Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 7

I had something simular happen to me only I got a cheap cheap case (like 20$ and it was clear green !!! awesome....) I did install the standoffs but the case was so poorly made that the PCI/AGP slots in the back would not line up perfectly and I think my VooDoo 5500 touched the metal and shorted out. Followed fairly soon by the mobo itself lol

Not sure if 'Acts of God' count but this is an amusing story told to me by an ex DEC employee.

The guy was part of the project team installing a new mainframe for the Met office.

One morning he gets a call saying not to bother coming in to work today as there's been a 'slight' problem with the mainframe.

What had happened was a rather large storm had caused a rather large tree to fall straight through the new computer room pulverising the new mainframe!

Now if only it had been up and running the day before and they might have seen that one coming 8O

p.s. Great thread, kept me well amused on a boring night shift

I got to thinking (not safe for the world) we all talk about the hardware screw ups that we're commited but what about the software. As in what software have you ever loaded onto your rig, and it completly screwed it up. Norton anyone?

Crystal Reports used to be an almost guaranteed fubar...

I have been lucky and not burned a lot of hardware, but through the years I have still seen some pretty unfortunate things happen...

One of the most strange and destructive events, was when the CFO of my work burned quite a lot of equipment, probably due to ESD or improper grounding. Even to this day it is a mystery how things could go that bad.

The actors in the drama was: 1 CFO, 1 IT supporter (me ), 2 Olivetti M24 PC's (8086 - 6MHz - top of the line at that time) and two matrix printers.
First the CFO disconnected printer 1, from PC 1, without turning off the equipment first. Then he connected printer 2 to PC 1.
... No printing... Nothing. Hmmm, he thinks for him self, something must be wrong. I'll try to connect printer 2 to PC number 2. Still no printing.
Ok, printer 2 must be bad.
Then he reconnects printer 1 to PC number 1 - that ought to work ..... dead silence... nothing...
After that he calls the IT department, and I climb upstairs to the executive offices to see whats wrong. After testing the equipment, I could conclude that the casualties consisted of two dead motherboards and two dead matrix printers. I had told him it was best to turn the equipment off, before changing connections, but having seen me earlier on changing printers rather carelessly, he concluded that he could do the same - no such luck, though.
Turns out, that I was the only one favored by the gods of (static?)electricity.

I have had a few software disasters. One involing FDisk and forgetting to change active disk to the correct one, before deleting and recreating partitions. And no current backup. It only took a day, while sweating profusely, to recreate the disk with the help of a diskeditor

8===D <-- there

:[

WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN?

please; call me fishy. i like this name a lot more than the other one.

Eeeeww... I hate McAffe. Norton is okay; I'm using it right now, and have never had problems with viruses. I really like AVG, though.

By any chance, were "the guys" the Geek Squad? My dad's like that, too, but I understand his logic. He goes by the "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it" theory, and I go by the "If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features" theory.

Is your computer stable?

Is your computer stable?
Very.

A combination of TEC, A/C and ninjutsu.
(I actually studied the Shinobi arts for 5 years before returning to Capoeira )

So you think it's that easy to stereotype techs at hundreds of stores across North America? I've met some useless GS'ers and some very informed GS'ers.

So you think it's that easy to stereotype techs at hundreds of stores across North America? I've met some useless GS'ers and some very informed GS'ers.

I don't care how informed some of their employees are; the simple fact is that they rip you off. $150 to install an OS (OS not included )? Please!

ive got a few nice screw ups. 1 wasnt completely my fault but i still consider it a screw up.on the first build i ever did myself about 3 years ago i made the mistake of buying a tower with a PSU already installed. of course within 2 weeks my pc just completely shutdown on me. i couldnt get it to respond at all. so when my dad came over later that day(he has alot of electronic experience) we started trying to troubleshoot the problem. within seconds we got the PSU to spark and smoke as well as getting the outlet from the power strip i was using at the time to spark. really quite interesting. luckily nothing else went bad. used that system until around march of this year until another screw up forced an upgrade.

i had purchased a x850xt through work for $270 when they were still going for $500 but hadnt realized that it took up a PCI slot for the fan and heatsink. anyway it worked fine until march when i started having heating problems and couldnt figure out what the problem was. decided to take out the video card to make sure the air flow was fine. the size of the card and the design of my asus board made it very tricky to get out. after a few minutes of trying to get it out without breaking it my hand slipped. ripped off a capacitor. the card came out of course though. after that i just upgraded to PCI-E and made sure to get a smaller card.

