Hardware Show us your hardware horrors

Some great entries here. Me likey. MOAR!

 

I suppose this counts? Even if we created the situation...

 

Ive posted these before, but ill post them again.

This is from a computer that i was told kept shutting down and was generally really slow!





All from the same comp, its the only computer ive had to put gloves of to work on! and the smell was disgusting

 

might be able to dig up a cyrix heatsink.. remember the rig it was in, there was a gi joe sliding around the bottom of the case with a small screwdriver

ok the above poster wins xD

 

years ago when i first staretd with pc's i put a ddr1 stick in the wrong way and when i turned it on pop, and then no life in the system,

the board had actually set on fire and black marks over it and the power suply and the motherboard were both fried and ended up having to buy new motherboard,psu and cpu

 

Have you ever just looked at a client's PC, and just said 'F*** off.'?

 

Actually a pic my mate took fixing his mum's PC



Had a similar one happen at work where a mouse had crawled into a printer and gotten shorted across the 240v fuse, wasn't very pretty

 

No photos, but this happened in a pc shop where I was working.

We built a rather expensive (at the time) watercooled machine for an upcoming show. It featured an EVGA fully watercooled motherboard, two 8800 Ultras which were also factory watercooled and a lot of other stuff as well.

The show went well and the machine was returned to the shop and it was kept in there as a show piece for the customers.

One day I walked past it and looked at the coolant. It was originally blue and now it was transparent, well the "color" was on the bottom of the reservoir and probably in all of the waterblocks (about 7 of them in the system). Coolant level was also lower than it was before...

I immediately shut it down, carried it away from the shop to the back room. There was a lot of problems with the computer, but one in particular. The person who assembled the machine was in a hurry before the show and the only coolant we had in the shop at that moment was Zalman branded. Not a good move with Innovatek blocks

All 7 blocks were corroded, some of them so badly that they had leaked the coolant all over the mobo and the two graphics cards. It was a pretty cool sight when I opened the GPU blocks and they were so corroded that there were "canals" going under the O-rings.

All in all, everything worked even after being wet, but finding air cooling parts for a factory watercooled mobo and cards was really hard.

The impression on my bosses face was priceless after the initial report though

Darkened

 

The fan stopped working on my XFX HD 4890 and their support team refused to send out a replacement.

So I removed the fan and drilled a couple of holes in the case then screwed a fan over the hole...



Kinda overkill but it did the job and has been working fine for months now with no problems.

 

I'm usually very careful when changing parts over and stuff so I don't have many horror stories. but this one time, I had just bought a new hard drive and was proceeding to the installation. I had installed it correctly and now was time to transfer all my precious data from a smaller hard drive to the bigger new one.

When I say precious, I mean precious. So I plug the molex in and turn the PC on, and BANG! flash of light and smoke.

Turns out I had managed to put a molex connector (that connects only one way) in upside down. God knows how. The driver board was burnt with nice shades of yellow.

I had a second Hdd that was the exact same make and model in my dad's pc. So I tried swapping the boards, but apparently the heads had been damaged too cause all I got was a scraping sound form the Hdd.

Bye bye precious data. you should have seen my face

 

My recent heartbreak... was installing the components in my new case while it laid sideways... Peeked inside to check AND the silver chain around my neck swung towards my ATI 4670(PCB side)....BOOOM....

 

If there ever was yet another reason not to wear a silver chain that is it.

 

It was back in 2001, and no camera on those time. I was fixing a compaq computer for a friend of mine.

The computer was shutting itself down after a few minutes. I immediately though of over heating causing the computer to secure himself by turning off.

I opened the case and OMG !!!! This was not only dust, but a dust forest .... no no no .... it was dust paradise !! Every holes, every heat-sink fins were obstructed, the mobo was lying on a dust bed. There were missing fins on CPU fans. Screws were moving freely inside the case (still a miracle that nothing blew due to the screws making an unwanted contact).

I unmounted all heat-sink and washed them because the air blower wasn't enough to remove the dust, blew all the dust out of the case (I was on the garden, didn't wan't to ruin my bedroom) ... i coughed.

When everything was back in place, I turned the computer on, but noticed that the PSU fans wasn't turning anymore due to long hairs wound around its axis. I removed the hairs from the psu which began to rotate ... and the PSU spitted a thick cloud of dust right into my face ... coughed again.

When everything was back to a clean PC, I came to my friend with the computer .... and saw the desk (sticky), the keyboard (cover with a plastic sheet, itself covered by cigarette ashes), the monitor (yellowish and burned by candles flame) ...

I wish I had a camera ! But I'm still wondering how a computer can be treated that way

 

LOL! cue music from a Lynx advert...

 

Winner!

 

Thankfully the worst I've come across when opening someone's PC is a mountain of dust. I've never had the misfortune to see anything serious.

 

How long will this competition be open and is it open for european contestors too ?

 

Last year I decided to build an Desktop to be used as an HTPC out of the perfectly fine components that no longer met the grade for my Gaming rig. I built these in an old plastic transparent (goldfish bowl) type case that I used to think was cool. For this build I needed a new PSU.

So built the PC everything running fine and I'm installing windows, while I'm waiting I'm absent-mindedly stroking the front of the case with my foot (wearing big sports socks) of course this is right where the USB ports are on the front panel. Next thing there was a modest sounding fizzzit a light whiff of blue smoke and the PC died.

I reckon my sock plus plastic case = way too much static. After much testing this cost me another PSU, new motherboard and invested in a proper HTPC case. No photos because none of the fried components had a mark on them, anyone want a transparent case?

 

There's some impressive ones in the Reg article about it http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/13/ventblockers/print.html

 

I had a cheap 300w PSU a while ago in an Athlon 64 X2 system, which was all running fine. Then there was some promotion on packets of mini-rolls, where I got enough packets to get a USB lava lamp (good ol' mini-rolls). I plugged in the lava lamp, turned my computer on and BANG, a nice-but-short light show and the PSU had been overloaded.

2nd failure - trying to replace the stock cooler on my Phenom II X4... The TIM had set to a rubber-like consistency, and was acting akin to glue. I was tugging on the cooler so much trying to get it off the CPU while still in the motherboard that when it finally came out I lost my balance and knocked some of the pins of the CPU against the side of my case, necessitating careful replacement of the pins for the next hour with a screwdriver and plenty of patience. What amazes me is that it's still working after that - those fragile-yet-resilient CPU pins...

And no, I didn't take pictures at the time because I had misplaced my crystal ball and so had no way of fortelling the arrival of this competition.