Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 8

Here is my story:
1. I was being a noob with my multi boot setup with 2x xp's and a 98 (which i installed after xp) and used fixmbr when i didn't really know what it did. I somehow hid all my ntfs partitions from windows 98. It took me 10 hours to diagnose the problem and 10 minutes to fix. I left the 98 drive alone after that.
BTW, if you cop the one crap computer in the class and you have a dumb teacher, pull out the network cable. It works out a treat if you logon using a network.
Has anyone tried to overclock a computer at school and screwed it up?

Fat chance, I've never seen a OEM system that'll OC. Be hilarious, though.

~Ibrahim~

ROFL, thats a disaster waiting to happen.

That is awsome. All my school has is crappy dells. But hey you can run Quake 2 on them.

As far as that school thing goes... our school was ghosting all the new computers from the server, so I would go over and unplug all the network cables, and then plug them back in... so they kept noticing it wouldnt work. They tried ghosting for a week before I decided to stop messing with them.

The IT guy at my school thought ghosting was the sh!t as well. Don't know why they paid him to screw up the network but he didn't last too long. He kept blaming all the problems on the "students that know too much" that keep messing with the system. The only thing he was good for was starting the internet cafe at school...(spent many days there)

The first old Mac "Classic"-type case (512, Plus, SE, etc.) had torx screws that were sunk so far in the case that no hardware store carried a torx screwdriver that long. The first time I had to open a customer's case I used a long phillips and turned the torx into concavities. I had to saw the case open with a jig. Cost me almost a grand to replace the case and the chassis I sawed through. But the customer never found out! Now that is customer service!!! (or terminal stupidity)

Many Thanks to you DaSickNinja

It was many years ago in the days of DOS and I can still remember the smell.

Now THAT is a classic story.

Now coffee has cost me many a keyboard over the years. Last but not least my new Zboard. I was pirating in Eve Online, having just blown up their ship and ransomed their Pod I was feeling very pleased with myself, when 3 players warp on me, make me wet myself and drop my coffee. Keyboard got a good soaking, all of the keys worked when pressed (really hard mind you) but the smell of rotting coffee did the damage.

This isn't a build though.... I wanted my old c language program from my old 10 GB HD. I successfully installed its power connector in wrong direction. I turned on my PC and ........... u all know what happened

We all played Counter-Strike and Diablo 2 on our Tech lab's school computers. When we played Diablo 2 we would leave our bots (mephisto or pindleskin runs) running on the computers with the monitors off throughout the school day, checking on them between periods and during lunch.

And every tuesday for 1 semester about 30 of us met after school to play Return to Castle Wolfenstien on the computers. My tech lap teacher has spare funds from the school and put GeForce 4's in all of them, he stayed after school and helped run the event every tuesday.

Anyways, as far as keeping to the subject...we could overclock the techlab computers in our school and there was this one that had issues with everything so for fun we let it fry...

what are you trying to do exactly? hide the game on the HDD so you can play it without anyone finding it?

Haven't posted for a looong time, but I enjoyed this thread so much I had to post my experiences:

My first exposure to the magic smoke was when my Sinclair Spectrum 48k (the one with the rubber keyboard) power supply decided it wanted to let the dragon have some exercise. My dad was trying to get it to work at the time. I can still remember the frantic "turn it off... TURN IT OFF!!!!" as the smoke continued to rise.

The best one was when I tried to upgrade my 486 DX2/50 (with 4MB RAM and a 1MB VESA LB graphics card ) with a CD ROM and a larger hard drive. I connected everything up okay, turned on, and the dragon got more exercise. I took the components back to PC World, and my computer back to the little "Comp Shop" that I'd bought it from. They sent it away to get fixed. The label on the computer said "Went bang. Doesn't work any more"

Andy

I will add to the tread again.

Originally my current rig had a G4TI4600 instead of the current 9800pro. One day when my computer froze, I got a little angry as this was the third time it did that in that day, So I decided just to yank the powercord from the powersupply...

Then came a loud BANG. The capacitors on the G4 had blown off completely. I managed to replace them (was increadibly hard to find replacements, had to solder(sp?) two different caps together in paralel to get the right rating for those caps). After that it amazing worked, but now I was stuck with 3 vertical lines on the left side of my screen, and they wouldnt go away. So I replaced it with the current 9800pro that is in my sig. Luckily the powersupply still lives and hasn't given me any problems yet.

Again, you must be thinking that I'm increadibly lucky...

This happened before my water damage story.

About a year ago, I promised myself that I'd never download a Microsoft beta. So far, I've stuck to my promise. I'm even considering using 2000 instead of XP on my computer, as I find that 2000 is more stable and idiot-proof.

Shoot for no less than 4GHz. Set the FSB to about 400.

My very first build was my parents' system which was just replaced last month. Athlon XP 1800+, 256MB PC2100, 80GB Maxtor hard drive, I talked them into a Geforce3 Ti200 instead of integrated, since I was into games. It was a killer upgrade from their previous rig, which my dad built - a Cyrix 6x86MX PR200 150MHz w/64MB and a SiS 6326 4MB. I assembled their entire XP1800 rig without a hitch, hit the power switch, and the fans spun, but nothing else - no beep. Great. I got real upset (I was only 14 at the time) and so I unplugged all the cables and plugged them all back in, then started her up perfectly. Must have been a tiny bit of corrosion on one of the connections.

