Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

[Zipa]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

 

[McMullen]

I let someone convince me that IE's security problems were a thing of the past and went back to using it (it was also sorta-kinda a condition for employment) and I ended up getting a few drive-bys from ads. I remember one of them was AV 2009, another might have been Conficker. I went back to Firefox with the NoScript and AdBlock add-ons, haven't had a drive-by since, and am never going back to IE. The amusing thing was that Vista's UAC let the malware right in without ever raising a fuss, but denied me access when I tried to delete them. I had to delete the virus from a Linux OS that I had on a bootable CD.

Then there's the animation rig I paid a guy to build for me. I had built machines myself before, but didn't want to spend the time to research the various components this time. I also figured this guy had more market savvy than I did. Well, the guy delivered the machine six months late, but that was the least of it. He bought and installed the wrong CPU, purchased a bootleg copy of Windows off eBay without realizing it, got a hard drive off eBay that was marked as new but was used enough that it started squealing after a day of use, and didn't notice that the motherboard's RAM slots were faulty and caused worsening memory errors to crash the machine after about 48 hours of operation. All these things were issues that I had to diagnose, discover, and correct; he was oblivious to all of it. He accused me of trying to scam him, refused to refund me for the CPU, promised to refund me for the OS and hard drive, but disappeared before doing so.

 

[Toejam]

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.

It was around the time a certain home video came out...I went looking for it. The PC was never quite the same again. lol

 

[Zemaddog]

I was playing Skyrim when my computer just turned off and wouldn't turn back on. My 5 month old pc that my friend built me just stopped. I took it to a computer place and it turns out the graphics card had failed. Took it out and the computer was fine. I was able to get the card replaced although it took the supplier 2 months to give it to me. I still have no idea how a broken graphics card prevents a computer from turning on.

 

[Roxor]

Worst I've had happen was a graphics card go up in smoke about a year after the warranty expired. Got a cloud of white smoke blown out of the case in the couple of seconds it took to get up and switch off the mains. The card is still lying around the garage. It still stinks.

 

[antidonkey]

This is waaaaay back in the super socket 7 days. I was given a brand new shiny Geforce card.....as in first generation of Geforce cards ever. I was ecstatic. Slapped in to the pc, hit the power button and nothing. It turned on but didn't do anything beyond that. I did some reseating and dusting and inspection. Tried it again with no result. I left it on while I thought about the situation. I then smelled something burning. I popped of the side panel to case and saw a small orange glowing dot on my motherboard. As I reached to yank the power cable, I heard a small pop. It was the death of the motherboard. I got on my father's computer to try to figure out what just happened. It seems that card drew so much power that it was known to overload the AGP controller chip and fry the crap out of it. Had to do some more research to find a replacement board that would handle it. I was sad as this was the first truly powerful machine I had build myself.

 

[Zetatrain]

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.

HA HA, I once did the exact same thing on my parent's computer a long time ago and boy were they pissed.

Apart from that not much. I think the worst thing that happened to a computer that I actually owned was the video card on my laptop getting fried due to overheating.