Whats your greatest PC Boj Job / Blunder

[markyb]

Blunder 1

When I first got into PCs a friends dad asked me to format & re-install Windows but backing everything up. I imaged the drive using drive image, (drive image 3 at the time) Im not sure the program finshed as when I came back to it a couple of hours later, everything from mine and his dads pc was lost! Gawd knows what happened.

Blunder 2

I was cleaning out my old 2800xp rig and just sliding my Geforce 4 ti4600 (oh yeh, amazing card for its time) graphics card in and heard a crack. I then noticed that one of the ram clips had cought the graphics card and snapped of a small chip no larger than a grain of rice! I took it to work the next day where my amazing boss, Solder King soldered it back for me. Still working to this day.

Im sure theres loads more, but can't remember

 

[Noto]

that reminds me lol, i was doing a fomat for my parents, and naturally backed up all their data on my PC... did a format and then put their data back on the HD. UNFORTUNATELY they put it straight on the net and got blaster virus etc etc.. and i think they had 4 viruses within 10 mins. So i just reformatted the drive and said dont put on net yet. But without checking their backed up data was no longer on my HD... cuz i used cut n paste instead of copy. KEKE ^_^

'DOH

 

[ATIorNvidia]

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

Sure, id have to have some1 watching me though, incase i do anything srupid

 

[ajf]

Lol. Some good stories there!

Had a couple of 'accidents':

Pentium 133 - going back a bit! Set voltage jumper on m/board wrongly and actually blew a HOLE in the CPU!!

Nice 6 month old laptop - left pen on keyboard and shut screen with ominous crack! Ouch.

Not me but had a PC at work come back where he had smelt a 'burning smell' whilst using it. No idea what had happened but the back of the CD drive was completely melted along with the IDE and power cable!!

Have also had the dubious honour of having to retrieve hard drives from three PCs that had been on a sewage works when they had a flood.....


Andrew

 

[ATIorNvidia]

This is what a m8 did.

He overclocked his amd athlon 3500+ and left it to download over night, then he heard a 'bang' he checked on what it was, couldnt find out what it was, couldnt smell anything, then he decided to open his PC and the finny thing is, its not that his processor was smoking or anything, it was gone, and on the computers surface was a hard mold (which was the melted, now dryed up) CPU.

 

[kingy666]

In my old pc i upgraded my graphics card from a FX 5200 to a 6600 nvidia card. The new 6600 card was a silent fanless one which had a huge heatsink which obscured the molex connector. Of course being male i didn't read the instructions and so i didn't connect the molex power connector. For around 5-6 months i put up with this card overheating after around an hour when playing games. in the end i drilled a big hole in the side of my case and added a case fan to cool the heatsink on the card, it was only when i was putting the case back together i noticed the molex connection----- doh

 

[mikeymike]

On an old athlon XP motherboard, the fan on my northbridge was squeaking for weeks but instead of spending a few quid on a new NB fan, i decided to try to "fix it" myself, i took the side off while it was still on and touched it with the end of a pen to slow it down a bit and maybe stop it squeaking/loosen any dust, as i did this i think it sent a surge back to the powersupply and it blew, never to work again. Ended up paying £30 for a new PSU instead of £3 for a new fan.
Doh.

 

[caff]

Oh I have far too many to list all of them...

I've bent pins on CPUs (tweezers sorted that)

Broke a motherboard by forcing memory in. Didn't know I had done it, had intermittent errors and spent months replacing different parts of the PC (PSU, memory, graphics card) to work out what it was.

Fried two graphics cards, not through overclocking just through poor cooling / ventilation in summer.

Most recent was last week trying to fit a new Zalman cooler in - I snapped the plastic 'clip' that surrounds the processor, so now the old fan is back in and just 'sitting' on top of the CPU. (I've ordered a new rig - cannot be arsed to fix this mess). I also cut my hands up quite nicely on the Zalman. Those things are sharp!

A few years ago as a student I used sellotape to hold PCI cards in the slots (purely because I'd lost the case screws).

 

[J.B]

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!!

Thats why im hessertant to water cool!

Blunder 1
First build for a friend, scrapped a blanking plate across the mobo trying to put it in when the pc was on, made a pretty blue spark.

Luckily the guy didnt know much about pc's so i said i had to realign the magnetic field of the ram and had to wait for a tool from a friend to do it, which gave me ample time to buy a new board.

Blunder 2
Recently updated the bios on a laptop id sold for a good profit, the screen went black, i thought it had crashed so i turned it off, in hinesigt i propbably should have left it running for a bit. Well now the laptop just beeps an error for the video card.

Blunder, not to do with me
My friend bought a load of cheap premade pc's for a factory to run different machines, they werent anything amazing spec wise.

One machine didnt work, my mate investigated, found the cpu was put on the wrong way and then the fan clamped on, bending all the pins over. He bent them all back with soem very small pliers.

 

[Cuchulain]

Where to begin ...

Put a K6 processor in the wrong way round and fried it.

