worst thing to happen to your pc

Nothing too bad based on the computer *touch wood* however a few years back, when i knew nothing about computers, i discovered there was a loud shrieking noise coming from one of the fans (later turned out to be the processors heatsink fan). So not knowing what to do, i had a *insert name of original computer supplier company* technician come out to check out the problem as we were still under warranty.... (note i had also had my neighbour who is a computer tech to come and check and confirm my thoughts that it was the fan which needed replace, he reckoned it would be an easy fix.. remove a few clasps, and replace) .. so out comes this technician, who decided to..after not being able to easily remove the fan, take his screwdriver to the poor thing and push it apart from the mobo.

Need i say, he replaced the fan..but the computer no-longer would boot, so he had destroyed the mobo. Ofcourse it wasn't his fault! no.. he put on the repair log, that the mobo needed replaced as it was faulty and had died, nothing about the fact that he literally took his screwdriver to the thing as if he was butchering an animal!

Resulted in my whole system being sent to their repair center for a month >.>
 
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Doctor McNinja said:
This will make me sound like such a newb (rightly so I guess).

With my first build I was ultra paranoid that I'd doing something stupid and ruin the whole thing. So read and read, asked questions... a lot of questions, I bought and anti-static wrist strap that I'd wear even if I was only touching the closed case. When I finally felt comfortable, I began the build. I had a few minor problems requiring complete disassembly and an RMA (which turned out to be unnecessary). The worst was yet to come. After the second build, which alowed me to lay the cables better, the big moment came. I tried booting it up but after a split second of power it would shut down. I examined ever millimetre of pcb, every cable, every conection, everything was where it should be... or so I thought. The the 4pin for the CPU wasn't plugged in. I felt like such a div.

We live and learn though.
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I did something similar. First time I ever built a PCIe PC I didn't realise you had to have a seperate cable powering your gfx card. Took me about 4 hours to figure this out.

:D
 
Jokester said:
*Smells smoke* *looks at PC* holy **** my graphics card is on fire.
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replace GC with NIC...(my dad's machine had an nic that decided it was a cooker)m apart from a scorched pci slot the only casualty was the nic.

PSU on my main machine went pop/fizzle - everything else survived.

My old Juno P6 tower fell over when I was pushing the trolley it was on, fortunately it only fell over about 30 degrees before it hit a wall. Slight damage to the case (mainly scuffing), but nothing damaged otherwise.

Possibly the scariest time though, was when I did my first CPU upgrade, it was on my Uncles 486sx 25, I'd picked up a 486dx4 cpu very cheaply for the time- the downside was that
A: I didn't have a manual for the motherboard.
B: It was all set via jumpers on the motherboard (luckily the board did actually have them labelled)
C: It was a old, non ZIF socket and I didn't have a chip puller at the time..(gently does it with a small flat bladed screw driver, one side, then the other, repeat as needed...)

After that I've never really had any major worries about fitting hardware, even Socket A CPU's with their heatsinks and unprotected cores weren't that bad :)
 
Back in the pentium II days when i had no idea about computer hardware, I fried the motherboard trying to upgrade the ram by not inserting it properly. :o

Nothing else since then thankfully. :)
 
Had (what I thought was) a really good quality Asus p4 motherboard that let go of the CPU port at the solder points.
Before I realised this I thought I'd bricked a HDD, so I bought a new one before then spending a further £150 on a cheap AM2 Athlon dual core bundle with 2gb RAM.
Wasnt my favourite week ever.
 
Brick my motherboard, when i used the windows software to update my bios from EVGA, the funny thing is that the tech when i called them said that i should never use that software, but use dos, then why are they still having that option on their site still??
 
Werewolf said:
After that I've never really had any major worries about fitting hardware, even Socket A CPU's with their heatsinks and unprotected cores weren't that bad :)
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After constantly swapping a Socket A 800MHz Duron with a 1.4GHz Tbird (must have swapped it over about 5 times at least), I eventually destroyed the little "foam" like pads in the corners of the 1.4 Tbird, and when I finally installed the aftermarket cooler I purchased for it I obliterated the core!
 
I once cracked the core of an AMD Duron socket A cpu, when they lacked heat-spreaders, the cores on these were quite easy to crack when applying the heat-sink if you weren't extremely careful not to rock it at all ...as you could chip or crack the corners of the cpu core and ruin it.

Anyway I did this, so I bought another one and a copper shim to help stop it happening again ...the one I replaced it with overclocked further anyway, it was the first cpu I got to 1GHz :D ...it taught me a valuable lesson, never run shimless!
 
Moeks said:
I once cracked the core of an AMD Duron socket A cpu, when they lacked heat-spreaders, the cores on these were quite easy to crack when applying the heat-sink if you weren't extremely careful not to rock it at all ...as you could chip or crack the corners of the cpu core and ruin it.

Anyway I did this, so I bought another one and a copper shim to help stop it happening again ...the one I replaced it with overclocked further anyway, it was the first cpu I got to 1GHz :D ...it taught me a valuable lesson, never run shimless!
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People said that, but I found them no trouble at all, especially when all heatsinks were either lock down (so they mounted straight or just didn't lock) or bolt down (so you could do up a corner at a time to keep it even).

You must just have been ham fisted :p
 
Well I actually took heatsinks on and off loads of unprotected socket A cpus, I only cracked one though, although it happened to be my personal one ...still that was probably better than breaking someone elses.

The heatsink I was using used metal spring retention clips, that snapped onto the plastic lugs around the socket, which was the worst design for core cracking I think.

Hamfisted isn't normally something I'm guilty off, I've always done a lot of fine precision work with my hands, I just got it wrong that day, still those chips were only about £45.
 
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Yateszy said:
Nothing - I guess if you get quality components it lasts quite a while. Had for a year no problems yet.
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More or less. My Gigabyte motherboard lasted about four years then just died the other day. There had been warning signs but I was relating them to the hard disc. Then one day I went to turn the computer on and it wouldn't start. Just wouldn't do anything. Replaced the PSU and the mobo battery, nothing. The mobo had just gone to sleep and not woken up.
 
First PC years ago, I fried the motherboard because too lazy to find the screw that had fallen inside :o

Applied too much thermal compound on an early AMD processor which had no IHS = dead chip but what was funny was going around trying to get any PC store to test it for me to be sure :o

Broke pins on an relatively new IDE HD. Sold it off cheap (think P&P was higher) & the guy who bought it managed to fix it :o

Couple of old ATi cards have died one me with no apparent reason/warning :confused:

Recent worst thing/s to happen I've gotten off lucky because managed to fix including corrupted BIOS which involved ordering a new chip & bent pins on a processor which I fixed using the credit card method :cool:
 
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Heard a clunk from inside the Pc, which raised an eyebrow, followed by the PC switching itself off. Turned out a plastic tab securing my heat sink to my CPU had broken off. That mobo had lasted me three years and effectively 'forced' me to go fully 64bit via Vista. :( Windows Vista, that was bad... *shudders*.


I've had the magic smoke pouring out of a PC during the final stages of a build. I'd only flicked the switch on the plug and the damn thing turned itself on. I hadn't even pressed the power button yet and I turned round wondering what the noise was, and couldn't believe my eyes. :D My Mobo had a couple of large patches of circuit board burnt out after that.
 
Had my power supply and motherboard blow when I bought a new monitor. I had a basic 520 watt corsair power supply that was running an overclocked e2120 or something or other! along with an 8800 gts, the 320mb model. Well anyway I plugged my new dell 2407wfp monitor in and loaded up a game of CS Source. Increased the resolution up to 1920 x 1200, and the game ran fine for about 2 minutes. Then all of a sudden I heard a large bang, and a flash of light from behind the computer. Safe to say the power supply had blown along with the motherboard! Was pretty gutted:( Can only guess the extra strain from the graphics card at running that new resolution had caused it to blow!

Also about about a month ago I accidentally knocked that monitor on the floor! This caused a deep scratch on the screen that would look pink when the screen was on. Safe to say that monitor is cursed!
 
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