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Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Lizard, 9 Nov 2010.

  1. Combatus

    Combatus Bit-tech Modding + hardware reviews Lover of bit-tech Super Moderator

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    That's very true indeed. Thankfully the Lian Li V2000 I'm using has a mid-section plate which practically seals the PSU in the bottom. I'd never have the PSU pointing up in the bottom of a water-cooled case, just too scary.
     
  2. mi1ez

    mi1ez Modder

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    My first build with my Asus P5K-E. I pressed the power button and everything spun up and lit up before going black and silent again...

    A few seconds later it powered itself back up and started the Windows install. It still scares the life out of me whenever I disconnect the power and have to turn it on afterwards that it looks like it's died after just a couple of seconds before powering on.
     
  3. Mattmc91

    Mattmc91 Minimodder

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    I was flicking a 10p piece around with side panel off, flicked out of my hand and onto a 2 day old 5770. Massive blue spark.

    PCB was roasted but still works to this day! (in the mrs PC)
     
  4. Ross1

    Ross1 What's a Dremel?

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    Worst - Probably when aria sold me a dodgy mobo and wouldnt give a refund, and then ignored my emails. Was a lot of money for me, and made me feel robbed and helpless.

    Best - putting an accelero s1 on what was a very loud 8800GTS. silence is bliss.
     
  5. Kamikaze-X

    Kamikaze-X Minimodder

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    worst moment? the long period stuck with 2GB of ram when the other two sticks would not work at all, even after a motherboard swap.

    5 different sets of ram from corsair, and it turns out their revisions weren't compatible with the p35 or p45 chipset and they sent me a 2x2GB set of RAM which has worked perfectly.

    all that after wanting to upgrade my old DHX which would go all the way from 800 up to 1150mhz. i miss them :(
     
  6. ChaosDefinesOrder

    ChaosDefinesOrder Vapourmodder

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    Good moment 1:
    going from a factory built AMD sempron 2400+, geforce 4200, 80GB IDE HDD and flickery 17" CRT to a brand new PC that I built myself from scratch with i7 920, GTX280, 300GB Velociraptor and a 27" monitor! Holy cow that's one hell of a difference! Also had the "it's alliiii-iiii-iiiive" moment!

    Good moment 2:
    Using Linux to repair the MBR of a hard drive that I thought had died and wouldn't let the PC POST! Used a IDE to USB adapter to get round the POST issue and after repairing the MBR, miraculously the data survived! Copied out all data and never used that HDD again 'cos I didn't trust it anymore, but was a big relief to get everything back!

    Bad moment:
    Couple of years ago XP decided to corrupt my entire fonts directory. Windows looks very odd when the ONLY font that still works is "system"... including the start button...

    Bad moment of a friend of mine many years ago:
    He just bought a brand new Pentium 3 and we had gotten back to another friend's place to install it (part of regular LAN parties). Open case, remove fan, remove heatsink, install processor etc. Go to turn on PC and there's a brief spin of fans before it just... stops... with a definite electrical burning smell... friend frantically re-opens case. "Oh crap, where's the CPU fan?" *looks in right hand* "oh... that was stupid". Was still holding the fan the whole time!!! Somehow managed to take out the motherboard and PSU with that - not sure how!!!
     
  7. Bakes

    Bakes What's a Dremel?

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    When I went from an 800MHz Pentium 3 with a Ti4200 to a 4.2GHz i7 920 with a 5870 :)

    I guarantee none of you have had better performance upgrades than that lol
     
  8. Bakes

    Bakes What's a Dremel?

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    ^ whooo chaosdefinesorder we had basically the same upgrade lol
     
  9. PlayedStation

    PlayedStation Possessed like an apostrophe

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    Touche,
    I went from a Playstation 3 to a PC.
     
  10. Evildead666

    Evildead666 What's a Dremel?

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    Worst moment :
    Trying to install an external ZiP100 drive into a tower PC, got the power set up and data cable, but got something wrong. Start up PC, cue ZiP drive power cable going bright white and cutting through IDE cables like butter. Large amounts of smoke through the PSU. Strangely everything survived. ;)

    Best time :
    Building my first PC, going from a PII300 and a S3 Virge/Voodoo1 to a PIII 450(@600) and a Matrox G400 clocked at 'Max' speeds, and a UDMA66 HDD. Speed demon of the times.
     
  11. Phil Rhodes

    Phil Rhodes Hypernobber

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    Had a similar experience recently - an ever so cheap and nasty Atrix PSU died, taking out the motherboard with it, and I simply threw in another similarly-specced but completely different piece of hardware and Windows just dealt with it.

    Try that with Linux.
     
  12. TWeaK

    TWeaK Minimodder

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    I had an X1900XT and thought the fan on it sounded a bit like a hair drier, so I decided to replace the heatsink. Unfortunately, it was a long(ish) card and the Zalman flower cooler didn't cool the VRMs on the end of the board. This, coupled with a very hot summer, perpendicular hard drive cage and leaving games running when I was away from the computer, fried the card. The BIOS screen looked like Matrix code! I later found out (shortly after finally chucking the card) that I may have been able to fix it by putting it in the oven for a bit.

