Blogs My best and worst PC-related moments

Best and worst - my first system build (AMD K6 300), fired it up and everything was glorious. Went to put the shell back on the case (the old U shaped job) and slid one of the back corners down between the motherboard tray and motherboard. The unpainted metal edge sliced straight through the insulation and shorted out several of the traces on the PCB. Oops? I managed to keep the system working for a couple of years afterwards but it was always more than a touch flaky.

Most embarrassing has to be setting up a POS system for demonstration purposes, hooking up a US 110 volt laser printer (as opposed to the UK 240 volt version) and having it go "BANG!" as soon as I switched it on. I also just happened to have my head under a shelf while I was switching the printer on and stood up rather sharply. Ouch! To add insult to injury, I managed to do this in front of the entire office, not off on my own in the test rig

 

You guys, let me know if you think I underestimated the heat load.

 

bad timing stories:
1) me and my friend decided to play the game Krash Kill n Destroy. And it actually killed one of the RAM sticks right after launch
2) Spooky game called 7th Guest toasted my CRT-monitor on launch.

 

Ok now imagine the pain of installing a waterblock (badly) on an X1900XTX card (XTX!!) and cracking a single VRM MosFET... That was one expensive mistake and no amount of home cooking was gonna fix it

Now I have a couple of very stable watercooled OC EVGA 8800 GTX's - so it's all a distant (but financially unsettling memory)...

Bob

 

My worst moment was when my brother was messing with my watercooled pc and he punctured the cable and it oozed everywhere.

 

buying a 486 instead of the slow 386. It had a 110 meg hard drive and 4 megs of ram.
The sound worked some of the time, some of the time not.
Some poor bugger broke into the house and stole it.

 

Worst PC moment would probably be 6 years ago.

While playing KOTOR 2 the game started to stutter, so I restarted the PC only to discover that my sole hard drive had completely failed. The one that had my entire 60GB collection of game saves and (completely legally obtained ) mp3s, films + tv shows that had taken me 3years to build up.

The next day my order 50 blank dvds finally arrived.
Because for 3years backups had never occurred to me.


The kicker being that I destroyed the drive and chucked it, only to find a year later, when a similar thing happened to my parents' pc, that I could have just used a disc caddy and recovered the data


Silver lining: I now back everything up twice. Even my xbox saves. And my tiny mp3 collection now only contains songs that I actually like.

 

Deciding to accidentally create a 12V-Gnd short on an improperly connected floppy connector.


Oh, Plastic+fresh=Yum, plastic+heat=Yuk




Still haven't done the SDRAM-Backwards trick....

 

One of my worst moments was moving my PC into another room and spending ages setting it and a mate's machine up for an evening of LAN gaming, only to finally turn it on and find that - for reasons that are still totally obscure to me - it wouldn't boot. It would post and then the OS simply wouldn't load; attempting startup repair returned a BSOD.

I eventually got it working, after several CMOS wipes, endless blind guesswork in the BIOS options, and plugging and unplugging everything I could think of. The timing was absurd - for about an hour I was just troubleshooting while he sat playing Battlefield.

What makes it really infuriating is that it worked fine two minutes ago in the other room in the same configuration, and when it finally started working again it wasn't because I'd tried something new - I'd just hit the required number of resets, or something. Horrible.

 

still have the 6600 unlocked to ultra.. the x800xl was a good card too- could overclock pretty good

 

I bought into the Matrox Mystique, but soon became fed up with the lack of support from the titles of the day. At the time my gf worked away for spells, so one weekend when she was overseas I walked to my local independent PC shop (remember those?) and splashed for an Orchid Righteous 3DFX card. A brief install later and I called her in Romania to tell her how real the clouds looked in FS!!

Nothing bad to report - I've had a happy 18 years, including working in the industry, as a PC geek.

 

Good:

Upgrading from a 1GHz PIII laptop with 32 MB GeForce2Go and 15" 1600x1200 screen to a Core2 Duo 1.86GHz desktop with 768MB GeForce 8800GTX and 30" 2560x1600 screen...

...and then installing an old version of SiSoft Sandra to see how the new system benchmarked compared to a 66MHz 486DX2.

Bad:

Putting together a new system, powering it on and nothing happens. Scratch head, check cables. Sleep on it. Next day find the problem - PSU not switched on.

 

The PSU....


98% of ALL computer problems relate to it.....

Like the fact that mine got delayed......