Your biggest hardware problem

Guest2

Guest2

Guest2

Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
Posts
20,369
Which is the one piece of hardware you are always having problems with?

For me it seems to be CD/DVD drives. I must have had about 15 cd/dvd drives in the past 10 years. I have just had to go to ****** and get a new LG one because my current dvdrw drive no longer reads 90% of dvds. The best it managed was a ripping a brand new cd and 6x speed

Touch wood, ive been pretty fortunate with hard drives, memory and other stuff, with just 2 hard drives failing (due to being dropped by me)

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motherboards are always the most problematic for me, anything else is easy to swap out, and i've had more issues with MB's than anything else..
 
At work, it's memory I think - my XW8200 has coughed up it's last - Windows 7 is crawling and graphics performance in Aero [PCX5750 over PCIe] is atrocious. Getting page faults in ntfs.sys.

My home computers only ever seem to have OS based issues - hardware wise, I can't recall anything giving up the ghost on me, full stop. Even the RAID0 array I set up on my Athlon box over five years ago still works fine!
 
Laptops. Every single time i get one, or i know somebody who has one, they break. I don't mean like a software problem, they literally melt. That's why i'm sticking to desktops until something series is done about cooling.
 
Two weeks after installing a new Graphics card for a customer, it failed so I swapped it out for my workshop one which worked.. So I ordered a new one but got the same problem .. right in the middle of all this the hard disk failed.. After replacing the disk.. I then returned back to the card.. turned out that the replacement card was dud too. How unlucky was that. I was livid because apart from the costs it was all FOC.
 
Ram gives me the most problems. Refusing to run at the speeds I ask of it (even when within stock) and just dying out of the blue.

For a specific event, the asus board that blew a few months back and claimed cpu, psu and ram angered me a fair bit. It killed everything that was attached to it when it failed, I thought that was meant to be what psu's did.
 
OCZ ram, had 2 lots which were faulty, 2nd lot resulted in me sending the board and cpu back which come back ok, ordered some Patriot ram this worked a treat, RMA'D the second set :(
 
PSUs. I've had about 4 just die for no reason in the last few years (in various PCs, like ones I've built for family members). I'm never buying el-cheapo PSUs again. >_>
 
The only failures ive ever had were an evga 680i mobo on which the memory controller died, a couple of asus a8n sli boards packed in with dodgy memory slots, 2 leadtek 6800gt cards i had died in the space of a week, an enermax psu that went boom after 2 years and the most annoying was a brand new seasonic s12 psu that blew up the first time it was turned on.
 
CD/DVD-RW's have given me the most trouble, suddenly just plain refusing to write to anything. Just replaced one a few weeks back for this reason, plus it wouldn't read either my XP or Vista discs which was extremely annoying because I needed to do a clean reinstall to get SP2 for Vista (I'd cloned it off another drive that was going into another rig as a storage drive, SP2 set-up doesn't like cloned installs it seems).

Other than that my first ever RMA was my Corsair RAM a week after buying it (faulty on arrival), and a few few years back I ended up having to buy a new mobo and cpu after the heatspreader came off the cpu with the cooler when I decided to change it, the cpu (XP1800) was soldered to the original board. Oh and the psu gave up on that rig too, after 6 years! (wasnt that surprising that it'd gone when I opened it up, it was quite literally full of dust!).
 
I’ve had two motherboards die on me, both were MSI. Now I’m trying Gigabyte, so far so good with over two years of abuse it’s still going strong (fingers crossed).

Although one of my DVD drivers has started to make a strange noise.
 
still have a p3 800 running well, is full of dust, i think of it as a comfy blanket keeping everything cosy :)

Was an xmas bonus from my first 'real' job, can't remember how old it is, think it was either 00 or 01. Kicked ass in it's day - not.
 
Headsets (microphone breaks, snap, twists and starts WW3).

Other than that graphics cards - once ate 3 ATI 9800 Pro's, 1 8800GTX and very nearly lost a GTX 260.

Other problems have been 1 dead mobo - 680i, and 1 dead stick of OCZ PC2-8500 reaper. Also 1 dead Asus PSU. I had so many probs with this machine its now ramme din the loft and I bought a whole I7 setup in a fury of rage.
 
RAM, I don't think I've ever had a major build which didn't have some form of ram failure,

My first build with Athlon XP 2500+ developed a fault in the RAM leading to BSODs allllll the time.

My second build with Athlon 64 X2 3800+ also developed a fault in one stick so I had to get it replaced, it was a matched pair so I had to send both back so ironically I had to put the faulty stick from my first build into this build to get it running while waiting on the RMA.

My latest build with C2D was fine up until a while ago, then I tried adding a couple of sticks as 2GB didn't cut it anymore and it refused to boot with more than 3 sticks, regardless of how high I put voltages. So replaced both pairs with 2x2GB, and now it's running smooth so far, at least for now. *Touch wood*
 
RAM, principally because I made the mistake of buying some Crucial Ballistix DDR2. Three RMAs later I just bought some Corsair instead - no issues so far.

Wireless cards. The drivers are always terrible, especially on 64-bit. Latest problem is that the driver for this Linksys card is giving me horrible latency issues under Win7 64, sometimes even causing my music to skip. Disable the card and the problem goes away.
 
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