Worst PC Build Screw Ups

Page 8 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Oh yeah, one more--I was on a BF1942/DC team for about 2 years, and one of my builds was to get better framerates in said game. In the end I had a Dual-raptor Raid-0, P4 3.2 Ghz, 2gb DDR400, 6800GT beast, but for the longest time I would get intermittent hang ups.

I was pissed! I could never host Vent, I could never successfully play an entire match, and it was sooo intermittent that sometimes WEEKS went by and I was ok but then I'd lock up, CTD, reboot like once an hour, and it always seemed to happen on tournament night! It was MADDENING, and I swapped nearly every single component trying to figure out what was causing it. I reinstalled so many times that I was putting in my XP serial number from heart! (I still remember bits of it.)

All this, for about 9 months, until I learned of a little utility called "memtest"...

Turns out that the last stick of my ram (4 sticks) was faulty and would call out failures at half way through, so unless my system got up to using more than 1750mb of memory, my system was rock solid.

Running DC and Vent? no problem. DC, Vent, Frapps, Punkbuster, Gamespy, BlackBagOps, and everything else I needed for a tournament match? CRASH.

Felt stupid and incredibly relieved at the same time when I saw all those errors in memtest. Haven't had that problem since. Oh yeah, you know what I started out with (2002 mind you)?

P4 2.4Ghz, 1gb DDR400, 2x40gb HDD's, Radeon 9700Pro, Audigy 5.1 card and a DVD player and a CD writer. Oh well, at least I was pretty pimp with the final system specs for a while.
 
ive had small stupid stuff happen - ribbon cable not pushed in all the way - card not seated completely - stuff like that

never once anything major (finds some wood to knock on)

but just last week my neighbor was hit with a bug to clean out his computer

he took off the heat sink cleaned the goo off his processor (stock heat pad)
he thought the goo was a bad thing and reinstalled the CPU and heatsink with no thermal paste... i know what you are thinking now

well his computer refused to boot (nothing at all)

turns out he put the CPU in totally wrong, 7 pins were broken off and all the rest of the pins were bent - think about this for a second - in order for all the pins to be bent, the processor wasnt even in the socket, hehe

so i let him borrow a 2.9ghz celeron (i installed it for him of course) so he has a working system

Almost wish i could figure out how to put the 7 pins back on this CPU just so its usable, without taking it to a jeweler or somethin like that, anyhow....

later
 
I know this has already been asked, but why does everyone hate VIA? I've used a few VIA chipset based boards and they werent that bad(they were fairly cheap boards but could accieve decent overclocks, ran fairly stable. Definetly worst that other chipsets but I dont think they were as bad as they are described here)

Otherwise, I dont know what my biggest screw up was, but one that was a good one was when I had a 10g aquarium setup beside my pc, at the time I had the case positioned under my desk and the aquarium stood above it.

Well one day, the aquarium decides to break and developes a medium sized hole in the front pane about 1/2 to 3/4 way down that causes the water to spill out almost directly onto my fairly new computer(the one currently in my sig, this event was some time ago). If you have seen the case before, then you know that there is a fan oppening on the very top and that is where ~1/2 of the water flowed into the case.
I'm not sure If I have mentioned but the computer was on at the time.

Amazingly nothing got damaged in the computer. The soundcard did do something funny before cutting out but it's fully functioning now. I was extremely lucky.

The next day I had gone and bought a new aquarium and have moved it to a position where if it breaks again, it will cause little damage. Thankfully some of the fish survived because not all the water spilled out. Since then it has been converted to saltwater and has been moved to the living room.

Well thats my story. I've gotten a few laughs out of it, but my dad at the time wasnt too happy with what happened, as he was the one who funded my new pc.


EDIT: Forgot to mention about a time in electronics class. We were working on a plug/outlet tester(this was a long time ago) and a friend of mine was almost finished his project but he messed up two wires on it, another friend of mine decided to test his project, while the first friend was away getting help from the teacher, by plugging it into an outlet. Next thing that happened was a loud pop, the covering blew off, and there was a very strong burning smell. needless to say, the first friend and the teacher weren't very happy.
 
Well one day, the aquarium decides to break and developes a medium sized hole in the front pane about 1/2 to 3/4 way down that causes the water to spill out almost directly onto my fairly new computer(the one currently in my sig, this event was some time ago). If you have seen the case before, then you know that there is a fan oppening on the very top and that is where ~1/2 of the water flowed into the case.
Click to expand...
Shocked.png

And it still survived? Good Grief!
Number 1 Water Damage story. :trophy:
I've been gone only for a day and look how much its grown! I've created a monster. Keep them coming.

