Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 6

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The one time you should have used one but did'nt will be the tell all...

The wrist straps do work and can prevent ESD (electro-static-discharge) when used properly.

To that note I do not use them either but I am way too careful around my case when open at all.

I find the folks that fry things this way either leave the case open all the time and kinda disregard protocol or those folks who do not know about it at all.

I just ground myself to the case with the plug still in the wall then disconnect.

Anytime I get up and sit down again to start working I do the same again just to be sure.

When you have a rig that is worth $5000, you can be damn sure the anti-static bands work.
Why? Because I've never left it to chance nor could afford to.

The correct translation is "lo que usted ve es lo que usted obtiene" either that or "lo que ves es lo que tienes", both are correct, depending who are you refering to. Yours is the literal translation, which is wrong

By only the lo, I dinn't think it would matter.
My parents always yell at me for my spanish, not you too. My creole is far better anyways.

Ok Ill add my stories. BTW None of them are Computer related. But all electronics stories.

Ok my most recent and favorite one. You guys talk about blowing capacitors. BAH ha ha ha. Caps in a computer are less than an inch around and hold maybe a few watts of power. I was installing a 7 Channel NAD 200WPC 1400Watt Total Amplifier in a customers theatre. Well something was wrong with the power cord. I plugged it in and fired it up and it popped a fuse. So I replaced the fuse and tried again. Well it wouldnt fire up and was making a weird hissing sound. So being a dumbass I put my ear really close to the amp to try to hear the hissing. Then I powered it back up, with my ear an inch away from a huge power capacitor blowing up like a shotgun blast. It was awsome. Besides the fact that I couldnt hear for a few minutes out of one ear. Needless to say my boss wasnt happy and I was later fired from that job.

Also I worked for a car audio department at a local chain electronics store. When we had a cosmetic problem with a product the company wouldnt fix it. IE a subwoofer cone was torn, or a cd player face was scratched. So what we would do was have some in it "blow". Howd we do this? You guessed it take a power cord, cut the end off, strip the wires, plug them into the sub and plug that sucker into the wall. You every want to buy a sub that can handle a high power system. 120Volts A/C into a voice coil is a great stress test. 9/10 subs blew within 2 seconds. But the Rockford Fosgate Power series 12" Played for 20 minutes! We even flipped it over so it was flopping on the ground. We finally gave up because it wouldnt die.

Well thats been my fun stories, hope you enjoyed.

well I've actually never had a real computer accident like anything you guys have ever had. I can tell you of the two sort of mishaps that I had.

About two years ago, I found my aunts super uber old computer that had a pentium 1 or something. I know it had a turbo button that went from 66 to 133. Well we stripped it for all it was worth, and then we took off the cpu heatsink and fan and pressed the turbo button. 6 hours later, nothing, zilch, nadda. It was only mildly warm, and although the hard drive didn't work so we couldn't go into windows 95 and make some cpu activity, it should've gotten to more than 45 degrees or whatever it was without a cpu heatsink. I ended up putting a micro blowtorch to it for about 30 seconds with no avail. I still have that processor today.

The other thing just happened the other day as we were putting my brothers computer together. Now his computer is nothing special, sempron 3000, 512 ram, 160 gig hdd. Well his motherboard is an MSI, and for some reason it only has 2 ram slots. We put his single stick of ram in the slot closest to the cpu, and when we turned it on, there'd be no video signal or anything. It would show that the hard drive was always being used and all the fans were on max, and would not slow down. We screwed around for hours trouble shooting pretty much everything. Then we plugged the ram into the other slot and it worked. I just checked the motherboard manual, and it says that if you have one stick of ram, you need to have it in the other slot, which I find just stupid.

So is the 0 Dimm Slot the furthest away on all mobos?

Having to occupy dim 0 is not always true. My Asus k8n-e deluxe does not require dim 0 to be occupied, however, quite a few motherboards do have this requirement or recomendation.

Well, I guess it’s my time to add a story or two.

Well there is the one about the old laptop I was converting into a digital picture frame, I had received the laptop because no one knew why it wouldn't run, so I took it completely apart examining everything, and came up with nothing. So, I tried checking the CPU fan with a dc source I had, well, burnt that right out, then I tried an old hard drive, silly me, forgot to turn it off taking the hard drive out after finding it wouldn't boot, and fried that. Lastly, I was mounting the motherboard to the back of a piece of wood and found that it would boot fine lying flat on a table but once mounted, it wouldn't boot any more. Turns out that when I took everything apart, I took a protective cover off that prevented the memory from touching the motherboard when it got moved or twisted at all, so my memory was shorting out the circuit. Luckily, it didn't fry anything that time.

No, my main pc, I have been lucky, I have plugged and unplugged in my video card while the computer was running, no problem, I shorted out my motherboard causing it to restart while putting in a pci bracket blank, hot plugged many a fan, including the power supply fan monitor to the motherboard, it wouldn't reboot however until I unplugged it again. Side note, has anyone ever got a computer to boot when the power supply fan monitor was plugged into the motherboard? Anything else almost burnt my fingers on a set of 3 SCSI drives because they ran so hot, put a blank cd with a clear cover cd that comes on top of spindles into my burner, that sounded terrible, but only ended up scratching the cd.

Oh, back when we had a Pentium 1, we were having problems with the computer getting slower and slower each day, turns out that the bearing in the cpu fan had died about a month prior when the problems started. Burned a finger determining the temperature.

In terms of hard drive fun, I was trying to partition a 250 GB hard drive, ended up turning it into a 160 GB, so I tried unpartitioning and re partitioning, turned it into a 120 GB, this continued to a 32 GB. I finally took it out of the computer, put it in another and repartitioned once more, and finally got it to realize that is was a 250 GB drive and recovered the "lost" sectors.

