Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 9

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Yeah, I remember, and have been around since *before* there were Turbo buttons to push. IIRC, the turbo buttons were only on some 386s and 486s and did not actually "turbo" the CPU but let it run at full speed. The reason that it did not run at full speed all the time wasn't an early version of manual SpeedStep/Cool 'n Quiet but so that your DOS games that were tied to the CPU's clock ticks for timing would not run at warp speed.

My worst- and only- goof-up was that I accidentally connected a FDD's 4-pin one pin off. It was in a ATX dual-CPU server, so I was a contortionist just to reach the back of the FDD. Of course there were sparks, smoke, and a burned FDD and power connector when I turned the unit on, but the rest of the computer was fine. It wasn't on my own computer, so a new floppy and 4-pin end got put in and it runs fine. It was kind of hard to explain how I shot sparks all out the side of the machine to its owner, but he was certainly understanding as he'd did it before too on an 8086 box if I am not mistaken. Now he's much older than I am

All of ours were (and to the best of my knowledge, still are) Duron 700s on Biostar mobos with 128MB RAM, running Windows 98. Before that, it was a few odd all-in-one beige PowerMacs, Mac LC2s, and Apple IIe's.

At college, we have a real smattering of old stuff. Here's what I see in the numerous labs. Note that they all run WXP unless noted.

1. PII/400 MHz, 256MB RAM
2. PIII/700, 866, 933 MHz, 256MB RAM
3. P4/1.5 GHz, 512MB RAM
4. P4 1.8 Williamette, 256MB RAM
5. P4 Northwood, 512MB RAM
6. P4 Prescott 2.8E, 1.0GB RAM
7. P4 Cedar Mill 3.4, 1.0GB RAM (some of these run Linux too.)
8. Pentium D 820, 1.0GB RAM (some of these run Linux too.)
9. Motorola/Freescale 7447/700 MHz (MacOS 10.4)
10. IBM PowerPC 970/1.6-1.8 GHz (MacOS 10.4)
11. Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz (MacOS 10.4)

They retired the PII/233s last year, and replaced them with little Dell OptiPlex SFF units with the 3.4 P4s in them. You can hear those things a mile away. However, the mid-tower version of the OptiPlex with the same chips are nearly silent and you can hear the 6GB HDDs in the PII machines over the sound of the mid-tower units. SFF cases and hot CPUs just don't mix.

[quote="verndewd"]

Wot? I do that all the time whenever I'm doing a build. Otherwise you don't appease Zappus the Ape God Of Electronics. Then you're in big trouble. Is there something wrong with that?

the card was ruined but still booted up and let you work in windows but as soon as you started a movie or game, down hill from there. i was angry cus the guy lied, first he said he didnt OC it, then he said he used coolbits, then what i asked what clock and memory speed he had it set at, he gave me voltages 8O .

then when i tried to return it to him saying that he falsely advertised, he said it was a done deal and refused to refund for an exchange. (second thing telling me he screwed up the card and dished it off on ebay)

so i popped it to get a lil bit of excitement out of my $1xx silicon and HSF.

what would you have done with a crippled card that cant be returned? but get me straight i would never do this to anyone elses computer. or something that i thought had a chance of being resurected.

cant say ive had a 'worst' build.. but ive done a couple dumb things.

1st one was back in college, I was building a "brand new 486/66" box for a friend's dad. Ordered the parts from a local store and put it togther in my room. since he lived an hour drive away I didnt give it to him right away.
so it sat on my desk and got "tested" playing Doom with some friends.
The next nite during a game session. both my box and the new box rebooted themselves. They came back up and we resumed playing. except the supposedly uber 486 box was now Dog slow.
To make a long story short - a power spike came through and fried half the cpu on the new box, but left min untouched. This presented a big problem for me as replacement cost for that thing was $600. And for a broke college student, that was 2x what I had in my savings account.

My friend's dad eventually came down, picked up his PC, bought a new CPU and took it directly to his business and watched me make sure it worked.
Thus I now take great pains to ensure I have adequate power protection


The only other dumb thing that I remember was testing to see if a cpu fan was running by lightly brushing my finger over where the fan blades were supposed to be. the fan was running alright - and srong enough to snap off 3 of the 6 fan blades, and imbed one of them under my fingernail.

The price of replacing the Orb fan was trivial compared to the sore thumb I had for a week afterwards

Next time I wont do this in the dim light without my glasses on.

