Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 3

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guys as one of the youngest ppl on the forum at 12 (don't get me wrong, i know my hardware), you're jinxing me. Im building my first when kentsfeild when it comes out, and i hate u guys for this. lol, well you learn with mistakes so w/e

I have another great story, this one involving my friend.

He insisted on being cheap when it came to building his brand new computer ...except for the mobo, the processor and the video card (p4 prescott, dunno the mobo, and a 9800pro)

Well, the thing that I warned him over and over and over about was not to buy a cheap case that comes with a high wattage psu (you know the kind that last a little over 30minutes). I told him straight up, buy a decent case that won't easily dent and buy a seperate antec psu. He refused to listen because he is cheap and needless to say "I told him so"

He took all of his parts over to my house so we could assemble it for our 10 man lan party that we held a few times a year. CS and Wacraft 3 were on the list, but he wanted to truely put his new machine to the test, so he installed Flight Simulator 2004. About 5 minutes after taking off a really loud "BANG" came from his case. His monitor went black and sparks were boucing off the fan at the back of his psu in a spectacular light show directly infront of me (our machines where back to back). He yelled jumped up and unplgged his psu immediately. Soon after all the laughter and me saying in my head over 100 times "I told you so" we all scrounged up enough money to buy him a 450 watt antec and the lan party continued. Luckily nothing but the psu was damaged.

Taking the psu apart we noticed a huge big black smuge where one of the large capacitors should have been and a lot of damage in the genereal vicinity.

That was just the PSU

I warned him about the plastic handle on top of his case(uhg, didn't he learn by now?), I told him I wouldn't trust it, just carry the case as if it didn't have handles but again he didn't listen. Rushing up to my other friends house for our 3 man lans we had every 2 weeks, he decided to carry the case by the handle and the rest of the stuff in paper bag under his other arm. Sure enough it broke and landed in the thick muddy rockey area at the front of his driveway. His case was muddy and serverly dented becasue of the cheap thin steel case...but after arriving at the lan party, his machine still worked.

Lesson : Dont buy cheap cases, especially if they come with a psu.

This is not one of mine, but my father-in-law one day decided that his, vintage at the time, Pentium 133 I believe was just too slow and that I guess he thought he needed more room on his hard drive. So he found a folder that he never used and decided to start deleting files from it, since it was obvious that they were never used... Needless to say he killed Windows, the folder was named Win95 if I remember it right. He did retrieve some hard drive space, but it turned out he could not find his Win95 CD key so needless to say he had to get a new computer...

Have to leave work now, great thread, maybe I will post a couple more later.

Ok, I've read all the previous screw ups, and with the exception of the $150K+ server one, I think I've got a winner. [G]

This is more a story of inattention rather than lack of knowledge, though it does lead to a much more simple nooB mistake that is kind of anti-climactic. [LOL]

I had purchased a high dollar "cutting edge" system.... circa 1988-ish... 486DX/2 66 4M ram and a big 1M vid card!
I had been having some stability issues with my *mostly* stock WFW3.11 install, [the groaning may commence] and was busily poking about the system moving back and forth from the command line to the shell, tweaking and testing, and was getting frustrated.
In the middle of my trials, my brother came into the room. It seems that a mutual friend of ours dropped by and wanted to see my new 9mm pistol. /begin foreshadowing
Since I was elbows deep in DOS, I told him to retrieve it from next to my bed and bring it to me... at which time I paused and removed (and pocketed) the clip, checked the chamber and handed the empty firearm to him.
I went back to work. A few minutes later he came back in and handed it back to me. I replaced the clip and told him to place it back by my bed where he got it. I continued to fight with the system for another hour or so, till I got fed up and gave up for the night. \end forshadowing

When I woke up the next morning, I was still frustrated, and in jest, picked up the pistol and pointed it at the computer...

wait for it....

Yes, you guessed it... Unbeknownst to me, my brother had racked the slide before putting it down.

BANG!

I lived every frustrated tech's dream, I had just shot my $1500 PC.

I sat there totally frozen. I know *exactly* what a deer feels like when it sees headlights.

The bullet impacted just left of center on the 5 1/4 drive and continued on a diagonal path to the side of the case... which was a good, heavy steel case... put a grape sized bulge in the side and proceeded to the rear of the case, lodging itself in the 1/8 inch space between the power supply and the case frame.

Astonishingly, the 5 1/4 was the only casualty.

I replaced it with a brand new $140 4x CD-Rom... which I proceeded to hook up backwards, since IDE connectors back then were not tabbed and could easily be put on in reverse.
After 45 minutes and a threat to shoot the thing again, I had it hooked up properly.
The system ran fine, with it's bulged case, for another 4 years before being retired.


--Druid

That's pretty freaking halarious. LOL, I can picture it in a artistic black and white fashion with a camera over your shoulder and the computer in the sights at the end of the pistol.

That truely might be a winner.

I concur. I was *extremely* lucky. Taught me many lessons, and not just about the hardiness of 486's. [LOL]

--D

I have yet to Kill anything either.... I have always been a careful sort (read as anal )....

Probably the worst thing that happened to me was only 1/2 my fault and 1 whole frustrating.

I was putting together a Pentium Pro 200 (top-o-the-line for the time) with an Ultra Wide SCSI II, IBM Deskstar drive. I ordered everything and the last piece had been delivered that day "friday" (Whoooo Hooooo). Being me is kinda difficult, you see, if I have spent the time researching/purchasing something when it arrives I will "NOT" sleep until it is together and working/tweaked (try to time these things with the weekend since I know this is going to happen).

