Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

[GrimTuesday]

For me it is my current laptop, and a series of problems I am dealing with constantly. I was throwing a ball at my ceiling one night, it landed on my dresser and hit an empty coffee cup, which preceded to fall and hit my keyboard. Suddenly the sound stopped working, well there was sound, but it was a loud crackling/humming sort of noise. So I restarted it, everytime I tried to boot it up, it would freeze, and wouldn't work. Finally I got it so it would start up, and actually let me do stuff, but the sound driver didn't work and I spent many futile hours trying to install and uninstall drivers. So I decided to try to circumvent this little problem by using some headphones that plugged into the USB port, only to find that those has also stopped working for some reason. I took it apart to make sure there was no structural problems, and everything looked fine. A few months later, I went to turn it on, and it would power on, but for some reason, it wouldn't actually start, so I have to leave it on all the time, or its just kind of a crapshoot whether it actually works or if I'm going to have to keep trying to get it to start over and over again.

The sound comes and goes (another reason it gets left on all the time, because once the sound is back, if the laptop gets turned off, there is a good chance the sound is gone when it gets turned back on), but the other problems persist, even with a reloading of the OS, nothing has changed (No USB's meant no backups, so I lost all my stuff that I didn't put online or already had saved), so I lost everything for no reason other than confirming its not a software problem.

Apparently this is a known problem with Toshiba laptops.

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

I guess when a fork of lighting hit a nearby telegraph pole, which in turn shocked the house and fried my PC. Man, the massive bang woke as all up in our beds thinking WW3 had arrived. Fucking hell.

Well, ever since, I unplug my computer if there's even a hint of a storm coming.

 

[loc978]

My latest laptop (circa 2008) had a hinge freeze up a few years back. When I went to open the lid, it didn't work as a hinge should, but rather snapped off the bit of aluminum it was screwed into... which turned out to be an arm off of the CPU/video card heat sink (very odd part, that heatsink). It also cracked a whole bunch of plastic, and the panel with all of the soft-switches above the keyboard doesn't quite fit right anymore. I was angry, but I just took it apart and used it with one hinge.

Fast forward to last year, and the same thing happens to the other hinge... so I disassemble the screen and order new hinges. They come, but they're amazingly stiff, can't open 'em without the use of a couple of clamps. On top of that, the screw holes in 'em are so poorly machined, they don't catch screw threads until a depth of about a quarter inch... I ask for a refund and get literally no reply. Wasn't worth pursuing for $10 parts...

So now my laptop, while it still functions if I want it to... isn't very portable. I've reassembled it without screws in the hinges, and the lid doesn't close unless you take it off and bend the hinges with vise-grips, then set it back in the closed position.

Oddly enough, my old single-core laptop from 2003 still works like the day I bought it. Slow as hell now, but it can still surf the internet so long as there's not much Flash to load.

And people wonder why I tell them to build a $300 mini-ITX desktop rather than bother with a laptop. Unless the portability and quick access on buses and planes and such is absolutely necessary, mobile hardware isn't worth the headache or the price.

**edit**
Just thought of another fun laptop story...
A friend of mine has a tiny little high-ish performance laptop from 2011 (maybe 2012. Not sure). 12" screen, quad-core i5, geforce ~550 or something like that, hybrid SSD/7200RPM hard drive. Damn thing put out enough heat to cook an egg... instead, it cooked the solid-state bit of its hard drive. Replaced that with a WD Blue 5400RPM drive, and suddenly the heat output was completely tolerable. Damn hard drive bay was completely unventilated, pressed up against a solid piece of plastic. The plastic looked scorched on the inside.
...I offered to drill new ventilation holes, maybe add an exterior fan, but he declined.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Two things that have happened to my cousin while he was at my place for a LAN party years ago, on separate occasions.

I think we were playing Battlefield 1942. He drops out of the game so I look over at him to ask why. He has this WTF? look look on his face and he says "It just shut off" Then I notice that his power supply had caught fire. I just said "Uhh dude, your power supply is on fire." Everyone in the room just started laughing. He blew the fire out easily, but his power supply was literally toasted.

Another time when he visited, he was having problems with his games drive getting detected by windows or some such thing. He shuts it down and opens it opens it up and turns it on it's side. Pulls out his drive and inspects it and reattaches the cable and is going to reboot and check his BIOS. Everyone else just goes back to the game and then again I notice something odd. "What's that smell? Smells like burning plastic?" We just immediately look over at my cousin. There is a tiny amount of smoke coming out from under his hard drive, which he had ineptly laid with part of it touching he metal on his case, so I guess it shorted out or something. He's like AHHHH DAMMIT and turns his hard drive over and one of the black chips on the bottom is slightly smoldering and smoking. And again everyone just starts laughing.

Sucks he lost that stuff, but it was funny all the same.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

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.

