Whats your greatest PC Boj Job / Blunder

[Noto]

im gonna sound like a spak now but here goes another one... Before i got the PC above lol... I had just upgraded and the new system that required DDR Ram.... So it was Monday and i expected all my bits to arrive. Everything i bought from OcUK had arrived, but the ram was coming from else where...

So i eagerly pulled out my case and started building my new system into it just waiting on ram to arrive then plug it in... Typically the ram didnt come, so I didnt want to waste a night of CS (back then my game of choice ) So instead of pulling all the bits out and re-building my old PC... I just turned the case on its side.. and put the old mobo on top of my case and had it running.

CS was goign great till for some strage reason i wanted to re-position the mobo... slide it about on my case and SNAP CRACKLE POP!!!. You guessed it, my case was metal and the pins on the back of my the mobo were moving around and short circuited each other.

2 huge blunders, Do i win a medal?


ps... i hope to build a conroe system soon \0/

 

[CF93]

Biggest blunders were...

Forcing a hard drive that seemed to wide for the cage into place. My hand slipped off the drive and I sliced my thumb on the sharp edge of the cage, leaving me with a nice semi-circular scar on my thumb just behind the nail.

Switching on my pc with the side off, with one of my 145CFM 12cm fans plugged in and standing on the bottom of the inside of the case, not attached to anything. Watched it dance merrilly around the entire inside of the case, shattering and sending pieces of broken black plastic everywhere but fortunately not actually damaging anything else!

 

[Ping]

many years ago i put on a globalwin cak4 88t (lighthouse) carried my pc downstairs and heard a bump opened the pc too see my new heatsink sitting on the bottom of my case along with my cpu and zif socket . 2700+ still worked fine though just had to swap out the mobo.

Thimk ive done about 75% of stuff already mentioned on this thread pmsl advantage is if you learn the hard way you tend not too forget things a second time.

 

[daven1986]

i once tightened the barbs too much on a pump - fortuately it was only 30 quid wasted - and i got a new, better pump, acrylic cracks easily!

my mate once said "what does this do?", promptly flicked a switch on the back of a school pc and "boom", it turned out he put the voltage to 110v!

daven

 

[vincent1989]

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)

bwahaha so he finally admits it (*)

fingernail lost a battle with a fan...grew a new one though

(*) not me, one of our other friends...lol, and then he thought his CPU was borked so got 2-3 different 'new' ones, and none of them worked

 

[Raikiri]

Well at least it made him finally upgrade from integrated graphics...

 

[vincent1989]

Well at least it made him finally upgrade from integrated graphics...

ah yes, he was truly a muppet

 

[LanceCrossfire]

boj job = i couldnt get my heatsink of my northwood P4 3.4... so i put it in the microwave for 30secs... the fan bearing blew up, cpu came out fine though and is still being used in my bros PC...

blunder = had a jeantech apollo case that has an internal door with fans mounted on... closed it and trapped the positive wire, it set on fire and burned all the way into my psu... thank god i was using a spare

 

[PinkFloyd]

Blunder:

Installing a UV cathode into my case with the pc on, as I put the pci bracket in (with the on/off switch on it) into the case I touched the motherboard with it.

Cue the large spark and the rig switched off, refusing to turn on for a while.
Managed to get it working a while later after leaving it off for a while.
Everything was fine except my storage harddrive that had had its motor fried, loosing huge amounts of stuff on it. (all my own custom coded stuff for various things plus large amounts of music in mp3s.... which I then had to remake when I replaced the drive)

Luckily Seagate took it on rma



Bodge:

Hanging a 120mm fan from a few elastic bands and bits of cable to blow nice cold air over my northbridge

 

[Cyber-Mav]

this is my best boj repair job ever. someone handed me this hard drive as it is in the pic and i managed to retrieve 6 gigs of data from it. made a good bit of cash that day.

 

[Greenlizard0]

Getting fustrated in the past has caused 3 hard drives to fail....

I also decided to try and change the LED's in my keyboard. I couldn't put the thing back together Oopss...I had to buy a new one lol...

