Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

I remember when I went from AMD/ATI to Intel/Nvidia... Ahh that was a wonderful day lol.

Nothing like starting up a newly plumbed water loop!

 

Sounds familiar, my first watercooled rig did the same thing - I took advice, opted for the pretty clampless 7/16 and all was good for about two weeks and then a sudden gush of water all over my spanking new hardware. Luckily my twitch gaming reactions got the thing powered off and unplugged before any hardware was damaged and 3 years later its still going strong.

Another joyfilled occasion was when my girlfriend at the time decided that my rheobus switch was the PC on switch, flipped it, realised her mistake and then switched the PC on with the power button (not flipping the toggle on my baybus thus leaving it off). It just so happens that my entire loop was tied to that one switch and powered independently of the PSU (for filling reasons and I stupidly forgot to disconnect the damn thing). Within hours of my PC being on and my arrival after work I found my baby almost out of water and making some hideous noises! Argh!

 

"the hole house"? Is that some sort of underground dwelling, like a hobbit hole?

 

Dropped my brand new Athlon 64 and bent one of the pins. Convinced myself that I had just ruined the chip and sat there staring grumpily at it for a while.

Eventually in desperation I picked up a butter knife and bent the pin back into place - First one direction, then the other.

Amazingly, the pin didn't break and the chip still works even now.

 

Mine has been most recent as of this weekend gone. But I'll start a bit earlier.

Last week I was away for work. But before I left I turned off my gaming machine by the socket on the wall (don't worry it was already powered down itself). The main PC was switched off but not by the mains as my broadband was on it for my housemate to use.

Anyway, I returned home on Friday night and I turned the socket back on for the gaming PC.

It wasn't until Saturday afternoon, whilst watching the Brailian F1 qualifying, that I went to turn on my gaming PC via it's Power button. At this point, I heard a sizzling noise, followed by a nice "BANG". Cue plumes of smoke rising from the PSU and me (quite calm I must say), turning off the power by the mains and removing the power cable.

The PSU itself was a Hi-Power 900W that I bought online over 2yrs ago, therefore warranty replacement was out of the question.

Luckily, I have a 700W in my main PC and I quickly tested it in the gaming machine. Everything powered on fine. So I am waiting to get a 400W from a friend to use for the time being and put the 700W in my gaming machine and finally get some F1 2010 and COD: Black Ops on the go

Oh the spec of the gaming machine consists of an Intel Core i7 920, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 4870X2 and an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2. So you can imagine my slight horror when I thought they were gone with the PSU as well.

This will be my 4th PSU that's died on me since I started building PCs way back since 1998. Fun times.

 

I once used a crossover cable in place of a standard cat5, and spent the rest of the evening testing everything else.

You ain't a certified computer geek unless you've wasted three hours because of the wrong cable!

As far as highlights go - picking up two dead 22" 226BWs for a song and building a working monitor from the parts.

 

+1 Always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when I build a new machine and it comes to life.

 

2 years ago I returned from holiday to find my roof leaked and there was a pool of water in the bottom of my case. Strangely enough that rig still works to this day.

 

+1 Was almost the same for me. I had an HIS 9800 PRO IceQ (which only passed away last year I think) and upgraded to a Gainward 6800GT GLH (Goes Like Hell Edition ). I'm too embarassed to say how much I paid for that, but soon after I got it, I decided to try W/C for the first time. I spent £200 just to W/C that GPU! But it all worked more or less fine first time and I learnt a lot, so no regrets!!!

 

Hmm, i have some ery bad moments wih my pc

The scariest would be when i build this ustom blue led bar for my pc, it would iluminate the inside of it. When i inished building it i forgot the back of the bar wouldbe totally uncover, leaving the sticks of the litle LEDs get in contact wiht the case... so then I fired my rig on... and oh the horror!!!! the whole system shooted down and all I did was being there staring at my case in shock...

Ofc a few minutes later I took the LED bar out of the case... started it again and for my relieve the system started like nothing happened... windows shows up and me Happy

 

I was sitting at my computer early one morning and stretched out my legs while still in the chair. My foot flipped the switch on my surge protector and I fried a good 350 dollars worth of components, including my video card which was the majority of that 350. But the BEST news about it was the warranty on my GPU had expired less than two weeks earlier.

good times? no not really

However I quickly learned that taping down that switch is a good idea and haven't made a mistake like that since

 

Try days!

