Stupid Computer Tricks! (Silly Issues Caused by Unexpected User Error On Our Boxes of Rocks.)

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

First to explain the title. Leo Laporte once said about personal computers this: "A computer is a box of rocks and it's a miracle it works at all..." That actually refers to the mind blowing amount of error correction our computers do on a second to second basis, which gets worse as data density goes up and complexity expands.

Anyways this thread is about silly things we do that make our computers pitch some sort of fit. I'll start.

Boot fuck ups. I have set my boot order to take a USB DVD-RW drive go first. Partly because the mounted DVD-RW on my lamed laptop is so full of dirt it can't read a disc and I don't have a lens cleaner to remedy that. So here are some errors that causes:
[li]Having my external USB HDD plugged in causes the BIOS to attempt to boot to it, resulting in an "Operating System Not Found" error.[/li]
[li]Having my dad's external USB HDD enclosure, which has a clone of my dad's computer's HDD, causes my laptop to boot my dad's copy of Windows 7. This causes errors with genuine advantage on both my and my dad's computer. Fun.[/li]
[li]Having my MP3 player(used for audio books) plugged in causes the boot to hang on the BIOS screen. Worse still I can't access the BIOS, Boot order, or any functions similar until I unplug the MP3 player.[/li]
[li]This is all due to the crap BIOS on my lamed laptop.[/li]

Some other fun: All due to my use of Lubuntu, which is a slightly modified Ubuntu-Linux that uses the LXDE[footnote]Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment[/footnote], making the OS much lighter on system resources.
[li]Plugging in a new monitor resets ALL of my desktop settings, which if the monitor doesn't work for me I have to fix everything on reversion to my current monitor.[/li]
[li]DOSBox screws up my desktop resolution until reboot. Lubuntu lets me save standard settings, but going from my native resolution to anything less with DOSBox enforces that resolution until I reboot. Worse still because it violates the default resolution, windows set to the resolution go outside my cursor's range, and I can't access my task bar either.[/li]
[li]Driver updates to date has made this computer overheat terribly.[/li]
[li]Updates to current include at least a dozen, but probably more like two dozen generic Linux images and support images which are still required. That eats up several gigabytes on my main partition.[/li]
[li]WINE is crap, mixed with crap graphics drivers, that means I can't play any newer windows game.[/li]
[li]Speaking of crap graphics drivers... My GPU isn't supported by current graphics drivers, on Linux only, this causes attempts to use proprietary Nvidia drivers to lock my OS up.[/li]
[li]The X.org Nouveau drivers use a CPU core, because they also don't support the GPU.[/li]
[li]Because my GPU, a GeForce 8400M GS, has no Linux support I can't use my HDMI port for video output.[/li]

Still the best is this: Because of the poor support for my hardware, Google Chrome and Steam are both programs that run my GPU to produce their UIs, which overheats and locks up my computer.

So what do you all have that goes strange with your PC?

 

[Zombie_Fish]

I once corrupted a

.txt

file. It was on a USB stick and I didn't eject it before removing it. So remember to do that, kids.

The GUI for my old Linux Mint partition would crash if I tried using certain keyboard commands.

Booting Linux Mint once with a different external monitor plugged in caused that partition to break so hard that I eventually gave up and did a clean install.

Windows 8 hates sharing a Disk Drive with Linux Mint so much that I couldn't even get the Windows Boot Manager to recognise it. So my technique for booting up Linux is to spam the

F9

key to get into the BIOS boot manager.

Also, the USB-powered fan board I have on my laptop only works if the USB port is in at just the right angle.

 

[CeeBod]

I'm using my laptop connected to a monitor and keyboard at the moment, but sometimes use it without either. Weird things tend to happen in the transition from one to the other and I have 1 game (OOTP16) which now has to be played in windowed mode whilst connected to the monitor. If I switch it to fullscreen it stops outputting to the monitor, which then switches itself into power saving mode and shuts down - which is a tad annoying!