OK, I get your point - well, I would probably have kept the card in a drawer and waited for the 'nouveau' driver to be advanced enough (note: nouveau is the name of a free/open source driver for Nvidia cards under Linux) since one of the programmers intends to include a memory check and bad RAM spots workaround for busted cards. And yes, it would be pretty much useless under Windows.

Now if artifacts come from a damaged GPU, you could have tried disabling pipelines one after the other to see which one is busted and thus, restore the card.

Old AT form factor AMD rig (K6 i think... can't remember, it was 1998-ish) built out of random bits salvaged from friends and dead machines...

Plugged the power cables into the mobo backwards...

The Caps on the Mobo ignited, exploded, and shot across the room trailing purple smoke, OOPS

Not noticing the HUGE zalman heatsink slide off the Athlon XP 2200+ that i'd just fitted and wondering what the smell was Vapourising artic silver smells like crysanthemums...

Wow. . . I've haven't built my rig yet, but now I'm gonna be super-cautious.

2 stories, one of loss and one of luck:

1. Once upon a time I had a Comodore 64, and for the benefit of those of you whom may have been just twinkles in your parent's eyes back then, the C64 had/has an external power supply we used to affectionately call a brick, largley because it was heavy (the transformer was sealed in resin) and rectangular. Well, I loved that machine, and used it most everyday. One day my cousin visiting for a week asked if she could use my C64. I said sure, and started to set up (as at the time I had to connect to the TV in the living room, and so it had to be set up every time I wanted to use it and take it apart again when I was done). I encourage me to help her assemble the parts together. See, back then most everything was external or plugged into some kind of slot, and everything was meant to be taken apart and put together this way and so the connectors really only worked 1 way if it mattered at all. So I ask her to plug in the brick's connector to the actual C64 unit (again, it's only supposed to go in one way) and went to the bathroom. When I come back I find a burnt small and my cousin asking "Is it supposed to smell like that?"

Well, no, it wasn't. Seems she managed to force the power connector into it's socket turned nintey degrees clockwise somehow and (as later investigation showed) the main graphics chip, which was soldered onto the mainboard and so unserviceable. Lesson learned - don't assume that because it's only meant to go one way that you can't make it go another.

2. Much more recently I bought an external 300MB HDD as a way to move lots of data around between my machines and have some back-up of personal data files. It's pretty nice and it connects via USB and has an external power supply with a pretty long cable. The day it came in the post I was pretty keen to pull a lot of files from the downstairs machine so I could move them to the upstairs and still have the back-up. As such I hooked it up to the USB and went looking for a spare power socket. Turns out we were full up by the machine but I could just reach the one by the aquarium across the room if I sat the HDD on a chair at the end of the USB cable. It starts up fine and I start moving folders in a big lump. So I think to myself: Hmm - seems it'll be a half-hour. Well I'll just pop upstairs for a bit and check my e-mail and such while I'm waiting.

SMART. Very smart Especially since The WIfe(TM) was out when I set all this up. Cue sunset and 30 minutes later when I hear shouts from downstairs. My wife had come home, and it was dark in the living room and she had come through and run right into the power cord yanking it out of the computer and sending the HDD flying across the room. I come running down to find out what's happening and she's appologizing - luckily she wasn't hurt by my own stupidity and neither was the drive. Considering I may have to do that operation again, the lesson learned would be to babysit starnge setups.

I was reading through some of these posts and some were so funny I have to share my own experience. Its more of a prank then a screw up but I think its funny as hell.

Well i was over this nerdy kids house on new years drinking with a bunch of people because he had thrown a party. He only had a couple drinks but somehow managed to get so drunk he passed out but during the whole party he was bragging about how good the computer his rich parents had bought him for chrismas was and it could own any of our computers. So I had suggested a couple of funny things to do to his computer to make him think it was broken or something but then this other kid says he had a even better idea. So he disconnects the computer and brings it into the bathroom then comes out and hooks it back up. Then I start to smell something nasty and I relieased he had taken a shit inside the computer! so we all just leave the room and start partying again and didint tell him about. A couple weeks later I go to his house and he has a brand new computer that looks even cooler but didnt say a word about it and he hasnt had a new years party since.

My worst mess up is relatively mild to some of these ones.

