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Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

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

  1. Lizard

    Lizard @ Scan R&D

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    I was talking cars with my brother the other day. He has owned several old VW Beetles which he's tweaked and modded over the years so has had plenty of good and bad experiences with them.Then I realised that I had just as many, if not more, interesting moments with the various incarnations of PCs I've owned too.

    http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/11/09/my-best-and-worst-pc-related-moments/
     
  2. memeroot

    memeroot aged and experianced

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    every time I plug in headphones or usb to my current computer... no earth
     
  3. lifer

    lifer Water on the pcb

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    +1 for building my first water cooled system, man I felt like GOD himself!
     
  4. mingingbollock

    mingingbollock Minimodder

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    How many of us have had a old psu go pop, just as you plug in the power cable or press that power button , certainly a heart stopper lol
     
  5. MaverickWill

    MaverickWill Dirty CPC Mackem

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    What he said.
     
  6. KieX

    KieX What's a Dremel?

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    Think my worst moment was accidentally droping my brand new i7 920 on the floor after saving up two months for it.:wallbash: Equally bad was dropping my old 4870X2 when trying to clean it out. Thankfully both survived :rock:

    Best moment I think was like you, getting the 6800GT. And back then a simple OC meant you had the same card as the Ultra. Good times.
     
  7. Gremlin

    Gremlin What's a Dremel?

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    Two horrible ones come to mind for me

    Back around 96 one late night around 2am I was sitting in my room and I noticed a switch on the back of the power supply and I didn't exactly know what it did and being the inquisitive kinda guy I am I proceeded to flick it

    What proceeded next was the power supply blowing up because I unknowingly switched its input voltage from 240v which we run on, to 110V and as you can imagine the resulting surge blew it so big that a fireball erupted out the back of the PSU as well as a resulting bang and smoke like I'd just let off a stun grenade in my face...

    What followed next was a 3 month search to find a PSU that fit the case because it was one of those custom Packard bell jobs that had its own custom PSU!

    The next big stuff up was when I was given an Athlon XP system to keep that had random shutdown problems only to discover it was built by someone who forgot to put thermal paste on the heatsink! I then was happy as a pig in crap at my new whiz bang system and proceeded to show it off to a mate who was chewing on his silver necklace only to have it break and fall on the motherboard while it was turned on, and as you can imagine the PC let off a giant zap and everything died.

    It's fair to say I'm no longer friends with that person....
     
  8. Jack_Pepsi

    Jack_Pepsi Clan BeeR Founder

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    One of my worst moments, which in hind-sight is nothing now; was when I got my first PC back when I was 10. My olds had got me a Packard Bell P166MMX and with only a few months in I had got a cheap crappy PC Line floppy disk caught in the drive.

    Worryingly I janked it out causing the metal contact to say inside the drive. I was so scared, a brand new machine and I had done this. Suffice to say I had more balls taking the machine part than I did telling my parents.

    Maybe if that hadn't have happened I wouldn't be working as an IT Tech today.

    Another worst scenario was when I pissed on one of my Shuttles. Old Peculiar is brilliantly dangerous stuff.

    :D

    One of the best, overclocking the aforementioned P166MMX by changing a jumper and removing the plastic fan grill from the back and installing more EDO Simms.

    Another, getting my XP-M to 8°C with only winter air funnelled directly into my Shuttle and then OC'd it to 2.7GHz/Modding my old 9800SE AIW so that all the pixel pipelines were enabled.

    \m/
     
  9. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    i remember going from a lowly x1650 to 8800gtx, performance and visual increase was HUGE!
     
  10. Blarte

    Blarte Moderate Modder

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    I was in the middle of an upgrade bought all the water cooling gubbings and then bought a thermaltake Mozart Case and left it in the garage until I was happy with the loop and set out I had planned. It never actually got put in that case as I reversed into it in the garage squashing it against the wall.
     
  11. pistol_pete

    pistol_pete Air Cooled Fool

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    My first and worst attempt at overclocking involved setting the bios to load 'high performance settings' which I now understand set the fsb to 133 from 100mhz. Naturally my 1.3ghz duron disagreed, and on a budget mobo from 2003 there was no bios restore if an oc failed. I paniced for an afternoon, and with no net access for help i even faced the humiliation of asking the 'tech guys' at pc world if they could do anything. Yes, for £60- no thanks. After hours fiddling with the system on the floor I somehow managed to reset the cmos with a jumper, but didn't realise it at the time. Xp loaded up as if nothing had ever happened. I love how no matter what punishment and trauma you go through with hardware, windows always seems oblivious.
     
  12. BRAWL

    BRAWL Dead and buried.

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    Building my first system back in 2003 and forgetting the basic rule of thumb is to actually put the CPU in the socket... after careful and destructive raging, standing there glaring at the problem, I checked through the boxes and there was my loving cpu sitting there all new and unused... poor cpu.

    epic sighs were had and various insults to my own stupidity.
     
  13. Kúsař

    Kúsař regular bit-tech reader

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    I've experienced one such funny moment. It was like in the Star Wars movie - after plugging in the power cable a dampened explosion came out of PSU, lights went out and sparks were all over the place.
     