 

[DoPo]

My favourite mishap was when I had a keyboard that destroyed PCs. Time for (short) backstory - basically, I got a new keyboard and soon after, the cable got ripped out from it (not my fault). Feeling particularly lazy then, I just brought it back to where I got it from hoping the guy there would fix it for free, and he did. I picked the keyboard back, brought it home, plugged it in, switched the PC on and...Windows froze. It got past the bootup scren, it did actually show the desktop but nothing worked at all - the only thing I could do is move the mouse - the cursor responded but neither clicking nor keyboard commands worked. See, this isn't something I'd expect from plugging a keyboard to the PC, especially since it was a PS/2 keyboard, not a USB one, so I didn't suspect it. I tried various things including multiple restarts for the next ten minutes, yet things seemed odd - by all accounts the keyboard worked - I could go to BIOS and everything. It seemed that only Windows didn't work after bootup. Everything pointed to the keyboard being a problem, though - nothing else had changed at all - no new software or hardware or updates or anything. I couldn't believe it but finally, I decided to confirm I wasn't mad and unplugged the keyboard, hoping nothing would change.

Turns out I was mad - everything worked afterwards - I had double clicked on several shortcuts and all the applications launched at once. I couldn't believe it - I plugged the keyboard back in and...Windows froze again. I was completely baffled - I went back to the PC shop I got the keyboard from and asked them to test this out and confirm I wasn't actually insane. The guy there certainly looked at me as if I was when I explained what was happening. Hell, I certainly thought I was, since that simply wasn't possible to my mind. So anyway, guy in the shop plugged the keyboard to some old Pentium 1/64MB RAM machine he happened to have at hand and...it immediately restarted. We both stared at this stunned. Bootup came to the windows loading screen (the one with the bar) stayed there for a few seconds and the machine restarted again.

To this day, I remember the guy's face when he turned back to me. It was as if he was just told he was an alien clone or something - it was the expression you get when you're so surprised you don't know how exactly to react. I might have looked the same. But yeah - he turned to me and said in the most flat of tones "I think there might be something wrong with the keyboard". I couldn't agree more. I mean, if he had suggested that it was haunted, I'd have agreed - it made no sense.

I stayed around when he opened it to see what exactly was going on. Was a ghost going to fall off or something? Well...no. Turns out that when the keyboard cable was soldered back on, it was just slightly out of place, so instead of having the signal from the PC being fed through the board then the result being sent back to the PC, the board was just factored out - the power from the PC was immediately redirected back. Forming a loop that most likely bombarded the machine with "keyboard signals". Which would explain the behaviour.

It's still one of the coolest and most bizarre things I had seen happen.

But something not as cool yet slightly bizarre was when Windows once decided to perform a disk checkup. OK, the disk checkup by itself isn't strange - Windows likes to do those (if only to waste your time) but one time, one time it decided that there was an error on the disk. Being the friendly and helpful operating system it is, it decided to fix that WITHOUT giving me any options to accept or reject. It just went "Oh yeah, I found something. I'll just fix it for you real quick". And it did. It fucking deleted the master boot record of that partition. Resulting in the partition being complretely empty of the 100 or so gig of data I had. Real helpful there, Windows, you fucking imbecile. And the problem it found wasn't even serious - the checksum for the deleted files on the file system was apparently wrong. Don't know why that was but I think the solution is "recalculate checksum" not "nuke everything". Oh, and just to be safe, dskchk also nuked the mirror backup of the MBR. Just to make it even fucking harder to restore everything. I managed to restore the files along with the directory structure in the end and without any losses (none that were important) but it took me a couple of days.

 

[Kaymish]

i did the free upgrade to windows 10 what a stupid mistake that was Windows 10 couldn't understand what a USB flash drive was and when i tried to fix it all my USB ports stopped working including the ones for my keyboard and mouse and rebootss didn't work so i had to hunt out a USB to PS2 adapter because Who uses PS2 mice and keyboards these days?
then windows update broke and it was an important security update and after trying every solution Microsoft supports great idea was "hey we wrote this tool it will tell windows update to ignore the update and one day we might put out a new patch that works with these broken systems"
i did a OS reset instead
oh and it was the day Fallout 4 was released and i had jumped on the first carriage of the hype train and the OS reset cleansed Steam and FO4 from my hard drive meaning i had to reload it and the interwebs here are so crap it only downloads at 420 KBpS which comes out to like an 18 hour download suffice to say i cried
at least now windows 10 works almost as well as windows 7 did

 

[seventy two]

Most annoying was some auto-installed software for a WD HD caused a memory leak that would very quickly lock up the computer, though the cause was pretty clear. A more interesting memory leak is that a Windows service on my laptop kept trying to scan files in the background, and somehow managed to get stuck reading the same folder repeatedly.

