Lol, there's no better teacher than a situation like that. Most of my computer education has been preceded by the words, "Ooooh shit."Apostheum said:
Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered
- Thread starter Mr. Q
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As a person that repairs PCs for a living let me just say that there is no reason to not do a weekly backup, especially if you have a Mac (time machine backup is awesome). And as far as the weirdest thing I've seen I will have to go with the machine that was I believe literally haunted. Wouldn't power on unless you held it upside down, the screen was broken so everything was blood red, and the sounds were messed up so the Windows log in sounded like zombie moans. I wanted to dunk the thing in holy water and burn it.
Save early save often people.
Save early save often people.
my personal luck with PC's is....deadbottom, as a friend once told me,
'you know King Midas and his touch of gold?'
"aye?"
'well..your the opposite with PC's...you touch it and it turns to shit.'
Ive had that luck with PC's, on my old PC my graphic card died, went out to buy a new one, implemented it, and then I kid you not, 4 hours later I got BSOD's cause my Hard drive broke. Not only that but Id have random occurences of my PC just giving me the middle finger...forever. Nevertheless though, the PC I have now...loves me or something, I have not once yet had the touch and its always been faithful to me, I spose Ill marry it someday. If Japan allowed that one chap to marry his pillow with his waifu, I do think I should be able to marry a piece of Technology.
'you know King Midas and his touch of gold?'
"aye?"
'well..your the opposite with PC's...you touch it and it turns to shit.'
Ive had that luck with PC's, on my old PC my graphic card died, went out to buy a new one, implemented it, and then I kid you not, 4 hours later I got BSOD's cause my Hard drive broke. Not only that but Id have random occurences of my PC just giving me the middle finger...forever. Nevertheless though, the PC I have now...loves me or something, I have not once yet had the touch and its always been faithful to me, I spose Ill marry it someday. If Japan allowed that one chap to marry his pillow with his waifu, I do think I should be able to marry a piece of Technology.
My previous laptop shipped with Vista, had to deal with it for over a year, oh the horror!Queen Michael said:
Ah, those were the days. I still have one that I use for some older games. It's a shame IBM stopped making them; they were really pretty good machines.Varrdy said:
OT: Anyway, probably the worst thing I can think of is finding out recently that one of my old computers has capacitor rot, explaining the weird crashing I'd been having with it. One of these days I'm going to try replacing them myself, but I need to brush up on my soldering skills first. The computer actually runs even with the bad caps, but I don't want to risk the rest of the PC to keep using it, especially since the capacitors that are bad lead directly to/from the CPU.
My brand new computer managed to contract Conduit really really soon, requiring an entire windows re-install to get rid of it. I did every single step the internet knew of, and it still someone managed to live on. Little bugger was strong. Luckily, I didn't get anything new and important added in the 1-2 day time frame I was using it, so, I just had to re-do the install and file transfer process
Someone decided it would be funny to enter the "INITIALIZE DATABASE" command(which resets EVERYTHING to factory default) on a Promina system(an older networking device).
You don't know tedious until you've had to re-program 500 circuits in a 20 year old machine while the phone is ringing off the hook because people are demanding to know why their internet doesn't work and can't even track down which idiot just killed the network because the login record got deleted with everything else.
Thankfully it only reset that particular node, so I could coordinate with other sites to get mismatches corrected while I had to re-enter all the information for all the circuits.
You don't know tedious until you've had to re-program 500 circuits in a 20 year old machine while the phone is ringing off the hook because people are demanding to know why their internet doesn't work and can't even track down which idiot just killed the network because the login record got deleted with everything else.
Thankfully it only reset that particular node, so I could coordinate with other sites to get mismatches corrected while I had to re-enter all the information for all the circuits.
Nothing I couldn't deal with. Wayyyyy back in the day I got a pretty nasty virus from Steam, back when it was using the IE platform for browsing. It resulted to a reformat, which was a hassle.
The worst thing I can imagine happening is hard disk failures. I always choose the pricey WDs with the 5 year warranty as my main drives and backup the super important files on a cloud service.
The worst thing I can imagine happening is hard disk failures. I always choose the pricey WDs with the 5 year warranty as my main drives and backup the super important files on a cloud service.
I'm not sure if this counts as a disaster, since I was able to salvage it, but here goes.
About two years ago I suddenly began having some major overheating problems in my desktop and suspected that either my liquid cooling system had failed, or the thermal paste needed to be redone. I had to take it out to check either. So, I carefully edge around the seal between it and my CPU, give it a firm but steady twist to break the bond cause by the thermal paste, and POP! out comes the CPU, in spite of the lock supposed to keep it in place. I had little pins bent every which way except for straight. (for anyone who has not seen the back of these units, they have a couple hundred tiny pins, no more than about 5 millimeters in height)I was convinced right there and then I was suddenly holding a $250 piece of garbage.
