Here's the deal,
This is for your "best of the worst" PC related nightmares. The wildest / stupidest / dirtyst thing you've run across while building or repairing PC's

HERE'S THE RULES FOR POSTING !!!!!!!!!!!

#1 - Must be a computer YOU worked on or have contact with in some way
#2 - picture to go with your story IF you can snap one
#3 - Can be hardware or software related ( dust in PC , 100000 virus's etc etc )
#4- Keep it clean ( no vulgur pics)
#5 - Must be real , dont go and make up a story or find one on the WWW

I'm sure I"ll see something impressive soon. A few weeks ago I saw a PC with
over a 1000 virus/spyware/malware hits on it. Didn't take a pic or anything.
I will next time though :-)

Stickied...

I will have to get the guys at the shop on here.. they have (or use to have) some screen printouts of machines that were in the tens of thousands for infections (virii, spy and ad ware)

awesome topic high i love old tech stories

i know the dumest thing that ive ever done was with my first computer a dell web pc had it a week and then one day i was screwing around with it and accidentally formated my hard drive

your probably thinking why whould you do that?

i wanted to see what format ment.

Just got to college with my 6month old PC. A week in it stopped working. I was flipping out trying to figure out what was wrong. After taking the entire thing apart I found a screw that somehow (read lost it when working on the case and decided i would find it eventually ) got dropped in behind the motherboard and was shorting it out preventing the PC from working

Let me tell you this was a few days of agony and hair pulling

I put a heatsink on backwards. Yeah that was a few years ago. What have I learned from it? I have a 50/50 chance of doing it right.

Quote: Originally Posted by Slaymate I'm sure I"ll see something impressive soon. A few weeks ago I saw a PC with over a 1000 virus/spyware/malware hits on it. Didn't take a pic or anything. I will next time though :-)

1000 is nothing. I've seen 100000... All pr0n. Haha.

I'll remember this thread is my PC ventures.

Once I had an old Dell Gx110 laying around with a bad PSU, I had the sense to take out the bad one and put in the new one. I found out it needed the Aux. connector old PC's use but Dell being stupid made theirs proprietary... Well I jammed on the Aux. Connector anyway and fried the board... fun stuff...

Another time another Dell I couldn't get the screen to show anything after I switched out the CPU's... So being the smart one I am wanted to see if the CPU is getting hot at all... Well in about half a second the 1.7Ghz Celeron CPU was hot enough to burn the back of my fingers before I pulled the plug... The CPU still works... and so does my hand... sort of...

After working on a particularly nasty and tenacious virus for a while, I got into removing all the spyware, malware and cookies. There were a ton of them from pr0n trackers...










I said, "MOM!?!?"

I think i've posted about this before but i'll do it again.

I had a PSU go on me a few years back and didn't have the cash to buy a new one. So my friend lent me one he had lying around , an old 250w POS. Anyway I managed to get a few months out of it.

Then one night I shut my computer off and went to bed. After a few minutes I looked over and saw a blue glow from my cathodes and LED fans. The computer was "off" but the lights and where dimly glowing and the fans were turning real slow. And there was this burning smell. So I ran over and unplugged it. Luckily it didnt fry any of my hardware but the PSU was toast. Close call

No pic , sorry.

I was building a computer for the first time---a sweet top of the line system.....for a friend. Decided I was going to overclock it so I went into the BIOS and doubled the FSB. Didn't boot so I went back in and upped the voltage on the RAM. A lot. Fried the RAM totally but at least the CPU was ok. And luckilly said friend was very very forgiving.

I was putting together a computer for a coworker...

Put one too many mounting screws in the case... one more than there were holes on the board.

Yup. I put one in a MicroATX mouning hole when it was a standard ATX board.

So after all of it was done, the machine wouldn't turn on.
I tried everything I could think of to trouble shoot it... everything short of taking the board out of the case. I mean, why would the case prevent it from turning on?

Nothing got damaged, thankfully, but was rather embarrasing.

Pics are hard if we're telling stories of Hall of Shame ... so no, I don't have one to go with this.

Went to a friend's parents' house for dinner one night, and the dad asked if I could take a loot at their PC -- apparently, it worked fine when they were on dial-up, but now that the mom was working from home, they added high-speed internet and the computer just hangs a lot. For some reason, they're getting a lot of bounced e-mails ...

So, I run upstairs, the dad supplying me with a pitcher full of gin martinis ... ... and I start up. Looks like they're running XP Home, no service pack. Hmmn... firewall? Nope. Find the ethernet cable, trace it to the router ... it's a low-end cable to cat-5 converter, no firewall.