More confusingly I have noticed a trend that every ~6 months whatever browser I used at the time breaks in some way, the most recent couple times have been that it is no longer processing downloads. Normally I would suspect this is because of some behavior of my own, but recently a browser on a system that I rarely use also broke.

 

[The Eupho Guy_v1legacy]

Windows 10 couldn't understand what a USB flash drive was and when i tried to fix it all my USB ports stopped working including the ones for my keyboard and mouse and rebootss didn't work so i had to hunt out a USB to PS2 adapter because Who uses PS2 mice and keyboards these days?

I do! I have a couple old PS2 keyboards (That I acquired from TAFE) that I keep on hand just in case. Also I used to build PCs for friends and family and I've had instances of USB keyboards not detecting when attempting to first install Windows, so keeping it on hand for that was handy too.

OT: I've had a soundcard destroy a Windows install... somehow. I'm a little bit hazy on the details (This was about 10 years ago) but I distinctly remember installing the card and its drivers, then plugging in a set of headphones, which resulted in a hard lock. After taking out the headphones and restarting I tried again with the same result. So I try to restart again... Nothing. Windows refused to boot entirely, requiring a reformat. I sent it back to the place I got it from for a refund and they didn't believe me... Until they tried it in one of their test rigs, where it did the same thing.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well I constantly get people with old ass WinXP original laptops who demand to have the latest and spangliest OS installed, and even after countless warnings in how many horrible ways shit will go wrong they demand none the less.
Surprise surprise those laptops run like crap with a new OS, usually take entire days to even make half functional... and then the owners come back demanding the old OS... waste of everyone's goram time.

 

[Schadrach]

One summer when I was a teenager (late 90s), I was doing development work for a friend of my Dad, part of a team of three who was working on a video poker machine (to be launched at his strip club). I ended up writing the sound library for it. About a third of it was in assembly. Why did I need to write a sound library, instead of relying on commonly used libraries that could handle things? There was no OS on the machine. We were still trying to talk him into a proper BIOS, because he was trying to skimp every penny he possibly could (we were assuming we were going to win that fight).

The only test sound on my development machine was the AOL "Welcome!", and I had no internet access.

40 hour weeks for an entire summer, at least 3 hours per day of which was listening to "Welcome! Welcome! Welc--#$%#^%$^#$SCREECH!" -- goddamnit, another buffer overflow...

Once had a niece's friend call me to come to her house and help her and her dad figure out why the laptop she got for Christmas kept dropping off the internet. They thought I was engaging in some kind of black magic when I observed it for a few minutes while she used it (waiting until it dropped out in my presence) and then solved the problem without touching the laptop, but by moving furniture. It's suddenly less impressive when I admit that the furniture in question was a small table containing a cordless 2.4 ghz phone with an unusually strong transmitter, whose base was very close to the laptop and that putting some distance between the phone base and the laptop was all it took.

Windows 8 hates sharing a Disk Drive with Linux Mint so much that I couldn't even get the Windows Boot Manager to recognise it. So my technique for booting up Linux is to spam the

F9

key to get into the BIOS boot manager.

As a general rule, if dual-booting windows and anything other than OSX, use the boot manager from the other thing (so bootlin or grub for a linux/Win combo). If booting OSX alongside anything, use Boot Camp.

Speaking of Linux, I had an early plug-and-play sound card, a Sound Blaster that fit into an ISA slot when I first tried out Linux back in the late 90s. Did you know that Linux really, *really* hated ISA-based PnP cards back then? And also that the documentation was sparse enough that it took actual research to learn that you had to install a special driver to handle those sorts of cards, then run it's config tool, *then* take the config file created by that tool and tweak it to match the actual settings of your card? PCI PnP stuff worked more or less automatically.

