Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 12

2003 - 2nd build- installed mb, then noticed a few burrs on no-name cheap case and decide to file them down. Created quite a bit of metal dust all over motherboard. Not quite comprehending the nature of the problem, decide to used "canned air" to blow out all the little particles.
Looked like it worked to me...but the canned air was not certified for electronics and I did not take into consideration the propellent residue. I am not sure that there was a single uncontaminated circuit remaining. Got worse - compounded problem by not verifying complete latchdown of cpu hsf. Turned it on. Did you folks know that sufficient short induced rpms for a quality cpu fan not latched properly can result in lift-off? This is especially true if you get a nice boost from small capacitor explosions. Good thing the fan cable acted as a tether. Only took a couple of days to air the room out, replace the wall circuit, some minor repainting. Made the folks at New Egg and Zipzoomfly real happy though, with another $3K set of orders....almost (not quite) enough to think about Dell.

Or use the quote button in the thread.

I would consider a Dell system only for very small desktop systems that I need to get for people I'm not supposed to see for more than 6 months - because building those by myself is indeed more expensive - but That. Is. All. I don't want to be set ablaze by their laptops, nor do I want to deal with tattooed BIOSes or HDs, and I want to be able to disable the onboard sound chip if I need to.

About small print: I think the Ctrl+ shortcut used by Firefox/Opera/Konqueror is the next best thing to cryogenized apple pie.

O.o

Do not, under any circumstances try to remove the cover from a CRT monitor, ever.... The capacitors, and other electronics will shock the hell out of you.

That would be one screw up you might not be able to post.....

i am use to this. the 3700 singlecore

*Breathes sigh of relief*

How did you get a free Glock?

I was telling my brother over the phone how to work on a old computer built by powerspec, I was trying to get him to replace the processor so he could turn the thing into a media pc. So I told him to unhinge the cpu fan and pull it off of the processor. Little did I know, however, that the people who work for powerspec decided it would be a good idea to use some kind of thermal "glue" instead of just the regular paste. My brother haveing not worked with a computer before did not realize that it was taking to much force to remove the processor, and he ended up ripping it out of the socket leaving several pins bent and some still stuck in the slot. Needless to say, that Mobo and cpu were done for.

Worst was years ago....a rebuild of an old clunker 166mmx to a cyrix pr233 for a kids 'edu-tain-tional' My First PC...

Nuts and gutss hanging out, I decide to test one more time, and had issue finding a drive. it started to work intermittently with the 166 but not with the cyrix in. Later pinned it down to a flaky ribbon cable... but not before I'd pulled out the 166, jumped jumpers for vcc and fsb etc.. put in the pr233.. back and forth once more... forget ONE jumper... 166 boots at 193mhz

*PP-POOK*

blew off a pin or two, slagged one down to raw elements and bonded it to the socket.. nothing a big screwdriver cant lever out...melty-melty on the plastic pin socket.. mobo and chip totally unusable of course, no backup mobo for the meantime, so the kids reaquainted themselves with the Duplo for a while...

The smell... hot metal and frictioned ceramic and tangy ozone... and that thin streaky blue smoke....

I've seen the Smoke Goddess released from her silicon dimension...

Does this count?

I upgraded the wife's eMachines PC to RAID1 (mirrored not striped) using a cheap PCI RAID controller card. Everything worked fine for a couple of weeks until, like an idiot (I guess) I decided to try and test the RAID1 functionality for crash recovery.

Get this...

Using the PCI RAID Controller card's own Windows XP Utility, I removed 1 of the 2 disks from the array (in the software - not physically).

I got an immediate BSOD, and it would not boot any more - neither the RAID card nor the onboard IDE controller could see either disk's partitions correctly. After a week of swearing, the system restore CD was used and everything is working now.

But it not running RAID1...

Copy/Paste to notepad.

Hey, whats wrong with Edlin? I love the command line, and a command line editor is perfect. It can even be scripted from a file piped into standard input. But don't even think about word wrap.

Ok... I saw it for sale at best buyfor $29.95. I will avoid it per your recomendation.

My personal favorite is word perfect vs 4. That and straight dos using text direction.

WordPerfect had a text editor (ED.EXE) that was part of WordPerfect Office for DOS (a menusystem with a collection of small utilities). Same interface as WordPerfect, but only with commands relevant to pure text editing. That was an excellent texteditor, which I used for many years as my primary programming editor for compilers without an included IDE. It even had a good macro capability. Still today it is my favorite editor when doing pure text editing.

Notepad works well enough to use. Personally, though, I replaced mine with something called 'programmers notepad', which works extremely well.

Particularly as PN is actually designed for coding (which I do frequently on PLCs and suchlike), so it includes syntax help, remarkably intelligent indenting and a whole horde of other little useful bits.

Plus, it even has a point-and-shoot interface!

em*cs... grrr...

I worked at IBM many years back in the UK for their European Helpdesk supporting desktop/servers/OS/2 etc etc ... One day a guy from the Italian line came over to work on the UK line as we were short staffed. A customer phoned up to say that he brought his Aptiva PC from the US to the UK & plugged it in & was having a problem in windows. The Italian guy asked if the customer had changed the power switch from 110V to 220 V on the back of the PSU (there was a wee red switch you could move so it worked on either back then). Customer said nom it's still at 11V, Italian guy said that wouldn't work, customer said it does, so italian guy .. wait for it ... goes up to our test PC's, switches it off & changed the voltage on the back to 110V. He then switches it on, there is a loud bang & funnily enough that PC got completely fried. I haven't laughed so much in a long long time ....

..I personally once snapped a DX2-66 chip in half whilst trying to get it into the old sockets ... OMG ... Those chips were like £200 back then ($320) .. ooops.

Sure! Let's just agree on the price!

That's US$ 282!!!

No, thanks!

That reminds me of a similar work prank... My other half did a similar thing to one of the guys she worked with... alt+print screen desktop... hide icons/hide and lock start menu....etc

Anyways, normally he would come to her for computer help so she figured it was harmless and a bit of fun... not this time... the n00b rebooted the pc.. which came up the same way... so he rang our companies helpdesk for support... they remote desktopped to the machine, couldnt figure it out, so they send site support... site support have a quick look, have no idea either and re-image the whole PC.... Says alot for the calibre of some of the people we employ....

i have a few motherboards lying around and decided to do up one of them

while playing around with a socket 7 mobo, fitted an AMD K6-2-400 that i got off ebay, layed the board on newspaper, conect the cpu, mem, hard drive and psu, and used a flatblade screwdriver to short the power pins to switch on and sat back waiting for the post screen, while staring at the blank screen for 20-30 secs, then SHIT, unplugged the power cord from the psu - in all this time, i had forgotten to install the heatsink/fan. D'OH! fitted the hsf, and powered on, nothing. works fine with a p1-200, but can run at 366 with the right chip(K6-2)

This is the screwup section... There is a thread entirly set aside for Pc Pranks. And if you read it, you will find you are doing the print-screen joke very noobishly.

Yes. The printscreen wallpaper prank is a very basic yet effective way to prank someone. It does get old though, as its one of the most common and well known pranks out there. Most people just drag their mouse over to the edge to reveal the real start-bar and change their background... all is well... boring!


If you would like to step up your pranks, next time you do that trick, don’t bother hiding the icons or taskbar. ctrl-alt-del --> end task on explorer.exe. There... now the prank is more technical, and thus raises it's status above noobish.