I bought a NAS this year and when I plugged it into my O2 box, it would cause the box to randomly reset every few hours, so I plugged my netgear router into my O2 box and moved the computers and the nas to that router, but that router utterly refused to see the nas. Turned out to be the cables - the router and the nas were both gigabit capable and threw a wobbly when used with cat 5 cable (rather than just drop down to 100mb). I tried the cat6 cable which came with the nas and all is fine and dandy.

 

Agreed

 

My worst moment has got to be when i was recovering data from someones laptop hard drive. Some how when i plugged the IDE drive into my desktop I managed to bend one of the power pins over. Next thing I know I smell burning and look down to see a small flame moving up the cable to towards the motherboard, everything went slowmo as i dived toward the PC to unplug it lol.
Had to buy a complete new PC that day... somehow every single thing in that machine had been completely fried!

 

I once stupidly started fiddling about with the innards of my old Xbox (the first one). I was tearing it apart trying to find out how I could fix it. I had it plugged in but turned off thinking "this will ground it, no need to worry about ESD now". And then my hand brushed what was a big lump of metal....

"AAHHHHAAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAAAAH" Was the sound that I was said to be making. The whole house heard me and found me sitting there stunned... I can remember a warm tingly feeling slowly running across my chest afterwards... strange.

 

I think I can top most of these gaffes on here with a boneheaded idea I had

I was reading up on my thermodynamics, and recalled seeing how water had the second best "specific heat capacity" of any fluid. What was the #1, I wondered? Ammonia. So, since water could remove so much heat, with a better specific heat capacity, Ammonia should be able to remove more.

Now, household ammonia is much different than pure ammonia. It's been diluted by a fair amount. So, rather than use that, I went to a place that sold industrial strength stuff. They gave me the R717 refrigerant, Anhydrous Ammonia.

Of course, I bypassed all of the WARNING labels and just poured it into my cooling rig on my bench at home. Which, of course, had COPPER TUBING, that reacted horribly to the Ammonia, which proceeded to turn the copper into some green-colored, chalky, salt-like compound, disintegrating the tubing, pouring all over the bench, and stinking my whole house up like a chemical warfare zone for 2 days!

 

My Compaq POS computer blew a Vreg and caught fire. It was still going when I noticed the smoke and so in the true spirit of a gamer I waited until the round was over until I powered everything down.

 

2/3 weeks ago I was on ebay looking for a replacement 3dfx card for my old PC so I can play my old pre XP games when the card in my current PC decided to die. Spooky.

I've also broken 3 monitors (2crt,1lcd) whist getting a bit frustrated during gaming.
Tip: If you must punch an lcd screen, aim for the centre, its less likely to break the glass than if you hit a corner.

 

How very true.

+1 to feeling like god when powering a new computer for the first time

The first time I blew up a PC when I was 10. Went to a friends house and the screen on his desktop mac was flickering. The monitor was being powered by the PSU so I figured it wasn't getting enough power. Went round to the back of it slid the red switch thinking it would fix it. BANG! What little hair I had grown on the back of my hand had gone, replaced by a black mark. It was ages before I went to his house again (this was before I started to teach myself about computers).

Another PSU moment. I was at work and we were testing this old computer we were given. It was running fine for a good hour. The caretaker for the building came in to collect something so my mate went into the storage cupboard to get it. The caretaker said he smelt something. I walked over to the computer and could smell it too. I called my mate over and he stuck his head inside the side of the case to really check (we were in a metal workshop so sometimes there are similar smells in the room). All this time the caretaker was recommending my mate should turn the computer off. BANG!. The caretaker laughed out "I told you so", my ears were ringing and my mate was deaf in one ear for more than a week.

At work once again, I was in the server room with another colleague moving some stuff around. I looked down in case I tripped over a tower we had sitting on the floor to see a spider crawling across the top of it. Called the other guy over and we just sat there watching it crawl towards the top fan where it broke its fore-legs and then dived in after them.

It seems we all share similar stories

 

Now that is hilarious!!