Rant Your computer nightmares told here...

[PennyBlack]

What's been your worse computing experience, the worse situation you've faced with our new technological toys. What did you do to be in that situation and how did you, if you did, resolve it.?

Here's my WORSE experience with a PC, EVER...

My six year old pc is no more. The loyal bag of bits that kept me in the artificial sunshine which I call electro-magnetic radiation breathed it's last. I managed to save my backups and had to borrow usb memory sticks. I've had a hell of a game to get back her up and running with a new second hand mother board and graphics card. Believe me, I waited little time in ripping the guts out of the old base unit, remembering the good times, the long nights and mellow days I had with it as well as the days I spent trying to fix it, upgrade it. I kept the old hdd, dvd rom and power supply.

My frustration came from the fact that when I put the new one together, I needed an adapter from the card to get a vga signal to my CRT monitor and finding one was a pain. I had one some-where and ripped every box in my house apart trying to find it. For hours, the mess grew and then I realised, I gave it to my brother. Why didn't I remember that before I tore my house apart annoying "her in-doors", I don't know.
Worse still, when I finally did get one, the pc kept turning off while I was installing XP.

What.! The bits are supposed to be working right...
"Yes, they worked for me m8ty" is a sort of a paupers garentee that I usually get and nine times out of ten, it's a verbal garentee, not worth the paper it's written on. I've forgotten how many times I've swapped the boards only to return to the old, hopeing it starts up again. But where this one was concerned there was no going back and I was told, it's your power supply, have you checked the connections, have you enough memory, it's the graphics card, it's your drive and it's just bad gear dude... get a new one.

So after all the advice I brought a new PSU. From a 450 to a 650 watt and thought I'd cracked it.
But no, it still kept cutting out. After a calming period of a few days. I took a chance and I connected the 450 watt psu directly to the graphics card's external six wire connector with two hdd power leads and I pushed the on button with a wooden paint brush. I often use wooden objects to turn electrical stuff on if I'm unsure about it. It's because of the respect I gained for electricity whilst tatting with the old TV's I think. But even the extra power from the extra psu did nothing. It kept crashing the same as before so I just brought another PSU that was 800 watt, luckely exchanging the 650, cleaning out my PC allowance. I was relieved when it successfully installed the OS, Windows XP pro.

I was feeling good, a practicle scientist, a real computer geek. Another word for a smug git I think.

I installed my select software, system installs and updates ect., transfering my backups which I then deleted in order to return the usb sticks I borrowed. Configering the system and waiting while it defragged and virus scanned. Great, job done and I had an exellent pc with better capability. No more memory exceptions, currupt PSP8 undo histories and fatal crashes useing Wings3D and CTD when I logged into my fav online
sim. No duff graphics for me.!!! Even the net pages loaded faster. I was well happy. But then it started to randomly crash, well, die.

What a pain this new pc was turning out to be. My frustration grew with this. I started to monitor temps and found the termal threshold was cutting the power to the system on the graphics card. To cut a long story short and a couple of days, I have now three stratigically placed psu fans (because I never throw anything away) blowing cold air against the both the graphics card and the mother board and the sides are off. I plan to salvage a small fan for the front side bus in the future. It runs without crashing now but it does sound like a Boeing when it's on. It's very cool and I often wear a coat when I sit next to it. I also found the adapter I went potty looking for, it was in the bag with the psu fans along with other stuff. Not with the selection of old AGP cards, where it should have been.
Anyway, I'd installed orbiter along with my other installs before this huge distraction and when I ran the exe, it failed to pick up the runtime files I neglected to install which came with the package.
Owe, those dammed readme files, you'll never now how sorry I am at not reading them because an error message told me that orbiter wasn't configured properly when I tried to run it and I had to re-install the program. So I did, I got the error message again when I tried to execute the Orbiter program. So I completely deleted the Orbiter directory and created it all over again, installing the files. I installed the runtime files, then ran Orbiter for the first time again and it loaded great.
Unfortunatly, I completely forgot that my XR5, XR2, CargoBay, Meshes and odds and sods where restored to the directory tree in Orbiter when I orginially transfered my backups. Which where now deleted. Well, nevermind because I can just re-install them from the erased usb pens I was so hasty in giveing back to those I'd borrowed them from, who probably never used them anyway. Months of work gone, only leaveing the old original backups on my already full security pen.
Thankfully, not the family pics. I'd really would have got it if I'd lost them. I really don't have much luck with fileing systems and "Do It Yourself" computer building. This has happened before, a few times actually. So, it's cost me more than an old tempremental pc, the price of a 800 watt psu. It's cost me my prime hobby work material.
I mentally club anyone to death who says, "At least you have a better PC now".

