Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

KnightOfTwo

New member
Jan 10, 2012
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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.
 

Malkav

New member
Jan 17, 2012
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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!
 

Da Orky Man

Yeah, that's me
Apr 24, 2011
2,107
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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.
 

Bazaalmon

New member
Apr 19, 2009
331
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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.
 

RedDeadFred

Illusions, Michael!
May 13, 2009
4,896
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0
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.
 

Zipa

batlh bIHeghjaj.
Dec 19, 2010
1,489
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Worst thing I have ever had happen to me is a faulty GPU (was a GTX 470 if I remember). I put it in my machine, connected it all up and powered it on. The next thing I knew the room was filled with smoke and I scrambled for the PSU off switch as fast as I could. I lost a PCI-E slot in the conflict as it turns out but otherwise I got away light.

I returned the card and it turned out to be a fault with it not something I had done (thankfully).
 

Sigmund Av Volsung

Hella noided
Dec 11, 2009
2,999
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Only about three come to mind:
-Got a virus on my PC(back when I didn't know shit about that kind of stuff) that kept playing this one specific song at random->Win7 reinstall, thank you very much.

-I was playing a game, then the PSU broke(I bought a really cheap replacement one, but I have learnt my lesson now). Thank god I still had my old one, which surprisingly enough, worked really well(and never broke).

-I was assembling my new pc, but it kept rebooting every time I launched chrome. Turned out that I didn't screw in the CPU fan properly, so the blasted thing kept overheating. By the time I had realised this (and after reinstalling windows 7), 10 hours had passed(I began assembling in the morning). Yes, I did feel like a right wally, but oh well, no permanent damage was suffered.
 

laggyteabag

Scrolling through forums, instead of playing games
Legacy
Oct 25, 2009
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My PSU slowly started to die. Every time I turned my computer on, my computer got slower and slower, to the point where I couldn't even play games anymore. A couple of days after I threw my PSU out, my brother's PSU (same model) exploded inside of his computer, gladly however, nothing other that the PSU itself was damaged. Dont get cheap hardware guys.

I also downloaded a virus when I was not tech savvy with this kinda' stuff. "Anti-virus 7" it was called, a Trojan, luckily my brother came upstairs immediately after I had downloaded it, noticed it was on my desktop, and deleted the thing before I went on anything important.
 

Black Reaper

New member
Aug 19, 2011
234
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I got an Alienware laptop a while back, and i was really enjoying it, but about a week and half after i got it, some lightning hit my house and killed it, along with some other stuff but mainly that
Luckily, i managed to get a new one due to the insurance on the previous one, but it took like a month to arrive
 

Veylon

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Aug 15, 2008
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On my first computer, I broke Windows by programming in QBasic. The programmer threw some kind of error and then Win95 no longer ran. From there on out, it was strictly a DOS-only computer. I didn't have the savvy to reinstall OSes back then, but I did get pretty good at editing the CONFIG.SYS file.

On my latest computer, I broke Windows SxS (I think?) by fiddling with a program that changes the startup animation. A whole host of programs start spitting out unrelated-seeming errors at random times, leading to massive aggravation. Fortunately, reinstalling Windows fixed it.
 

Someone Depressing

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Jan 16, 2011
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After not using my computer for about a week, I turned it on, and the cpu burnt; it smelled of barbecue fish, the room was literally overflowing with thin to thick smoke, and my windows were literally stained with smoke for a few days.

I'm so lucky there wasn't a fire; the side of the desk it was on was pretty badly burnt. Still, though, it confused me to this day. I didn't really lose anything important though; someone probably just left it on for a few days and never bothered to turn it off.
 

DirgeNovak

I'm anticipating DmC. Flame me.
Jul 23, 2008
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My hard drive failed and I lost the only copy of my novel manuscript. I had over 200 pages done, up in smoke.
Now I have five backups. Laptop, external HDD, USB drive, Dropbox and Google Docs.
 