Anyway I get home and start the build immediately... Everything ready except that the drive did not ship with an UWSCSI II cable and neither did the Adaptec SCSI adapter. In my research the white box IBM drive does not come with the same things the brown box does (dating myself ).

No biggie right? Wrong.... Absolutely NOBODY has what I need in a 50+ mile radius. One guy even tries to tell me that "you are totally wrong DUDE, there is NO SUCH THING as UWSCSI II" In his defense it was very very new.

I spent the next four days online and on the phone trying to find a cable. Finally on the fifth day I found a guy (only one who really knew what I was talking about) that had one in the back of his little shop. It was an extra for a server he was building (the customer will never use it). I paid a serious premium to the guy $80.00 just so I could get up and running immediately since by now I was really Jonesing. Got home, got the machine running, OS loaded and tweaks from tweak UI applied.

About two o'clock that morning I finally went to sleep..... I had lost nearly 5 days worth of sleep with maybe 2 - 3 hours max each night until the machine was up and running.

It is the same for me at work.... No sleep until "IT" is fixed...

Man I have issues

PS.... In my defense the "white box" version of the drive was about $100.00 cheaper than the "brown box" which included the cable so I still came out $20.00 ahead.

But Wusy you've had extraodinary luck in not having to RMA a DOA part. Thats either luck or black magic.... 8O
Did I mention that I hate RMA with a passion? Except when the part is from newegg I've always had trouble with the RMA

Have some with that bastage.

You've had absolutly no products that pissed you off either Master Wusy?

Hah, even you are plagued by technology!!! [/tries to take back bastage]
See that n00bs? Even Wusy has to deal with the failings of technology.

Don't even get me started on the failings of my technology .

Hey I did wire my Mobile Ham Radios antenna wrong (swapped the core and the shielding because I was not paying attention). Luckily I was only on 5 watts and the feedback only blew the fuse and not the radio..

Does that count?

8O People ... support.... VIA????? 8O
My message to them:

..... 8O
Wow..


@wusy:
That Anti Via army is the first time i've ever seen Wingy post outside the dungeon.

Once again:

I stuck a socket 3 in backward, or one of the sockets that were able to be inserted backward. I powered the system on and the circuits around the socket on the motherboard glowed bright orange for half a second and then came the smell... Burnt IC has a distinct smell. Another time I responded to a work order (field POS technician) for an IBM 4694 POS system which caught on fire and caused the evacuation of a wal mart

Because most uv uss is male and ecksploshuns and fire iz gud.

Hmmm Ninja sitting in front of the computer all day replying to every single post..............now is that commitment, love, OCD or a little bit of all three

Nuff said.

1. My father bought a combo special of a 486 with a motherboard, pre-mounted. The chip went poof when I powered up the completed system. In the autopsy I found that they shipped it with the CPU installed backward: it was rotated 180 degrees in the socket. Not quite my screw-up but a screw-up nonetheless. This incident also instilled a fear of the phrase "Smoke test!" into my father, as I had said it just before turning on the PC and getting the resulting poof.

2. Impatient with the wonky 80mm exhaust fan on the back wall of a case, y'know, right by the CPU, I was replacing it with the PC powered on. I slipped with the screwdriver and crack knocked two of the blades off the spinning CPU fan. This was a quick-to-fry Athlon XP, so of course I immediately yanked the power cord and then went out heatsink-shopping.

3. In the process of sleeving my cables, I inadvertently switched the +12V and +5V wires in a power connector. But of course it wasn't powering a fan or something similarly harmless; it was the connector at the end of the four-way splitter powering my four hard drives. Three of the drives fried. I managed to recover the most important stuff by buying another drive of the same model (a 120GB SATA drive, which at the time was cutting-edge, enormous, and freakin' expensive) and swapping the new drive's circuit board over, but lost everything on the other two drives.

Neal

ya sumed it up,

anyway got another for ya

I built a friend a comp i showed him how to do it ect, i got it up and running before i left, i called him a week later and told him to take off the HS and put on the as5 that he ordered late.

told him how to clean it off and to apply the new stuff, a drop about size of bb no more and tada you done, three days later he calls me and says his computer wont turn on. I go over there and look at what he did. i looked down and i saw thermal paste oozing out from underneath the cpu and into the socket... i was like omg wtf didnt u listen i said bb size. He said he forgot how much to use and figured more is better. I ended up cleaning it all up out of the socket and all that. told him to rma mb and cpu , well he decides im a dumb ass and calls amd and tells them what he did and that he wants them to send him a new cpu.. he said they laughed and said NO. and he ended up just parting out a week old computer because he couldnt use a q-tip and clean out them damn ears.

btw this was a 1.2k computer when he bought it, was when the geforce fx series just came out. It was good stuff and he fubarred it..

We won't hold it against you for being a late starter.

You mean you're not?

This one is credited to my father... Sorry Dad...

He was working on a machine, and needed to drill a hole in the to fit some wirers through them... he used a air compressor to blow out the system... but well he must have not done a very good job...

He said it sparkled...

Mobo still works... and the machine never crashes...

BTW: It was a giga-byte mobo...

Nice pic.

How tall is that flame? 2-3 feet, maybe?

That's how it's supposed to be with Cable Select surely?

As for my biggest cockup, well I one plonked a floppy power connector on in the dark and didn't realise that I'd managed to plug it in one pin out of line with where it was supposed to be. Shorted 12v to ground, melted the power lead, produced loads of smoke, but amazingly never blew anything inside the system. How I don't know!