Whats your greatest PC Boj Job / Blunder

Man of Honour
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15 Mar 2004
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Liverpool
I always get really impatient if something doesn't work out first time, and I think I have lost a motherboard and 2 hard drives to quickly switching the power button on the PSU on and off too quickly.

I have also destroyed a keyboard by trying to replace the LED's inside with blue ones. If it had worked out, it would have looked wicked, but alas I couldn't even align the damn thing back together to try it out. Into the bin it went, and out went £30 on a new keyboard :(.

My first skype handset didn't work that well, and I banged it against my table in fustration. It worked fine and still does, even though my mom has it now lollage ;)
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2005
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Woking
Not so much a blunder but i replaced a mobo, graphics card, memory and hard drive one after the other because i thought that they were faulty and causing windows to not install properly. It turned out that i had been using the correct SATA drivers but had the hard drive plugged into the wrong controller :p
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2004
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Nantwich
biggest blunder: thought i could keep up with technology :rolleyes:

how wrong i was.

also, shoved my hand in a 220cfm 120mm delta at full throttle....
DAAMMMM!! THAT HURT, ripped 4 blades out of the fan, blood everywhere.
 

Nem

Nem

Associate
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2 Feb 2003
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Mansfield, Notts.
1) Managed to get the molex's all the wrong way round after a full rebuild with new cathodes. £100 Enermax PSU went up in smoke.

2) Managed to get a stick of normal DDR in the wrong way round, god knows how. Fried the £150 memory and £150 motherboard in one go.

3) Overtightened the barbs on a poly topped LRWW block after cleaning it out. Ended up cracked from the strees after a few hours with water pouring out and dripping on the gfx card. Waterblock and 9800 Pro both wiped out, gfx card had seriours corruption on the screen and never got better after drying out.

Nick
 
Soldato
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6 May 2004
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Location
Fareham
I was replacing the chipset heatsink/fan on my Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard when I slipped slightly with the pliers and cut a trace on the PCB. I've got no idea how I only cut one trace, but luckily that was it ... still, it didn't work after that. I got a needle and scraped away at either side of the broken trace and then I put some tape all around it. I then blobbed on some conductive paint that I had (left over from the Athlon XP unlock days ;) ) and let it dry. Peeled all the tape off then fired the board up ... it's still working to this day.
 
Soldato
Joined
2 Oct 2004
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4,362
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N.W London
My biggest blunder was not screwing the stand-off screws onto my new cases motherboard plate. I screwed the motherboard directly onto the plate. Because of the big bracket on the bottom of the motherboard, caused by CPU fan lock, the motherboard was kind of bent when i had fnished screwing it on. It never booted up.

Ditto....did this on my first pc....remember unscrewing the 1 of the stand off thinking "what a stupid place to put a mount" lmao lol...

unfortunately I fried the mobo....however I sent it back to retailer and well erm I got a replacement as I said it was D.O.A.

otherwise I am a very honest and genuine bloke :D
 
Associate
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18 Dec 2005
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Londontown
I didn't double check all the connections on my watercooling for my new £1200 rig. Set it all up, turned it on. Gush! Water all over the motherboard, sound card and on to the PSU. Incredibly it's working, and i'm on it now.
Also I've kinda covered up a bit of a leak in my watercooling kit with blue tak, not sure how long that'll last...
 
Associate
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30 Nov 2004
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Location
Herts. UK
Nem said:
2) Managed to get a stick of normal DDR in the wrong way round, god knows how. Fried the £150 memory and £150 motherboard in one go.
I've had that one - but not done by me.

It was at work and we were working in a supermarket upgrading the RAM in the tills to 128MB (woo!). I'm talking to the boss of the account taking him through the work flow of the evening and timescales involved and one of the lads calls me over.
"Its not working." he says.
"I can smell smoke!!!" :eek: I whisper so bossman doesn't hear. "Leave it to me and work on the next set of tills."
I open it up and the new stick of ram looks okay - clipped in and everything. The bossman starts wandering over.
I unclip the ram and take it out. "****!" It's HOT! Dropped it back in. Using some pliers I pick it out and look at it's orientation and it was in the wrong way round. Bossman arrives.
Grab another stick from my pocket and put that in. The till is dead. I didn't even bother checking the ram - snapped it in two and chucked it our box of gubbins to go back.
"Looks like they've found a dead till." I say to Bossman.
"The health check reported that all tills were running okay at the start of the night. Can I smell smoke?"
"Ummmm..." :rolleyes:

I thought it was impossible to put ram in the wrong way round (this was normal old skool SDRAM), so I tried it myself on the freshly-dead till, and it took a hell of a lot to force it in. I watched the guy do the next till he was working on and he did it right - god knows what he was thinking when he broke that till.
 