EDIT:
Thank you everyone. Not just to those who post their stories but the veterans that respond to the posts that I don't see or have the oppertunity to answer. Wusy, verndewd, greenjelly, ches111, Clue69Less, StrangeStranger, angry_ducky and exit2dos, not to mention whoever I may have left out in my haste, thanks so much. 😀
 
I was in the Air Force stationed in England. I was proud of my Commodore 64, and had bought the 5-1/4 drive with my income tax return OOOOOO!
When I came home on a vacation I wanted to show the thing off to my dad (who had a TI-99), but I forgot the power cord to the floppy. This was in the day when power cords weren't just laying around. (No I am not the guy who started the wonder thread on very old computer, hehe) Suffice it to say I could only show him the comp and the little drawing pad. All the programs and games were on the floppies.

I've also learned about touching the outside of a PSU in barefeet, even when off, there is a mild current (I am serving as ground).

Fortunately pretty bland, lame experiences.
 
heres one ,
i was messing round w/ some older (lol)p3's a few weeks ago and having a few beers 8) (1st mistake) i have a collection of like well now 3 p3's and a assotment of old hp mb's had a system up and runnin (2nd mistake -shot of jack d) ok i thought tear it down and put in case give to poor needy person.
re assembled powered up ,ok all good celebrate with a few more beers.
take to needy persons apt above me (ok at this point :wink: had like 6 or 7 beers and a few shots)
he thanks me with a beer
hook up pc hit power and a LOUD pop happens and nothing im like wtf ,
open case and precariously "perched" on mb was(what was left of a ) a 2nd p3 with pins touching all kinds of small solder spots on mb...

the lesson here is beer + good idea = loud scary noise
 
I personally havn't screwed up too bad. Just the usual little mistakes, most of which have been mentioned by someone else.

but i'll never forger my first computer repair class in 7th grade. we had to fully disasymble some old crappy computers then reasymble them. my group's did fine. but the day that we had a sub (big guy bout 6' somethin and bout 390 8O ) another group somehow forces a small wire where it shouldn't have gone and smokes the wire. our sub freaks out and unplugs the computer tells everyone to run outside and takes the computer with. when we're outside, he says to us "I just saved your lives in there, you should thank me." :lol: i'll never forget this big guy freakin out about a little smoke.

by the way, do those anti-static wrist thingies really do anything, because i never used one in my life and i havn't killed anything yet. maybe just dumb luck

--------------------------------
there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
 
Are you sure? Its kinda weird. You see, I bought it used off ebay... XFX does have some kinda double warrenty, but when I tried to get support, their page was down...

Both ways, my family is planning on a new PC a little after Vista, so this ol' thing will be obsolete. I think I may OC it like hell for fun...( 10 ghz maybe? Boom!)
 
My worst mistake was not that I forgot to connect the power dongle to my 6800 video card, but when I turned the computer on and got that warning tone and I quickly pulled off the side cover and plugged it in with the power still on. My video card was a goner.

hball
Click to expand...
wtf? I had done the same thing in my 6800. I heard the beeping, I immediately knew I forgot to connect the extra power cable, then switched off the pc, connect it and boot up and everything was good. How did you fry yours? scary!!!!!!
 
My worst PC screw up was 3 years ago when I stuck in a 128mb sd ram stick on a p4 motherboard that supported both sd and ddr ram. There was also a 256mb ddr stick on the board already. Turned on the power switch the pc wouldnt start. I removed the sdr stick and it still wouldnt power up. I swapped the motherboard for a new board i just bought off of ebay for very cheap and tried booting the system up. Same problem. It turned out by mixing in that sdram stick with the ddr already on I fried the cpu and motherboard. Pissed me off because I fried the new motherboard too.
 
not sure if it counts as screw up...


I worked at a computer shop, which taught me a lot, even tough i knew more than my boss oo, we had this client that complained about his old old computer, bitched that it was always shutting down or failing, that it ran slow and that no matter what we said it was bad and we NEEDED to fix it, becuase since it ran, it MUST had a fix

the thing is , i tested the computer for hours, benchamrked it overnight, it never locked up or anythin, yet the guy kep coming back, for refund/guarantee abou the machine still beeing slow/restarting

the guy was rich, but DIDNT want to buy another one, becuase even tough it was faulty under his eyes, it still worked


what was i to do.??


pry the cpu out from its slot1 while it was on....


the guy happy to proove that the machine was failing, laid down the cash for a new one, convinced that his old one didnt boot anymore, becuase as i explained, capacitors and circutry where starting to fail and this was bound to happen any moment....

