Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 10

Evil bastard....

Didn't I just say no more of this? Is my English that hard to understand?

i had an old p2 back in the day as my first pc, i new absolutely nothing, it was dirty inside so i took a hoover to it, i even opened up the psu and was cleaning it out and looking at it (discovering) for some strange reason i decided to touch the shiny soldered pice of metal, not remembering that i still had the psu plugged int, WOW did i get a shock and a half, been scared off psu's ever since

hehe, it wasnt much fun i tell you that!

my worst screw up:
i tryed to remove the cpu heat sink on a gateway with a p4 2.0 so i could put in a p4 2.8.

The damned heatsink would not come off, so i pulled a little harder and it came out and to my supprise the processor was still attached to the heatsink. I tryed everything to get the processor off of the heatsink with no luck.

I decided to try to see if i could put it back in the socket.

Of course the little arm that locks the processor down was in the way so i snapped it off.

Then i spent about an hour trying to slide the processor socket into the locked possition while the processor and heat sink were in place, But it wouldnt work.

So i decided to just hold the processor and heat sink in place and power on the system. Just to see if it would work.

At this point i saw sparks shoot out of the side of the processor, followed by the nice blue smoke.

It burnt half of the pins off of the processor, and blew a good chunk of plastic out of the socket.

>emitting a noise identical to a kazoo

*falls off chair laughing*

Already Handled... We can move on...

No you got it right in your signature, people are just stupid
(somedays I can be included in that catogory)

If we go into the server's upgrade dance, here's one I took part in - forced and ordered because I smelled a rat, but it was my boss talking, so...

Here goes: there was a 3U server running 2K Advanced Server that was running MS SQL Server 7. It was a production server, but it was late in the evening so no one was using it any more - and anyway it had just been restored, if I remember well.

Well, the beast was using a pair of P3-733 (the server model, coming with their own VRMs on a daughter board) and 512 Mb of RAM. The boss wanted to make the SQL server faster (it was several Gb, accessed simultaneously and all the time by 50 employees) by adding more RAM, and since we had a couple of spare 256 Mb sticks...

I told him I had my doubts: at the time, having 1 Gb of RAM was not something anybody saw very often, and I thought making the attempt without preliminary tests (or even, reading some results on similar configs) was foolish. Boy, was I proven right.

See, 32-bit OSes in the NT family can't address more than 4 Gb of physical RAM - accessing the rest via paging. Since at the time having 4 Gb of RAM was a distant dream, it was more or less understood that anything over 4 Gb would be swap space. Add to it a 512 Mb addressing range dedicated to the OS, and only 3.5 Gb can be accessed by apps. Since it is difficult to take into account without a performance impact, many apps merely expect to encounter at most 2 Gb of RAM - thus do any 'internal' addressing on 31-bit. Now then, add 1 bit for parity (just to do it 'old-school'): 30 bit addressing means 1 Gb of RAM max. Well, if this wasn't the explanation for this exact problem, it must have been really close: as soon as I was done installing the extra RAM and rebooted, I noticed extreme sluggishness once the SQL server process had restarted: it was eating up all CPU resources, making the server unuseable.

The boss wanted me to reinstall the server OS. Knowing that it was a very bad solution to a very strange problem, I decided we'd better call a colleague, who told me 'parity' - I was then sure that all we had to do was remove a RAM stick and be done with it. And we did - with tremendous success.

Not my screw-up, but imagine how smug I felt after my boss had sent me a black look meaning 'what did you do to my server?!' after the 'upgrade', and I was proved right?

As a matter of fact, he was the IT department boss - but was soon replaced.

Incidentally, I had the new boss running out of my office very soon once he arrived when, after one of the staff got a screwed up laptop, I used several spares, my own laptop and some kniknack to build a 'laptop stack' (I needed to get the HD from one laptop, the ethernet card from another, a new laptop that could accomodate both at the same time to clone the fourth anew - I stacked them all one over the other to save on desk real estate).

Sometimes it's good to be me

Word.

That brings new meaning to 'flashing your bios'.



Bad luck dude, but also it's not good to handle the electronics during a natural build up of static electricity at any rate.

This is what happens when you use outdated tech...
Lesson: Floppy Drives are the root of all evil. Period

Where I work, someone put a really cheap CD-R in one of those noise 52x drives. The drive started spinning really fast and then... bang! The CD was left to pieces and the media layer of the CD was all over the place... until today we find little shiny pieces of the CD in the room.

I also remembered a screw up I did once (with the same computer I mentioned before). The mobo is an Intel D815EEA. I was installing network adapter with a WOL connector. However, I placed the WOL on the wrong connector on the mobo... it was in one of the cooler power connectors. As soon as I plugged the PSU cable, even before turning it on, the mobo fried... a little smoke and a big black spot on the mobo. Fortunatly it was under warranty and Intel sent a replacement.

The worst thing me and a mate done (we decided after a few vodkas) that we'd have a little look inside his PC, this was not a common thing to look in a PC (have built systems myself) but while drunk it's not such a good idea. So we had a look at his PC and wanted to look at his CPU, unknown to us that they have things such as a heat sink and a fan, but thet didn't stop us...We decided to 'help' it come off with a screwdriver...That really wasn't clever. Managed to force the CPU out and rip half the pins off. But still this still didn't stop us...So we then proceded to super glue the CPU onto the motherboard (this really isn't clever...Never do this, not even wen you're sober)

IT still works...Somehow, not sure, somewhere this should of broken when we managed to rip out the CPU, fan and heatsink in one go. Managed to damage the motherboard a bit too...

I thought the power supply was the root and the floppy was the victim?
That's what the floppy wants you to think. How else did it survive that shock? I'm telling you, all floppy drives are evil.
I remember when I had a very important project, and this was when I had to use floppies to transport the data. As usual the diskette broke. I failed that class. The drive and its media are evil man....

If you search somewhere within the recesses of this thread you'll find that someone actually shot there PC....
Its in there somewhere... :?

laptop stack---

You're welcome.

That brings new meaning to 'flashing your bios'.



Bad luck dude, but also it's not good to handle the electronics during a natural build up of static electricity at any rate.

True, but then I was a noob back then, didn't know anything about flashing, and failure would deem my mobo useless.

The funny thing is ... how often does someone flash their mobo's bios? and how often does it rain cats and dogs outside? and how often lightning actually hit my main power line and tripped my whole house's electricity?

Combining all of that, I'd say the probability of that happening is like 1 to a billion gazillion? Maybe more, maybe less. But I'm pretty sure that I'd have had better chance hitting the lottery/jackpot, than that happening. So, in a way, I'm a winner.

It's more fun to go to the roof of a large building and toss the sucker off. Have a video camera running near the impact zone. You might be surprised how well a hard drive can bounce.
Oohh. I'm going to go try that now...

Don't forget to make windage corrections...

I just remembered another one (after 20 years working with computers, I have more stories than I can remember).

One raining night I was doing some important stuff at my P233 MMX, when a lightining stroke. My PC just went down, and a lightly smell of burnt stuff. I was so mad! I opened up the computer, tried to unplug and plug it several ways, several times... nothing worked. Tried fixing it for over 2 hours.

I was so mad I went out for a beer, met a few friends at the bar, stayed out until 6am, went straight to class, drunk as a skunk!

The same day, at night, after the headaches were over, and I was a little less p*ss*d, I tried opening up the PSU, and noticed a blown fuse. I replaced the fuse, tried turning the PC on and... I WORKED!!!!

Note: the PSU was from my previous Gateway 2000 386DX/25, which had been upgraded to the P233MMX, so it was a first class PSU.

Lesson learned: ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS use first class PSUs! They take the damage so the components don't.

I'm missing something about HHD's 8O

Remember when the PCB's on the HHD did not have recesses for screws...

I took a machine apart 3 times, assembled on the bench it works fine, put it in the case it refuses to see the drive.

Used shorter screws on that one , felt really



Taking it back a bit, anybody scramble a couple of punch-cards... It takes a couple of days to sort that out... (guess it does'nt count... only mini computers has punch-cards) But it was fun...

tried to install "golden orb" cooler on my cusl2-c / p3 1Ghz (1st homebrew..f*cker was working fine w/ stock hsf

stupid golden orb did actually twist all the way on (have i mentioned how much I hate the golden orb cooler?) and poof no more p3 1Ghz....


and just last week.
bought a FX-55 (for quite litte amounts of money) didn't realize my 9NDA3+ wouldn't work with it.... OOOPS.. oh well got Asus A8V for about $30 from mwave problem solve

well guys just last night i had a major screw up. i was bored and decided it would be a good time to clean out the hsf on my ferrari 4005 laptop. and in case you don't know, getting to the side of the hsf where you can do the most cleaning requires taking almost everything apart.

Well disasembly went smoothly, i even kept track of the 30+ screws and took pictures of how wires were routed and stuff. I then proceed to blow out all the dust without a hitch. now reasembly is where the problem always happens. as i put everything back together i was trying to make sure all the connecors were seated properly and all the screws were tight, but as i found out later i missed one of the connectors (it was 3am).

So i have everything but the keyboard attatched(it was pluged in though) and press the power button. It posts as normally and the windows xp loading screan appears, then i get a wiff of something, look down in the keyboard opening and see the evil smoke.

after immediatley pulling the power i begin disassembly to see the extent of the damage and which board got fried. to my disappointment there was a blackened component on the mainboard, but it was right next to a connector for the usb daughter board so i decided to take a look at it, and i found one of the pins bent and touching another pin.

i then decided it was time to sleep (although i had this horrible feeling in my stomach so it was hard to sleep, i was fearing buying a several hundred dollar mainboard). this morning i woke up early (again bc i couldn't sleep) and went back to work. i figured that since the comp was booting, that the component must only be related to the usb plug i decided to take a chance and run the thing with the pin fixed and the connector unplugged.

Luckily it works and i am typing this on it now with no problems, other than i now lost 3 of my 4 usb ports, the internal bluetooth, and also the connector hooked up the right speaker so i lost that too. but i can live with that compared to buying an expensive mainboard. now why couldn't this have happened instead while i was building my parents cheap system last year, it always happens to the expensive stuff.