Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

For my current rig, by far the most nerve wracking moment was bending the pins on my hexcore.

Ordered it, installed it with stock HSF. Wasn't happy with the noise, so I ordered a basic 80mm heatpipe tower. It was a pain to uninstall the stock, because the baseplate was very large and filled the entire retention bracket. I couldn't really twist it, and the thermal material was holding good. I was finally able to get it off, but doing so pulled the CPU out of the socket and bent a couple pins. It took a few very scary minutes with a razor blade bending them back into position, and then the install of the new cooler was very suspenseful as I had no idea if I had killed my 3-day-old-CPU. Fortunately, everything worked fine and has been working fine since then, nearly half a year (I was an early hexcore adopter). I guess no more spectacular displays of stupidity.

Damnit. I hate when my good post is at the bottom of a page, and my crappy post is at the top of the next page. Go read post #79. It's witty. This one isn't.

As for highlights - nothing can compare to my first PC build. I went to a computer fair in 2003 with my dad, and for my 14th birthday he let me pick out my own stuff for a PC, as I had been telling him that I was capable of building one, but he only wanted to buy a Dell. I got a Pentium 4 2.4GHz Northwood B, a DFI mobo, a Geforce 3 64mb, and 512mb of RAM. I put it all together and installed Windows and was absolutely thrilled with having built my own computer. There's nothing like that feeling. Never bought a pre-made PC since then.

Another good one was building my Thuban. For three years, I had been rocking (as my primary rig, no desktop during that time) a C2D laptop with Geforce 8600M graphics and a 1920x1200 screen. Great res, but rough on games. I was playing TF2 with most settings on medium and no AA and getting just under 30fps, which was plenty playable but nothing special. I upgraded to a hexcore and a Radeon 5750. The CPU wasn't anything particularly amazing, but skipping three generations of video cards and going from a laptop GPU to a desktop GPU was just kickass. Every setting maxed, over 60fps, and 8x AA. Game looks so much better and runs so much smoother.

 

Had my own share of good/bad/good moments.
My first W/C rig, I plumbed it all in, went to do a leak test, and then noticed water dripping from the (poorly attached) CPU hose, onto the GPU (ahh, my lovely 6600GT). I cleaned it up before I ran the computer of course, but that graphics card never worked again (although it could have been me fitting the water block).
So of course what I did was refit the OEM fan, and RMA'd it.
Scan, lovely people that they are, not only were happy to RMA the old graphics card, but also offered me more money than I'd originally paid for it (still not sure why), so I got to upgrade to a 6800

My current W/C rig I did a bit better, I had the case and components separate, so I could spend as long as I wanted modding while my rig was running in it's old case. After a slight problem with the wrong radiator (the new rad is much bigger, so it sticks out the top of the case rather than being stealthy, but it cools better), I finally got everything in, and connected.
Finally, the moment of truth! I press the power button and...
nothing
I try again...
nothing
I hold it down
It flickers to life!
then stops.

Eventually I worked out that the power switch (which I'd never thought to check) is a bit dodgy and has to be hit in just the right way to boot. Annoying (especially as I'd cut holes in it, so there was no chance of a refund), but at least it works (it's so quiet now

 

A true computer geek. Places the computer over the cat in his list of things he was worried about. xD

 

Snap [with my own adjustments in brackets] - at least two Athlon XPs and one PIII of mine had bent pins, one arrived like that from Ebay but the others were my fault, but thankfully all of them were put right again.

Other bad moments were the frying of one other Athlon when the HSF wasn't fitted properly and leaving a working hard disk in a cold room one winter when the temps went below zero, killing it stone dead. Thankfully it was only 8.4gigs. Had a northbridge heatsink fall off one mobo causing random crashes that I didn't find until looking in the case. Finally there were two lightning strikes took out a dialup modem outright and causing a slow decline and death to a Socket A board six months later. On reflection I suppose it was quite well built to carry on working for those six months instead of dying on the spot. Everything is now surge protected of course, end of problem.

Other than that I'm not sure whether demanding games finding faults in my PC count for bad moments: AvP '99 killed a PIII motherboard, Supreme Commander did the same to an A64 mobo right when I'd gone dual-core, and Supreme Commander 2 finished off my router. I thought it was only ArMA II that could kill hardware! Since I was gaming and having fun, they don't seem so bad...

 

Guess mine was around 96 or so, I had already bought myself a compaq all-in-one computer with money saved up from delivering newspapers on my bike. Then decided i wanted one of the new "cd-burners," so saved up the $400 or so and installed it in the computer. Then I realized i only had a 430mb hard drive, so couldn't even fill an entire cd with my current setup. Still laugh about that one to this day.

