Build a PC - Horror stories
- Thread starter fiveub
- Start date
My first ever home build in the pre internet days of 1992-3 ish.
Build issues.
Non zero insertion force socket, supported motherboard on a book and pushed like **** to get it in there, luckily pins were fewer, thicker and stronger on a 486DX processor.
ISA Sound card, soundblaster compatible. Installed card, installed drivers, configured memory and interrupts. Would it work? No. and the computer locked up often. Finally returned the card and got a proper Creative one.
Drivers and software. All from paper manuals and floppy disks. Endless hours of fun making everything happy and just work.
Hardware.
486Dx 33MHz
Intel motherboard
Local bus graphics card 256kb
Local bus IDE interface card
Creative soundblaster 16bit ISA
4 x 1Mb ram
120Mb HDD
OS Dos 6 and Windows 3/3.1
Things are easier now
Build issues.
Non zero insertion force socket, supported motherboard on a book and pushed like **** to get it in there, luckily pins were fewer, thicker and stronger on a 486DX processor.
ISA Sound card, soundblaster compatible. Installed card, installed drivers, configured memory and interrupts. Would it work? No. and the computer locked up often. Finally returned the card and got a proper Creative one.
Drivers and software. All from paper manuals and floppy disks. Endless hours of fun making everything happy and just work.
Hardware.
486Dx 33MHz
Intel motherboard
Local bus graphics card 256kb
Local bus IDE interface card
Creative soundblaster 16bit ISA
4 x 1Mb ram
120Mb HDD
OS Dos 6 and Windows 3/3.1
Things are easier now
Had a major scare all the way back in 2003 when I built a machine for my friend, with the 111/220 switch on the PSU. For some reason it was set to 110 by default which I didn't notice before I booted it, heard a zap and whole thing powering down. Major scare as my friend just plowed £800 into the components and it was only the second time I build a PC so we walked over to my house over a mile away to pick up my PC which we then carried back so can start the process of elimination to see what died. Turned out it was just the fuse in the power cable and the thing is actually somehow still working to this day!
Apart from that had a machine that kept cutting out after a CPU upgrade, couldn't figure out why until I realised I didn't plug the CPU fan so it was overheating. Luckily enough didn't fry it and worked for a few years before I sold it on.
Also once found Cherios inside my little sister's PC when upgrading it, to this day wonder how those got inside a sealed case.
Apart from that had a machine that kept cutting out after a CPU upgrade, couldn't figure out why until I realised I didn't plug the CPU fan so it was overheating. Luckily enough didn't fry it and worked for a few years before I sold it on.
Also once found Cherios inside my little sister's PC when upgrading it, to this day wonder how those got inside a sealed case.
Associate
- Joined
- 6 Jul 2013
- Posts
- 36
Thought I'd found some super secret turbo mode on our trusty family P90.
POP.
Quickly flicked it back, and sat down looking innocent. Fortunately the bloke in the local shop told my mum PSU's just blow from time to time. Got a new case out of it, as back then every case came with its own PSU.
Had a serious sense of humour failure trying to install an aftermarket HSF on a P4, and ended up stabbing the mobo with a phillips.
this reminds me off an incident at a quarry where I worked in the late 90's
there was a computer in the workshop that ran on 110 it got used for doing diagnostics on the machines and cost a pretty penny back in the day when it was bought.
so the new quarry manager was in the workshop one evening and spotted the computer in the workshop and must have thought "Ill have that for my office.."
so in his moment of smartness he took the computer to his office and then proceeded to plug it in to a 240 outlet..
we ended out needing to get a replacement as it was fried. think at the time the cost of it was about £15k
the new manager's response was he couldn't understand why the workshop had a computer and he didint have one in his office..
Last edited:
Associate
- Joined
- 31 Oct 2012
- Posts
- 2,243
- Location
- Edinburgh
My first ever home build in the pre internet days of 1992-3 ish.
Build issues.
Non zero insertion force socket, supported motherboard on a book and pushed like **** to get it in there, luckily pins were fewer, thicker and stronger on a 486DX processor.
ISA Sound card, soundblaster compatible. Installed card, installed drivers, configured memory and interrupts. Would it work? No. and the computer locked up often. Finally returned the card and got a proper Creative one.
Drivers and software. All from paper manuals and floppy disks. Endless hours of fun making everything happy and just work.
Hardware.
486Dx 33MHz
Intel motherboard
Local bus graphics card 256kb
Local bus IDE interface card
Creative soundblaster 16bit ISA
4 x 1Mb ram
120Mb HDD
OS Dos 6 and Windows 3/3.1
Things are easier now
I'd completely forgotten about configuring interrupts, brings back painful memories of trying to work out what was going wrong...
Yep, computers now are super-easy
Soldato
- Joined
- 16 Aug 2009
- Posts
- 8,308
Once upon a time I had motherboard and I wanted to fit an aftermarket cpu cooler the trouble was there was a backplate already fitted to the mobo and it was well and truly stuck down nothing would shift it. So I decided to take a screwdriver to it to lever it off...
as you can imagine that didn't go well. The plate came off but so did a few tracks on the PCB. Needless to say it was kaput. So I RMA'd it as faulty and got a replacement. Naughty. I subsequently found out if you heat up the backplate with a hairdryer or warm it over a lamp it will become unstickable, which it did. My first ever build I think.