So ... they've had their business machine online, 24/7, for about three months, with a high-speed connection and no firewall or security software installed, and no security patches in place. This is a n00b hacker's wet dream.

After a 1+ hour scan, the spyware count was at 14,000 and still climbing. All the "bounced e-mails" they were getting were pr0n advertisements; ie, some porn company had installed a mass-mailing application on their system and was sending porn spam from this little, old, jewish couple's internet connection.

Classic.

-godling

No pic sorry but .................

Just got done doin' a fresh install for a guy , who desided to try it himself ** totally PCtarded BTW**

so he puts in his HHD disk and formats the drive, it finishes up , and he tells me he tryed to get it to do the install for like 3 hours but it wouldnt work.

He was trying to install XP off the HHD diag. disk

He didnt even own a copy of XP .

WTF ????

Quote: Originally Posted by HigHTecHReDNecK No pic sorry but ................. Just got done doin' a fresh install for a guy , who desided to try it himself ** totally PCtarded BTW** so he puts in his HHD disk and formats the drive, it finishes up , and he tells me he tryed to get it to do the install for like 3 hours but it wouldnt work. He was trying to install XP off the HHD diag. disk He didnt even own a copy of XP .

I think you should edit out rule #2 that says "You must supply pics" ... even you don't have them!

-godling

When I first came to PimpRig, it was because my Fony VAIO has several brownouts and finally burned out the mobo to the point where I couldn't get it started.

I built my first computer and attempted to slave the old master hard drive to get all of my files off of it. Well, plugged it in and got a boot up error.

Unplugged it, started the computer up, and tried to plug it in while the computer was running. No dice...locked the computer up.

Finally, I decided what the hell.....I plugged it in as the master drive and reformatted it. Went to go format the new drive that I had originally planned on using as the master as the new slave drive.

It was then that I noticed that there was a tiny little jumper that you had to move to make it a slave drive.

Yeah...I was upset.

In 1998 I had a 486-66 running at 80MHz with an AT board.

As you may recall, most AT cases used plastic standoffs, but a few had metal risers. The case I wanted to use, a huge full-desktop from an AT&T 386/25 (so old it had an ESDI hard disc, but it had a 120mm fan), was the latter type. So the plastic standoffs should be removed from the board.

Scissors are the wrong tool for this.

Almost $300 later, I installed a K6-233, a 4Mb PCI video card, and two 16Mb SIMMs (to replace a 16Mb 72-pin and four 4M 30-pin SIMMs) into that case.

If I had to post a Hall of Shame: Cable Edition I could be here all night with war stories.

I do have one that any technician in any field could get a good laugh from.

Roll up on the house 3 story riverview hacienda, 5 car garage and as I am walking up to the door in the garage is an 07' Porsche 911 Turbo, 06' Infiniti Q45 and a Mercedes E55 AMG. Maximum amount of win.

Customer complains of the box not turning on so I am thinking the cable outside has been cut, so I fire up my signal meter to run diagnostics on the line and go to grab the line and look at the back of the man's cable box, it isn't even freaking plugged in.

One more for the cable guys out there, back in the day before I started doing service and repairs, in my installer days I was on my last job doing a disconnect of services. The main hookup, the tap, is on a pole maybe 25 feet in the air. Typical textbook disconnect.

So I go grab my ladder throw it up on the strand and see two drops, the line running from the tap to the house, plugged in. I disconnect the one I was there for, and the other one falls out. Anyone who has ever watched a TV knows the cable screws into the port.

I can't believe I didn't even notice it, the guy next door was stealing cable. Which is something I run into quite often, but this guy deserves a Darwin award for his efforts in doing so.

He nailed boards that I could have broken with my bare hands and not with some tae kwon do crap either, he actually nailed a ladder made of old rotted boards that I was able to pull off with my left arm while I was still holding an 80lb ladder with the right arm. And these were fresh nails too, no rust or anything. Nailed them to the pole and climbed all the way up in the air just to steal cable.

I've seen some real Darwin award candidates in my year-and-some-change tenure at the cable company.

1. I was called out to a job last week, this woman said her computer wouldn't turn on.

Got there, turned it on .....floppy disk in drive....>.>

Waste of my time, embarassing for her.

2. My friend Shane got me to look at his computer a few months back.

The CPU fan was so clogged with dust it had stopped spinning and the dust was actually hard like a cookie and you could snap it in half in little chunks. >.>