Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

Changing my PC case best and worst moment.
At first it didn't boot:worst moment, then it did boot best moment.

 

Absolute win!

 

Lmao - you should have seen how long it would run for

 

My best moment was the feeling of having built a new computer - actually I'd just installed a new motherboard, CPU and cooler but it felt like a whole computer as I'd had to take all the power cables, data cables, etc. out and put them into the new board.

The worst moment was a few weeks later, the hottest day of the year, when I was playing something and suddenly the computer shut itself off. This happens occasionally due to over-heating, since I basically live in a brick oven, but after letting it cool down I still got no response.

It turned out that when I'd put in the motherboard, I'd put the stand-offs in the wrong place (m-ATX holes, ATX mobo) and one was touching some solder on the board. I'd managed to make the PC case live and that had blown the graphics card, sound card, motherboard and PSU.

 

Dropped a hard drive, which stopped being able to read data 10 minutes later...

Blew a (large) capacitor in a PSU about 6 inches from my face, crapped myself.

Being electrocuted by plugs just after unplugging, happens all the time, tingles or is like a static shock.

Electrocuted by a PC case with a dodgy PSU. That hurt.

Amazing moment: motherboard died while I was away, put a different replacement in, overclocked (before ever booting) and yet nothing, drivers, Windows, bluescreens, nothing complained.

 

Whether the new mobo is a similar spec or totally different, Linux won't even blink
Try that with Windows.

 

haha, that used to happen to us at work all the time... the old POSPOS (piece of sh*t point of sale) unit that we had for the bottle return window had a nice little issue that if you touched the bare metal it would give you a pretty hefty shock.... it turned into an easy way to get sent home with pay for the rest of the day took them forever to replace the damn thing

 

Try going from a Riva TNT2 to X1950XT.

I've not had too many terrible moments with PC's thankfully. I did forget to put the RAM in before booting up on my current build.

Good moment: First ever custom HSF-Freezer 64. So much cooler and quieter.

 

My best PC moment? two days ago I built my first ever PC, went from 20 fps average on css all minimum and lowest res possible, to maxed out settings on hd with 60fps min...went without a hitch

 

My worst / most frustrating was just after i'd bought my brand new 6800GTX for some crazy ammount of money, and I was super young at the time so it was even more to me. I Plugged it in and turned on and it turned off again instatly. Turns out my PSU fried, had to wait a week for a new one. One of the worst weeks of my life!

 

Worst would have to be bleeding one one loop while installing xp in the early hours of a saturday morning after 12hrs of building and changing things around, well needless to say the bleed screw came off and a couple of pumps emptied the entire contents of the loop over an x-fi, 8800 gts and a abit quad gt which all survied needless to say i went to bed after that.

High, would have to be my current rig nothing like powering up a 5970 with 4 velco raptors and a couple of dcc's makes me smile.

 

Left the door off my last PC since I'd been doing a bit of fiddling and cable management from time to time and couldn't be bothered attaching and detaching the door. Sat down one day and slid the door on without screwing it in, just to get it out of the way. After a few minutes of gaming I heard my cat, then just a little ~5lbs kitten, meowing as he often does when hungry. Decided to let him be on the hopes that my parents would sort it out. But it doesn't stop, and soon there's metallic scratching. To my horror, he'd been sleeping in the case and was trapped! Luckily, having a mATX board in a ATX tower kept him from bumping into anything damaging to the computer or himself.

 

I decided to hook my secondary PC to my Samsung 40" LCD. I had a spare HDMI to DVI adapter so I unplugged my HDMI cable from the BluRay player and hooked it up to the PC via the adapter. No video signal after powering up the PC. Odd. Tried a different HDMI port on the TV and still same result. WTF? So I took the adapter off and hooked the BluRay player back up. I turn on the BluRay player and all I see is static on the 40". Now I'm about to crap my pants. So I try a third HDMI port on the TV and get the same result. OMG, how can that be I think? Did I somehow short out the entire input panel? I completely unplug the cable from both the BluRay player and the TV and for the first time take a look at the ends of the cable. Apparently the HDMI to DVI adapter actually bent the gold pins in backwards on that end of the cable. RELIEF!!! TV fine, cable bad. Then anger directed at the adapter. That was a $100 HDMI cable ruined by an adapter! Ultimately had to buy a new, albeit cheaper, HDMI cable as well as a second HDMI to DVI cable for the PC.

 

My first windows re-install ever:
booted off the DOS floppy, formatted C:, inserted the Win95 CD... oh... no DOS cd drivers..... now what?

 

Haha some good mini storys here , I see a few of us had the exploding psu issue worst pc moment for me was on my old enermax psu, it had a voltage change switch, I wasn't sure if it was on the correct setting so flicked it & when I switched it on FLASH BANG, my head was about a foot away from it, I was tired at the time but have never been more awake in my life when the flash bang happened was seriously loud, thought this is it I'm gonna die for a split second, I really s*** it lol , the makers of such a feature must have done it on purpose to sell more psu's & give us something to lol & talk about .

Another bad one was my first attempt at water cooling, got a thermalchill tripple rad, anodised aluminium res, d5 pump, 1/2" tygon tubing, d-tek fuzion cpu block, but was simply too paranoid about it leaking so pulled it all apart struggling to stop the liquid flying all over the place & then sold it & stuck with air since lol.

Best pc moment for me was getting over the silly fear of opening the side panel & self learning how to put a pc together so no need to rely on pc repair shops that grossly overcharge for something as simple as pulling the header out of the secondry pins & plonking it onto the primary pins of a cd writer, I was once charged an outrageous £30 for that (unbelievable) lol, so yeah straight after that I researched as much as possible & could now put together a pc in an hour nice & neat & can diagnose & fix friends/family pc's very easily .

I never bothered with laptops but just fixed a neighbors laptop, had a damaged screen & had spyware/adware & a trojan on the hdd, it's as good as new now , a pc repair place quoted them £150 just for a new screen, they gave me £100, the screen cost £78 brand new with delivery & they have a working, clean & optimised system now .

My first decent overclock made me feel like a total smart a$$ for having a high performance chip at a fraction of the cost lol .

Lapping my TRUE heatsink & claiming an extra 6c lower temps, lapping an e6600 & getting even lower temps but only gave about 3-4c

Another best moment for me with pc's or modding was after 2 semi half effort attempts of making my own case completing the air cube & then getting featured in CustomPC was awesome .

 

My worst was way back on a Compaq 233, fiddling with the SCSI CD-R drive (remember those?), forgot to hook the IDE cable back up to the other CD drive. Boot Win95, no go. Plug it back in, power back on, still nothing. I can't recall the exact errors anymore, but tech support was useless (after holding for over two hours, literally) and I messed with it for another 3-4 hours before I got it working again.

Had the PSU blow on a PB P150. That was old enough that it was an AT power supply, and I didn't have a replacement. This being not so many years ago, it was time to upgrade everything. The HDD, though, I'd had to partition into 7 drives, as the BIOS couldn't see drives larger than 8GB. Whatever software I'd used to partition, nothing could undo it. So I could see what had been the C: drive, but that was just the Windows drive. Everything I cared about was on the rest of partitions. After hunting for months I found a little utility that cleared the partitioning and gave me back my precious data.

More recently, upgrade from Athlon Thunderbird to Athlon 64 X2, first brand new build ever, only recycled the case and PSU. A week later, power on, and smoke comes pouring out the side vent. Power off, pull the side panel. Find the 5V line on a disconnected Molex had fried. Freaking out, thinking I'd just fried my brand new box, but I was already late to bed and I had to get up for work the next morning, I couldn't do anything about it then. Had to convince myself it would be fine, new PSU and I'd be all good, went to bed. After getting lost trying to find the Best Buy (closest place with computer equipment to my office), got the new PSU home and thank God, I was right. That's what I'm typing this on now. Waiting to see what AMD comes with next before I upgrade again.

 

I still have my first WC rig around. I get a good laugh every time I look in there b/c of how bad of a job I actually did with the cooling system. Although when I first made it I did not see any problems with it. Today though it could be used as the best example of how not to build your WC setup. 3 different sizes of tubes and a bunch of elbows along with lines that were too long with the way you had to fill it made bleeding almost impossible. (Who could have thought that making the only place to add water at the lowest point would be a bad idea, apparently the idea of bleeding with the computer off never occurred...)