Hope you guys enjoy my futile endeavors.

-Dewey

I just hate it when it decides to go to the nether region

.....

cute

Thanks and congratulations on the 300th post to the topic.
At uber_g >> thank you, thank you

I listed you as a contributor to my blog here

im out, my class starts in 15 min 8O

Hey, speaking of the Old Days: I returned my Commodore 64 (to Target!) three times, getting a replacement C64 each time, because the sound had stopped working. Turns out you're not supposed to plug or unplug the cassette drive while the C64 is on. I kept blowing a fuse in the system, a fuse that, for some strange reason, only affected the sound chip.

Awesome. My stepfather's XT had a keylock switch. They used to lock me out of it. I opened the case and wired a reed switch across the keylock switch, so if I stuck a small magnet on just the right spot on the [thick steel] case, it would trip the reed switch and unlock the PC.

That XT also had EGA graphics---glorious sixteen colors!---and a 20MB hard drive. Yes, you read that right, kids: twenty megabytes. And it never got more than half-full.

Oh yes we are reading to the end.

Ewww you bought a Dell?

And

You admitted it here?

Just kidding... As you can see from this thread their are numerous lapses in judgment

Word.
I'm out till about 9:00 EST
Take over for me.

I work in a casino, and last week I found a system on property that hadn't been defragged in 2700+ Days.

A few years ago I worked for the most evil company in the entire world, and on top of it, they were really cheap when it came to computers. One day I was sitting in my office when I hear this loud boom. I jumped out of my seat and started looking around, and about that time I noticed that there was black smoke rolling out of my POS computer. The boss came in and yelled at me about what a F*ck up I was. Then the next day they gave me $150 to build a new computer. Boy that was a piece of crap, I had to use a screw driver to get it started because they junky mobo was shorted out, and the case was missing a side(I got parts from some friends that were throwing them away). To make it even better, one of the other people was having a ton of problems with his POS, and the boss told him that if he didn't get it fixed and get back to work, he was going to be fired. Well I fixed it for him! A screw driver really can do a lot of damage to a running computer! It was about this time that the company decided to spend some money and buy computers that could run CAD and all the other geology software that we used. I still laugh about all the crappy computers that we had, and how I "fixed" so many of them.

Now I've always tried to figure out how thats posssible. I'd find it easier to walk uphill both ways than to fix a smoking PC with only $150.

Our kids have to do it. We live in mountains and there are multiple hilltops on the way to school. There is about 200' vertical climb on the way to school and 100' on the way home.

The other way is to be trapped in an Escher painting on the way to and from school!

I took my first computer science class in Faner Building at SIU-Carbondale. The building was designed by a psychology professor turned architect that happened to be going mad at the time. The building had 13 entrances, only two of which were interconnected. The motto was "You can't get there from here". I'd leave one class and run over 1/2 mile to get to my next class that was only a hundred feet or so away. I should have gotten free college credits in Cynicism 403 for enduring that BS.

Congratulations on having two of the ugliest computing problem bastards rear their heads in the same build.
Welcome back to the forums.

Well this thread is not only entertaining, it is educational. For pure entertainment, I recommend that one visit the thread starting with "Thankx for the no help..." in the memory forum.

On to topic. I myself have not commited any of the masterpieces described here, but I have seen a few gems in my time. The worst that I have done is miss-connect a floppy drive cable, but no damage done. Other than that the noly other self-inflicted errors have been jumper settings on hard drives.

I suppose that the reason I have been able to escape the little fauxpas described here is because I am careful and take the time to RTFM.

The best thing I've seen was when the head IT guy at a client's company decided to experiment with disconnecting the CPU cooling fan power connection on an AMD Athlon 1200 while it was running. It took about 10 seconds for the CPU to fry. Little popping sound and a small puff of smoke. Now, we had built this system for this person and had delivered it about a week before the incident occured. Those versions of the Athlon ran hot, and cost over $1,000.00 wholesale (hyow times change).

The next most interesting thing I saw was when a relatively new staff member was assembling a ssytem for a client at the shop. He was drinking coffee while assembling the componentsa onro the MB and moving the mug (with coffeee!!) back and forth over the MB and putting it down on a pile of empthy parts boxes right near the edge of the new system. Oh yeah, it was a reach to get to the resting place of the mug. If the mug had slipped there would have been a real mess.

This same individual generated an extremely interesting system fault in one of the in-house computers a few months later. Not his fault, but an object lesson, nevertheless. This was at the time when SDRAM was transitioning from PC100 to PC133. It was usually clearly indicated what speed the stick was, but not always. many PC100 MBs wouldn't support anything else, some would support PC133 but run it at the slower speed. Furthermore, some MBs would support mixed speed memory sticks and some wouldn't. Usually, if they didn't support mixing flavours there was no doubt - the system wouldn't boot. Unfortunately, there were some boards that choked on the mix, but still seemed to work. Bootup was problematic in terms of taking a long time, but the system seemed to work OK after that. No way to tell there was a problem because the systems were being used for low-intensity business apps. This particular case had a very strange manifestation. During the boot process, the system would attempt to access the floppy drive for a very long time. It took at least 2 resets to boot the system up, but after that it worked OK. Eventually it became necessary to sort out the problem. I got the job. Several days spent trouble-shooting the components - individual RAM sticks worked fine and so on. Eventually the individual mentioned that he had upgraded the system by adding a 256 MB stick to the system, leaving the original 64 MB stick in. Good thinking, reasonable plan, system assemled correctly etc. But that model of MB did not support mixed speeds of ram. One or the other, but not both at once. And this was in the manual, which we had a copy of. Once the smaller stick was removed, all problems went away.

Moral of th4e story is:

1) think at least three or fopur times.

2) RTFM

3) excercise caution

4) execute very ambitious projects in stages.