 

Have to agree the feeling of building your first PC from nothing but boxes of parts is just brilliant and to this day I still have an old crumpled issue of CustomPC kicking around like a lucky charm and of course still say "hold onto your butts" when I start it up for the first time.

Two really bad moments come to mind. The first was a few years ago after I left my job and wasn't working I was cleaning out my PC and all seemed fine put it all back together booted it up and started to play then suddenly smelt something odd then suddenly the PC turned itself off opened it up to see some residual smoke coming off the graphics card (a 6800gt oddly enough) and the northbridge.... Took me 3 months to save up for another machine.

Then the second was the replacement machine which is more of a story about how things aren't always as bad as they seem. woke up one morning to do the usual put the pc on watch the news and get my daily info and she wouldn't turn on. What could it be so the long winded process of switching ram in and out replacing the cpu and gpu all to no effect just dead. A ha it must be the psu. Alas I had no spare PSU's around so my mate came round to help we walked to my other friends house and asked to borrow a spare one came home tried it still nothing so just to be sure we built up another pc tested the original psu and it turned on. Starting to get very irritable by this point we took everything apart and tried it all one by one.

Low and behold it turned on first time with all the original parts and posted fine so we put it together and tried it again nothing! What the devil. Then suddenly understanding. When posting it wasnt in the case it was on a box no power switch i was jumping it so after an entire afternoon of mucking about in dust and pc parts it turns out it was the bloody power switch on the case that didn't work. Needless to say we both looked at each other and went out to go get a drink.

 

That's no way to talk about your parents house!

Building my liquid cooled PC is my favourite moment in my PC history too. I'm so proud of it, and it looks simply stunning with it's subtle UV blue glow. It makes the living room of my flat glow blue at night if you look through the window when the room lights are off! You can see a pic in my sig.

 

I remember when my neighbor finally got her Macintosh, and I ran over to her house with my 5.25" disk with all of my cool B.A.S.I.C. source code on it from the Apple ][e. Then I just stared, my mouth open, and saw that it was a 3.5" drive.

Biggest disappointment in my life up to that point in time.

 

At least it wasn't too tragic

I remember saving for about a year what at that time seemed like a small fortune in hopes of buying my first CDRW ever. (a plextor W8432Ti)
After finally acquiring it, blank CDs started giving out recording errors and considering how much a pack of these cost back then, at no more than 3 ruined ones, i decided to take matters on my own hands and try and fixing it by perhaps "cleaning the lens" (i had heard that's what happens after use, obviously unaware it couldn't have been a dirty lens after no more than a weeks use).
Carefully removing the screws and lifting the warranty sticker, i proceeded to remove the cover
which wouldn't bulge even after making sure there were no more clips attached.
Slowly aggravated i gave the cover a quick yank, which to my surprise finally came loose, only to turn it over and find out i had actually snapped the data cable ribbon
About to cry, i did my best to close it up, making it look as untouched as possible,
Contacted plextor for an RMA, and 4 long weeks later, hand a brand new drive burning discs with no issues.

Now the best one was not that long ago which was almost bad but with a "happy ending".
I had kept a Voodoo 5500 (which i originally purchased brand new back in the 2003 i think) wrapped on napkins hoping to one day see it run again, because the host hardware had died.
A friend of mine, came to the house with what he called some "junk pc parts".
Lo and behold, there it was, an old socket A with a universal AGP adapter just begging for my
3DFX card
After gathering some parts, i manage to put everything together anxiously waiting for that boot
screen right after pressing the power switch, only to finally see what it looked like a bad 98 matrix screensaver
My first thought was that probably one of the ISA chips had passed on to a better life and it would be best to leave it at that, but remembering how much i valued that card and how many good times we had shared i simply couldnt let go. I took it to the bathroom, pulled out some rubbing alcohol, and after some very careful cleaning (god bless toilet paper)
i take the card back to the dinosaur, sit it as carefully as possible, press the power button and HOLY F*CK, a clean sharp as heck BIOS screen ....
It felt as good as God himself must feel if he had a Voodoo card and made it work after years of retirement.