Its ok when you didn't know any better. When the Linux admin at one of my older jobs deleted the /lib directory (you know the one that holds all the basic commands and calls the operating system needs to function) of the main server without realizing what he did until the reboot... lets just say that was one messed up day. I also found that the term "admin" doesn't bring with it any weight of respect or knowledge because an "admin" can be just as dumb as if not dumber than a lowly "user".
I ended up fixing the issue while saving the information. Thinking out of the box, literally I pulled the main drive out and popped it into a different PC, copied over the /lib directory from that one and popped the drive back in the server.
After 8 hours of him screaming in the NOC, trying to figure out how to fix the issue.

 

[Zac Jovanovic]

An old Cooler Master PSU farted out a fireball and caught fire.
I put it out and it didn't damage anything except the case which had nasty burn marks in the top back area, and I kept using it (the case, not the PSU obviously).

 

[Vivi22]

Worst thing that ever happened to me was my graphics card dying. And that's basically the worst that can happen to me as I have no software or files on my computer that can't be readily reinstalled, or which I'd miss if they were rendered unrecoverable.

 

[mindfaQ]

Hmm, the most annoying problem probably was quite some years ago when my computer sometimes froze here and there. The funny thing was that all components worked flawlessly when I put them in another rig and did some testing. Back to the original machine though, the freezes showed up again. New OSes did not change anything, either. Maybe was a faulty motherboard. Second interesting thing about this occurence was, that I ended up bringing it to an electronic store for repair. They ran the computer over maybe a week and the error did not occur, so they could not really tackle the problem either. Back at home, voila, freeze after 5 mins of running DotA. I don't know, with some time passed the error occured less frequently and I just had to live with it, until I could get my hands on a new PC. It was quite an unresolved odyssee ^^.

Going from Win 7 to Win 8.1 was annoying as well. Only changes for the worse (except starting time I guess, but that's only because Win 8 keeps session data like it would when turning the computer "off" to energy saving mode and then starting it up from there. If you do that with Win 7, you probably achieve similar results) and also seeing old problems to still exist. I'm not very surprised though, MS doesn't strike me as competent anymore in the recent times, so many fails are to be expected.

 

[renegade7]

Personal computers (the funny stuff, which I'll get to in a minute, involves things I have done/had happen to me as an electronics engineering student):

A fire. Not even kidding. When I was 14, my parents allowed me to have my first computer, an old machine from the basement, on the condition that if I fixed it I would use my own money. Turns out I didn't even need to spend a whole lot, I knew my way around electronics even then before the days of these Arduinos and Raspberry Pis when now every slightly geeky twelve year-old with $20 to spare can learn electronics theory and it was only a matter of replacing a few wires. Anyway, it worked fine for a few months, I played some Marathon, bit of Daggerfall, Starcraft classic, and even WoW on low settings (the computer was from 2000, this was all in 2007). Later I started having BSODs and had it open while it was running...I can't remember the exact reason, but to 14 year old me it made sense. Anyway, out of nowhere, a spark around a little gate drive transformer started a fire (when I was SURE it would be the CPU to go) and I had a small panic and managed to put it out. Thankfully the motherboard wasn't damaged and repair consisted only of soldering in a new GDT, miraculously, it continued to work for another two years when I was able to buy a modern PC.

The worst computer disaster in my life would be introduction to digital design final project in my freshman year of college. The assignment was to use an FPGA board to create a working 8-bit digital computer. I got into the electrical engineering program a semester late (my dumbass self came to college wanting to be a composer despite my background with electronics) so I was taking it in the off semester (EE is a very linear program in terms of the progression of courses, normally one course is taught only in fall or spring, with some exceptions for intro courses) so everyone else in there was there because they failed it the previous term. This did not bode well. There was only one group consisting of the entire class of 5, and we had chosen to do the hardest project (aforementioned computer) for the extra credit opportunity. Surprise, they ended up bailing to do the easiest option the week before everything was due, and I spent 7 days of pure terror rushing to get it all done...barely slept, barely ate, lost nearly 4 pounds, and had to go to student health at one point, but was able to finish. A+ though, so it worked out for me The rest of them got Cs and Ds, a predictable consequence for starting an entire final project with barely a week to go.

 

[kasperbbs]

My first PC was a disaster itself, first my GPU stopped working specifically for me, it worked just fine when i put it in my friends computer and the guys to whom i sold it to, well it was about time to buy a new one anyway. Then my power supply fried a year later, then 2 or 3 more after that and finally my motherboard gave in so i gifted that piece of shit to my little cousin. My second PC is still alive and well, been that way for over 6 years now, i had no idea that a PC could last this long without something breaking.

 

[mirage202]

Power supply burned out. Quite literally, caught fire and gutted everything inside the tower.

That was a bad day.

