Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

[DanielBrown]

An old computer of mine crapped out along with all songs I had written and recorded for the past year. Luckily they were horrible as I had just started out with that hobby. I never got any good at it, and lost intrest a long time ago, but I wish I still had them so I could see and hear exactly how awful I was.
Also lost plenty of other things that were important to me, like all the pictures taken of me when I was around 13-18 years old. Luckily I managed to find some of them on discs or through friends, but a lot were lost.

Worst part is that it was showing major signs of dying for months before it happened and I just ignored it.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

1) Accidentally downloading Antivir 2010 before I understood what it really was. It even comes with its own ads and fake reviews!

2) Motherboard burned, preventing my computer from getting past the loadup screen. Had to replace the whole thing, but according to most people I've talked to, 6 years is an impressive lifespan for a laptop. Here's hoping my new one will last that long.

 

[Avaholic03]

I once deleted System 32 in order to save space on my hard-drive.

... I wish I was joking.

Needless to say I am significantly more tech savvy than I used to be.

Hey, you gotta learn somehow. Usually learning lessons the hard way means you won't repeat that mistake. My family's first computer frequently had problems like this, usually due to me doing something I didn't understand. I had to re-install Windows 95 from 3.5" floppys more times than I can remember. But now I'm pretty much tech support for the family, so I'd say it paid off.

 

[Varrdy]

Many, many moons ago I had an IBM Aptiva - a beast of a machine with 16Mb RAM and a blistering P133 processor. Anyway, my dog could have cared less what was in the tower when he widdled on it. Many moons later I was screwing the new joystick connector into place when some of that crusty, stale doggy wee must have found it's mark and the PSU blew out, right in my face.

I was not burned but I got a hell of a static-shock, making my hair look even more silly than usual, not to mention my almost crapping myself as it was unexpected to say the least.

 

[FPLOON]

I was in the middle of downloading my monthly dose of pre-paid porn software updates when I got hit with one of those "the government is about to break down your door" viruses that almost made me loose everything on my first laptop...

Less than a week after fixing that problem, the laptop basically died on me... I was lucky enough to buy a backup hard drive during the virus situation otherwise I would have been screwed... (I had a major [pain in my ass] college essay to turn in during that time...)

The only other disaster I can think of is when my mom's computer crashed for the first (and last) time... (So much stuff was lost that day...)

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

At one point, for no discernable reason, I started getting infrequent blue screens of death, and then eventually I just got them almost immediately on startup. Thankfully I managed to log in quickly and get my important data onto an external hard drive and do a factory restore.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Thankfully I've never managed to have one. A friend of mine, however (and no, this is not just a story I'm making up for something I did) was having problems with slowdowns and lockups, and did just enough research to decide that she needed to uninstall her USB drivers.

Fixing the issue took some time.

Also, my brother managed to kill a Windows ME installation within half a year. Then again, Windows ME is known as "the trainwreck OS" for a reason.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

Well, this one wasn't my fault, at least.
But my mother's ex-boyfriend wasn't very computer savvy, and apparently some dialogue box had popped up one day that he simply clicked X on.
We'll never know what that dialogue box said, but after that we couldn't log in anymore.
Just as soon as the Log in box appeared, it would close and the computer would reboot in a never-ending cycle until you forced a shutdown. It was like this for weeks, and so we had an unusable desktop.
We eventually just said "Screw it" and somehow managed to reformat and re-install the OS.

 

[Thaluikhain]

In my house it was known as The Paris Hilton Incident.

Didn't exactly wreck it, but I had some explaining to do...she found it funny luckily.

That sounds like you either broke Paris Hilton's computer, or you got "excited" looking at pics of her and shorted the keyboard out.

 

[WindKnight]

Well, my tower is getting up on 9 years old, and a bit over a year ago the motherboard finally died, and just other a month ago the hard drive died. Currently, factoring in those failures, upgrades (and my old monitor dying a few years back), the only original parts are the case, sound card, power supply and speakers.

 

[Easton Dark]

Worst was my laptop hard drive stopped working I suppose. But it made me build my first computer as a replacement, so I consider it a good thing.

I dunno what would be the worst then, as I haven't had a virus since I was 8 looking up porn for the first time, and never a bluescreen or anything like that. Love your computer and it will love you back.

 

[sovietmisaki]

That may be sort of hard to pin down given all the things I've put my computers through, although the worst would probably have to be when I was trying to learn the ropes of PC building, so I bought a 2 GB stick of RAM into the slots that already had 1 GB sticks, of a different brand and model than the 2 GB stick I bought (the mobo had 4 slots in total). things worked out all right, for a while, then when I was playing Medieval 2: Total War, my motherboard suddenly went kaput, since then, I've learned to never ever mix RAM. Luckily I was already building another computer on my own, and I was about halfway done, so that disaster didn't set me back too far.

 

[teqrevisited]

A couple of years ago was probably my worst. The hard drive died and I had made no backups. Now I've got games backed up on cases full of DVDs and important data & really obscure mods & ancient modding tools on an external.

Aside from that I've burnt three graphics cards to death in my previous machine through excessive use. All of the other mishaps have been minor ranging from messed up boot records to bad drivers.