That was a few days ago and I'm feeling better about it now, less homicidal and will bounce back from it too. The lost art work is nothing compared to not being able to replicate it so the computer I've put together makes the outcome a positive one.
I've gone from an AMD 1700 mghz, Radion 9800, DDR1 2 gig to a AMD Duel 2.5 (4800), GeForce 8800 GT, DDR2 4 gig computer. It may not be fast by some standards but I do enjoy it. I have even turned up the graphics on that online game because my temps don't go near that cutoff threshold so I can see flowers and tree bark while I sit in ambush for some noob to coast past with confidence.

So, what's your worse computing story or experience. Don't be shy...

 

[RisingFury]

I take care of my PC. It's 6 years old and has had a couple of PSU failures and a stick of RAM, but nothing lethal. I enter the realm of PC hell when I touch the keyboard of another computer. School computers are a nightmare, because the admins locked away every feature that could be used to maintain the computers. And of course, Windows 7 installed on the computer that should run nothing bigger then XP.

 

[Jarvitä]

Nothing that drastic, luckily.

I gave a colleague access to the git server we were using for a project. He wiped the entire git repo and replaced it with his local copy of the project. That didn't even use a revision control system. He thought that's what I wanted when I told him to "push your commits to the side branch and we'll get the tree guy to work on integrating them". We spent the next week trawling through each other's local backups to get things straight. After that, we clearly distinguished who takes care of commits and who has access to the git/build server.

Also, people who "send" you a website they think you should look at by clicking "select all" and pasting it in an email.

I take care of my PC. It's 6 years old and has had a couple of PSU failures and a stick of RAM, but nothing lethal. I enter the realm of PC hell when I touch the keyboard of another computer. School computers are a nightmare, because the admins locked away every feature that could be used to maintain the computers. And of course, Windows 7 installed on the computer that should run nothing bigger then XP.

That's why I absolutely refuse to touch any PC that looks "user-administrated". I swear just about every public PC in this country is running unpatched windows 2000/XP with IE6 and bonzi buddy.

 

[jedidia]

reformatting my computer over and over again after Win7 destroyed itself on installing SP1. First I thought it was the HD, so I installed it to another disk. System ran great. Shutdown, windows installes updates, system destroyed. A few more tries with only priority updates, same result. Everytime, the system destroyed itself beyond any other recovery than a complete disk-wipe.

After a while I found a patch that prevented the system from destroying itself. The bug was rare, but was reported on some systems. But here's the catch: The patch had to be installed PRIOR to the SP1 update. But do you think MS put it in the update schedule before SP1? nooooo, you had to prevent your system from updating on install, then download the patch, install it, and then update the system. In other words, I wasted alltogether probably about 24 hours reformatting, reinstalling and searching for a solution, just because MS can't get its update schedule right. :chainsaw:

I swear just about every public PC in this country is running unpatched windows 2000/XP with IE6 and bonzi buddy.

Well, it's not easy to patch them, since just about every public PC in this country is running a PIRATED XP... :lol:

 

[Artlav]

First and second contact with Linux, ten years ago.
First time i screwed up the hard drive, that was before i knew what backup was and why bother doing it. All data lost, on a family computer.
Second time i wanted to reinstall the system. In good windows traditions i did rm -rf /. That was before i learned that a backup should be on a separate media instead of another hard disk in the same PC. Some data lost this time, as i figured it out before it was too late.

Hard to name any quite nightmare situation since then, regular backups and accessible parts make it hard to lose much.