I decided that for that kind of money it was worth attempting to save, and so spent the next two hours gently realigning the pins. Fortunately, it worked, and once I replaced the cooling system, ran just fine. It is still running the computer I'm using to type this in fact.
About two years ago I suddenly began having some major overheating problems in my desktop and suspected that either my liquid cooling system had failed, or the thermal paste needed to be redone. I had to take it out to check either. So, I carefully edge around the seal between it and my CPU, give it a firm but steady twist to break the bond cause by the thermal paste, and POP! out comes the CPU, in spite of the lock supposed to keep it in place. I had little pins bent every which way except for straight. (for anyone who has not seen the back of these units, they have a couple hundred tiny pins, no more than about 5 millimeters in height)I was convinced right there and then I was suddenly holding a $250 piece of garbage.
I decided that for that kind of money it was worth attempting to save, and so spent the next two hours gently realigning the pins. Fortunately, it worked, and once I replaced the cooling system, ran just fine. It is still running the computer I'm using to type this in fact.
New Years Day, just this year, my laptop exploded. That's no euphemism either. A capacitor inside blew up and covered everything in acid. Thankfully it didn't damage the hard drive and so I didn't lose a single thing. Well, except for the computer.
Never had a disaster. I've had several pains in the ass.
I once had to DBAN a machine to get rid of a Virtumonde infection. Goddamn but that program can cling. I saved all my files, though.
I lost all my files when my old Gateway bit the dust unexpectedly. This was many years ago, before amassing the ridiculous conglomeration of useless data I have today. There wasn't much to lose.
After installing BioShock (and therefore SecuROM), my machine developed several....let's call them idiosyncrasies. It would often refuse to recognize CDs (even the legitimately purchased BioShock disc), running antivirus would result in BSOD, sometimes it would BSOD just because it felt like it, the list goes on. SecuROM is the single worst thing I've ever had on a machine. Most viruses are less invasive and easier to remove. My favorite part is that the makers insisted it would not cause problems with any legitimate hardware or software.
Lost a bunch of music I had bought through the iTunes store because everything there is account-locked and iTunes wouldn't recognize me on my new machine.
I once had to DBAN a machine to get rid of a Virtumonde infection. Goddamn but that program can cling. I saved all my files, though.
I lost all my files when my old Gateway bit the dust unexpectedly. This was many years ago, before amassing the ridiculous conglomeration of useless data I have today. There wasn't much to lose.
After installing BioShock (and therefore SecuROM), my machine developed several....let's call them idiosyncrasies. It would often refuse to recognize CDs (even the legitimately purchased BioShock disc), running antivirus would result in BSOD, sometimes it would BSOD just because it felt like it, the list goes on. SecuROM is the single worst thing I've ever had on a machine. Most viruses are less invasive and easier to remove. My favorite part is that the makers insisted it would not cause problems with any legitimate hardware or software.
Lost a bunch of music I had bought through the iTunes store because everything there is account-locked and iTunes wouldn't recognize me on my new machine.
During a round of Guild Wars 2, my GPU died. Took a couple of weeks, but I amassed enough money to get a new one (GTX 760); I was planning on replacing my aging 560 Ti, so it all worked out for the best.
Also, yesterday, my Razer Naga broke, and I'm basically forced to use an old mouse I've had lying in my closet for a couple of years. I was also planning on replacing that mouse with a Logitech G600 (not going back to a non-MMO mouse for games).
Also, yesterday, my Razer Naga broke, and I'm basically forced to use an old mouse I've had lying in my closet for a couple of years. I was also planning on replacing that mouse with a Logitech G600 (not going back to a non-MMO mouse for games).
Happened just a few weeks ago.
Was playing the last Elder Scrolls Online Beta weekend and suddenly everything crashed. My GPU had finally given out on me (though I was unaware at the time). I opened up the tower to take the GPU out thinking that the fan may have been clogged or blocked by something, as this has happened before. I ended up bumping a cheap little plastic latch that came with my unit. I was unaware of this latch as I didn't build the PC, I merely took out the power supply and put in a new one to support the GPU I added. Well this tiny little latch was the only thing that held the heat sink/processor in place.
Suffice to say that got knocked around a bit and so now that whole thing is fucked. I'm way too clumsy to want to just replace it myself so for the time being I salvaged what I could from it and put it into an older machine I had laying around (thank goodness I never decided to scrap that one).
Luckily I still have a capable laptop so I'm able to play my games, just not to the level of quality I'd like. Saving up money for a new one now.
Was playing the last Elder Scrolls Online Beta weekend and suddenly everything crashed. My GPU had finally given out on me (though I was unaware at the time). I opened up the tower to take the GPU out thinking that the fan may have been clogged or blocked by something, as this has happened before. I ended up bumping a cheap little plastic latch that came with my unit. I was unaware of this latch as I didn't build the PC, I merely took out the power supply and put in a new one to support the GPU I added. Well this tiny little latch was the only thing that held the heat sink/processor in place.