 

[Worgen]

My worst computer failure was when I was installing service pack 3 for my old xp build. After installing the service pack my machine would just not turn on, the light would go on but that was it. I ended up having to take it to the shop, I got it back but one of the drives was bricked. They said that the service pack upgrade had corrupted the driver for a gaming mouse I was borrowing and that somehow bricked that hard drive. I tried the drive on the machine when I got it back and it wouldn't boot with it attached, but it worked fine without the drive, fortunately it was just a secondary storage drive so I didn't lose my os or anything really important.

 

[wooty]

My old pc (before my current build) caught that fucking "sasser worm" a few years back when it was all the rage. I tried formatting it, reinstalling XP, installing Vista, going back to win 98 for a short time, but oddly nothing could get rid of the problem. So I ended up kicking the ever loving shit out of my rig and scattering its parts and diodes to the four corners of my bedroom. Just as a warning to my other electrical devices lest they decide to break and malfunction. My 360 didn't heed my warnings and wound up with the same fate. Silly, silly 360.

 

[Segadroid]

The switch from XP to 7 didn't go very smoothly for my PC. Originally the XP version was never supposed to run on the custom type I had, which required a few workarounds by the people who built it for me at the shop. The period of time with XP went great, but when we wanted to upgrade to 7, together with installing an extra harddrive and graphics card, the first time we booted it up it locked up and claimed we had an illegal copy. After much peril we got it working, but a lot of (personal) files were corrupted in the process.

Nowadays the bugger's getting older and slower, but it's had a good run considering the amount of viruses and crashes it endured for the 7 years I've had it.

 

[Aeshi]

Do self-inflicted disasters count?

Because once when I was about 7 years old I rammed an SD card into my old computer's Floppy Disk slot because I thought the two were the same thing. Said slot began spitting out sparks like a goddamn welding torch when I then started the computer up. Thankfully the only thing that broke was the disk slot (because this was back when computers were still learning how to fit in rooms instead of being the size of one.)

 

[Quazimofo]

I don't know if I've ever had a computer "disaster" so to speak. Just general computer hiccups which aren't too difficult to fix with a bit of internet research on a separate computer.

One funny issue I had though was on my laptop. I got it second-hand 3 years ago (it was already a year old but still ran very well). Of course, I wasn't aware exactly how goddamn hot the things can get, so over the last couple of years of heavy gaming it wore down a bit. About 7-ish months ago though it developed a somewhat hilarious hiccup where the caps-lock would flick on and off at irregular intervals. Much time was spent wrestling with the shift and caps lock keys to try to get sentences that don't look like text from a virus/malware before I realized I could type things out in a word processor then convert the lot to proper casing.

It was also pretty funny on online games like LOL where I had to try to convince people I wasn't yelling at them every time I used the chat function. I think at least one person was pretty sure my hands were constantly spasming as an explanation For TEXt LIKE ThiS COmIng OuT eVery timE i Tried tO tYPe soMETHing.


Unfortunately that computer died completely a month back. Hopefully Godot will show up and buy me a new one, but until then I wait.

 

[DragonZA]

Hmmm... Second worst disaster: had a fan fail on a Pentium 2 or 3 (I forget which - one of the Slot 1 jobbies). Placed hand on CPU package to pull it out. Got a nice blister clear across my palm, hadn't turned it off.

 

[UltraPic]

I'd have to say getting an atari 65xe computer with a resin filled power pack, a new one would have cost more than a new computer. Thank god for the c64 and it's plentiful and cheap power packs.

 

[AdagioBoognish]

My old rig was water cooled and had two Nvidia 8800GT graphics cards. I wasn't watching the water level for awhile and it ran low. I noticed the system was running hot and bought some water to fill the reservoir. Everything was working fine for a minute, but then I started seeing dead pixels; Pinkish, purple, blue, and green dots started showing up all over the screen, then the monitor went black. Apparently the seal around one of the connections cracked, from age and the increased heat when the water ran low, and little drops of water were landing on the top graphics card, frying the card. I didn't know what to do, so I ran to grab a bowl, cut one of the hoses, and drained all the water as fast as I could. Ended up saving all the other components, but I still can't believe I almost destroyed my gaming computer.

Hmmm... Second worst disaster: had a fan fail on a Pentium 2 or 3 (I forget which - one of the Slot 1 jobbies). Placed hand on CPU package to pull it out. Got a nice blister clear across my palm, hadn't turned it off.

Lol, ouch! I've done the same. Didn't get myself as bad as you though. This was before I really knew anything about computers and didn't realize how hot a processor can get without being properly cooled.

 

[Apostheum]

Happened a few years ago, was running Linux - Decided: I want to play games, I'm just going to dual boot windows! So I installed Windows on a partition.

- BAD MOVE -

Installing windows on a partition wrecks the bootsector and makes it impossible to boot any other partition. I had to run Linux from a live-CD and reinstall it from the terminal.

I'm NOT a computer savvy person, this took HOURS for me.