Have you been very lucky over the years?

krooton

krooton

krooton

Caporegime
Joined
9 May 2004
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Leafy outskirts of London
You read about borked components, driver issues, constant CTDs, SLI/crossfire niggles, etc. but I realised that my history with computers (17 years) has been relatively trouble free.

I had a Hiper PSU blow up in my crappy media machine back in 2004 (didn't take out any other components though), but that withstanding everything I have bought, first and second hand, has worked fine whilst in my possession and then eventually sold on or passed to a friend/relative.

Games don't crash for me, no driver issues, my leap in to the world of crossfire has been without any issues, no bad RAM, failing HDDs, pretty much everything that has been in my main machine has always been fine. *touches wood*

Obviously people tend to be more vocal when things go wrong, but who out there tends to be blessed/lucky such as myself?
 
One blown PSU in 10 years. Although if you include problems caused by my tinkering then I have had many issues to resolve, though no damaged hardware.
 
I've had endless flippin problems with various components in the last 5 years. Ranging from some really poor clocking CPUs to several PSU failures and single-handedly uncovering a range of rare and elusive windows bugs and specific hardware incompatibilities!

I'm just about to build a new system based on AM3. I really hope it's no trouble!
 
I've had the following fail. A hiper psu, a antec psu I think, a keyboard on my laptop and now the screen on the laptop. I've had a stick of ram go bad and 2 hard drives that used to massively overheat, and a 4650 that developed flickering at stock speeds, was out of warrenty so I turned down the frequencies. Oh and P6T motherboard which is in the process of breaking.

This has been in the space of 2 years. Probably going to have more fail on me, lots of things seem to break for me.
 
My whole life time huum considering im 15. one cd drive that ate cd's and a Pentium 4 3.4GHz melt onto the mobo in my old pc. Nothing else really except a pen drive bent and a N64 attacked by me :P
 
Had a couple of Thermaltake psu's go pop on me. One mobo slowly died and a couple of XFX cards fried as well. Oh, and I would say the most troublesome product I've had are dvd rom drives, erratic and unpredictable. All in all though, not that bad at all.
 
I remeber onces when i was around 10 i fired my PSU, my pc wouldnt turn on so i changed the setting on the back of my psu from english to US hoping it would fix it then i hit the power button and it made a Bang and there was smoke, XD.
 
I forgot to mention my optical drive that set alight, melting itself and some bits of my case. The burning CD smell lingered for weeks! I eventually got it out of what was left of the drive, looked like a burnt pringle.
 
I have had a few problems over the years.

Had a Gateway PC with a Intel P133 which the motherboard failed.
Dell dimension, I managed to blow up, don't know how, after which I went self build.

Enermax PSU blow up on me, lucky enough it dod not take out any parts.

My current pc has been the most problematic, Had 2 lots of faulty memory, then the gpu went. Put my watercooling back on over the weekend and pump is leaking.
 
In more than 20 years of owning PC's I've had one PSU blow up and one wireless mouse stopped working. Not too bad I would think.
 
-fairly- lucky, in that my PCs have lasted a long time. 3-4 years average between builds.

my latest build took 4 months to get working though. but that itself was lucky because in that time I wrote my entire dissertation on my laptop, finished well ahead of schedule.

due another build soon, so we'll see.
 
Just spoke to my dad. He told me that when I was about 3 he replaced the motherboard for the Tiny desktop twice and after that gave up and never touched a pc or game console again :(

No wonder why my dad hates me spending my money games and pc parts :L
 
I had a Hiper 580w PSU blow up too just 3 months after buying it. Luckily it didnt fry any of my components, just silently shut off with smoke coming out from the back of my PC.

I got it replaced with a Tagan 580w that lasted for well over 3 years, then had an OCZ 780w, and now a 1100w Tagan Piperock.

When using two 4870s in crossfire on my UD5 with 2 slot spacing, the top one died. After I got Street Fighter 4, I began noticing gray triangular artifacts (cards were at stock speed), and the top card was heating up to over 100 degrees (they were gigabyte aftermarket cooled ones without blower heatsinks, and I didnt have any additional cooling other than my cases intake and exhaust fans). Street Fighter 4 was overworking them for some reason, and eventually the top one got toasted (I were playing all day long while it was baking up to maybe 110-120 degrees :x). Reading around, I heard plenty of similar problems with 4870 crossfire setups, they were even hotter than the GTX 480 currently is.

OCUK gave me a refund on both of them despite being several months old, and I bought the tagan 580w and 5770s as replacements.

Oh, and I had an Asus A8N-SLI way back when SLI and the Geforce 6800 were first released that died on its first day while installing windows. For some reason, it took 3 months to get a replacement back then :x.

So I kind of like never want to buy low cost PSUs or hot graphics cards again.
 
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Had a spectacular psu capacitor blow out quite a few yrs back in a K6-2 233 rig, BANG! and black smoke everywhere, power went off in the house etc.. this was a clients IBM Aptiva. Caps blew so hard they dented the psu chassis. No idea why it happened but they mobo and RAM were stone dead after, hdds and opticals were fine though, lucky as the 17gb HDD was like almost the biggest you could get at the time without selling organs! Had a few hdds die, boards, the odd cpu, threw a pc out the window once cause of random win98 protection errors etc.. :D Most psus i've ever had die was a batch of Hipers!
 
I also got a power surge protector after my hiper died, would that help to prevent other hardware failure if a PSU blows again?
 
Doubt it. Whatever happens happens on the output of the psu so by the time it blows and if the surge kicked in, it already did its damage.
 
Meh... not really.

I bought into socket 423... and socket 754... two hardware fails right there :p

Broke very first computer by screwing around with "VL BUS DRIVER" floppys, i thought it had a game on it where you drive busses around
Broken CRT, wouldnt stop flashing
Blown antec truepower 430 power supply
DOA samsung SP160 hard drive
Rubbish opteron 170 couldnt overclock to save itsself
Busted WD 1TB USB drive (ok my ex dropped it but still...)
DOA 2GB stick of 1600mhz corsair XMS3 memory
Busted bluetooth thingmy in old laptop

Apart from that its been trouble free.
 
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