  14. PlayedStation

    PlayedStation Possessed like an apostrophe

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    Was it because he wore a silver chain? :)

    I did the whole switching of the psu supply thing too....schoolboy error
     
  15. exceededgoku

    exceededgoku What's a Dremel?

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    I have quite an extensive history of computer related incidents/things:
    - Old Cyrix 133(?) CPU running windows 95 kept on coming up with "program has performed an illegal operation" so my attempt at a fix was to upgrade bios. Which for some reason had no effect whatsoever. This system still works to this day. Although I would never use it for anything other than legacy games,etc.
    - Numerous dead power supplies, always around Christmas as well when there's nowhere to get a replacement (I HATE THAAT TIME OF YEAR!). I now always buy 2 powersupplies, and have always used a surge protector...
    - My watercooling set up is constantly leaking but the coolant is non conductive and it's only right at the radiator (the drain pipe will not stop leaking despite my best efforts! Including epoxy resin).
    - A couple of bad bios flashes including one for an AMD build, had a power cut mid bios flash. I tried everything to recover it including taking the bios chip out and putting it on another motherboard - this didn't work.
     
  16. Digi

    Digi The not-so-funny Cockney

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    I will definitely echo the 9800 pro comment. I bought a 9700 pro at launch and a few months later went up to the 9800 pro (300-400 quid both times) and thought I was a gaming god.

    PSU's blowing up in your face is a definite bad time as mentioned above.

    Building your first PC is - for everyone imo - a fantastic moment and great achievement when you realise you made this pile of parts into a living, breathing machine! My first was a 486 DX2. Setting all the jumpers with my dad watching over the shoulder is why I am a techy today.

    Overclocking my Cyrix by only 33 or 66mhz but on a 233mhz chip and feeling amazed and empowered!

    **EDIT**: Running the old DOS based ghost to mirror one hard drive to a new and accidentally mixing up source/target so you put a blank drive over the data on the one you wanted to copy and lose it all. Serious ARRRRRRGGGH moment!
     
  17. cypressgroove

    cypressgroove What's a Dremel?

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    Worst / scariest moments would have to be:

    1) I upgraded to a Radeon X850XT from some awful old card. Fired up CoD 2 to see how it had improved things meaning just to test it. Two hours later, still playing and sorta immersed in the mud and smoke when I thought to myself "Wow, this new card really makes me feel like I'm *there*. I mean, just wow, it's like I'm getting olfactory hallucinations. I can *really* smell the gunsmoke...." a few minutes later the 'gunsmoke' starts obscuring the screen and I looked across to realise it was *pouring* out of the back of my case. Immediately switched the computer off *bricking it* and leaned round the back to see I'd set fire to the PSU. >.< I can only imagine what would have happened if I hadn't acted quickly as PSUs have a habit of taking whole systems with them when they go. Amazingly enough, once I upgraded to a decent case and put in a new PSU, it turned out none of the other components had been damaged at all.

    2) Was doing 'the hard drive shuffle' which is when I buy/uncover/get given a box of old hard drives and I'm trying to see if any of them still work. Basically just a repeated process of power down test rig, unplug one HDD, plug in next HDD power up, rinse and repeat. Anyway this was back in the days of IDE drives with the 4 pin molex connector. At some point I guess I must have got distracted and forgotten to power down the rig. Unplugging the old drive didn't clue me in, but seeing a frigging great blue spark go flying off the molex when I went to plug in the new one brought me up to speed with brown-trouser inducing speed. I realised afterwards I'd been doing it so long I'd literally edited out the sound of all the fans like the ticking of clocks. >.<

    Best moment was probably jumping from an old pentium 4 rig with that aforementioned X850 up to the C2D rig with an 8800GTX then firing Crysis up for the first time and just letting my jaw hit the floor. Good times. ^_^
     
  18. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    had a few psus go pop with some interesting results.

    We got a cheap psu think it was 250 watt for a dead old system for a pc my sister was using ( pc world it was from ) we powered it up and for 10mins it was fine, Then all we heard was a bang and electric cut out.

    Checked the psu it had a huge whole in it. Suffice to say pc world was never brought from again.

    overclocking my 6800 gt to ultra performance was fun also.

    +1 to the water cooling, It does have its risks and id always use clamps just safer.
     
  19. Tattysnuc

    Tattysnuc Thinking about which mod to do 1st.

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    ditto. So far have killed a Maximus II Formula, GTX 295 due to a leaky Swiftech integrated Pump/cpu sink (the seals leaked) leaking water into the PSU which was mounted at the base of the case. I've been paranoid about leaks ever since, to the point where my now I will only mount power supplies ABOVE the components.

    I'm about to break that convention with the my latest acquisition - a Obsidian 700, but that's only because the PSU has a physical barrier between it and the mob compartment.

    I've been folding 24 hours for the past 3 days and still dont trust my newest build which uses compression fittings. How can a fitting that rotates not leak I ask you!!!
     
  20. Snips

    Snips I can do dat, giz a job

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    I keep getting reminded by the Mrs that it's "GOD herself!"
     
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