Worst Computer Problem Ever

[Alexandrous]

My Dell laptop is beloved, but a handful. The keyboard is messed up, if I press "a" it somehow strokes several buttons, including page down. I use a USB keyboard, effectively making it a desktop. The battery life lasts about long enough to mock me by booting up, then going into hibernate to keep from powering down. The wireless card doesn't work properly. Lately it's been bluesceening, and failing the DST tests in diagnostic. Since it came preloaded from Dell (that's a mistake right there), I can't fix it with a boot disc unless I effectively steal one off the internet, and even that might not do the trick; I could end up having to get a new hard drive. It's now crashing several times in a row before deciding to work, apparently at random. It works fine after that, but you have to wonder if playing the restart-dance is worth your time when all you want to do is check your email.

 

[slaygore]

Vista screws the hell out of me. The worst one is when it wouldn't let me use microsoft office properly. I couldn't open any save files from word, excel, powerpoint or any of them. What's worst is that I can't even open word without going into safe mode. It just pissed me off so much even when I reinstalled it 5 times! As a result, I went to open office, which saved my life since I had a huge amount of paper due.

Now I reformatted my laptop and now everything works properly now except for 1 big ass annoying problem.....it freezes......in the most random time ever. I'm not doing anything, leaving nothing open. I leave my laptop alone for 5 mins and BAM I come back only to find out it froze. Other times I play my music and it randomly freezes and it gets so annoying cause the sound is still there and its playing that 1 tone over and over again like a broken record player. I don't even get the damn blue screen of death which I got alot before I reformated.

 

[OneHP]

Oh just remembered another one. My dad once shut his laptop whilst his in ear headphones were resting on the keyboard, bye bye screen.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Trying to browse the forums when a video is being uploaded.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Bearing failure on a hard drive, for me. Smelled kinda nice, actually, except for the undertone of "OMG everything's gone and I'll never get it back".

-- Steve

edited to add: It was only a 20MB hard disc... but this was back in the early '90s, and the few backups I had were on 5.25" floppies (500kB each, IIRC), and I couldn't find a compatable replacement drive for that obsolete clunker.

 

[Corsair256]

Back in the day, I somehow managed to overwrite windows boot sequence with Micromachines 2. So as soon as you turned the computer on, just after bios and dos, straight into Micromachines. Lucky for me it was still dos though, fixable in the end.

Also, the internal soundcard in this PC had a 'driver update' that caused windows to bluescreen whenever it tried to play any sound. Gave me an excuse to finally get round to buying a new card heh.

 

[TheKnifeJuggler]

I once fried an HP laptop's motherboard once...

See, the power cord was broken and you had to hold it in place, with one of the wires going into the port and the other to the ground on the USB port.
Thing is, I was typing something up and then my finger slipped, (Cause that wire couldn't be soldered in or something and you had to hold it in place) and all of a sudden, I heard a loud POW and the screen turned off.

DEATHLY Fatality.

 

[Arkitext]

Everytime I close down my computer and it tells me

"Program X Has Failed to Close Properly"

End Now? OR Cancel?

Yeah, which am I going to choose? Fuck XP, just select End Now for me so I don't have to feel bad about closing Windows Clock before it's saved all my preferences.

 

[LivemeLifefree]

My XP does that too, my worst computer problem would be, well, in comp maintence one of my partners unscrewed the HDD. That was funny, then, he dropped it, while it was exposed. It bounced off the table and onto the carpet. Teacher still doesn't know it was us. We swithced it out with another computer's and acted as if nothing happened.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

You can't buy XP, but depending on the version of Vista you have, you can downgrade, as long as you have access to a Windows XP disk. Vista Home Basic is the only one, so far as I know, that has no downgrade rights. Some computer manufacturers have downgrade disks available, and if you have a regular copy of XP that is installed on another computer, you can install it on your Vista box and use the Vista key to activate it. This, of course, entails a call to MSFT's activation support, and XP probably won't have the drivers if your computer was built for Vista, but you can get XP compatible drivers for most Vista units these days.

 

[Sib]

Didn't happen to me but did happen to my friend, on his XP when he booted up he got this program which normally hides in the background, but today it decided to be Rambo.

It blocked every single .dll file, all of them, it was like a virus made by Microsoft, but it was epic, it even kept running and doing the same thing when we restarted in safe mode. Bastard thing took us an hour to sort out.