 

[Torque2100]

The worst computer disaster I've ever had was when my mom used my PC while I was out of town. She got one of those really aggressive, session hijack ads telling her that the computer was infected with malware, fell for it and ended up downloading some kind of unbelievably nasty Virus. This thing slowed the PC to a crawl, used up every smidgen of bandwidth on the home network(sending real-time screen grabs to Nigera, no doubt), got into my Outlook contacts and sent virus and worm-laded spam to all of my friends, fellow students and my professorsand it attached itself to all files on my computer. Worst of all, it was impossible to remove. It got into the BIOS chip so even wiping the hard drive didn't help.

The worst bit was that I ended up losing a nearly-finished term paper and had to pull and all nighter to re-write it .

My Mom felt so guilty about it, she just up and bought me a brand new PC so it wasn't all bad.

 

[Happiness Assassin]

Had a nasty fucking virus installed on my family computer one time. I don't know what it did or how it worked, but it somehow shut out almost every possible route of getting rid of it. It also made only IE accessible, locking us out of all other browsers. We eventually had to wipe everything on the laptop. Couldn't even access regedit.

 

[TechNoFear]

The worst of many was an install at a remote iron ore Port in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

It's not a hole in the ground, it's the place they piled the dirt when they dug the hole somewhere better...
No mobile coverage, no internet, at least a day to get anything shipped there, HUGE trains with lumps of ore flying off, dangerous wildlife and 35 - 50C (100 to 125F) temps on the track.

I was there for a week to install of a prototype video imaging system to monitor the condition of ore cars.
Onsite requires extra hard work;
1 hr 4 wheel drive to / from the site each day,
a 10-12 hr day,
7 days a week.

First the couriers dropped a PC off the truck as they took my pallet off with a fork lift.
As I watched the driver threw it back up 2m onto the pallet of PCs and electronics.
The CPU was smashed out of the motherboard, cards broken and a total write off.
I ordered another PC which took 3 days to be built and shipped.

Then the 24 PLC chips for a special video capture card in the 12 PCs all failed.
I discovered this after I had spent a day installing them all, lesson was you shouldn't let PLCs get X-ray-ed by customs...
Add another 4 days to get and fit replacements.

Then the mining company sent a grinding train through the system and ground the top off 2 of the cameras. Only Au$8,000 each...
Add 3 days to replace.

Then I had to start fixing the bugs real world data causes in any new system.
Add another week...

After 3 weeks I finally managed to get the system working and demonstrate it to the mining company.

So after working 21 days without a break, doing 6 weeks work in 3, my boss told me to 'take some time off and come back when you are ready'.

3 days later he phoned me up and asked me why I was not in the office...

Then again, Windows ME is known as "the trainwreck OS" for a reason.

'If you play the Windows ME disk backwards you hear a message from Satan, worse though, if you play it forwards it installs Windows ME....'

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

First is for my old xBox360 (not sure if counts, but it is funny). I was walking down the stairs with dinner, lasagne, and I tripped. I managed to balance myself, but that meant releasing my plate and the dinner it contained. The lasagne hit the corner of my monitor, coating the bottom right quarter if steaming hot sauce, and the rest land on my 360 and proceeded to drip through the vents on to the circuit board. I literally had to tear the xbox apart and scrap off the congealed sauce (for some reason I waited a couple of days to do this). It worked fine, but smelled like lasagne whenever it heated up. Red ringed a few months later.

Second was from a Windows 98 PC I had back in '99. I was plugging in a new hard drive and I forgot to disconnect the power. When I plugged the power in to the hard drive, bam! The surge caused physical damage to the drive. Lost about 200mb off a 2gb drive. Fortune smiled on me though, the damaged portion of the drive was right at the end, so no data was ever written there.

 

[EHKOS]

Well, I had an HP desktop for about three and a half years. During that time the CPU overheated causing minor damage to it's performance, the whole thing got really hot when I put in a $50 ATI 4550 despite it having two free PCI slots. And then, two weeks before its replacement, the motherboard caught some static or some shit because it hit the HP logo, the screen distorted and then it would hang. Couldn't even get to the BIOS. I had my uncles HP do the same thing so I knew it was toast.

I yanked my hard drive out and bought this cool, cheap kit that turns an internal drive to a USB external that plugs into the wall. That was a very two weeks without a PC. I had a PS3 and my mom's laptop to play around with, but we know how the PS3's browser is and my moms laptop had a single core Intel Atom.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and somehow my sisters brand new Sony Viao wouldn't let her access her C drive and she couldn't save anything to it. It also wouldn't start up on occasion. She doesn't let me touch her stuff so I couldn't really diagnose it, but she did a factory default restoration and it works fine now. No idea what the hell was going on with that one.

 

[Johann610]

Gateway, 1999. After 9 months of use, the video card breaks down--the OS won't load anything but awful graphics, and the safe mode won't even network. For two months I have to wait while Gateway takes forever to replace the card. Then the DVD-ROM fails. Then something else...I re-installed the OS in blind panic, and lost the registry. But it does explain why Gateway quit the business early.

 

[D.j. Wellborn]

One day when i was cleaning the walls I bumped into my water bucket which was sitting on a unstable table and the whole thing drenched my computer. My computer has fans on the top of the case so it got in really nice and easy. My motherborad was fried and i had just gotten it too. Luckily it still had warranty so i took a Q-Tip and alcohol and rubbed away any water marks. I sent it back in and got a refurbished one to replace it. No one any the wiser.