Worst PC Build Screw Ups

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Well it's not quite as fantastic as some of these other stories, and it was my friend (quite honestly) who did this one and then came to me asking why it wouldn't work anymore...

He was building a system for a customer, was worried about getting the job out the door as soon as possible. He started to screw in the standoffs, but with no regard for which holes matched what his VIA board had on it. Put a standoff in every hole on the backplane and then started to screw in the motherboard, shifting it into place as he did so. Ended up pushing a resistor across one of the misplaces standoffs, scraping it off the back of the board, one right near the CPU. Machine wouldn't boot and he was wondering why that resistor mattered, and why he shouldn't have placed a standoff there. Wouldn't it just lend extra support to the board? Did its being metal matter too? Even if it hadn't touched the resistor? Does metal conduct electricity?
 
This wasn't a real bad one, but my first build I didn't turn the PSU rocker on the back from "0" to "-". I spent two days troubleshooting, disassembled everything, and took the PSU to CompUSA to have it tested.

Here's the real kicker: CompUSA's technician said the PSU was faulty. On my way home, however, I noticed that the rocker switch was on the "off" position and realized that the dummy at CompUSA tested it that way. I put the PSU back into the computer, flipped it to the "on" position and everything booted up. What a stupid mistake.
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I had a similar situation when i thought my power supply wasn't working (it was actually a problem in the motherboard). Took the PSU to a Geek Squad, the guys at Best Buy. Sure enough, they told me the thing was dead (which I had told them earlier as my hypothesis...). So i RMA'd the power supply back to Newegg's City of Industry in Cali (i live in Virginia), waited another week, got the brand new one back and the same thing was happening, at which point i knew it was a mobo problem. Luckily the mobo was cheap and only about 75$, so it was more of a loss of time and effort. The whole experience ratified my thought that the guys at these technical stores don't know what they're doing most of the time.
 
I've got two. Both are really, really stupid.

I had a 2600 Barton. I decided to flash the BIOS to my motherboard (an aged piece of MSI Crud) and it didn't work, so my board was of no use. I used another computer to find proper BIOS and flashed it and I thought I was back in business, but when I looked at the BIOS it said that I had a 1900 running on FSB 100. Well, that wasn't right, I knew, the chip had 233 FSB, so I just cranked that sucker right on up. I was sleep-deprived at the time, and well, tired of dealing with the thing. That the FSB only went to 200 should have been a clue. Anyway, when I turned it on, there was a popping sound and it never came up again.

The next one had to do with an upgrade. I bought a 754 chip OEM, but I thought it was a 939 chip. My motherboard had instructions for both 754 and 939 chips (it came as a combo purchase). So, I put the poor little chip in the way the manual said to put it in for 939 chips, pulled down the zip slider, then put on the heatsink. When I turned on the computer, it didn't boot. "Hmm", says I, so I pull it apart and look at the CPU. 27 bent pins - crimped, not just bent out of the way. So, using a small pair of pliers and a couple of credit cards I bent them all back into place. 7 full hours later, I was ready to try again, and I noticed that the pins didn't seem to line up with the holes...

I was, and still am, amazed that it still works.

I learned alot that day...
 
Mac screw ups are also accepted.
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Well, my aunt, not I, got a dual powermac G5. The guy at compusa convinced her that a mac was better somehow, although how I'm not sure. She is really into gaming and loved the programs she had on her old computer (windows 98). After $3800 USD, and 2 weeks of grueling hell, she sold it (the store wouldnt take it back). So, kids, the moral of the story is dont throw away your sanity, life, and well being on a mac. Buying one, imo, is worse that blowing metal shavings into your precious gaming rig. DON'T DO IT!!! She got an HP and kept the cinemaview monitor (which is something apple did right).
 
Im building a new rig tomorrow. I fully expect to be posting again on here later that day!

To date I have not personally done anything particulary bad. A friend though... This was special.

I spent the evening helping him contruct his brand new PC downstairs in the front room. Once we were done it tested OK. All was good. The problem came upon carrying the PC upstairs to where it was to be kept.

Fortunately for me it was him that neglected to fit the case back together properly because as he carried it up the stairs part of the case that he was using as a grip came off. This resulted in a brand new build bouncing down the stairs to end in a pile at the bottom. It wasn't pretty!
 
:lol: Speaking of dumb friends... Back in the '80s I went shopping for a new dot matrix printer (laserjets were far too expensive then). So my friend from the office decided to tag along, although he didn't own a computer. You know the type - real nerd's nerd - coke-bottle glasses, Moe haircut and 60's 'Howdy Doody" plaid clown pants. I usually tried to keep my distance from him in public, so nobody would associate the two of us :lol: .

After I finish looking and am standing in line to pay for the new printer, I hear all this shouting from the rear of the store. Apparently my friend wanted to buy some Diablo-type daisy wheel printer and was asking a sales rep about compatibility issues, and finally blew his top when the rep asked 'What kind of computer are you going to be hooking it up to?' one too many times. My friend started shouting "I don't have any g*ddamn f*cking computer, you f*cking moron!" at the top of his lungs! Anyway the manager comes over and kicks us both out of the damn store! He must have seen us come in together or something... Most embarrassing moment ever.