my favorite though is one i didnt do myself. i was in a A+ hardware class at school and we had to repeatedly teardown and rebuild the old towers in the room to get used to them. at this point i had 5 years of experience building PCs so i was fine with it but some of the people didnt know how to even right click. somehow 1 guy got a stick of pc133 ram in backwards and booted the system. got that sweet smell of burning electronics from the fans in the back. teacher named him smokey after that day.

and my favorite software screwup was with a program called astonshell. it worked similar to other skin programs but actual changes the windows shell out so everything can be customized. i went about my normal backup of new data before a format and had only begun when i accidently moved the folder containing the astonshell skins. of course i didnt realize this at first and lost everything on my desktop including my start menu and task bar. keyboard shortcuts didnt even want to work right. i had to do everything through task manager and the run cmd from there. including opening websites. luckily i was getting ready to reformat anyway so it wasnt to bad but still sucked for a few days using the task manager run command.

astonshell is a very nice program with alot of nice options just very picky when you want to uninstall or make a drastic change. finally got it to look like this though

all of the buttons on the top left linked to programs so no need for shortcuts

For me, it would have to be when I fried my brand new Athlon xp 1600+, back in 2001, when it had cost me 150 quid.

I was watching my mates playing GTA3 on my ps2 and I couldnt get the heatsink to go on, so without thinking, I spun the heatsink round and clipped it on easily. Then booted up and within 10 seconds i could smell burning, and that was that, bye bye xp 1600, hello 1Ghz Tbird again. I was so angry, just like lighting up 150 quid, arrgghhh.

Because I'd spun the heatsink round 180 degrees, the lip was on the wrong side and it meant that only half of the core was in contact with the heatsink, whoops!

The things we do to RMA our killed hardware... washing it?

I've never had a lucky save... it either blew up or didn't.
To all the newbies out there, I implore you, especially if you have new and expensive hardware, don't do anything stupid so you can end up here. when we give you advice on the forums, please listen to us. We've had the benefits of screwing up massively. We want to spare you this. So if we seem harsh after repeating the same thing over and over, its not because we are pissed at you per say, but we can't stand to see good hardware go out so soon after you've gotten it.

bump

How can one ever forget something like that. Give your "forgetfullness" the righteous name and admit that you didn't know you need standoffs

lol pretty good

i remember the c64 loved it and the atari
they were classics

Hey no need to get all worked up
One can't know everything at that age.

Let me tell you my story. I had to fix an old overheating Athlon XP. I turned it off, opened the case and put it on the side. Then I removed heatsink, cleaned it and the CPU, and I tightened the spring which holds the heatsink with pliers because it was lose (poor contact was the cause for overheating).

After remounting heatsink (which went with one slip of a flat screwdriver right into the board) and turning it on it wouldn't post.

I was afraid that I damaged some SMD component with a screwdriver on the mainboard and I took it to the qualified service where a friend of mine there told me that it was PSU.

You can imagine my surprise when he told me that I killed it even before I started working on it when I moved the case to the side because capacitors in the PSU were all f.cked up (cheap chinese 300w trash costing around $10) and caused a short circuit when I turned it back on.

That el cheapo PSU took the RAM and the mainboard with it so it cost around $100 to get a working computer again.

That was my worst and completely unintentional screwup and it wasn't even my fault. Luckily I didn't have to pay for it.

A close friend of mine broke plastic retention mechanism for S478 cooler two times. I managed to find him a replacement first time he did it but second time I told him to go forth and multiply.

Another close friend of mine was attaching friends HDD on a live machine (his own), basically a thing I did numerous times without any problem, and he managed to short-circuit the PSU when he plugged the molex.

It turned off so he turned it back on and BLAM!!!. His HDD (not the added one) went up in smoke.

That wouldn't happen if:

- he knew that he should unplug the PSU from the outlet and let it sit for a few minutes to discharge

- if the PSU had protective circuit requiring you to reset it (by unplugiing it or by flipping the 1-0 switch) before allowing you to power it on again

I didn't have my reading glasses on

Probably the best one was on one of my very first builds. It was a Micro ATX build using a AMD Thunderbird. Can't rememeber the MB brand. But I ordered the CPU & MB as a combo. The company claimed they test all combos before shipping them. Recieved everything and put it together. The Tbird was already seated in the socket and had a QC tested sticker on it. So I put the HSF on it and fired everything up. System just kept beebing. Shut it down and checked the CPU, It was HOT! VERY HOT! Then I noticed that the arrows didn't line up for the socket and processor. QC tested my ass! Guess it was my fault for not checking it out first. I should have caught it but didn't even pay attention. Needless to say, My T-bird 1200 was smoked! They refused to replace it and I never did business with them again.