 

[PinkFloyd]

I couldn't put the thing back together Oopss...I had to buy a new one lol...

Nearly had the same isue with my mouse the other day actually.

The left click was getting sticky and being really loud, which I found irritating.
So dismantled the whole thing.
Didn't give a thought about what would happen if I broke the mouse completely (I don't have a spare here at uni)

Luckily I managed to get it all working and give it a good clean too. The screws did appear to breed whilst I did it though, I ended up with 2 extra screwsm god knows where they came from.

 

[ATIorNvidia]

Blunder


I tried reseated my ram whilst the computer was on.

Blunder

I got my finger stuck inside the power supply whilst the computer was on, i had metal on my hand too

 

[LanceCrossfire]

Blunder


I tried reseated my ram whilst the computer was on.

Blunder

I got my finger stuck inside the power supply whilst the computer was on, i had metal on my hand too

are you sure you wanna be building a new pc??? lol

 

[ATIorNvidia]

Blunder


I tried reseated my ram whilst the computer was on.

Blunder

I got my finger stuck inside the power supply whilst the computer was on, i had metal on my hand too

Boj/Job

I disconnected my whole computer to clean around the area, was really dusty, connected everything back and it decides not to turn on, (it wasnt a short circuit/fuse or i didnt go in the insides of my computer. It just kind of, died

 

[Si MPS]

Best boj was probably putting a CPU fan on my Voodoo3 3000 with epoxy (my word indeed) or possibly snapping the BIOS chip in my elonex Pentium 200 and having to use a paper clip to replace the snapped tooth

 

[semi-pro waster]

this is my best boj repair job ever. someone handed me this hard drive as it is in the pic and i managed to retrieve 6 gigs of data from it. made a good bit of cash that day.

What on earth did they do to that drive? Hit it with a sledgehammer? The casing on a hard drive is normally pretty solid and whatever it got damaged with must have greated a fair few Gs as well which isn't supposed to be good for hard drives..

 

[VaderDSL]

Biggest blunder?

Few years ago, was into watercooling on the old socket A's ... after refitting my waterblock one time, I forgot to connect the tubing up to the waterblock.

I thought it was connected, fired up the pump :

"****!!!!!" dove to the multiblock adaptor behind the PC to switch off power to the pump, needless to say the inside of my PC was soaked through (luckily was all powered off). But to top it all off, loads of water got onto the 8way powerblock also, and shorted it out which caused the pump to fire up again lol!! in the end I had to yank the plug out of the wall to shut it off!!

Well a few hours later and prolonged use of a hairdrier, all was dry and reinstalled properly, and it all worked fine still

 

[achitophel]

Boj Job - Soldering / cutting bits to hack the BIOS of an old Amiga ROM chip

Blunders - too many to mention, but I do think that they are all valuable, since that's how you learn. For example, I never knew the difference between FAT 16 and NTFS, unless I did a part-install of XP over a 98 installation. Lost lots of data, but did learn abotu disk-filing systems

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Back in the day before I knew what I was doing we built an Athlon XP machine but didn't realise it had no HSF (the first machine I built was a P3, which had the whole slot thing going on). We went into the local independent computer store and they agreed not only to sell us the HSF, but fit it for us. Little did we realise that he had sold us an Intel HSF not an AMD one so of course it wouldn't fit properly. He used a screwdriver jammed in the clip to try and stretch it across to where it needed to go, until BAM the screwdriver slipped, totalling the motherboard and the processor. Glad that place had insurance!

I tend to be careful with my home machines, I only tend to cause problems with the work ones. Nothing worse than being remotely connected to a live server and then pressing shut down rather than log off

Oh and there was the time that I was replacing a card in the back of a server. The case was jammed on the thing tight, and the only way of getting it off was pushing down in a little depression on the top of the case to slide it off. With my colleague bracing the rack, I proceeded to smash at the depression with the back of a screwdriver hoping it would come off. It did: and flew right out of the back of the rack and straight into my colleague's face