 

plugged in a drive and had the deerfield psu zap and catch on fire.. lost all the harddrives in that rig =E think the all time greatest fail wasn't by me, but a guy I trojaned

he used to always brag about how he was good with computers and he fixed them.. but we all knew he was a snuffaluffagus

so the irc goes off and I find I have him, I get in there and it's hillarious.. he has garfield as his background on windows 95- after redirecting him to a few porn sites I made his computer tell him through microsoft dictation, that he was a midget and violated microsoft code and was running pirated software.. and stuff about his grandma and how she gonna find out and beat his ass

then it went dead.. find out a few days later- he tracked it back to me through people I had given the cd to

the phone call went like this 'when I find you it's on! I took apart my computer thinking I had got a virus.. took out the chip to get rid of it and when I put it back in.. none of it worked..' *me trying to control my laughing* 'it's on next time I see you.. you cost me 500 dollars!'

thing is this guy was serious.. he owned a mac10 remember too.. I had to avoid him at all costs for a few months- ran into friends at a computer show and they were like.. taps was just here man- he was lookin for you XD

you know, it's all bad karma.. but that's one of the biggest fails I ever seen- take out the chip to kill the virus

 

Wrecked a Lianli PC60 case when modding fan holes in the top for my rad with a dremel. was so concentrated on the holes that i did not see the rest of the spinning dremel was touching the case also. I orders another PC60 case and top was redone. but then i miscalculated the cut out on the front for the Graphical LCD. So i toke the frontplate from the first case and that wend ok. So i needed two LianLI pc60 cases to build a decent mod. One of my worst modding projects.

 

Oh and one time long time ago with peltier cooling a Abit BP6. All working perfect. around 2degree celcius. A couple of days later i checked and the back of the videocard and pci slot was covered in rust. The condensation of the peltier dripped moisture on the pci bus and all over the videocard. I sprayed it all with silicon spray and system was running 24/7 for a year

 

Watching my colleague jamming a PCI card into a ISA slot, screwing it to the case and I just watching him do his thing in silence and wondering what he will do next.. him turned on the system and watching is face. I laughed my socks off.

 

Putting a cd drive upside down in the system. and then after starting up trying to get the windows XP CD on to the cd-tray...

 

Blow dry a keyboard after a spill and suddenly see the keys on the board deform in all kind of weird shapes.

 

one of my worst moments was when i decided i should up the bios of "my" toshiba satellite somethingsomething.
'bout halfway through my laptop died. just died. no sound, no flickering screen, just died.
my first reaction was "hey, this is probably how it should be, it probably needed to reboot"
(keep in mind, this was the first time i tried to install new bios).

after about 5 minutes i gave up on the wishfull thinking, figuring that i probably just have to press the on-switch and it'll continue installing.

20 minutes later, after having tried to reanimate my laptop by pressing the on button approximately 200 times (once every 5-6 seconds), i finally gave up and realised i might have done something wrong. bear in mind, this was a laptop made for industrial CAD which my father had taken home from work and which i a couple of weeks later "borrowed" from him. i returned it unbootable =).

this was years ago.

there are jumpers (three) which need to be connected while powering on, but no result. anyone know how to fix this? is the option where you put bios on a diskette or usb on available on every motherboard or is it just selected ones?

anyway, that was a horrifiyng experience.

 

Oh man.. over the past 15 years, think I've done most of the things in this forum...

Played with the switch on PSU.. blew the lot..

Attached a new hardrive with the power cable upside down - took out everything!

Broke some of the pins forcing an AMD processor in the wrong way..

The list goes on and on.. and what do I do now for a living? IT Tech. (thankfully haven't blown anything up for a while)

Lastly - thanks to my IT assistant - who will probably read this later - plugging my nice new Corsair USB stick into a computer he had just built. (without checking if he'd put the USB connectors in the right order!! Thanks Jay I now have an expensive paperweight! - (this was after he fried his one first!!!)

 

Well, when i was 15 years old, i decided to build my first pc. It went pretty well to plan however im a ragequit person. This means when someone goes worng i tend to blame other things such as my PC case :'( one day i kicked it too hard and the cpu fan basically exploded in to thousand pieces. this however is not the bad bit, after taking out my £50 broken cooler i replaced it with the intel one, the pins after a few months gave up (i constantly clean and re-apply thermal paste). i got extremely angry and screwed my heatsink to my motherboard (striker extreme) to my amazement it worked for a while, then one day i turn on my pc... a big bang flashs of light, nothing worked again, its now sat in my shed with a bunch of other old pc and horriable cases filled with tri-led fans you get the picture!

 

LAN - 3 PC's on a cable roll and two laptops.
4th PC guy comes and pluggs into the same cable roll (not rolled out), the moment he flips the switch, everything goes dark, 4 guys cry "Where's the power?" and two guys yell "hey, the network's down".
You guess who was who

I've NEVER (knocks on wood) had a PSU die on me, what the heck do you people do?
But the 200-110V flipswitch on the back...tempting...so verryyy tempting!

10 points for beeing the ultimate cooler
-10 points for chemistry though

If you bought a 100$ HDMI-Cable...you've been had