 

[Mourndark]

Right: In my time I have had all sorts of strange, often not fully explained and expensive PC problems:

1. Dodgy HD gave up every few weeks and meant I had to reinstall windows every time
2. Bad RAM catching fire ("Is it supposed to smell like that?")
3. CoolWebSearch spyware. Took a good few days of solid HijackThis grind to shift it
4. Destroying my graphics card with static discharge (I can't think of any other reason)
5. Shorting out PSU and getting some nice electric shocks
6. Trying to reformat a pair of RAID1 discs to work normally (had three machines running case off...and got nowhere)
7. I think I've had most possible BSoDs over the years
8. Wireless networking

Moral of the story? 2nd hand PCs = bad.

 

[smallharmlesskitten]

My dad blitzing the ram by putting it in BACKWARDS, i didnt think you could do that

 

[werepossum]

one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

Yeah, you can still buy it in stores. Even better if you're a student, you get a huge discount when you order through your University's bookstore. I've heard that Service Pack 3 may have alleviated the Vista headache, have you downloaded it?

The end date for XP sales has been extended to June 30th, 2008. From what little I've read, I'd guess it's unlikely to be extended again. OEM sales may continue however for very low end machines, where Microsoft recognizes that Vista is too resource-hungry for the hardware, and possibly for large corporate entities where support and software compatibility issues dominate and sheer volume (and the chance these customers might otherwise buy - gasp - Macs!) lends power. But us ordinary mortals will be SOL. Also, most OEMs have ceased offering XP, as other than in a few limited special situations selling XP hurts your quantity discounts from Microsoft, who really wants to move everyone to Vista.

As mshcherbatskaya mentioned, most versions of Vista come with step-down rights. This would obviously be cheaper than buying a new copy of XP (currently $90US at New Egg.) However, Service Pack 1 is out for Vista, which is said to resolve most of the issues with Vista. (Service Pack 3 is for Windows XP.) If you have enough RAM (at least 2GB) and moderate processing and graphics power, then you should be able to get Vista working satisfactorily as long as your hardware (video card if present, motherboard chipset, special controllers, printers, and other hardware) has good Vista drivers available. Laptops are probably in the worst shape, as many have less than 2GB of RAM and also share it with onboard integrated graphics.

You may have to do a repair or even a re-installation, but there's no real need to drop Vista now unless you have a very low end computer or you have older or non-Vista compliant software you need to run. Of course, there's really nothing new or special that Vista brings to the table, either, at least so far.

This whole Vista thing has been a fiasco, but it's about fixed now. Windows XP had similar teething problems, but brought a slew of improvements to compensate. I don't think many people see Vista in that same light. Had Microsoft been smarter, they would have offered only two versions, Basic and Pro, both 64 bit and differing only in the add-ons. Then other companies would have had to write only one new driver and one new version of software, and Vista would have had at least one compelling reason for adoption. In trying to force universal Vista adoption, MS forced Vista on machines not nearly powerful enough to run it, and as a consequence bought themselves a class action lawsuit. But hindsight is 20/20.

 

[Omnidum]

Also, I needed to reformat my mothers laptop. At 64 percent, it gave up work and did not want to come back to it. I think it went broke when I turned it off. I still chuckle at it from time to time.

 

[Drong]

Ok not actually a computer fault but rather one with a phone system (I used to repair them for LG) on one of the old analogue systems I was getting a strange intermittent loss of power and odd smells, checking the resistance across the PSU indicated that it had half shorted so I take the psu board out and underneath it is a mummified mouse which had somehow managed to crawl in there and jam itself between the live rail and ground (messily evacuating it's bowels in the process)

The little guy then became the office mascot for a while before he eventually got shrunk wrapped and stuck in a jiffy bag and then sent through the internal post to one of the girls who worked upstairs.

 

[Yellow Scarf]

My first laptop had a habit of randomly freezing for completely unknown reasons. But it never did this after I changed the autosave times on word 98. Never understood why.

As for my current laptop... at first it would just randomly turn off, but leave an annoying whine going. Then it stopped liking the battery. Then it simply refused to turn on at all, making just a depressed whine.
Turned out that the power supply had stopped reducing the current to 19v, completely ruining the battery, and frying the motherboard. The motherboard damage has been fixed (it apparently needed resetting and a tiny bit of soldering), but I haven't replaced the cables yet.

As for my desktop, I think somethings going wrong with the heat sink, it keeps turning on a siren-type-thing and shutting down post haste. Advice?

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

My brother managed to spill iron brew over his computer...which was funny. From reading this thread it would seem that I have had pretty good luck with computers. Since upgrading to vista though I have not been able to use my recording gear because there are no drivers...really wish I had researched it better.

 

[Aidanadv]

The day I discovered the file registry on my mom's computer. She never thought of backing it up or even knew it existed until I screwed it up.