<...< my boss was happy to sell the stuff, the client was happy cause now his new machine had no trouble at all, and was convinced his machine died by natural causes....


>...> then no harm done 😀
 
Swapped out a 366 for a 400 slocket...with the power still on. Smoke.

Took the fan off an X800GT to see what GPU it was...forgot to put the fan back on. (don't ask, I got distracted.) click. dead.

Plugged the floppy power in, it was dark, thought it was in right, Smoke. BIG smoke.
 
My worst mistake was not that I forgot to connect the power dongle to my 6800 video card, but when I turned the computer on and got that warning tone and I quickly pulled off the side cover and plugged it in with the power still on. My video card was a goner.

hball
Click to expand...
wtf? I had done the same thing in my 6800. I heard the beeping, I immediately knew I forgot to connect the extra power cable, then switched off the pc, connect it and boot up and everything was good. How did you fry yours? scary!!!!!!

Read the quote carefully. Perhaps he fried his by plugging the cable in with the system power still ON.....
 
I have to say that this is one of my all-time favorite threads.

Personally, I've only really been into computers for about 1 1/2 years. Until we got DSL (Feb. 2k5), I thought that computers were only for games (Need for Speed, Sim City, and Roller Coaster Tycoon), and the occasional school project.

Anyway, I started getting into computers when my (admittedly refurbished) HP m1050y started randomly shutting down about a year ago. But before I tell that story, I'll tell how I got the computer.

Two months after we got DSL, my computer (Dell Dimension 4400) was totally f^cked up from viruses and sypware. I didn't know about viruses and spyware, because, prior to then, we had never had internet worth using.

My friend's dad (who works for HP) was in town, so I asked him to come by and take a look at my PC. He came by, and suggested that he take it back to Colorado with him. A couple days later, he called, told me what was wrong, and gave me two solutions:

1) A new HDD
2) A new computer

I (stupidly) took the second option, and he found what appeared to be a great deal. It was an HP m1050y media center with the following specs:

ASUS proprietary mobo (915 chipset, I beleive)
P4 540 Prescott (eew; a Prescott)
1GB DDR400
X600 PCIe
250GB SATA hard drive
DVD burner
DVD reader
SoundBlaster Audigy 2
TV Tuner (I never used it, cause we don't have cable)
WinXP MCE 2004 (I think)
A sh!tload of bloatware
HP case
300W Hipro PSU (19A on the +12V rail!)

I beleive it was a refurb, but I'm not completely sure. It was built in June 2004, when Prescott, PCIe, and SATA were just coming out. The quote from HP said $3000, but my friend's dad got it for $625 off of uBid (of course, I had to pay him back for this).

The Dimension 4400 was treated to a HDD reformat, a Windows reinstall, and became the family computer. It, too, has had its share of problems since then (June 2005, which is when I got the HP), but that will be the subject of another post.

I got the HP in June 2005, and it worked fine for a couple of months. However, I was always wondering why this "great new computer" seemed so slow and unresponsive.

Around November 2005, the computer started to shut off randomly. It got so bad that it would turn off 5 minutes after I turned it on.

So I call a friend of my dad's, an electrical engineer from University of Michigan. He comes over, looks at the computer, and says that there's a heat problem. So I ran it with the side of the case off for a while, and that worked, but only for about a month.

The computer continued to shut down, so I replaced the case and CPU cooler, but it didn't make a difference.

Eventually, I just got a new CPU (A64 3700+), motherboard (DFI nF4-DAGF), and power supply (Thermaltake TR2 430 watt). There wasn't anything wrong with the other power supply, but I didn't trust 300 watts to power my system.

This worked for a while, but then the mobo's USB and NIC failed. So then there's the fun of RMAing the board for a new one. I don't want to go into the details, but at least newegg is good with those things.

Finally, more than a year after I first got this POS, it works. I don't overclock, as I'm happy to have this crap working at stock speeds.

Also, since my dad doesn't trust me to fix my computer (I'll thank him for this when he's dying), all the work was done by his friend.

I see this whole computer experience as a mixed blessing: On the one hand, I wasted more than a year and $600+ making this thing work. On the other hand, I learned a lot about comptuers, from websites and forums such as this one.

Here's the cost rundown from this experience:

Original computer: $625
New Case: $50
New CPU: $220
New Motherboard: $80
Shipping Costs: $30
Labor Costs: $250+
Total: At least $1005
 
I've not had that many screwups, though i've had a few pretty close ones.