Also, Cyrix CPUs. I think literally everything had a patch for Cyrix CPUs.

Nothing too weird thinks god, but studying operating systems in the university and the complex stuff there is both ridiculous and amazing.

Memory management and driver stacks, oh my! I'd rather write another compiler, maybe even a compiler for Malbolge written *in* Malbolge than do OS stuff.

My favourite mishap was when I had a keyboard that destroyed PCs.

I had a ZIP disk damaged in such a way that if you put it in a ZIP drive it would damage the drive in a fashion that would damage any ZIP disk put in the drive in the same fashion as the original disk (basically it had a cut in the disk platter that would partially decapitate the reader head in such a way as to cut new disks used in it the same way). Like a fucking hardware virus.

Also: Interestingly, due to a certain bug in the USB standards that was brought up a while back, it should be possible to write a virus that infects USB devices and controllers, and could technically be passed to any USB device or controller connected to that one (as in, a USB keyboard that infects any USB port it's plugged into, which would in turn infect any device plugged into that port and so on). If only you had enough space to attach a useful payload to it...

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

I work at a small IT company that does some computer repair on the side.

Not too long ago, we had a kid come in with an old desktop gaming rig. The side panel was missing, the back plate for the video card was missing (which meant that the VGA port was basically hanging free), and the thing just looked like a complete mess. Even then, it wasn't that impressive; it still had DDR2 RAM and the processor was an old Core 2 Quad, which was pretty good when it was new, but not so much now.

The thing is, this kid traded his PS3 straight across for it, and his dream was to turn it into a modern gaming rig. The problem with that is that the computer was old enough that upgrading it to modern specs basically meant replacing EVERYTHING: new motherboard, new processor, new RAM, new video card.

Poor kid didn't know this. After we got it running and cleaned up for him, he would be constantly calling us, wondering why his upgrades weren't working. He didn't realize that most modern components aren't just plug-and-play; twice, the kid bought the wrong type of RAM for his computer. The first time, he bought DDR3 when his motherboard only supports DDR2, and the second time, he wound up buying server RAM, which is different from regular RAM. He simply didn't do the research you need to do when you upgrade your computer, and it showed.

I felt bad for the kid, especially after I told him he needed to replace his motherboard if he wanted a new processor. His dream was to have a computer that could run Fallout 4, and that wasn't gonna happen without basically replacing every major component. He should've known that from the start, and now he's invested in a box that was way more trouble than it was worth to upgrade.

Whoever traded him that piece of garbage for his PS3 was an asshole.

 

[Elfgore]

My new PC has a lovely little tick. Whenever anything of the power strip it shares or the heating/air kick on or off in the house, the computer will wake up from sleep mode. The keyboard lights up if the computer is off too. No idea why it does it whatsoever and Google wasn't much help either.

 

[Rattja]

Not sure it is exactly what you had in mind, but I had one that I found to be very strange.

On my previous machine I had the problem where it would randomly just freeze up and loop the last sound played in a horrible feedback loop so I had to force it to restart. Since it was so random as to when it would happen, it was a real pain to figure out as it sometimes happened after 5 minutes and other times it could go days.
In the end it turned out to be a damaged motherboard, and getting a new one fixed it right up.

Now, the strange part of it was that during my time trying to figure it all out I noticed that there was one thing I could do to keep it from crashing. I realized that it had never crashed while I was playing Mass effect 3, not even once.
After some experimentation I figured out that if I just started up the game, then alt tabbed out and just left it in the menu, it would keep it from freezing up. So as long as that game was running, it was all good. but it had to be that game, no other game I tried worked.

 

[DoPo]

I felt bad for the kid, especially after I told him he needed to replace his motherboard if he wanted a new processor. His dream was to have a computer that could run Fallout 4, and that wasn't gonna happen without basically replacing every major component. He should've known that from the start, and now he's invested in a box that was way more trouble than it was worth to upgrade.

Whoever traded him that piece of garbage for his PS3 was an asshole.