I built my newest system into an old atx v1.0 case. The screw holes on the backboard are in the same configuration around the rim of the motherboard, but there were no holes that lined up with the the mobo in the center of the board. I was affraid of putting too much pressure on the center (causing it to flex) so i screwed a stilt into one of the slots that was near a hole in the mobo but not quite. There were no components there, so i figured it would be harmless and just hold the mobo up. Well somehow I managed to scratch the film on the outer layer of the pcb when i was putting the board in, so the metal stilt was shorting across two pathways.

Needless to say, I was trying to diagnose the problem for quite some time. I was getting no POST beep and no video: the most ambiguous problem I had had in awhile. What was worse, it was not visible so I complete forgot about it. I tried just about everything. The last one involved taking the the board out to reseat the cpu (my cooler has a backplate so I had to) and I noticed the scratch.

Ill never make that mistake again

Hey all,

My worst screw up was 21 years ago, I was 15 working as a developer for a company in my summer holidays.

They had written a large system in Apple Pascal (running on III and IIe) for the largest shipping company in the world. I was sent along to retrieve a copy of the live system, for some amendment off-site.

So in I goes, box of floppies in hand, sits down and gets to work.

The filing system used volume numbers (#1, #3 etc), so I set about blanking the floppy in the drive. Got the volume number wrong. Completely erased the live system, no backups (early days those).

They sued the company who sent me in, the company folded.

My first, and luckily my worst, mistake.

S!KO

haha that reminds me of the time we pranked my roomate. We used the old desktop snapshot: alt+print screen to take a shot of his desktop with no apps open. We cut the start menu off and freezed his start bar to visible right? Then we moved all of his desktop icons to a folder and replaced his wallpaper with the screen shot. He thought something was wrong because he couldnt use any of the desktop "icons" but everything in the start menu worked. After letting him freak out believing it was a virus, we finally let him off the hook.

Oh, we also disassmbled his computer chair and reassembled it in the bathroom (the door was too small for it to fit though). Imagine watching a desparate computer science student try to wrestle his chair out of the cramped dorm bathroom for 10 minutes. Ah the memories...

That reminds me, I've done this many times before too. Its so funny when there like "wtf why can't I click on anything?" The funniest time was when I did this to all the computers in the computer room before class started, so everone was like "I cant click on anything, the computers broke!" So the teacher starts messing around and can't get it to work either. So they call down the head tech and since I did it on every computer in just that room, he thinks its the network and starts messing around with the network plugs. When he can't get it to work, he calls the head disrict tech guy and he happened to be in the area. I guess he finally figured it out because the next class they made it so you couldn't change desktop pic somehow. But hey, it got me out of doing work for one class.

word :-)

your good very good

One more, I might have posted this somewhere else but not here..

I managed to corrupt my bios during a flash and so my mobo was toast, and also past the return, and I hate RMAs because I'm an instant gratification sort of person. So, in my infinite wisdom, I went and got the exact same mobo, popped the bios chip out of the new one, put it in the old one, and presto, my system was restored. I even managed to flash it OK this time (I think the first floppy I used was bad).

Fast forward a few months, and a friend of mine heard what I had done and wondered if we couldn't resurrect the bad bios chip somehow. We actually managed to hot-swap the chip at a key step in the bios flash and get a clean flash on it! I can't tell you how nervous I was, pulling and reinstalling out the bios chip on a powered-on PC. 8O 8O 8O

Anyhow, I built a desktop for my g/f out of old parts that I'd upgraded out of and that mobo. Three years later, it's pulling office duties for her dad and still working flawlessly with a 2.6ghz P4 and 2gb of DDR400. Even has a 9700 pro. 8)

Oh christ, cant I share my silly pranks without getting preached to? You dont need to write 3+ paragraphs to illustrate to us how annoying you are.

But I will agree, we did get somewhat off of the original intent of the thread :-p.

My first build: I was in a high school class for building PC's. Sure I had fooled around with PC components before, but i was not ready for the plastic packaging that the CPU came in. Sure enough I opened it the wrong way and out dropped the CPU bouncing, not once but twice, onto my build table. I caught it before it bounced again. As if that wasn't enough, I could have Static discharged the F*** out of it because I was holding it by the pins when I caught it.

My instructor was like, "and look how you're holding that processor" obviously not caring that I had accidentally dropped it, but more so that I was handling it wrong.

