding the icons or taskbar. ctrl-alt-del --> end task on explorer.exe. There... now the prank is more technical, and thus raises it's status above noobish. :)
 
ctrl-alt-del --> end task on explorer.exe. There... now the prank is more technical, and thus raises it's status above noobish.
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yes, obvious. but we did not have access to end task in school back then.
 
Comp,

That is a very noobish way of gaining admin access to a machine.. 😉

Especially since admin is still locked in Safe Mode.

He was thinking along the lines of loading up a Linux live cd like Gnoppix and mounting the windows partition and deleting the admin entry in the san file.

That is the upgraded "not noobish" way of doing this task 😉
 
Comp,

That is a very noobish way of gaining admin access to a machine.. 😉

Especially since admin is still locked in Safe Mode.

He was thinking along the lines of loading up a Linux live cd like Gnoppix and mounting the windows partition and deleting the admin entry in the san file.

That is the upgraded "not noobish" way of doing this task 😉
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haha thats great! Nice comeback.
Anyway, depending on how good the school IT is, many times the admin is not set, so in safe mode, you can bypass admin. And your right, loading up a linux kernal (winternals) is a great way, though slow way, to do it. I prefer a windows admin reset boot utility for speed of doing it as so the teachers dont notice.
 
This is the screwup section... There is a thread entirly set aside for Pc Pranks. And if you read it, you will find you are doing the print-screen joke very noobishly.
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If anyone missed it... the point of my post was that one of our "not much" Helpdesk staff couldnt figure out this simple prank, and neither could onsite support... which all ended in the machine being wiped and re-installed from scratch....

Off to look up the thread on pranks now... im in an office environment with sooooo much potential.... :twisted:
 
Too bad. I seriously need an upgrade, especially my gpu. My fx5700 barely runs carbon. My cpu isn't much to talk about either. The days of the Barton 2500+ has long gone.

Can't upgrade just yet though, need just a bit more. No use in upgrading little bit at a time...waste of money and I don't have that much to blow these days. Because of the rediculous ram prices I'm getting me a s939 X2 (I know it's old already but for me it's one heck of an upgrade) to keep my ram. For once I'll have a good GPU at least.

*edit* any donations will do :wink:
 
howz about dropping a screwdriver onto the motherboard WITH THE POWER ON (only had the motherboad and the PSU installed, hadnt realised i had left the damn thing plugged in after checking a dodgy power supply)

flash bang wallop goodbye brand new expensive motherboard, and a big black mark on the mobo tray - good for proving the story tho
 
Similar story, a roomate of mine in college was putting together all of the pieces of his brand new 6x86. He had taken the HD out to tranfer files to another PC before formatting so the HD was sitting on the case, not screwed in place. He needed to turn the computer, so he picked up the HD, moved the case, and set the HD green side down on the case. Sparks flew and the system cycled. It still worked after that but there was some sort of MB damage as it detected a different random amount of RAM on boot from then on. Some times it would lose 24K, sometimes it would lose 4 MB, always some random amount.
 
haha, thats crazy never heard anything like that before :lol:

i did however place a HD down on the carpet once (stupid stupid stupid)and it exploded, literally exploded. couldn't hear anything for about 10 minutes afterwards!

thing is it was a friends Dell computer i was fiddling with and he lost all his data (some 50gb of media, together with important docs for work) and his operating system as it was an oem version of windows.

i had to pay for a new HD and a new version of windows professional (ouch) he was very nice about it and said i didn't have to but when you put someone's job in jeopardy you kinda feel obligated 😳
 
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