Haha I did that with a plastic fan blade once and that was bad enough, who knew a piece of spinning plastic can take a chunk out of your finger?
as you can imagine that didn't go well. The plate came off but so did a few tracks on the PCB. Needless to say it was kaput. So I RMA'd it as faulty and got a replacement. Naughty. I subsequently found out if you heat up the backplate with a hairdryer or warm it over a lamp it will become unstickable, which it did. My first ever build I think.
Decided to touch a - surprisingly sharp - metal fan blade on a Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti 200 while it was spinning. Nope nope nope nope nope
Haha I did that with a plastic fan blade once and that was bad enough, who knew a piece of spinning plastic can take a chunk out of your finger?
Last edited:
The only expensive mishap I have had so far (kiss of death after this I am sure) relates to my first desktop PC.
A P133mhz 16mb 1G desktop from Escom (remember them?)
It had an onboard soundblaster pro, my mate bought a PC roughly the same time as me, but he purchased an AWE32 card.
The sound from this thing was awesome compared to my pro. I went and purchased one before realising how damn big the cards were. I have to bend
the card to make it fit, the bend must have been around 15 degrees
Eventually after a bit of force.....the card cracked.
I dont know how I got away with it, but I took it back to PC world and claimed it came like this. Funny enough I asked for a refund and not a replacement.
A P133mhz 16mb 1G desktop from Escom (remember them?)
It had an onboard soundblaster pro, my mate bought a PC roughly the same time as me, but he purchased an AWE32 card.
The sound from this thing was awesome compared to my pro. I went and purchased one before realising how damn big the cards were. I have to bend
the card to make it fit, the bend must have been around 15 degrees Eventually after a bit of force.....the card cracked.
I dont know how I got away with it, but I took it back to PC world and claimed it came like this. Funny enough I asked for a refund and not a replacement.
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 2,727
- Location
- Gillingham, Kent
Was disappointed with the cooling performance of a CPU fan I'd chosen and fitted for a high-ish end PC at work a while back:
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18584250
Turns out, the plastic bit saying "remove before installation" does actually matter!
And I'm an idiot.
Not got many friends who build PCs, so not got any horror stories about building PCs. I have got lots about PC usage in general, so I'll share one of those:
About 5 years ago, one of my wife's friends broke up with her husband, who took their (ancient) PC with him. I felt sorry for her, so gave her one of my spare PCs and a printer I'd replaced for free - an HP DC7600, late Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM, a 17inch LCD, 500GB HDD, you know the kind of thing. Explained it would be fine for internet and email but won't be any good for gaming (her 12 year old son had a PlayStation 3, so wasn't a PC gamer).
Unfortunately, she turned out to be a complete cow who believed the world owed her everything. After lots of complaints from her and almost a dozen visits to her house over the next couple of months to replace the WiFi adapter I'd given her with a Homeplug setup (that I gave her for free) because the internet signal wasn't reliable and she wouldn't move her router or the PC closer together, and to remove the many viruses she and her kids put on the PC by trying to download illegal movies and PC games (again explaining the PC can't play games beyond Solitaire), and the Windows repair reinstall because they always just switched off the plug rather than tell the PC to Shutdown ("it takes too long!"), my wife finally had an angry voicemail from her.
Her son had bought GTA IV and installed it on the PC, but the PC couldn't run the game (duh!), so he'd "finally" lost his temper with it. He'd ripped the PC away from all it's cables and thrown it onto the patio. Annoyed the PC didn't break/shatter, he'd then thrown it onto the patio again another three times, then dumped the PC in the garden waste wheelie bin and covered it with all the waste food from the kitchen bin. This had happened three days before, and she was contacting my wife because all her family pictures were on the PC and she was demanding (yes, that was the word she used) that I come round, get the pictures off the PC and give them to her, and replace the PC with one that works.
So very glad when the wife finally had a falling out with her and I stopped having to deal with the woman.
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18584250
Turns out, the plastic bit saying "remove before installation" does actually matter!
And I'm an idiot.Not got many friends who build PCs, so not got any horror stories about building PCs. I have got lots about PC usage in general, so I'll share one of those:
About 5 years ago, one of my wife's friends broke up with her husband, who took their (ancient) PC with him. I felt sorry for her, so gave her one of my spare PCs and a printer I'd replaced for free - an HP DC7600, late Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM, a 17inch LCD, 500GB HDD, you know the kind of thing. Explained it would be fine for internet and email but won't be any good for gaming (her 12 year old son had a PlayStation 3, so wasn't a PC gamer).
Unfortunately, she turned out to be a complete cow who believed the world owed her everything.
After lots of complaints from her and almost a dozen visits to her house over the next couple of months to replace the WiFi adapter I'd given her with a Homeplug setup (that I gave her for free) because the internet signal wasn't reliable and she wouldn't move her router or the PC closer together, and to remove the many viruses she and her kids put on the PC by trying to download illegal movies and PC games (again explaining the PC can't play games beyond Solitaire), and the Windows repair reinstall because they always just switched off the plug rather than tell the PC to Shutdown ("it takes too long!"), my wife finally had an angry voicemail from her.Her son had bought GTA IV and installed it on the PC, but the PC couldn't run the game (duh!), so he'd "finally" lost his temper with it. He'd ripped the PC away from all it's cables and thrown it onto the patio. Annoyed the PC didn't break/shatter, he'd then thrown it onto the patio again another three times, then dumped the PC in the garden waste wheelie bin and covered it with all the waste food from the kitchen bin. This had happened three days before, and she was contacting my wife because all her family pictures were on the PC and she was demanding (yes, that was the word she used) that I come round, get the pictures off the PC and give them to her, and replace the PC with one that works.
So very glad when the wife finally had a falling out with her and I stopped having to deal with the woman.
Was disappointed with the cooling performance of a CPU fan I'd chosen and fitted for a high-ish end PC at work a while back:
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18584250
Turns out, the plastic bit saying "remove before installation" does actually matter!
Not got many friends who build PCs, so not got any horror stories about building PCs. I have got lots about PC usage in general, so I'll share one of those:
About 5 years ago, one of my wife's friends broke up with her husband, who took their (ancient) PC with him. I felt sorry for her, so gave her one of my spare PCs and a printer I'd replaced for free - an HP DC7600, late Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM, a 17inch LCD, 500GB HDD, you know the kind of thing. Explained it would be fine for internet and email but won't be any good for gaming (her 12 year old son had a PlayStation 3, so wasn't a PC gamer).
Unfortunately, she turned out to be a complete cow who believed the world owed her everything.
Her son had bought GTA IV and installed it on the PC, but the PC couldn't run the game (duh!), so he'd "finally" lost his temper with it. He'd ripped the PC away from all it's cables and thrown it onto the patio. Annoyed the PC didn't break/shatter, he'd then thrown it onto the patio again another three times, then dumped the PC in the garden waste wheelie bin and covered it with all the waste food from the kitchen bin. This had happened three days before, and she was contacting my wife because all her family pictures were on the PC and she was demanding (yes, that was the word she used) that I come round, get the pictures off the PC and give them to her, and replace the PC with one that works.
So very glad when the wife finally had a falling out with her and I stopped having to deal with the woman.
Oh....my......days........cow might be an understatement for this woman's audacity!
Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Sep 2009
- Posts
- 10,390
- Location
- Billericay, UK
I'm sure from time to time we have all built a computer making the odd mistake. I've seen all sorts from working at OcUK, from customers gluing the graphics cards in the PCI-E socket, to customers complaining their PC is not working (they haven't turned on the PSU).
This thread is for you to share your horror stories, it can be you, a friend or someone you know.
I'd love to hear them!
What about the guy who put Coollaboratory liquid Metal pro all over their CPU socket and tried to return the board as faulty!
That thread needs a bump!Well the other year I had what you might call a bit of accident when building my water cooled rig Link
I picked up a CPU on the way home from work once and it turned out to be one of them magic clockers, someone i was talking to wanted to know the batch so i said i would take a look and get back to him. I started removing the insulation from the evaporator head then got distracted for a while, when i got back to it i removed the bolts then yanked it off and to my horror realised the CPU was frozen solid to the evaporator head and half of its pins had remained in the socket. I luckily managed to get hold of another one of them nice Athlon XPs which clocked even better but i subsequently went on to break that one. Seems i have a talent for breaking good cpus as ive broken many since with my heavy handedness.
If anyone ever needs hand with their CPU just give me a shout
If anyone ever needs hand with their CPU just give me a shout
+1 to this.
Some of the cheap case should have "Government Health Warning" sticker on them.
I once installed a GPU and never plugged in the pcie cables, nearly pooed my pants when i powered it up.
Properly crushed a Thunderbird core, so much so that the motherboard died in a spectacularly large puff of smoke.
Got a finger caught in a delta fan. Yup, still got a scar on the tip of my finger.
Forced RAM into a socket the wrong way round before realising the socket had off centre locating lugs. Motherboard cracked and RAM needed replacing
Used a hole-saw to cut out some fan holes on the side of a case. Went way to quick with the drill and the case paint caught fire.
These are just off the top of my head..
Got a finger caught in a delta fan. Yup, still got a scar on the tip of my finger.
Forced RAM into a socket the wrong way round before realising the socket had off centre locating lugs. Motherboard cracked and RAM needed replacing
Used a hole-saw to cut out some fan holes on the side of a case. Went way to quick with the drill and the case paint caught fire.
These are just off the top of my head..
Associate
- Joined
- 29 Jan 2003
- Posts
- 1,258
I've done that. Those few moments when you're staring at a screwdriver sticking out of your motherboard really are quite special.
The first time i got a rad i cut a hole using a blunt 120mm core drill, it got so hot the metal all twisted and the paint changed to lots of different colours