Associate
Joined
24 May 2004
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2,022
Blew up a PSU by switching from 110V to 240V when its on

Cracking the core of an skt A Athlon 1ghz when installing the HSF.

Both was done on my first attempt ever to build a PC, luckily OCUK replaced both :p
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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7,519
Location
Glasgow
Blew a few power supplies in my time at work, one of which wrecked a motherboard along with it. Also, when I bought my old 1.4Ghz AMD T'bird I forgot to plug in the fan adapter and wondered why it ran so hot on idle. Fortunately it didn't fry in the 5 minutes it took me to realise.
 
Associate
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14 Jul 2004
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England
Blunder = I powered up an AMD chip with no heatsink on just to see the bios, thinking that just "afew seconds" wouldnt hurt. Power button pushed, heard a "chirp", dead CPU.
 
Associate
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18 Oct 2002
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910
Rusting not one but two motherboards, damn phase change.

Noticing in horror while looking through my case window that there was water dripping from my CPU socket onto the Northbridge heastink. The Northbridge heat sink had caught the water between the fins but had become full and was dripping the excess water onto the back of my Geforce 4 and it was seeping in behind the Leadtek heatsink.

Shockingly the PC was completely fine while this was happening and after a quick blow down with a hair drier.
 

uv

uv

Soldato
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16 May 2006
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Manchester
5.jpg

botch job? i'm on my third 7900gt ;p

don't have much luck with grfx cards.. in my old shuttle, i was plugging in a fan header with a screwdriver - whilst the machine was on - one little slip, and the screwdriver made contact with the 9600xt.. machine powered off instantly. *cry*
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
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8,075
Location
Swindoniantown
Managed to 'POP' a motherboard by buying a cheap USB headder connector only to find out there were 3 different ways these things used to be wired up!!! (before it was standardised)... Fried the Motherboard and the £50 Logitec mouse I'd plugged in to the USB!... :mad:

Got a replacement Mobo and Mouse from the guy who sold me the Headder! as he'd sold them to me as a bundle in the first place and should have known better!!.. :D

Not done any Boj Jobs yet!... :p
 
Associate
Joined
1 Dec 2005
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1,373
My greatest blunder involved no blown equipment or anything just me spraying blood inside my pc and swearing a lot, my pc was making a weird noise every now and again so I took the case off and looked around inside seeing if I could work out what was making the noise, I moved a few cables here and there then owwwwwwwwww, I put the side of my finger into the cpu fan, it took a chunk out of my finger and I was dripping blood everywhere, it hurt, oh yes did it hurt :)
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2006
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Location
Norwich
Long time ago this, but I managed to put an AMD 486 in the wrong way round- The HSF wouldn't come off, and these chips fitted in any way, and you had to look at the top/ bottom to find correct alignment. Dropped it back in, and watched the plume of smoke :eek:

-Leezer-
 
Associate
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Cardiff, UK
I *shamefully* managed to put a molex connector in the WRONG way round, in my (at the time) brand new X800 XT PE card.. Needless to say there was smoke, and an almighty flash of electricity.

After the haze had cleared my gfx card, PSU, and MB were all taken as POW's. :eek: :eek: Cost a fair bit that day!
 
Associate
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1 Dec 2002
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1,884
Needed to take my CPU out to flash the bios due to the new stype AMD XP chips (back then).... so I tried to take off my XP120... but i put too much gunk on it and riped not only the XP120 but also the CPU out of the socket.... naturally the CPU lever was still down so A LOT of the pins on *** back were bent.

/CRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

spent 2.5 hours and a magnifying glass with a knife slowly pushing the pins back in order. constantly rotating the chip to see if pins were in line etc. After about 2 hours my eyes were watering and hands were shaking so i had to get a friend to finish it off. Its still going strong :)
 
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