Needless to say I never went shopping with that guy again...
 
worst mistake was on a old 66Mhz intel with a 2MB HDD(fast as hell :wink: ) i was messing about with it when i accidently pulled out one of the litte black connectors from the motherboard you kno the little black connecter things, well i quickly plugged it back into place(well so ithought) needless to say i had plugged it in incorrectly, the computer started and the plastic covering on the wire heated and melted sending the thing up in smoke and flames.

other silly mistake was buying a AGP GFX card for a mobo that only supported PCI.
 
Well since you are building I though I might share this with you and everyone else here:

Murphy's Computing Laws Treat 'Em as Gospel Folks...

1. When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.

2. When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it's probably obsolete.

3. The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.

4. When the going gets tough, upgrade.

5. For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.

6. To err is human . . . to blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human, it is downright natural.

7. He who laughs last probably made a back-up.

8. If at first you do not succeed, blame your computer.

9. A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.

10. The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.

11. A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want to do.

12. A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.

13. The computer will work perfectly at the repair shop.

14. Never test an error condition you don't know how to handle.

And Finally:

15. Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
These are our 15 Commandments. Live by them or be prepared to put your head thru a wall in fustration.
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Thanks to everyone for the submissions and please keep them coming. :lol:
 
yeah baby, hooray for BIG WATER!

one day while browsing the internet (firefox) i noticed my cpu temp increasingly going up. hmm i thought, thats really warm for this set up especially just browsing the internet. so i opened the side door on my case to see my pump had stopped and no water was flowing.

the block actually got so hot that the rubber ring actually leaked a few drops of coolant.

i cleaned it up and nothing was hurt, but every day from then on i always check to make sure that the pump kicks in and the water is flowing right.
 
Another 'friends' story: I had just built a 486 PC with a whopping 1x speed slot-load CD reader (which set me back a few hundred as I recall). I was showing it off to a friend who had brought his daughters over to play with mine, who was about 4 or 5. So I told my daughter to show them she already knew how to load some kids game or storybook that came on CD. After watching my daughter load and unload the discs a few times , my friend's 2-year old walks over, picks up a flat cardboard beer coaster and loads it into my brand-new CD drive!! 8O

It took me a week to disassemble the drive and pry the coaster out, and the drive would make funny noises afterwards, but at least I got it working again...
 
Not really a giant FUB but a screw up none the less.
Remember before the wonder that is SATA when we had, and still have IDE drives? You know how you always had to set one drive to slave if you had two drives on the ribbon? I got a deal on two drives from Tigerdirect, one was a 20GB the other was a 150GB. Not remembering to check behind and set the jumpers, I just pluged in the IDE cable and the molex.
I powered up the system, when to BIOS and tried to figure out why the dumb thing couldn't see either of the drives.
A friend of my father's who also was a electrical engineer, kindly pointed out to me that you had to set one of the drives as a slave and one as a master.
A newbie mistake I'll say. 😳

@Verndewd
Thanks for the promote. :trophy: For you
 
Lovin moses and his 3rd tablet 😉

The only thing bad so far as that I burned my fingers on an Athlon heatsink I put in my mom's PC. When I had put the system together, I didn't pay attention to where the main power connector bundle landed, and it sat just where it could touch the HS fan and stop it from spinning. Got so hot the PC was powering down and when I checked it, I scalded the ends of my fingers. Moved the wire bundle and it worked fine! Until about a year later that is, when the PS went up in smoke for some unknown reason. The little trail of smoke out the back of the PC was pretty funny though.
 
My first (and worst) PC screw up was the first time I laid eyes on one of these damn machines. It all goes downhill from there.

Ninja: It seems that, every day, your post count increases by 100. How do you do it?
 
I'm on the forums everyday, I don't have any classes till the mornings so i can spend time browsing the threads while I do my homework, I'm still in the forums while in class (and I still have an A- average suckas), have multiple windows open, and try to help as many people as possible.
Did I mention that I've been addicted to coffee since I was 5, so I don't go to sleep till 2:30 EST? :twisted: Hasn't stunted my growth yet.
Matter of fact, I recommend coffee to anyone under my age of 18 who is reading this.
 
Matter of fact, I recommend coffee to anyone under my age of 18 who is reading this.
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So do I. Right now, I'm drinking mocha that I made by mixing coffee with milk and nesquik. All of this while finishing a response paper that's due tomorrow. I have writer's block, so I'm wasting my time on the forumz :lol: .

Oh, yeah; I'm a high-school freshman.
 
6 feet 4 inches. (do I detect sarcasm in that O rly?)
Back on topic though...
Has anyone ever bought a component that didn't work with their motherboard? IE AGP card when you ment to buy a PCIe?
 
you had to set one of the drives as a slave and one as a master.
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If I got a dollar for every time I've had a problem with the HD jumpers....

I've also miswired the USB header. I didn't fry the Mobo - I fried an iPod. 😳 (Thankfully nobody at Best Buy ever questions my returns).