I built a system for myself later on, my second build - an Athlon XP 2400+ with 512MB PC3200 and a Radeon 9600. This one started up the first time, and had no problems until a driver problem... I turned both displays off somehow in the ATi control panel and had to wind up reinstalling Windows XP cuz I had no knowledge of booting in VGA mode >_<

My third build was for a friend, he wanted something for music, so I was building him a P4 3.2 on LGA775 with 512MB PC2-4200 and a 160GB hard drive, using integrated graphics and a Sound Blaster Audigy. I ordered him the wrong motherboard - I was trying to get him DDR2, but ordered him a DDR-based motherboard. :-) Instead of RMA'ing and losing 15%, I turned this into my next build, and ordered him the correct motherboard.

My rig based on that motherboard was a P4 3.0GHz, two 512MB sticks of Corsair ValueSelect PC3200, and a Geforce 6600GT for PCI Express from Leadtek. Two months after building it, the video card crapped out on me. I didn't know what the problem was, because it was so intermittent. Integrated graphics ran fine, then the 6600GT graphics card would run once every four boots or so. I was angered, and sold off all the parts except the video card, RMA'ing it for a replacement (which I then sold) and I, at the time, blamed the whole thing on PCI Express not being perfected yet (it was a new technology at the time).

So I pieced something together off a forum, my best build so far. P4 2.8 Prescott, same two 512MB sticks of Corsair, and originally a Radeon 9700 Pro. I wasn't getting high enough framerates in my favorite game of the time, which was Need for Speed Underground 2, so I got an XFX Geforce 6800GT for AGP. It clocked higher than 425MHz on the core, but I never really used it much over 410MHz, since the CPU was more of a bottleneck. I got a Zalman CNPS7000-Cu, and this started my love of Zalman heatsinks. I clocked my Prescott to a 250FSB, and it ran at 45C under load at 3.5GHz. I'm 100% serious. This was in an Antec SLK3700-BQE case, with an MSI 875P Neo-LSR. I ran that rig until I sold it to buy a car. What's kinda funny about this rig, at the time I was in a business class at school and for a project, I had my friend take a video recording of me talking about computers as a business person, then building my P4 2.8 rig. It's funny, because like so many others at the time, I didn't know how much AS5 was a proper amount. I put too much on, it oozed off the sides of the CPU, but luckily didn't reach any contacts - just did enough damage to not allow it to boot that time. Undid everything, realized there was too much AS5, cleaned it all up and reapplied a smaller amount... and clocked her back to 3.5GHz. :-D

One of the greatest flub-ups in my history is not one that I did. It was one that one of my friends did while I was with him at school. You guys were talking about overclocking school computers. Well we had an A+ Hardware class, and I was trying to milk more performance out of our slow Celeron D's running 2.53GHz. I got mine running at over 3GHz by clocking the memory down to PC2100 (we were supplied with PC2700) and increasing hte bus speed. Maximum speed I got to was 165FSB, resulting in 3.14GHz (yes, Pi GHz) and so my friend John tried the same. I tested mine Prime95 stable for a weekend, then recommended he try playing around with the bus speed. He didn't exercise caution - and jumped straight up to 165FSB, frying his chip. :-P

I received an XP1700 rig from a friend of mine who I built a 3.06GHz P4 Northwood rig for as a replacement, I wanted to test his "old" XP1700 out, and so I took the heatsink off to look at his chip and get the spec markings. When I put it back on, I secured one clip, then the other - but the first clip came undone in the process. This is the only time I've ever smelled fried processor. There was a burn mark on the underneath side of his processor. I saw the smoke - just a little bit. I didn't like myself after that. haha

Aint that the truth , but just for the hell of it. JUST KEEP BUILDING !

Here's a fun one for you guys. A few months back, I managed to actually rip an Athlon 64 (socket 939) partially out of the socket with the locking mechanism in place. It really was just kind of a fluke, and I'm still not totally sure how it happened.

I was basically building a computer for someone, and the PSU got delayed in shipping, so I put a temporary one in to test all the other components. When I went to change it out, I managed to bump the HSF for the CPU (not even very hard really). I didn't even think anything of it at the time, but the computer wouldn't even put out a video signal. In the process of trying to diagnose the problem, one of the last things I tried was to remount the CPU.

When I took off the HSF, the CPU looked a little odd in the socket. It was a socket 939, and the only thing directly attaching the HSF to the CPU was the thermal paste (AS5 I think). The thing had been pulled up out of the socket on one side, and numerous pins were bent pretty badly. I was afraid that there might be some broken pins as well, and the CPU looked like it was going to have to be replaced.

The incredible thing is, after spending about half-an-hour with a magnifier, pen knife, and very fine pair of needle-nose pliers, I managed to get the pins back into place. The CPU wouldn't go into socket the first few attempts, but I just kept fiddling. When I finally got the CPU to go in, it just dropped right into place with no effort, and the system booted up fine. I did some extensive testing, and everything worked flawlessly.

Oddly enough, the owner called me about three months later due to a lightning strike and I had to replace the PSU that started all this. Since the PSU didn't let the surge get through to anything else in the system, I guess it did alright in the end.