This story reminds me of my neighbour back in the day - he wanted to get a PC for his son's birthday. His son played some games and since I knew him and what he liked, I was asked to provide opinions for a decent gaming PC without going overboard on price. Basically a normal new gaming PC for the time. That was around 2003-2004, I believe. So I did write down a list of components that would have satisfied the budget - not great, as in, they wouldn't have ran Half-Life 2 on max but decent with the possibility to upgrade. So, my neighbour thanked me and went to get these from a PC shop.

They offered to build him a PC instead and have him 2-3 configurations to look at. That sounded appealing to him, as I didn't put down firm prices (since they depended where you got the parts from) and I had alternatives for most components.

OK, so some shops did provide good service in that respect - of the offers he had, one was reasonably close to what I had written down, so I suggested that to him. The other(s?) were a bit crap. However, they were cheaper. My neighbour then decided to see what other shops had to offer. In the end he went completely against my advices and just got some slimy offer somebody had. The PC was crap. It was what you'd expect getting if you went with a store bough pre-built machine - integrated video card, RAM that wasn't enough to satisfy most modern games at the time and a Celeron CPU. And, of course, no real upgrade path for any of the components, unless you want to rip out everything and replace it.

So it ran GTA Vice City on lower than average settings and it struggled even then. I do remember that bit because I recall GTA:VC had come out at least a year prior to the PC and yet it struggled to play it.

 

[TechNoFear]

I had a PC that a mouse tried to make its nest in.
Was fatal for both when the mouse took a pee on the motherboard...

I have spent 3 months looking for a bug in my code, while the mining multinational I had built the system for threatened to terminate a Au$2 million contract. I fixed the bug by moving 2 lines of code further apart.

General Electric threatened me with copyright circumvention when I reverse engineered their Automated Train Protection computer system (ATP) and found a huge bug that could cause accidents in some of the worlds longest and heaviest trains...

 

[chadachada123]

So Windows Explorer, for awhile, kept leaking memory, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on, as it only occasionally happened while perusing my files.

Turns out, if I recall correctly, that if I went to a folder with a large video file (like a movie), Explorer would sift through the entire freaking video for whatever stupid reason. For a several gig file, you can see how this was a major issue.

Honestly, I can't remember what I did outside of it being complicated by my standards, but boy am I glad someone else on the internet asked the same question and had it actually answered.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Before I upgraded to my current computer, my old laptop was having steadily increasing difficulty with booting. To start off with, about 1/10 times I tried to boot it wouldn't detect my hard drive as a bootable device. Gradually it got worse and worse, until it got to the point of sometimes taking 2 hours of turning it off and on before it's say "Oh hey, I see you have a hard drive in there" and decide to turn on. Once it was on it was perfectly fine and I wouldn't get any issue. Unfortunately I couldn't just keep it on because I was ferrying it between home and work and its battery life was something like 10 minutes at that point.

I tried various sophisticated fixes such as opening it up, staring at the hard drive perplexed for a minute before putting it back in, and shaking my computer vigorously in various different directions. It'd also work if I booted from a hard drive dock. I took it in to Memory Express to see how much it'd cost to get it fixed, they said that it was probably a hard drive problem, and it'd cost me $300 for the fix. I can replace a hard drive on my own for way less than that, and I was almost positive that it wasn't a hard drive problem (Motherboard was my best guess, but I'm not all that familiar with hardware). Anyways, it was a $1000 computer, and if it was going to cost at least $300 to fix it I thought it might just be better to get a new one since I'd owned it for a couple years before that.

Still using the hard drive to this day.


I also had an issue recently with my brightness not adjusting on Windows. Whenever I pressed the function keys to turn the brightness down it would display the current brightness, but not change anything. When I tried to turn the brightness up, it would go all the way to something like 17/100 and never move again. Restarting was no help, and reinstalling all of my graphics drivers didn't work. The only workaround I found was going to Display and then adjusting the brightness with the slider there (Still wouldn't change the actual brightness), and then closing my laptop to put it to sleep. When I reopened it, it would be at the correct brightness

Some other fun: All due to my use of Lubuntu, which is a slightly modified Ubuntu-Linux that uses the LXDE[footnote]Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment[/footnote], making the OS much lighter on system resources.