I had an original IBM PC - I got it for free a few years ago from someone upgrading to a top-of-the-line PIII. I wanted the keyboard (why doesn't anybody make spring keyboards anymore) - got a DIN to PS2 adapter, and forgot that the original PC keyboard used different key scancodes than they do today. Needless to say, my garbage was about 100 pounds heavier that week. (I considered keeping it for nostalgia, but it just took up way too much space, and weighed a freakin' ton.)
 
guys as one of the youngest ppl on the forum at 12 (don't get me wrong, i know my hardware), you're jinxing me. Im building my first when kentsfeild when it comes out, and i hate u guys for this. lol, well you learn with mistakes so w/e
 
I have another great story, this one involving my friend.

He insisted on being cheap when it came to building his brand new computer ...except for the mobo, the processor and the video card (p4 prescott, dunno the mobo, and a 9800pro)

Well, the thing that I warned him over and over and over about was not to buy a cheap case that comes with a high wattage psu (you know the kind that last a little over 30minutes). I told him straight up, buy a decent case that won't easily dent and buy a seperate antec psu. He refused to listen because he is cheap and needless to say "I told him so"

He took all of his parts over to my house so we could assemble it for our 10 man lan party that we held a few times a year. CS and Wacraft 3 were on the list, but he wanted to truely put his new machine to the test, so he installed Flight Simulator 2004. About 5 minutes after taking off a really loud "BANG" came from his case. His monitor went black and sparks were boucing off the fan at the back of his psu in a spectacular light show directly infront of me (our machines where back to back). He yelled jumped up and unplgged his psu immediately. Soon after all the laughter and me saying in my head over 100 times "I told you so" we all scrounged up enough money to buy him a 450 watt antec and the lan party continued. Luckily nothing but the psu was damaged.

Taking the psu apart we noticed a huge big black smuge where one of the large capacitors should have been and a lot of damage in the genereal vicinity.

That was just the PSU

I warned him about the plastic handle on top of his case(uhg, didn't he learn by now?), I told him I wouldn't trust it, just carry the case as if it didn't have handles but again he didn't listen. Rushing up to my other friends house for our 3 man lans we had every 2 weeks, he decided to carry the case by the handle and the rest of the stuff in paper bag under his other arm. Sure enough it broke and landed in the thick muddy rockey area at the front of his driveway. His case was muddy and serverly dented becasue of the cheap thin steel case...but after arriving at the lan party, his machine still worked.

Lesson : Dont buy cheap cases, especially if they come with a psu.
 
Many many years ago, I was building three different computers using three diffrerent brand cpus (remember when there were more than two?).

I was working on the Cyrix M2, with the motherboard on the bench, and had just booted it up when a cable (an led cable to the speaker) fell on the fan and the chip popped INSTANTLY as fast as a circuit breaker.
 
This is not one of mine, but my father-in-law one day decided that his, vintage at the time, Pentium 133 I believe was just too slow and that I guess he thought he needed more room on his hard drive. So he found a folder that he never used and decided to start deleting files from it, since it was obvious that they were never used... Needless to say he killed Windows, the folder was named Win95 if I remember it right. He did retrieve some hard drive space, but it turned out he could not find his Win95 CD key so needless to say he had to get a new computer...

Have to leave work now, great thread, maybe I will post a couple more later.
 
I have another great story, this one involving my friend.

He insisted on being cheap when it came to building his brand new computer ...except for the mobo, the processor and the video card (p4 prescott, dunno the mobo, and a 9800pro)

Well, the thing that I warned him over and over and over about was not to buy a cheap case that comes with a high wattage psu (you know the kind that last a little over 30minutes). I told him straight up, buy a decent case that won't easily dent and buy a seperate antec psu. He refused to listen because he is cheap and needless to say "I told him so"

He took all of his parts over to my house so we could assemble it for our 10 man lan party that we held a few times a year. CS and Wacraft 3 were on the list, but he wanted to truely put his new machine to the test, so he installed Flight Simulator 2004. About 5 minutes after taking off a really loud "BANG" came from his case. His monitor went black and sparks were boucing off the fan at the back of his psu in a spectacular light show directly infront of me (our machines where back to back). He yelled jumped up and unplgged his psu immediately. Soon after all the laughter and me saying in my head over 100 times "I told you so" we all scrounged up enough money to buy him a 450 watt antec and the lan party continued. Luckily nothing but the psu was damaged.

Taking the psu apart we noticed a huge big black smuge where one of the large capacitors should have been and a lot of damage in the genereal vicinity.

That was just the PSU

I warned him about the plastic handle on top of his case(uhg, didn't he learn by now?), I told him I wouldn't trust it, just carry the case as if it didn't have handles but again he didn't listen. Rushing up to my other friends house for our 3 man lans we had every 2 weeks, he decided to carry the case by the handle and the rest of the stuff in paper bag under his other arm. Sure enough it broke and landed in the thick muddy rockey area at the front of his driveway. His case was muddy and serverly dented becasue of the cheap thin steel case...but after arriving at the lan party, his machine still worked.

Lesson : Dont buy cheap cases, especially if they come with a psu.
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Don't you hate how ignorant people get all the luck?
 
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