Whats your greatest PC Boj Job / Blunder

Boah · 4 Jun 2006 at 12:36

Doohickey said:
Was trying to pull the heatsink off my cpu, but couldn't release the cpu first as I couldn't get to the lever, and was pulling ever harder and then all of a sudden pulled the whole thing off with a loud crack. Luckily, no pins were broken in the process.

Haha, I did the same thing - ripped it out of the socket with the lever down, still attached to the heatsink. No pins broken, but a few pins in one corner bent so that it could not be reseated. Out come the pliers and some anxious moments of careful pin-bending later they weren't perfect, but good enough so it slotted back into the socket, ticking along as if nothing had happened. I think that's the blunder and the bodge job right there

Jimbo · 4 Jun 2006 at 12:37

1. Putting my thermo engine heatsink fan on the wrong way, turning on the pc and frying my brand new t-bird 1.4 cpu. Amazingly though there was only a bit of burn mark under the cpu on a label, i cut it off and got a new replacment cpu of the shop.

2. flashing my laptops bios only to discover it was meant for the a different model. I got a working laptop but no display on screen. I eventually fixed it though, and I had to flash it blind becuase of the lack of vga lol.

3. trying to solder a plugged in joystick with the machine on (Amiga) it of course went pop. Well you live and you learn.

orderoftheflame · 4 Jun 2006 at 12:37

Tend not to bodge things.. although the door on one of my PCs is held on with a paper clip...

numerous times i've stuck fingers in spinning fans,

sometimes the fingers win.... (fan blades snap off),
sometimes it's a draw,
sometimes the fans win (trip to A&E, watch out for those gigabyte cooler fans!!! they're tough!)

ichabod crane · 4 Jun 2006 at 13:03

Broke Two 6800GT's

p4radox · 4 Jun 2006 at 13:14

Bought a 9800pro from ebay for £112, which was a lot more than i should have spent because it was only the 128bit version. When I got it, I thought it would look bling to trace the circuit on the back of the PCB with UV marker pen so it looked really good under my UV cathode. Unfortunately I think the UV ink was slightly conductive, and the card then refused to do anything remotely 3D in nature.

SiriusB · 4 Jun 2006 at 13:32

Blunder: I had a Maxtor 80GB HDD and I was messing around using PowerMax on it. Then I decided to do a zero fill on the drive to trash the gubbins left behind from a failed Linux install. I click go and 5 minutes later something made me just stop. So I click abort and reboot the computer.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Is all I get after the post. So I think, woops, forgot to plug the system drive back in. Look in case to see that system drive is already plugged in. A quick trip to the BIOS confirmed my greatest fears... Id forgot to change which drive to work on in PowerMax and had zero filled all the boot area of my system drive :eek:

Luckily I had a Linux Live CD and managed to rescue my data. Took AGES lol. Now I never mess around on a HDD without unplugging the other

Bodge Job: When I got my new Stacker 810 I found that the motherboard seemed too low in the case. Turned out the mobo tray was slightly warped out of shape. Instead of returning the case and risking waiting forever for a new one, I just rammed a bit of wood behind the mobo tray to keep it straight

SiriusB

2bullish · 4 Jun 2006 at 13:41

Got frustrated trying to get a HSF off, so decided brute force was in order, put my screwdriver through a nice new Asus mobo, ordered a replacement which was dead on arrival, got fed up so bought a new mobo from a crap retail outlet and was overcharged by 50 quid. In the meantime my replacement mobo arrived and was also DOA, lost my temper and threw the mobo against my study wall, needless to say I couldnt send it back, all in all cost me over 3 hundred quid to replace. Could have bought a new graphics card.

Note to self

"don't lose your temper when building a computer in the furture you dipstick"

R B Customs · 4 Jun 2006 at 13:42

my borther decided to get a PC from work and change the power supply... hes a drummer so naturally heavy handed. he *somehow* managed to plug the big ATX cable in the WRONG WAY ! thankfully he didng power up and i checked the build before he did so and noticed the power plug !

personaly i ahve a habbit of not installing the backplate for waterblocks after putting everythign else in the case, as the heatsink/block is usualy the last thing i install !

comp builder · 4 Jun 2006 at 14:59

Shane5578 said:
switching between 230v/110v on the psu, made a spark

stepped on my £100 sunglasses

£100? on sunglasses? are you mad?

luminous · 4 Jun 2006 at 15:01

Note to self
"don't lose your temper when building a computer in the furture you dipstick"[/QUOTE]

Lordy lord i don`t blame you for going medievil on that board.It can be incredibly frustrating,bad mobos make you have to troubleshoot everything.

In early days smoked an athlon xp chip by putting a copper heatsink on and not realising it needs a fan bought as well (luckily got it replaced).Also buying a `silent` fan that made an aircraft look quiet.
Recent guffs include 7 hours spent trying to get a hd recognized over 120gb until i realised the jumper was wrong..and reseating chip and forgetting to plug in cpu fan.
Overall don`t feel so bad reading everyone elses stories tho

gam3r · 4 Jun 2006 at 15:02

No blow ups yet, touch wood!

Blunder :

When i was fitting my new graphics card i had to unplug the IDE cable from the motherboard so i could push the 6800GT into the slot as it was quite a big bugger.

Then for the next hour i was sitting there wondering why on earth the pc wouldn't boot up. I removed a bunch of things as well.

God i felt so stupid when i saw in my very messy case that the IDE cable was not attached to the motherboard.

Mul · 4 Jun 2006 at 15:03

Was in a rush to get my server up and running. had no case, psu or spare graphics card yet.

Found an old geforce256 and strapped a socket a cooler on it with elastic bands.
Shoved it all in my old evesham case, but had no psu. found a spare psu lieing about and plugged it in. All worked fine for a while but yesterday it won't boot. No power to hdd's or cd drive so I think the PSU's gone bang...

Mul

trojan698 · 4 Jun 2006 at 15:35

Mounted my newly acquired barton 2500 using a shim & volcano7. Didn't mount it properly resulting in no contact between cpu and the hsf. Turned it on, it ran for about 30 seconds, then switched off, dead cpu, doh! :rolleyes:

semi-pro waster · 4 Jun 2006 at 17:45

comp builder said:
£100? on sunglasses? are you mad?

Not all that unreasonable when you consider some of the sunglasses available in that price range. I'd spend that much to protect my eyes although so far my Oakleys haven't cost over £80 each.

My blunder and bodge job are from the same occasion, I managed to snap one of the blades of my CPU fan by trying to stop it to see if it was making most of the noise in the PC. Tip to note is that fans missing a blade tend to be terribly unbalanced so it attempted to rip itself off the motherboard. I then could remove the heatsink so I had to cannabalise the old heatsink and fan to make one working cooler out of the two. It still works to this day as far as I am aware/

2nd bodge job is also still working, the passive heatsink fell off my old Voodoo Banshee so I attached a small heatsink and fan with garden twine.

bbreezeuk · 4 Jun 2006 at 18:01

orderoftheflame said:
Tend not to bodge things.. although the door on one of my PCs is held on with a paper clip...

numerous times i've stuck fingers in spinning fans,

sometimes the fingers win.... (fan blades snap off),
sometimes it's a draw,
sometimes the fans win (trip to A&E, watch out for those gigabyte cooler fans!!! they're tough!)

LOL, your not the only one to do that but i have yet to try it on my G-power cooler from gigabyte at 3200rpm thats gotta hurt

ColinR · 4 Jun 2006 at 19:52

My first bodge was a case mod. My Cyrix 6x86 was crashing and the side of my case was REALLY hot. Took it to work and drilled 10 holes in it in the shape of a pentacle (it was Halloween). Problem solved.

Also from about the same time (mid 90s) I had a Logitech Soundman Wave with a non-standard cdrom connector on it. I had loads of the cables lying around, so cut the plug off one end and soldered the lead directly onto the board. Looked ghetto as hell, but worked for years until they stopped supporting it with drivers.

Raikiri · 4 Jun 2006 at 19:57

bbreezeuk said:
LOL, your not the only one to do that but i have yet to try it on my G-power cooler from gigabyte at 3200rpm thats gotta hurt

I done it with the stock prescott fan at 12v...thats a 90mm fan at 3800rpm! Needless to say my finger lost, also done it to a 6000rpm coolermaster fan but my finger won that one

I broke my mates mobo by accident trying to get his heatsink off, had been on there 4 years without even being cleaned! (at least it was only a duron)

Bodge job would be making a graphics cooler by super glueing a 90mm fan to a pci bracket

And something else that turned out good was painting one of my old mice.

Johnnyboy · 4 Jun 2006 at 21:14

My 2 year old son watched me assemble a new pc, and smiled as I fumbled with my fat fingers trying to get those small screws to stick to the screwdriver long enough to catch the thread.

He picked one up that I dropped and deftly popped it into the PSU, through the fan guard. I couldn't be bothered to strip down the PC and open up the PSU, thinking the wee screw would be Ok in there.

Well, switched the PC on first time and was met with a blue flash and smoke. Bugger

Indy500 · 4 Jun 2006 at 21:16

Not so much as a blunder but bad luck :

Used MSI NF2 board + XP1700 = didnt boot.

Checked the CPU, smelled burnt.

Tried new CPU, board still didnt boot.

In other words, £50 wasted.

Dark-nite · 4 Jun 2006 at 21:20

Sister thought it would be a brilliant idea to put a cup of orange juice and a plate of spag boll on top of the box. Spilt. Computer died with a blue flash, sizzling and loads of smoke. Practically EVERYTHING ruined :mad:

Was my computer as well! I got her back thought by pouring some rubbish wine on her computer's keyboard. The 'Z's where 'Y's and well you get the point...