 

[krashkart]

On a whim, I fed the system folders to the trashcan on my Powerbook. Complete reinstall required. Not much of a nightmare, really. Just a really dumb mistake. That was my first computer.

A real nightmare came along about two years later when I helped a friend build his first barebones. I had made sure to double-check everything before we powered it on, everything except the Berg adapter to the floppy drive. My friend had plugged it in upside-down, and I had overlooked that simple (yet deadly lethal) anomaly on both checks. The end result was nothing spectacular; just a wisp of smoke and some ozone smell in the air. But it effectively killed entire system. We both learned a good lesson from that -- now I make sure to triple-check everything before powering the computer up.

 

[jangofett287]

My dad once tried to get a broken usb to work by plugging it into a different port on the motherboard. I don't know what that port did, but when I powered up I got a strange smell, so I cut power immediately. (screw switches, yanking the cable out is a dead cert) It was too late however, the usb's cables had melted and shorted the entire motherboard. I haven't let dad touch my computer since. I've had numerous computers over the years, many with BSoD Syndrome due to overheating. But, my latest box doesn't have any of the problems the rest have had. Its got a NEW one. ataport.sys every so often decides to cause a BSoD. this is a microsoft file. And I can't see if there is an update, because Windows update fails giving me an error code that no one seems to know anything about!!! :beathead:

 

[Linguofreak]

In good windows traditions i did rm -rf /. That was before i learned that a backup should be on a separate media instead of another hard disk in the same PC.

Ouch.

 

[FADEC]

The only computer nightmare I can remember was Windows 98 (the first edition) and Windows ME (even worse than 98). But so far I didn't have any nightmares. My current machine is 4 years old and it still runs like on the first day, and still with maximum settings for new games. Just recently I bought and installed sound dampening pads. The installation took almost 6 hours but it was worth it. If one is willing to pay some bucks and take some care one can be happy with a computer for more than half a decade easily. The only reason for upgrading my machine would be the release of Microsoft Flight and X-Plane 10

 

[krashkart]

The only computer nightmare I can remember was Windows 98 (the first edition) and Windows ME (even worse than 98). But so far I didn't have any nightmares. My current machine is 4 years old and it still runs like on the first day, and still with maximum settings for new games. Just recently I bought and installed sound dampening pads. The installation took almost 6 hours but it was worth it. If one is willing to pay some bucks and take some care one can be happy with a computer for more than half a decade easily. The only reason for upgrading my machine would be the release of Microsoft Flight and X-Plane 10

I hadn't thought of '98 as being a nightmare. That's pretty good. ('95 was my nemesis) :lol:

I built a computer around 2003 and kept it running till 2009. It wasn't the fastest or most powerful machine on the planet, but it did what I needed it to do and pretty much refused to die no matter how many dark ales were spilled on it. (No, computers do not wish to partake of the Red Hook, no matter how tasty it is ) What finally got it in the end was an unspecified motherboard failure, and ultimately an unplanned ESD into the CMOS.

 

[PennyBlack]

I've spilt tea over my keyboard many times. I had to replace a couple of them, but luckily it never affected the motherboard and plugging another in wasn't a ploblem. Windows prior to XP caused massive problems. The "Blue screen of DEATH" happened more times than I remember with older OS.

http://youtu.be/r36TcG5XZDg

Formatting was a monthly, if not weekly event with me and I suspect others had the same experiences. XP was an improvement in system stability in my opinion and I'm keeping to it until Windows 7 is proof tested by the crash testers. I like people verified software, rather than business promoted beta's sold at inflated prices.

I love my PC, through the years I learn't less about them, yet I gained so much more from them. The ulimate dream is photo realism and 3d virtual glasses with a frame rate over 10^12. "Vulcan Love Slave" springs to mind. :thumbup:

 

[iamwearingpants]

When my sister goes on, she's horriflying. She makes atleast 4-5 firefox windows everytime shes goes on, draws crap on paint.net, and doesn't know how to save my stuff. I made an awesome park in RCT3, and she decided to go on, and made an empty park without saving.

