Your best PC blunders.... *OOPS!*

Metalface Mark said:
My worst weekend, my weekend horriblus as i like to call it.

I bought a vapochill case and cooler for my athlon XP1700, and thats where the problem started.

My fingers were cut to shreds on the vapochill case, i didnt read the instructions properly, and ended up snapping the socket off the board i had.

Went to the shops and bought another board, fitted it in, cut my fingers on the case again and didnt realise i had bled into the case, which set my floppy drive on fire, taking out a power supply. Bought another psu, fitted it, hadnt sealed the vapo right and blew the board and chip, bought 3rd board, snapped off the socket from it.

To add insult to injury, i bled into my 9800 without realising it, and blew that up as well, all told, the weekend cost me about £800, not including the £500 the vapo had cost me, which was sold the week after for about £300.

Absolute nightmare from beginning to end.
Click to expand...

I know I shouldn't but I burst out laughing reading that :D
 
Was repositioning hard drives in my case with everything powered on and touched the circuit board on the top drive with the metal casing of the bottom drive and fried 3 years of photography amongst other things. Suffice to say I back 'EVERYTHING' up now.
 
When I was younger I took everything apart to see how it worked, my PC was no different. I had a 486 DX2 66Mhz and wanted to see the processor so started tinkering. Took the processor out, looked at it then tried to put the PC back together.

I switched it on and all I got was a strange smell and the little LCD display which showed the 66Mhz speed when the TURBO button was pressed was cracked.

I took it apart again and saw that I had put the processor in the wrong way. :o

I've done many others but that one sticks in my head.
 
i once dropped my E6750 when fitting a new CPU cooler.. i managed to drop the chip when i was stood up, it fell on to a wooden floor bottom down, i honestly thought i had killed it.. but luckily it was fine, it's sat here at 3.6Ghz.. ;)

Thats my worst PC blunder (So far).
 
Nothing too major but the old AMD Socket A heatsinks (amongst others of a similar design) required a flat-headed screwdriver to engage the clip to the socket. I have had the screwdriver slip out a few times and come really close to causing major motherboard damage, they were a real pain. I also cut my finger on a spinning CPU fan which projected a line of blood up my wall.

I remember reading something in a computer magazine where one of the readers took the term 'plug and play' too literally when installing some RAM. He tried to install it whilst the computer was booted into windows and got a nasty surprise when it fried the motherboard.
 
nikebee said:
That's true, although as long as it explained...

Mute.
Food.
Sex.
Sleep.
Beer.

I'd be quite happy to bin the rest of the manual. :p
Click to expand...


remote03lz3.jpg
 
When I was 13/14 and built my second computer, a Shuttle SV25. The PSU was located at the front of the case, with the 3 pin power plug trailing to the back, but the wires werent totally covered and were a little bit exposed. For some stupid reason I tried to connect fan wires to the exposed bits because I was bored, and BANG! The fan exploded, and burnt some of the skin off my finger, it looked disgusting.

Now I'm like...WTF did I do that for!??!? A 12v device connected to a 230v line...ahem...:o
 
Not personally, but a friend of mine turned his laptop on during a lecture - only to find he'd put it in sleep mode and a load of porn re-opened when it came back on.

Unfortunately for him he was sat infront of about 20-30 people.
 
mp3kla said:
Not personally, but a friend of mine turned his laptop on during a lecture - only to find he'd put it in sleep mode and a load of porn re-opened when it came back on.

Unfortunately for him he was sat infront of about 20-30 people.
Click to expand...

hahahahah, L-E-G-E-N-D

edit- on an unrelated note, my mate Robbo used to lend his laptop to the girls in my old sixthform, in the common room, to watch porn. It's the funniest thing I've ever heard when porn was playing, I'm never known girls be so disgusted.
 
EdGey said:
i once spent about a week trying to get sound on my pc, had m8s round trying to help me n all sorts. turns out i forgot the motherboard drivers :o:o
Click to expand...
I've done this, in fact it took about four or five installs to learn from my mistakes. I remember on my first PC ringing customer support and having a lengthy discussion about why I couldn't access the web, eventually he said "You should try reinstalling your network card drivers".

"uh, drivers?"
 
mp3kla said:
Not personally, but a friend of mine turned his laptop on during a lecture - only to find he'd put it in sleep mode and a load of porn re-opened when it came back on.

Unfortunately for him he was sat infront of about 20-30 people.
Click to expand...

The best prank is to change the startup/shutdown sound to something like porn as you can do little to stop them apart from muting.
 
When I upgraded my PC to modern times 2 years ago I bought all new components to sort it all out from a local PC e-tailer.

In retrospect I am so glad I drove the few miles to pick up the parts because if I ordered from an online store for cheaper money I would have killed myself out of frustration.

What went wrong? it was 100% e/n.

Basically I went to and from the store RMAing every single component except the CPU because I thought that something was faulty which stopped the PC from booting. I changed everything even the PSU.

In the end I decided to get another CPU, the same CPU (AMD 3700+) and the same problem occurred. As a last resort I thought I'd get into dual core and got a 4200+ and guess what....PC worked amazingly. Turns out there was a compatibility issue with my then Mobo and that 3700+ cpu even though it's listed as compatible with all BIOS versions.

It's not fun driving 7 miles there and 7 miles back several times until every major component inc mobo/psu is swapped for new ones only to find out the issue was something as simple as an incompatible CPU.

Not really my blunder as such but a goof that I didn't think to get a different CPU to see if that model had compatibility issues!

I've never ever had any Computer "Oops" before that or after that though. Nothing really ever goes wrong :p
 
Stolly said:
Back around 1992 when I worked for a big HP distributer they loaned us about £5k worth of Netserver complete with the then brand new ZIFF cpu socket. We marvelled at how easy it was to take the CPU on and off, and then i quickly learned that putting it in the right way is very important.

I may be the first person in the country to goose a CPU by putting it on the socket the wrong way around :)

No heatsinks back then though :) Was a 486/25 iirc.
Click to expand...

Been there, done that. (AMD K6 thing though)
Most of my major blunders came in my first days of Linux though. Got hold of a copy of Red Hat 6, took me god knows how long to get things even working to an acceptable extent, and even then I had a nasty habit of breaking all the dependancies when trying to get something else working.

-Leezer-
 
Prob. when I first got my current pc the sound didnt work at all because I plugged the green lead into the wrong input for the pc, took me a day to figure out :(. Some of the posts here are hilarious though (specially that one about bleeding on a computer).
 
I managed to rest my elbow on a mates new £300+ Pentium 4 CPU that we were just about to fit, cost me £300 did that.... :o
 
After reading this thread, I've realised that my motherboard is not mounted on rising screws; I just whacked it straight onto the motherboard tray. :eek:

Going to re-seat it when I get back home tonight... pretty amazed that it hasn't died yet! :confused:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom