Hardware Show us your hardware horrors

Can I just say....wow long legal bit

 

Got a call from a uni student I knew a few years back "why is my computer making an odd scraping noise?".
I thought it'd just be fan bearing or something, until I saw the fridge magnets on her case...
No pic though, soz.

 

Pics or it didn't happen people!

 

I wish I had a picture of "the soup incident"!

 

not really much point in some cases, I could post a pic but it would just look like a normal card, a toasted gpu looks pretty much the same as a normal gpu, lol.

 

Sadly i don't have any pictures, but don't intend to win. I had two things happen. One was my friends computer wouldn't boot up properly. He was quite messy so thought first would open it up. Once opened had found that some ants had moved in a decided to setup their own little colony, which hadn't gone down too well, as they'd been carrying sugar around with them wherever they went due to all the sweets. The sugar had fried and just left black marks all over the place, lovelly.
Another story was, i'd custom fitted a new VGA cooler onto my trusty Nvidia 4700Ti ( it was a 4 series can't remeber the exact model but had 64 VGA RAM PHOAR!). Everything was fine for a long time, then one day it started to artifact and just be generally messed up, untill eventually it wouldn't boot. After taking the card out noticed a brown dust over the heatsink, and realised some of the capacitors had exploded (from what i can recall it happend quite a lot with the older non solid state capacitors)

 

I've got a couple of story's but you don't tend to be in the mood to take a photo when you're at the lowest point in your relationship with your latest bit of kit.
I blew up a PSU once. When I was doing my first new build the computer wouldn't boot up and I was trying everything to get it working. I wondered what the red switch on the back of the PSU did, maybe it was on the wrong setting? I flicked it and 240V shot through a PSU that was now set to accept 110V, there was a big blue flash, a bang and then a very sad looking boys face. Luckily none of my other hardware was affected. If I had bought a decent PSU there wouldn't have been a red, blow up PSU button on it, which taught me a great lesson, always buy a good quality PSU and never flick red switches. I got a Tagan after that so it worked out for the best in the end.
My first attempt at cable braiding didn't go too well in the end either. I had painstakingly removed all the molex connectors on my PSU, braided the wires and replaced them, plugged everything back in and then my HD wasn't detected. No bangs or flashes this time, but I had put the yellow and red wires the wrong way round to the hard drive which killed the controller card and cost me another few pennys for a new HD. Nowadays most PSUs come cable braided already so I haven't been tempted to give it another go.
Looking back I think all Hardware enthusiasts should probably go thru an electrician's crash course before touching anything first. Or at least I should of done.

 

I once overloaded a generic 300W power supply and it melted and fused the ATX power connector to the motherboard. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to take a picture.

 

I remember the very first PC I built (AMD 2500 Barton and Radeon 9700 Pro on an Asus A78 NX mobo-or something like that..)

I bought a JeanTech 450w PSU from PC World (as I 'forgot' about buying a PSU when ordering the other parts..)

I had no idea what the small connector was for on the PSU, so ignored it. Started the PC and a minute or so later - BANG! Smoke everywhere, and the smell! I though my whole new system was toast! What I realised, with hindsight, was the fact that it blew up due to me not connecting the PSU fan connector. The insides of the PSU were melted almost beyong recognition.

I took the PSU back to PC World and got another (they replaced it as faulty!) - and much to my surprise, the PC worked fine!

It may have been a cheap and cheerful PSU by today's standards, but it did protect the PC.

 

I was in a warehouse installing a new PC. Needed to run a network cable into the office and decided to drill through the window frame. Not only did the glass shatter, but the power cable which had been clipped to the outside of the frame didn't appreciate the drill trying to go through - melted the drill bit, tripped all power in the warehouse and blew up the drill. How did I survive that! LOL

 

I went out to attempt to fix a duff Dell PC for my work. Tried to start it up and got nothing. Opened the case up and a cricket jumped out of the case and across the office floor.

Luckily only one cricket was alive as the rest had perished inside the case. Not, however, before crapping all over the motherboard and setting up camp inside the PSU where heads, legs and other insect limbs got stuck in the blades of the PSU fan. I'll be haunted for a few years yet seeing the little heads spinning round as the machine got switched on.

Turns out the employee opposite bought crickets for her pets at home and some escaped.

 

This came in for repair, the fault being 'It turns off a few seconds after post'. Sure enough, you barely had a few seconds of bios before it shut down. The outside was filthy, but nothing unusual, and I gave it a cursory quick clean before handling it. Little did I know that the inside was far worse than usual.

Yes, that is at least an average plantpot-full of a mix of fine dry soil and ash. The shadow in the corner of the forth image is no shadow, it's a Filth-drift. The impossibly gleaming white outside of the case is actually a grubby brown-grey, the exposure control had to get that low just to resolve the inside of the case.

Turns out the HSF retention bracket had shattered on two corners, allowing the ingress of Filth between it and the CPU, causing the thermal cutout to trip. A new bracket (and a damn good cleaning) later, and the box works perfectly.

I don't know what environment it was operating in, and I don't think I want to know.

 

The worst I've got is when I was installing a Scythe Ninja Mini, I was trying to get the clips over the plastic bit around the CPU [Lug? Lug sounds silly.] and couldn't get it to work.
So I tried using a screwdriver, it worked.
But when I booted up my PC The temps were WORSE than with the stock cooler.
So I took the heatsink off, replaced the stock CPU, cleaned the mini, checked temps.
Back where they were.
So I go to put the Mini back on and it's not going on by hand again so I use the screwdriver again.
Bad Idea, it slips and I stab some crucial connection on the mobo, killing it instantly.
So long first motherboard.

the only thing other than that is when I was handling my CPU and It slipped out of my hands and hit the table pins first.
Only a few were bent, and I put them back in place and it still works like new.
Scared the piss out of me though.

Another time I was installing XP on a hard drive for my dad, and I ended up with three half instlled copies of XP replacing my OS.

I -really- wish I had some horrifying story.

 

I've done that

 

there was a time i worked at this computer repair clinic and a smoker brought in their computer. i wasn't told what was wrong with it, just the fact that it wasn't working. so i plug it in and turn it on and found it to be 100% silent. on top of that, windows would bluescreen. so i open it up and it wasn't very dusty but there was this disgusting smell dark brown gooey stuff with dust particles inside it, and this "tar" was so thick it actually stopped all the fans from moving. since the "tar" stopped the fans, the computer got really hot on the inside and the stuff was burnt on most of the warm surfaces on the computer.
i attempted to clean the fans so they'd move again, but only the cpu fan would begin rotating. i had to replace one of the other fans, and the video card was defective due to overheating.

 

I posted this some time ago. My first mod was unintentional.


And modded:


As you can see, I've added a new chip. It's fine when it runs cool, gets a bit unstable when running hot.

Benchmarked with water, tea and coffee.

 

All you need now is two girls and some piano music.

 

That case is so f***ing filthy I'm surprised it worked after being cleaned out.

This wasn't a mod as such, I had to take out an old Abit board as it failed. I managed to damage the tip of one screw when I was dismounting it, I ended up having to snap it off instead. The result (click to enlarge):

 

Oh snap! :|

 

I remember a time when my younger brother was doing some troubleshooting for a friend, PC wouldn't boot, so he flicked the switch on his PSU to 110v...... BANG!

A picture of the guys face would have been Cheesecake