My brother though, he's better, he knows how to use tabs, (he even opens up 1 new window for his internetings) he can save things, and is pretty dang good at KSP. (He got to 80000m)

 

[Turbinator]

The capacitors on my video card blowing up.

 

[Scav]

The capacitors on my video card blowing up.

:blink:

Wow. I can see that happening on a spacecraft, only on a bigger scale. The way that shrapnel was being cast off, it could probably penetrate clear through into space. That's why we have people called 'electrical engineers' who work with beasts like that.

The worst I had was a heat sink that decided it didn't want to be on my video card. Worst part was, it had turned itself into a spare part. Had no idea where it went to, and no thought to really investigate the matter fully.

A month later the PC decided it didn't want to boot past POST anymore. Talk about a (perceived) phantom error.

 

[Turbinator]

The funny thing is, the video card still works. So far 3 capacitors blew.

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[Keatah]

Typical capacitors, onboard a Powerleap Celeron Slot-1 upgrade for a PIII class machine. System became increasingly unstable. And eventually failed to boot.

I replaced 6 sub-standard cost-cutting capacitors originally used, and had no problem since.

---------- Post added at 03:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:28 AM ----------

The funny thing is, the video card still works. So far 3 capacitors blew.

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50:65:72:20:41:73:70:65:72:61:20:41:64:20:41:73:74:72:61

Some component is now working 2x hard to compensate for the extra noise now present. Something should fail or start producing errors soon.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

I bought my computer at an Aldi and have changed the graphics card for a Gigabyte GT 220, it has next to no ventilation and as a result (I think ) bluescreens on average three or four times a week. But the graphics card is great and I can run lots of games on full graphics. (I can even run TES IV: Oblivion on full graphics with textures 4 times bigger than the standard ones! It scares me sometimes...)

 

[ky]

School computers are a nightmare, because the admins locked away every feature that could be used to maintain the computers. And of course, Windows 7 installed on the computer that should run nothing bigger then XP.

At my school they run XP on a Dell Optiplex 755.Theres about less than 1 GB of space on it for you to use.Your right about the admins too.No updates can be installed,no programs.But the computers run Orbiter faster than my computer does(I have Orbiter on a USB).

 

[Coolhand]

so I just brought another PSU that was 800 watt, luckely exchanging the 650

a AMD Duel 2.5 (4800), GeForce 8800 GT, DDR2 4 gig computer.

Thats a respectable rig but you really needed an 800 watt psu to run that system? quite probably a 400 watt should have been able to handle it with no errors.

It sounds probable that in effect, the 650 was simply defective... were you advised to go and drain your wallet on a 800?

A good name brand new psu of about 500 watts would probably have done the job just fine and given you somewhere to go in terms of upgraded graphics and so on. I have a quad core and a 9800gt and it runs just fine on a 550 for the last year or more... (my last machines motherboard went pop last year) I'm only saying it because you've obviously invested a bit in your machine and if i couldn't get that machine running smooth on less than 800 watts i'd be interested to find out why.

 

[Evil_Onyx]

My worst disaster has to be on my previous system, It was a combination of parts that started off 8-10 years ago and had been upgraded many times the only constant was the case, an old metal Dell Desktop case.

About three years ago i try and boot it up, and it only brings up the boot prompt then restarts. At this point i physically remove a storage drive as a precession (and I'm glad i did), I then started up it up again, the old CRT monitor flashed to life then i heard a POP then another and another before the CRT died with some smoke and a crack.

After replacing the fuse for the house mains, i grounded the pc case as it was no longer the right shape. After discovering the screws had fused the case shut, I cut a hole in the case too see what could be salvaged, the answer was nothing in side the case. The mother board and been broken in two by the warped case, the floppy drive had a pool of what was molten plastic on top, the hard drive fared no better with plastic all over the back (and i later discover also inside) and what was left of the power supply was a bent mass of metal fused to the case that was more spherical than box like.


The power supply manufacture did not initially believe me, it took one of there staff to come out to look at the wreckage to believe that it was to blame. They effectively payed for my current system that is all new parts. (was 2-3 years ago)