Plugged what I thought was the 12v cable into a motherboard, turned out it wasn't the 12v and fried the PSU and motherboard.

Didn't bother to soak test my watercooling, switched it on and it dumped water all over my brand new 9700 Pro (which still worked after drying it out)

Kicked over a watercooled machine whilst drunk, top came off the reservoir and dumped water into the PSU, fried it, everything else was fine.

Electrocuted myself whilst trying to botch a new fan into an old PSU (residual current).

Didn't bother to read the instructions on how to fit my new Scythe Ninja (never done an LGA775 HSF before), after a few day's I wondered why my C2D temps were reaching up to 70 degrees in Intels TAT, turned out that I hadn't clipped in the two left hand pins properly, fixed that this morning and it's cooled down a touch now.

So basically, I'd never advise anyone to let me build or fix a machine for them though to be fair, the amount of success stories far outweigh all the **** up's I've managed.

 

[locutus12]

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.

erm... how ??? do you keep an electron microscope in your home ???

i was under the impression that once the seal is broken the hard drive is useless in a conventional sense ?? tell me more

It did: and flew right out of the back of the rack and straight into my colleague's face

*roffles*

 

[Rroff]

Biggest blunder (well only thing I can think that could have caused it) was setting the Northbridge voltage to 2.1 instead of setting the RAM to 2.1 and killing the motherboard and CPU... so far cost me more than £400 in replacement components... at the same time I managed to knock my brand new 7950GX2 and damage it - 4 hour soldering job later and its back together but I'm not confident it will ever work again (haven't been able to test it yet)... prolly gonna cost me another ~£400 to replace with a g80.

I've forgotten to connect up the CPU fan a couple of times - fortunatly these were on intel chips which have excellent thermal management...

I've done many many boj jobs - mostly involving cooling solutions

 

[Rroff]

Blunder 2

I was cleaning out my old 2800xp rig and just sliding my Geforce 4 ti4600 (oh yeh, amazing card for its time) graphics card in and heard a crack. I then noticed that one of the ram clips had cought the graphics card and snapped of a small chip no larger than a grain of rice! I took it to work the next day where my amazing boss, Solder King soldered it back for me. Still working to this day.

Im sure theres loads more, but can't remember

solder king indeed - I've just had to do the same thing with components 1mm long and it was a pain in the arse - even tho I had access to a micro electronics lab they don't usually work with anything smaller than 2-3x the size... as my post above I still don't know if it was sucessful or not yet.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Have also had the dubious honour of having to retrieve hard drives from three PCs that had been on a sewage works when they had a flood.....

Had the upstairs toilet flood through the floor and all over an EMC rack. After it dried out, the whole thing worked perfectly. Indestructible

 

[ca9phoenix]

Blunder 1
sliced little finger in several places on zalman aeroflower trying to plug in power (damn 0.2mm fins) blead for hours

Blunder 2
plugged 12v in wire into 12v out hole on mates cdrom (brand new P200) everything went bang

non computing blunder

thought a piece of wood reasting on a kerb would be an excelent launch pad for some stones if i wheelie my bike onto the sticky out end.... stones hit me in the face a fraction of a second before my face hit the kerb! still have the scares!

 

[ghgh]

I used insulating tape to stick 3 capacitors back onto my ti4200 graphics card a few months ago. It still worked, usually, however it would make the system crash occasionally when the capacitors' contact wasn't entirely connecting with the piece of metal they were meant to connect to.

Screwed an 80mm case fan onto my Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro as I managed, somehow to snap the 120mm fan off. It's only held on by two screws but they do the job well and it isn't at all loose.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

Blunder 1 : screwed my old motherboard in wrong to the standoff the board was kind of bent worked fine for 8 month's. Till i came to an upgrade and it was very hard getting it out, when the standoff thread was knackered the board was basically stuck to the case luckily i sorted it out sold the case and mobo both were ok.

thats the only problem ive ever had and touch wood i don't have any more

 

[Vegetarian]

My raptor... somehow I put in power cable upside down (while also having sata power cable pluged in same time doh) - it went sizzle and never worked again.


Another time non PC related - I tripped over the cable of my £1000 electric piano severing a 4 inch part of the circuit board! spent days soldering every connection back! Piano still works to this day 16 years later

 

[Raikiri]

In my old pc i upgraded my graphics card from a FX 5200 to a 6600 nvidia card. The new 6600 card was a silent fanless one which had a huge heatsink which obscured the molex connector. Of course being male i didn't read the instructions and so i didn't connect the molex power connector. For around 5-6 months i put up with this card overheating after around an hour when playing games. in the end i drilled a big hole in the side of my case and added a case fan to cool the heatsink on the card, it was only when i was putting the case back together i noticed the molex connection----- doh

The molex connector wouldn't stop it overheating

 

[Rroff]

am I the only one thinking this... but reversed voltage protection and better protecting components on expensive electrical equipment hardly requires rocket science to implement and is pretty cheap to do... guess they'd rather the expense of RMAs...