Truniron

New member
Nov 9, 2010
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My old Vista pretty much burned it self to death, despite having great ventiation for the fan. In a last effort to do something, I cooked some really good egg.
 

TMEighteen

New member
Mar 6, 2014
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This one time, playing WoW, my CPU heatsink fell off mid-raid. Finished Onyxia and promplty powered down, redid thermal paste, properly secured it and kept on grindin.
 

Fdzzaigl

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Mar 31, 2010
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Nothing really, although my power supplies have the tendency to break down right after the warranty has expired. I seriously suspect that manufacturers are programming that in.

I guess the worst thing that happened was me touching the motherboard while I didn't realise my friend hadn't yet turned the power off. Needless to say:



But in retrospect it was quite funny, and ... energizing.
 

nvzboy

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Dec 29, 2012
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When I first built my PC the motherboard I ordered didn't come with a good cooling. This caused a sort of meltdown when I played any game. it took me a while to figure this out as the pc just simply went into blue screen of death and would not turn on for a while and then be fine. I then once by mere incident shut down a game after five minutes as I was called to dinner and noticed the temperature readings on my cpu was a whopping 95 degrees celcius. I could have been making dinner on my CPU. So i got myself a nice big aftermarket cooler and all was fine, never BSOD'ed on me since.
 

KefkaCultist

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Jun 8, 2010
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Nothing disastrous has happened to my PC, since it's practically my child, but my mother's PC, however, doesn't have someone tech savvy taking care of it, so I have to show up as their IT guy periodically.

One time I was called over because all icons were gone from her desktop and nothing was working. Then, when she went to reset it, nothing worked at all. Based on this info, I was already pretty sure that she'd somehow manage to delete her OS, but I asked her what she did prior to this happening. Here's what she did: The computer was running slower than normal, so she found a youtube video on how to make it run faster. This video was a troll video that gave instructions on how to delete System32 under the pretense that it'd help her. Yeah... She fell for that old trick. Thankfully I had brought the OS CD with me and got it fixed, but yeah, I had to give her the rundown on stuff to never delete no matter what the internet says after that.
 

RicoADF

Welcome back Commander
Jun 2, 2009
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Doublegee said:
6 hard drives suffering mechanical failure and dying over a span of 2 years.

"Didn't you have backups?"

They WERE the backups... so I lost everything.
That's why I keep both NAS and disc backups. Hard drive backups are all well and good but multiple backups over multiple media types for the important stuff is still needed.
 

PoolCleaningRobot

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Mar 18, 2012
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After reading some of these, I'm thankful I live in the age of cloud computing so I can just type up my documents in my Google drive folder and always have instant backups of my work. Though I'm starting to think I should get some secondary and tertiary backups...

I haven't had anything terribly traumatic happen to any of computers. My alienware got got hijacked by one of those ad-ware viruses that creates hyperlinks to ads on the text of any web browser. Since some sites do that already, I didn't realize it was a problem until I noticed it on Steam. After thinking about it, I gave up and figured I should learn how to use Alienware Respawn to reinstall Windows 7. I had 3 years worth of crap slowing down my machine from when I was less than pc savvy anyway. I ended up with an extra gig of ram free when the install finished.

The only traumatic data-loss I experienced was when I was experimenting with Linux distros on my netbook. I didn't want to install a separate OS on my hard drive until I had a second external hard drive to backup Windows so I was installing and running distros off an SD card. Thing is, when you click "wipe disk and install" when you don't have any other drives connected, some installers will immediately wipe and install on whatever disk it detects. Luckily I had copied most of my files to an external hard drive the night before so I didn't lose anything important or have redownload 80gb of Linux distros. It worked for the better because I learned how to manage partitions and installs manually and the Windows 8 disk I got from Dell gave me a much cleaner and better working installation than the bloated factory one. It also made me realize how much of a pain in the ass installing Windows is compared to Linux