Love Lubuntu, hate the bugs. I was writing a program for modelling flowers, and for whatever reason when I used LXDE the mouse position given by glfw was ~20 pixels off. I think it had something to do with it counting the window header, but I never found out what was wrong.

[li]Speaking of crap graphics drivers... My GPU isn't supported by current graphics drivers, on Linux only, this causes attempts to use proprietary Nvidia drivers to lock my OS up.[/li]

By any chance did you try updating the driver from the Additional Drivers tab in Software and Updates? I kept trying to update it using the driver installer from Nvidia's website but they somehow tanked my video drivers, and xorg, and maybe xserver. It's hard to know what exactly it destroyed itself because in the process of trying to fix it I left a trail of destruction in my wake. All the advice I found told me to uninstall xorg and reinstall it. Uninstalling worked fine. Reinstalling failed with a endless trail of missing dependencies.

Anyways, using the additional drivers tool somehow worked despite all that, I'm not sure if this would help for you or not.

 

[FPLOON]

My <url=http://www.roundstable.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/MLP_FanFavorite_MIMOBOT_p.jpg>Derpy Flash Drive literally lives up to its 64GB name... It will derp harder and faster than a Rob Schneider porn parody...

Other than that, when I bought my first HDD, my mom advise me to never extract the files automatically to my new laptop after it has made two or more backups from the old laptop otherwise I would end up with multiple duplicates on the new one... It wasn't until after the automatic extraction that the reason why I had so many song duplicates was because my old laptop was syncing with iTunes, which created backup songs over time... I ended up with up to 100GB worth of duplicate music to get rid of... Also, since my mom and I have the same HDD model, she told me that there wasn't a way to showcase in detail what the HDD actually backs up... and, after hitting a few shortcuts at random, I got to see every backup copy in detail including files that my mom thought could not get backed up in the first place...

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

A few older oddities:

1. I decided to experiment with doublespace in Windows 98 on a smaller drive that happened to hold my Mp3s I'd ripped from my vast CD collection. Basically it was a drive compression utility that would "add" more space to said drive but the experiment made some things horribly incompatible with the programs that usually read them. In short I couldn't undo the compression so sadly I had to format the drive. This is where it got weird. After formatting the drive and restarting the PC, I found every one of my files on that drive were still present, accounted for and above all impossibility working perfectly. I've never found an answer to how this happened or why, including pinging the odd circumstances off of every tech professional I knew. Everyone agreed I'd had some rare event of a derped compression utility and a derped format utility colliding in what amounted to a quantum reset to the previous uncompressed timeline, as if I'd never enacted the compression at all.

2. Once while playing Quake with a bot mod I'd downloaded, I was doing quite well in respect to my normal play of slightly better than awful. The way the mod was set up one had to manually add bots via the console as there were no keybinds coded into the mod itself, and I hadn't macro'd any keybinds in. Around 10 minutes of play the game informed me that 5 more bots were added, without my interaction with the console, and they proceeded to beat my ass. I'd recorded the gameplay as a demo because I liked watching my matches to learn where I could improve... I terminated the game as it kind of freaked me out and contacted the bot mod's developer asking them if there was a code line somewhere that had a threshold where if a player was winning too much more bots would be added. They replied in the negative and I fired back the demo file. I never heard back from the mod developer but the mod itself was taken down shortly after the demo file was sent. Strange.

3. Using a 56k modem was standard for my late teens internet usage, and a friend of mine ran the local ISP I dialed into. One day I was downloading a few music video files, something rarely found in those pre-high speed internet days, and suddenly noticed I was getting 100kbps+ speeds. I immediately called my friend to see if my PC was just having a shitfit and misreporting the speed since 56k shouldn't have been able to do that... he confirmed it wasn't a figment of my overstressed computer's imagination. It never was able to be reproduced and we never quite figured out how it happened but it definitely made it into our storybook of weird shit PC's did.

4. A buddy of mine had an IBM PC that would sometimes refuse to shut down no matter how many times you pushed the power button and even stayed on for around 3-4 minutes after being unplugged. Creepy.