Experience With Non-techies?

Lol, Had a person who decided to shove not one, not two, not three, but FOUR floppy disks into one drive! She literally bent the case into oblivion to fit them in.

I still can't replicate this today.
 
I had a next door neighbor ask me what was wrong with the PC they had built, as every time they turned it on there was a "Unplugged fan warning message". The PC would turn on and before loading the Windows Installation CD it would turn off, they had no clue why.

I went round and opened it up and saw a nice shiny CPU in the middle of the motherboard...

Me: "Did the CPU come with a Heatsink?"
Reply: "Whats a heatsink?"
Me: "Should be a block of metal fins with a fan attached"
Reply: "Ah yes, but I didnt install It as the CPU looks better this way"
Me: "But the CPU needs it to stay cool"
Reply: "Dont worry, we always have the window open"
Me: "How hot do you think these things get?"
Reply: "Dunno, 30-40'C?"
Me: "Without a heatsink it will just keep climbing past 100'C if it doesn't shut its self down first"
Reply: "Oh, does it have to have the metal bit? or can we just cable tie a fan near by?"
Me: "No, Do you understand how heat dissipation works? It needs direct contact..."

With that I installed the heatsink but the PC kept BSODing, so I think the CPU got damaged by heat. Apparently they had been trying to get it to work all day...

P.S. Its not all word for word as it was a couple of years back..
 
This is when i was green, bought a £130 sound card nice easy install, all good. About 10 months later realised my speakers were still plugged into the onboard audio ! :( doh.
 
Lemin said:
This is when i was green, bought a £130 sound card nice easy install, all good. About 10 months later realised my speakers were still plugged into the onboard audio ! :( doh.
Click to expand...

But h.. how? Did you never look at the available playback devices in 10 months??

I look 2-3 times daily to switch between USB Headset and my soundcard..
 
Lemin said:
This is when i was green, bought a £130 sound card nice easy install, all good. About 10 months later realised my speakers were still plugged into the onboard audio ! :( doh.
Click to expand...

That's a fairly classic one :)


More than once I've run into the problem of no video or no power on a build/rebuild/fix.
Usually to find out I've forgotten to either plug the power cable into the mains, or the monitor cable into the video card.

One of the reasons I try not to work on the insides of a computer when I'm not feeling well, or tired.
 
I forgot to plug in 4 pin CPU power... sat there for 1 hour watching the fans spin but not getting signal to monitor... Concluded that CPU was dead and nearly ordered new one, fourtenatly my friend who is far inferior to me in PC building asked for a picture of inside case... he spotted the error and now I have to admit that he is superior to me in all aspects of life... facepalm.
 
Being the computer repair guy among my family circle, and while they aren't exactly computer savvy, they aren't complete ***** either, so I'm grateful for that.

I suppose then that makes me the family idiot, especially when I...

- Left the plastic sticker on the base of a heatsink and wondered why I was getting almost 90C on Prime95. "What's going on, I'm sure I applied the thermal paste".

- Once forgot to plug one of the PCIE power on my HD5850, wondering why I was getting 2 fps. Somehow, the card still managed, it just throttled aggressively.

- And another tired late night posting on OcUK, telling someone it was ok to install the motherboard before inserting the I/O backplate. D'erp.
 
Bacon? said:
Nice one Lazder... :D At least you dont put reset wires into the CMOS jumper :o
Click to expand...

I plugged the USB front panel connector into the 1394 header having neglected to look in the manual, ignored the headers clearly marked as 'USB' and removed the blanking cap from the pins.

I then wondered why a chip near the firewire header proceeded to burn out, I voided the warranty on my motherboard, OcUK refused to replace it because of this and eventually they sussed out what I had done and figured out that I didn't want to admit to it. (Sorry OcUK!)

I still have the motherboard today (it is actually the board in my main system - see sig -) and apart from the odd hiccup here and there where it gives me an error on startup and I have to hard reset (maybe 1 in 10 startups) it is fine(ish)

My defense is that all of the sockets have the same pin layout they are all black, I was in a rush to get the PC built, and the 1394 header had 'front' printed underneath it.

Never made that mistake before, and I will never make it again :rolleyes: bye bye most of the boards resale value :D (this was probably a year and a half ago or more)
 
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