Suffice to say that got knocked around a bit and so now that whole thing is fucked. I'm way too clumsy to want to just replace it myself so for the time being I salvaged what I could from it and put it into an older machine I had laying around (thank goodness I never decided to scrap that one).
Luckily I still have a capable laptop so I'm able to play my games, just not to the level of quality I'd like. Saving up money for a new one now.
My computer once got glitchy and choppy. It eventually went read only. It wouldn't let me copy, move, send or even rename any file, not even to an USB drive. At some point, 19 out of 20, it wouldn't even boot up or get stuck at a black screen, and it was getting worse by the day. No backups, no chance of making one. For a couple of reasons, I guessed the hard drive was dying and taking revenge for a little accident I had with it, but I really wasn't sure.
The only thing I could think of was to have everything read out and transfered 1:1 to a new hard drive, without booting up. I also needed its two pre-installed OS on the new drive, but I was never given their installation CDs.
There was nobody who could help me with this. People usually come asking me for help, just because I have the skill to type a problem into google and follow a few steps. Oh yeah, and for some reason, I had some porn on my desktop I now couldnt do a thing about, so either way, I was on my own.
So without a clue what I was doing, two days and two nights, I somehow made the new drive an exact clone of the old one. Only very few files were damaged at all, and all of them were garbage.
Other than that, I got some ransomware which blocks your computer from doing anything. There are so many variants of this shit, and I got the one that also blocked off every single known method of circumventing and deleting it.
This was the only time that second preinstalled OS (Vista) came into use. Since I rarely used it, I could boot it up just fine, the virus didn't affect it, and I could go ahead and rinse it out of the system. Whoever made it, SUCK IT!
The only thing I could think of was to have everything read out and transfered 1:1 to a new hard drive, without booting up. I also needed its two pre-installed OS on the new drive, but I was never given their installation CDs.
There was nobody who could help me with this. People usually come asking me for help, just because I have the skill to type a problem into google and follow a few steps. Oh yeah, and for some reason, I had some porn on my desktop I now couldnt do a thing about, so either way, I was on my own.
So without a clue what I was doing, two days and two nights, I somehow made the new drive an exact clone of the old one. Only very few files were damaged at all, and all of them were garbage.
Other than that, I got some ransomware which blocks your computer from doing anything. There are so many variants of this shit, and I got the one that also blocked off every single known method of circumventing and deleting it.
This was the only time that second preinstalled OS (Vista) came into use. Since I rarely used it, I could boot it up just fine, the virus didn't affect it, and I could go ahead and rinse it out of the system. Whoever made it, SUCK IT!
While using my laptop iwth only the power cord, the battery having been taken out and kept at about 45% charge to maintain it's capacity, we got hit by a power cut. This sort of thing happens, so I pulled out my Kindle and read for the few minutes the cut lasted.
Sadly, when the power came back on, my laptop would not start. It owuld emit about 22-25 electronic beep when started, but since the manual only had instruction up to about 12, I was stumped. After some investigation, it looked like the hard drive had crashed after the power cut, with the laptop not only unable to read the contents of the drive, but not even recognising it had a hard drive attached.
Did I say that this was less than a week before I was to go to university to study Computer Science?
Anyhow, I ended up sending the laptop back to Asus, who had a guarentee on this particular model and others than they would replace any parts broken via accidents or manufacturer's fault. They got my laptop back to me three days before they said they would, and as I guessed, the repair notice said the hard rive was ruined, so they just stuck in another.
Sadly, when the power came back on, my laptop would not start. It owuld emit about 22-25 electronic beep when started, but since the manual only had instruction up to about 12, I was stumped. After some investigation, it looked like the hard drive had crashed after the power cut, with the laptop not only unable to read the contents of the drive, but not even recognising it had a hard drive attached.
Did I say that this was less than a week before I was to go to university to study Computer Science?
Anyhow, I ended up sending the laptop back to Asus, who had a guarentee on this particular model and others than they would replace any parts broken via accidents or manufacturer's fault. They got my laptop back to me three days before they said they would, and as I guessed, the repair notice said the hard rive was ruined, so they just stuck in another.
My brother once tried to upgrade his RAM in an old PC we had like 10 years ago, but he must have gotten the wrong format or something and tried to force it in anyways, because when he booted up the computer it actually started smoking and the plastic inside melted. Needless to say, we took our next computer to a friend who was more skilled in assembling a computer than he was. Since then my brother has gotten much better at upgrading his computer, and there has been no fires since.
One time, I sneezed on my computer screen, I had to spend a good minute cleaning it after that.
I know, that's some pretty scary shit. Wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I know, that's some pretty scary shit. Wouldn't wish it on anyone.