First machine i built was a 1ghz duron, i slipped fitting the heatsink and kinda chipped the edge of the core, somehow it still works fine many years later.


Worst non-screwup was funny, in a really bad way.

Was fixing a computer for a friend (he had an off the shelf job) Spent a while fitting a soundcard and cd burner for him, all went well until getting back into windows (Me 8O) and met a fair few BSoDs, so I just went ahead and sorted him an update to windows 2000.

All went as well as expected, everything worked fine, took it back to his place and got it setup. only for a *huge* thunderstorm to hit 2 hours later and kill his machine.


Less noteable: dropping a cheapy dell server down a flight of stairs, somehow it got off undamaged, has been running for 18 months with no issues.

Fitting an Arctic cooling heatsink on a 9800pro, accidentally overtightened the screws. dead.

Weirdest ever was a customer's computer, 20gb HDD, windows Me. Came to me failing to boot about half the time, so I backup the drive and get on with fixing it. turned out the machine had the most fragmented drive I have ever witnessed, less than 10gb filled but was totally fragmented.

So, I got on with defragging, only to have the drive die on the second pass.
Never did find out if it was just weird timing or the defrag that killed it.
 
No smole or for that matter losing any parts. Just a few really stupid things.

Only one worth noting and that was on this build (the comp i am now).

I had already built a computer before so i was not new to buildming computers, however unlike my last build i decided to do this build in one day on the floor of my basement (which is kinda dark) by just kinda throwing everything together in no real thought out order (and for the most part not reading the mobo manual carefully). Well i get everthing together fine but when i go to hit the power button on the front of my case nothing (read: absolutly nothing) happens.

So i spend my sunday kinda freaked out about why it isnt working (because i built this one with my own funds). I get back to school on moday and some of my computer freinds ask me the standard questions and make the standard suggestions (is the PSU on). One of them asks if the little plugs that go to the on of switch and the power light are connect and i say "yes". So i get back home thinking about what could be wrong and open my case this time looking in it with my flashlight. Then i notice that the connector for the on of switch is in the wrong spot on the mobo. I move that to the right spot and the computer has worked fine ever sense.

7800gt
AMD 3700
Asus A8N-E
160gig Seagate SATA
Cooler Master Centurion
1 gig DDR400 Patriot Mem


Thats worth quite alot back in november 2005 on a teenagers pay (aka almost nothing). Since then i have added a second 250 gig hard drive, an Audigy 2, and another gig of ram. Luckily all of those have gone flawlessly.
 
no smoke or anything, but a couple of dumb things...

I have an old compaq Presario with a P1 (runnung with a diff hdd) that had a power supply with a bad fan, so I opened it up, and first thing I did was touch the hard drive to move it to get to the PSU... BAD idea, Wound up getting a little shock, and that was the end of that, turned out only needed to be cleaned a little(the fan).

When I built the computer I have now, I started off with a Soyo 875 chipset board. something like I875P dragon 2 black label or somethin, well I ordered a 9800 AIW to go with this board, without checking the website... BAD IDEA, No radeon cards were supported by the motherboard, which I soon learned. I had someone help me out with the build, and he looked and found on the site, it was incompatible. I had never heard of a videocard being incompatible. ALSO, the board wasn't compatible with windows SP2... HOW THE FREAK CAN YOU SELL A BOARD THAT DOESNT WORK WITH WINDOWS???????? so I got rid of the board after not recieving my $120 in rebates and got a DFI lanparty Pro875B which I still have today.
 
I had an Athlon XP 1700+. I tried to overclock it about a Ghz..... It worked for a minute or two, and now I have it sitting in a collection of dead pentium 1 and duron processors.
 
Hey, sounds like my story:

First build, read the maunal from front to back, and put my MB in without brass standoffs because ASUS didn't bother to put that in. However, my PC worked for a year until I upgraded my GPU, thinking that the GPU was causing all my game crashes.

I put the new GPU in and had more problems. While working on it, it would turn on by me walking past it! Finally, I hit the power button one more time: a bright light appeared and I thought...oh sh**. Smoke rose from my MB...
 
When I was building my first PC (This one) I didn't know that the motherboard was supposed to be elevated from the case with the standoffs. Every time that I put a new screw in, the motherbord bent terribly. Looks like this is a common mistake, and im glad i decided to give those brass things a try before turning the thing on.
 
I would probably have done something similar if i hadn't watched Call for Help and The Screen Savers on techTV almost religiously before my first build. Come to think of it i probably would have never started building computers had it not been for that.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom