Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 18

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I'm guessing he gets his email by snail-mail now.

You know SnailMail has an option to send your letter via email.
They open your email, scan it in as PDF, then email it to whom ever you want.... very cool.

This is not a big screw up, it's more like "a series of unfortunated and annoying little to medium screw ups (tm)"

I was building my second rig from cheapazaki parts (except the CPU, I got my Prescott 2.8 GHz at rip off price thanks to a typo in an ad) and everything looked great. So I started by laying my parts on a large wooden workbench after opening my marvelous I-nick-your-knuckle case and setting the Mobo standoffs I screwed the MoBo in place.

After that the woe began...

As I was setting the ram I pushed too hard on the holding clips and popped one off, it's ok, not too bad let's keep working, ok now the turn for the processor. Proc went cool "Zero insertion force" is great I think but the HSF... OMG the HSF... It was too hard for me to set so attempted to use a screwdriver and BOOM! 8O 8O say hello to mr. crushed puny transistor

There I go to return the DOA MoBo, you know the story: -Hey my MoBo arrived damaged, it even has a loose ram clip. -Don't worry sir, we can fix that (pop! the clip snaps right in place) there you go!. -But it doesn't even boot!. -Did you checked the CMOS jumper sir?. -What? Do you take me for a noob? Of course i checked the jumper!. -All right, it looks like it got mishandled, please take a replacement from the rack, have a nice day.

Cool! I got away with it! back to the build up thingy.
So, rinse and repeat MoBo in place, memory set, proc set and the HSF... OMG the HSF again! It was too hard to place, so i go for the darn screwdriver again and... yep, you guessed it CRRRREACK! I busted the last arm of the HSF clip. I was too frustrated and angry to attempt another DOA scam. Oh well, 3 out of 4 will have to do.

All right, everything is (sort off) perfectly set let this baby rip! Click, buzz, beep... Why! Why! WHYYYYY! It doesn't displays anything!. Ok, maybe somethings loose, unplug and plug everything. Nothing. Check the case's connectors. Nothing. Daaayyyumm a whole weekend and this thing still won't work. Take it easy, call the (not) techie friend. Ok, dissassembled and assembled everything again and let's go! 8O 8O 8O

To make things short: ended up taking the whole mess to the retailer and payed $15 for an in-store assembly and test. Luckily the tech supp dude saw the broken HSF clip and blamed the front desk for not handling the customer's property carefully and made the dude pay for a brand new one for me. I felt bad for about 7 seconds

So after a year and a half the rig's working fine, let's Overclock it!

Ok, so first thing is to update the Bios right? guess, rig's busted again. After two weeks of research at last it got restored.

Moral. If you've seen how a PC is assembled, if you know the principles and how-to's, if you are a PC power user, still, get the dude that has actually built a PC to help you . Knowledge is not power, experience is!

Saludos

HHMMmM...Not gonna look at laptops anymore, managed to bend the chasis a bit (mobo had idfficulties going in) so decided to gently bend the chasis to make sure it fitted, thought it would be ok, bend it a bit and then gently hammer it back in.

All went ok with the bending and the fitting, but the bending back is becoming difficult...I guess it's not ment to be manipulated in such a manner.

Wil have to hit it with a hammer.

With an incredible delicate operation I managed to kinda fit it back to how it should look. The hammer works will try that again sometime.

Yep, don't worry, not gonna look at laptops, never has success with them, only look at networking, desktops and servers...Some other stuff, but not laptops...They look too delicate...Besides, I'm sure all of these mistakes will come back to bite me quite soon...

Well to date I've (with help woth a mate too...The first screw up)

- broke half the pins off a P4 when trying to remove HS...Still works,
- Fried a projector board,
- cut off brackets that secure laptop screen to front panel,
- and finally, 'manipulated' a laptop chasis...

Not bad for 7 years expaience in IT.

You know I was scheduled to go out to Zambia in SA to help set up a new technical college there. Very nice people I worked with here in the states (NM, and CA). Hope the college is set up now and working great. I feel bad though cause I believe they ended up going with 56k satellite dish and connected with one of the other cities ... forgot which as my South African geography isn’t too hot.

I had forgotten about this one.
In May 2005 before I went on vacation Thursday & Friday the tech guy said he'd move the OS & such from the 4GB HD C: drive on to the 80GB D: drive. I didn't think much of it, as I was finishing up my billing work before I left & said why not just get a new one. I come back Monday & the boss is working on it & finally got the D drive partitioned as C: 9.4GB & D: 40GB. So... I lost 30.6GB & mentioned that. After looking up some info on the p.o.s. I found out the bios version only allowed 9.4GB max for C: drive.

Six months later during my review I mentioned that the 450mhz PC I had was really inadequate to do my job because the company's new software loaded tables with 10,000 entries & it took the PC over 3 minutes to do what my P4 3.0 at home did in 20 seconds. Really fustrated me. Three months later, they some how got wind I was job hunting, asked me & I brought up the 8 year old plus PC. A new PC appeared on my desk 2 days later.

2 screwups. well..only one was, the other one was just me being really stupid.

So I bring my Desktop home for X-mas break, plug in everything , put it in the corner and turn it on...and I get this really annoying beep and a post code. So I go and check through the manual and the mobo's online post-code list and it's nowhere to be found. So I start googling around and find some weird "Bad PCI initialization" topics. So..I unplug all of the pci cards, then the ram, then hard drives...still nothing. So I unplug all of the keyboard/mouse, monitor, power cords from back so I can get ready to unmount the heatsink and CPU...then I notice that the keyboard and mouse cords were switched around. Magically...it boots up! Took me almost an hour to figure that out

The other messup I had was I was building a desktop for a friends parents. I ordered all of the parts, put it together all nice and carefully, turned it on....nothing. Again. Rechecked the connections...nothing. Then it struck me..the mobo I picked wasn't compatible with his CPU (supported Prescott, but not Cedar Mill). Luckily, I had the same CPU (prescott, though) and just swapped the two. Felt bad, till I realized that I got a 65nm processor and gave him a 90nm.

ORLY?

Damn! I knew there was an easier way than running hijackthis and deleting registry stuff!

"ORLY?" ?

you know, the OWL Says: "ORLY?"
YA RLY!

Now we know were your from PONK... Figured your a Britt.

Glad that intelligence isn't wasted on some people...Thanks for telling me...Next you'll tell me that water flows down when you turn the tap on...

(By the way, only having a giggle squire...Some people can't take a joke around here)

Go to hell. I'm in a currently deadlier place than post Soviet Ukraine.... the backwoods of Connecticut.

After the installation of a larger hard drive, my PC would power on for maybe half a second before it would turn itself right back off. I tried the power button several more times at first not being sure what was wrong before the "burning electronics" smell started. Opened the case and found nothing out of the ordinary. It was a textbook hard drive install.

It turns out that while sliding the 3.5" HDD partially out of its bay to connect it, the sharp edge of the case clipped a small resistor soldered onto the circuit board on the bottom of the drive. Instead of the resistor breaking off completely, it stayed partially soldered but bent backwards coming in contact with the nearby power connector on the drive causing an electrical short.

The hard drive as well as the ATA controller on the motherboard were fried because of this.

A new one

This weekend I was playing with some modding, having my K6-2 as a testbed. The mod in question was adding a 16x2 LCD display to the PC. I had to build the parallel cable that goes from the PC to the display.

Schematics in hand, I built the cable, soldered everything ok, isolated every connection... a clean job!

Now let's test it! I plug in the LCD in the internal parallel connector, power connector and turn on the PC... and it shuts down. Never to be up again! It happened that I had the connections inverted in the parallel port and it burnt.

Fortunatly only the LPT port was burnt. I remade the wirings, went to another PC and the LCD was working!

I also managed to burn the backlight on the LCD, by supplying it with 12V, instead of 5V. It was extremely bright, though, for about 5 seconds!

But, considering the LCD cost me $0, it came out pretty expensive, burning the LPT port on my K6-2.

fortunatly I have a few K6/2 mobos aying around, plus a couple Pentium 2 450MHz.

Well I'm currently building my first PC (never built one from scratch before) and I researched for about a month or two to scout out the most efficient parts for the money that were quiet. Anyways I ended up buying some very good quality stuff and then it came to RAM. As I said this was my first build, and I had read a ton of guides, tuts, ect. but none ever mention what the timings on RAM meant. Being the idiot that I am I thought higher was better which made me neglet the much cheaper Corsair 2 gig RAM sticks with 4-4-4-12 timings and instead urged me to buy the more expensive Mushkin Ram with higher latency and 5-5-5-12 timings.

Also I found some really nice reviews on the Silverstone TJ-03 and right after I got it and opened it up later read on the web that the TJ-09 which was much newer and supposably "better" was released with the exact same price. Still hating myself for that but at least the case looks nice. Just those times when you realize you could have gotten something better for the money and it was entirely your fault that bum you out.... :? :?


Blah, guess it had to happen sooner or later. Figured out how to build everything together so far so I'm kind of relieved, but then again software troubleshooting is supposed to be the worst so I better brace myself.

BTW anyone know what the differences in volateges make? I read that you increase them when you overclock but what about for stock parts. For example: The Corsairs had 2.1V while the Mushkin had 1.8V what do these differences in voltage mean? One consumes less power than the other or is there a more spec-related item.

MY Build so far:
Silverstone TJ-03 (black)
EvGa 680i SLI Mobo
Intel Dual Core 2 E660
Zalman CPNS9000
Mushkin 2 gig RAM (2 x 1G)
GameXstrean 700W PSU
EvGa GeForce 7800 GT
Seagate Barracuda 320G HD
Western Digital Caviar 80G HD (backup purposes)




Also while the Corsair used 2.1V and the Mushkin

Not really a hardware issue but on a new build I couldn't get a NIC to work for love nor money. Reinstalled drivers, find new hardware, deleted from profile, changed network settings - just everything I could think of. So I decide it must be bad out of the box - pulled one from wife's working computer to try. When I went to install in the new build I happened to notice the small problem of the network cable not being plugged into the network card. That bad boy will just work like it should if you will only provide a connection to the network. Those lights on the front of that router come in handy if you only take the time to look. I can't believe I didn't follow a more logical train of thought that would have found this before I wasted all that time. My nickname around here now is "ping ping"!

JYNX
I curse you with a failed hard drive.
(next time knock on wood).


Also, to cure the pricedrop woes.... COMPUSA offeres a good warrenty that allows you to get a full refund, or upgrade to what ever tech is availible at the price you payed, if something happends to the product.

I just picked up a 8800gtx and for $40 bucks, (1 year) I can exhange the product for the best card 11.5 months from now (should I overclock the card till it fails).

This solves all your problems.

Krazy.

Stupid email.

Email:

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Now you will be safe.