    I also had a power supply blow on me back around Xmas last year. I was playing Tales of Monkey Island too, which shouldn't have been too taxing! Fortunately the rest of the kit survived - I think it was just a capacitor that blew so I may one day try to fix it as a side project. Also, this happened just after the warranty expired!

    A good thing was upgrading from a dual core Athlon 939 with an 8800GT to the core i3 with 5830 that I have now, especially once I got an SSD installed. Mind you, when I first turned it on it did switch itself on and off a few times - was bricking it that something was DOA! I realised later that it was just the system figuring out which display to use.
     
  13. veato

    veato I should be working

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    Remember when CPU HSFs seemed to require considerable force to attach with the aid of a screwdriver pushing down onto the clip.

    Well I do and building a PC for my uncle one day the screwdriver went SLIP. I hit the motherboard to hard I swore it was dead. Thankfully though it booted and everything was fine.
     
  14. El Rando

    El Rando I know what a dremel is

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    When you say the creator of Frankenstein are you referring to his Mum and Dad or are you on about Frankenstein's Monster?

    Couldn't help myself, sorry.
     
  15. chimaera

    chimaera What's a Dremel?

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    Hmmmm worst for me would have been about 6-8 years ago. I'd been very happily rocking a ATI 9700 Pro in my machine for about 8-9 months when the VRAM blew on it. This was not the disaster - the retailer I bought from were also the RMA and warranty handlers for that brand of card and were very quick in dealing with it. As the 9700 no longer existed they replaced it with a 9800 Pro which I thought was awesome customer service.

    Anyway, got the card and ran home to rebuild the machine. To my horror all I got when I hit the power switch was a large crackling smell and a hefty stink of ozone.

    As far as I could tell the new graphic card drew just enough power above and beyond the old one that the PoS power supply in the PC overloaded and blew. Unfortunately it seemed to surge when it went and cooked the motherboard and everything that drew power from the motherboard - so RAM, CPU, Firewire card, soundcard were all rendered dead. This was about a month before a LAN party as well :(

    Ever since that monent I have *always* specified a decent PSU (most commonly Antec) in every build I've done :)
     
  16. rickysio

    rickysio N900 | HJE900

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    I went from a Pentium 4 2.4B SL6PC with 256MB RAM and IGP to a Q6600 G0 with 4GB of RAM and 9600GT, pretty BIG jump.
     
  17. The_Gnu

    The_Gnu 8-bit addict

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    Best moment:
    Upgrading from a matrox G100 to a GeForce FX 5900xt. It made me experience 3D rendered pc gaming for the first time. (if you don't count shadow warrior in softwaremode :p)

    Worst moment:
    I hooked up a video reciever I just bought to 12v power of my computer. Then I also connected it to a video capture card in the same comp. Somehow the ground and power got mixed up and instead of everything powering down as it use to when there's a short, the cables got glowing hot. I ended up with a pillar of smoke, some molten cables and a broken video reciever. But somehow I was relieved that there wasn't more than that.
     
  18. eddtox

    eddtox Homo Interneticus

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    I did that. Worst pc moment ever. I was only 11! It was years before I owned up to it :p

    2nd: Watching a large-ish spider run into my (awful, cheap) power supply followed by a bang. Luckily the rest of the computer survived.

    3rd: The sudden catastrophic failure of my two-year old 320gb data drive last year. I managed to recover most of my data from various dvd's and hard drives I had laying about, but I lost a good deal. I am now much more careful about backing up my data :)

    Best moment: Reading this thread on the first system that I have built for myself - my first new system for nearly 10 years - and thinking about the god-awful Compaq P4 with 1GB ram that I was using up until a week ago.
     
    Last edited: 9 Nov 2010
  19. tad2008

    tad2008 What's a Dremel?

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    I remember upgrading my graphics card inside a full tower case within cramped conditions and with the case on it's side partly under the large desk it usually sat under I removed the old card and carefully removed the new card from the packaging and began to insert it in to the slot when the machine powered up. I froze on the spot as I realised that I had forgotten to disconnect the power lead, looking down I noticed my knee was pressed against the power button!
     
  20. psyph3r

    psyph3r What's a Dremel?

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    1.Aaah the 6 Series, still have the agp 6600gt somewhere, it was to doom3 what the 8800gt was to crysis. But the jump from the Radeon 9250 to 6600gt was a good moment

    2.Remember frying the ASRock 845 baord while oc'ing the
    Preshott :D

    3.Then there was the Cooler master V8 back plate, cut me real good while aligning it on the board.

    4.Recently i was cleaning the old AMD 4400+, couldnt get the HS off the proccy, i just pulled it a bit too hard and off it came along with the cpu while the latch was still locked. Nothing a pen refill couldnt fix.

    But that feeling when a newly assembled rig goes live , very few things can beat that.
     
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