I was shocked to find out that it was not cracked at all and actually worked (to my knowledge) just fine, not showing any errors in the burn in process. 8O

Worst screw up was an old P 166 MMX.. blah, junk machine running windows 98! I took the case off of it because it was 'running hot' before i had any concept of how anything works in a computer. I then, while playing starcraft.. spilled my coke into the rig... It didnt smoke.. It didnt spark.. the carriers just stopped.

Your particular prank - if that is the appropriate term - is one of the few described here that qualifies as genuinely funny. Not to mention displaying a good understanding of the technology and having no signifacaqnt negative impact.

My post was actually 6 paragraphs long. And who actually is the annoying one here?

And some of the pranks that were described leave the perprators open not only to civil law-suites, but to criminal charges. Since it appears that most of you live in the US, you would be wise indeed to keep much closer control over what you admit to.

You may wish to have a closer lok at the recently passed legislation that allows your president to declare anyone an enemy combatant, and assorted "aggressive interrogation techniques" are now "legal". The same sorts of techniques that were employed by, among others, the GESTAPO and KGB.

DaSickNinja's little prank could easily be interpreted by Homeland Security as an attempt to interfere with emergency services. And, in their world, who is it that wants to interfere with the effective opperatiuon of emergency response services? Hint: it starts with the letter "T".

Buddy who defecated in his host's system is actually in much more serious trouble. Feces contains all sorts of pathogens, including fun things like typhus, cholera, salmonella - look up the others. Buddy could, in fact, be (semi-legitimately) accused of attemptint to commit a biological warefare attack. You don't want to go there, no sirree. For sure he could be legitimately charged under various Public Health, mischief and assault rubrics. A really creative DA could try and reamp it up to ADW or worse.

US Homeland Security has demonstrated a dismaying lack of competence, feel free to lok it up. Are you sure you want them looking you up for really stupid things you may have done when you were yopunger and more foolish tham now?

As far as "preaching" goes, I wasn't. I was pointing out the potential consequences of their pranks to the perptrators. The value judgement I made about many of the "pranks" is accurate and correct. That is a cold hard fact in the same category as murder is wrong and evil.

Your comment about the length of my post suggests that your attention span is very short. You may want to consider working on that problem by increaseing your attention span. You would be amazed at how the world will expand if you do.

lol! well maybe it was a bit off topic but i thought it was funny as hell! I don't think anyone would ever get charged with "attemptint to commit a biological warefare attack" for shitting on something, especially with no proof of who did it.

I wasn't acually the one who did it either and the kid got a new computer the next day anyway. But it tought the kid a very important lesson, don't talk shit about people that you barely know (especially when there in your house) and drunk people and computers = no good.

AH MAN! thats a brilliant idea! Then it will really seem locked up!

Hmmm...I have new roomates now....

DaSick,

Two stories somewhat linked....

A bunch of friends were having a gross "GIF" contest which got pretty bad (when Internet search engines first hit PCs). In fact one guy emailed us all a GIF that ended the contest in one fail swoop "man it was bad... 8O 8O 8O ". We all came into work that evening and immediately declared him the winner.

Months later while at work, I had a friend that was a prankster and he got my log-in ID and password. He put a "how you say" pinup as my wallpaper. I managed to turn the screen off just in time before the female colleague that was with me turned her head. /me "why don't we go to your PC to work on this"... He saw her there and just about lost it because he was freaking out about her seeing it..

It took a few weeks "he was guarding very well" but I finally got his login "using the same female colleague ". After I got the login I replaced his wallpaper with the above mentioned winner of the gross GIF contest. When he came back from lunch and logged in "I" was immediately declared the winner . Needless to say "he" nor "I" did that again..

Anyone who sends threatening mail to the president gets knocks from the men is suits. Doesn't matter who you are. Basic policy. This is kinda different.

My prank was kind of lame compared to some of you "pro's". I worked in a call center during my time in tech-support hell and once when I was transferred from on section of the floor to another, I changed the color scheme on the PC (this was win98 vintage) to all white...every singe object on the screen...menus, dialog boxes, icons, with the final change being the text. Then I performed a normal shut down with the keyboard. I knew there were some smart guys there so as I expected when I checked a couple days later the default colors had been restored.

well these arnt pranks per say but they are good harmless fun none the less

the original quake was installed on some servers at my high school for years unknown to the admin

The college I go to has prolly over 100gig of illegal games then several gigs of music on its servers. Shhhhh no one knows!!!