 

It was back in 2003. I was young, and was trying my best to make it as a modder. I had the enthusiasm and the spare time, but not the money or skill. I produced an embarrassing series of project logs where I either planned out a build and didn't make it because I didn't have the money to buy anything, or I started a scratch build and got halfway through mounting some cheap fiberboard to a trashpicked case before realizing the futility.

One of my more ingenious mods was a wooden (I was competent with basic hand tools and handheld power tools, so just about everything I made was wood. And not the fine-cut and nicely finished wood that wooden case mods are made from - I had hit a veritable goldmine of about a dozen 3/8" thick 16x16" fiberboard squares that my neighbor had thrown away after some home remodeling, and I had a couple of poorly veneered panels from trashpicked speakers I had gutted) SFF cube. The cube was some old P3 mATX hardware I had scrounged up from the dumpster behind my high school or something equally silly. I had gotten Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on it and was going to make it my domain controller to set up a roaming profile for the only other computer on the domain, because when you're a 14 year old nerd with a Microsoft certification, that's the kind of **** you do.

One of the mods involved having the PSU mounted in a weird location. This was well before it was commonplace to see SFF rigs with PSUs in odd locations and IEC power cable extensions built into the case. I took my garbage 350w generic (I had replaced it with a Antec TruePower 430 in my main rig, so it was just chilling. I had painted the TP430 black in my backyard and replaced all the wiring with 12ga solid copper, because another neighbor had done electrical renovations and I got like half a reel of it and didn't understand that flexibility was important) and took it out of the metal casing.

Then I got a minor shock from one of the caps, and it scared me. Just kidding. That's what you expected, but I set myself up for a far more epic fail.

I desolder the power socket wires, and extend them about two feet, for some really uber leet modding, and set it on top of the case, still completely removed from the casing, and connect it all and boot up the PC. I fire up Diablo II and start whooping some ass and having a good time.

An hour later, I notice the PSU is hanging over the edge of the case by half an inch or so. Without thinking, I reached up to pick up the PSU and slide it a bit. I didn't realize that it was on.

Imagine all of the horror stories in this thread about shorting out a PSU and frying it. Now imagine that instead of looking at it inside your case, you're wrist deep in the bare mains wiring. I'll never forget the feeling of being electrocuted. It was like nothing I had experienced before, and nothing I ever want to experience it again (although I did a few weeks later when the lightbulb pull-chain accidentally became live, but never after that). I'd best describe it was waves of pain in my arm. As if my arm was being run over by a vehicle with many small wheels. I quickly removed my arm. I don't really know how long I was holding it for, because time had no meaning. Just the horde of angry bakers, kneading my arm with their rolling pins.

However, I guess the most important thing is that it put hair on my balls in regards to working with electronics. I never grew fear. By the time I was an adult, I had already electrocuted myself, burnt myself, and injured myself working with electronics. I don't have an irrational fear of being shocked by something I'm working with. I'll pick up low voltage DC wires with my bare hands. I'm safe around mains voltages as long as I keep my left hand in my pocket.

Another fun one, which was around a year earlier. I had just registered here. It was christmas vacation 2002. I did my first ever case-mod, which was spraypainting an old AT tower silver then doing fancy pinstriping with blue paint because I had found really thin masking tape.

After the mod, the paint can was empty. Intrigued, I read online that you can get the ball out of rattlecan paint that makes the rattle. So, I grabbed a rusty old set of needlenose pliers and went to work. As I was ripping it to shreds to retrieve the ball, I got a nasty surprised. I gripped a loose chunk of metal with the pliers in my right hand, while holding the can with the left. I pulled with all my might. Unfortunately, the left arm was in the way. The jagged piece of aluminum hit my arm, leaving two deep parallel slices. They didn't bleed very much, and didn't particularly hurt. At dinner with my family, I carefully cradled my arm so they wouldn't see them.
The next day at school, some people thought I had attempted suicide and tried to talk me out of it. I carefully explained that I wasn't depressed, just stupid.

I have no pictures of the original cuts. This is a picture I took in late 2006, four years after the original incident. They still look exactly the same now, a full eight years after they were created. More noticeable in the summer, because my skin is a bit more tan but the scars are always very white.


For the record, my prize was a transparent deep blue sphere, about a half inch in diameter. I kept it around as a knick-knack, but lost it years ago. Still have the scars to remind me, though.

 

+1 - I know that feeling