PC Horror stories?

[FireFox]

^^ Wow...people never cease to amaze...kudos for admitting it though.

 

[psp_crazy1]

^^ Wow...people never cease to amaze...kudos for admitting it though.

lol.

we're all noobs at some point

 

[Waphlez]

My brother used to fix computers back in 99 and 2000 to make some side money, one day he came across a computer that wouldn't work at all. He found that is was infected with the CIH virus, or known as the "Chernobyl" virus because when the computer's clock reached April 26 (April 26, 1986 was when the Chernobyl incident occured) it would wipe out the bios chip. So it wouldn't even boot. Had to replace the motherboard to get it working again.

 

[atomic tofu]

I never did anything as silly as some of you
only things remotely bad with my own stuff...
building my fist computer, 486dx 66mhz baby! lol...I fried the mobo or psu, forget...got a new one from place I bought, and all was goo.
2nd...fiddling around with old hps...thought something was wrong with computer, no image on screen, turned out I failed to remember onboard video vs add on card...no real fix, just switch to proper connection.

then the other is my sis and her husband, gambling and sports sites galore. The first time I fixed their computer was a lesson to them. "it's so slow"...turned out 3000+ files were infected with virii/malware of some sort, lol.

but in the old days, the worst you could do on a "filddle around" basis, is mess around with your autoexec.bat and config.sys to get that awesome 600+k of conventional ram. sweet

 

[Luke]

i was taking a cd rom out of an old ibm computer, i took me 10 mins to figure out how to get the case apart, it was riduculas. You'd think they could have made it easier.

 

[Rakie]

Heheh... you guys are going to laugh at me. This is the reason I for sure got a new PC.

Well... Im a collector of large exotic fish, mainly SA/CA cichlids... So, one day I was about to do tank maintenence, I open the lid to the tank (I just use regular glass tops) but decide to use the rest room first... ok.

I come back and my PC monitor is off, cant turn it back on, so I put my hand on the side to turn the PC around and make sure the power cord is in and such, i feel a lot of water... I look and see my poor ancient 19" CRT has taken about 10oz of water. Yes, my fish decided to throw a temper tantrum for the one minute i left the lid off.

But it gets better, my video card is broken as well, I suppose the monitor blowing sent a shock through the cord into the video card or something.



And thats why I joined Tech-forums.net

 

[objecterror]

And thats why I joined Tech-forums.net

Pure unadulterated truth. I actually joined because before, I would run my old Dell into the ground, I mean , when we first got the thing it was the sh**, an entire 512 of ram, a clock speed of 3.2, an 80GB hard drive?!?! Man, I was so excited.

I crashed it on occasion, as in, more then once a year, one time so bad my dad lost a lot of MP3's that you simply cannot download anywhere anymore. I tried at one point to fix it myself(this was back in the day, i knew nothing) and, specifically, I never realized that after so many reboots, windows xp will not work.

Another story specifically, since i'm learning a great deal about PC repair-points to big A+ exam guide- I would try my best to troubleshoot family pc's. Well, most of my family are types to buy a dell or hp for 400 bucks and they figure it's a really good deal.

Grandfather, old compaq, I mean old, 64mb's of ram, 500mb of space and 500mhz or so of processor speed 'old'. I tried my best to change the msconfig, but windows 98 would not cooperate, I said to myself,"hey, I can defrag the machine.", I get a call back later from my aunt who says the machine can't open internet explorer, given that my grandparents live in california, it's another 4hr drive back.

I troubleshoot the IE issue, I can't find a repair disk, and if i wanted to, I can't get online.

.....ARGGHHHHH. So, I just fixed one issue(booting faster, my god help that machine) for another, (can't get online, only god knows why). I thought 98 was dead and gone, how is such old technology showing up in 07?!

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Computers should last about ten years... Get used to it...

 

[Jorsoft]

I used to fix computers retail and I've got so many stories that they've all blended together into one awful one. It's tough to even pick out a specific one. I remember that one of the first virus removals I did we had this poor guy's pc running avg and spy sweeper scans for over 1 week straight. He was so horrendously infected that we just set up his pc and started a new scan every time we walked by the tech bench. It took like 10 days of straight scanning and some manual removal to fix everything (he wouldn't pay for a reformat, that was like twice the price). We eventually got it fixed but then the idiot wouldn't even buy an AV/Antispyware package when he came to pick it up! Tons of customers would actually skip the whole protection software thing deciding that I was just trying to sell them something they didn't need and I'd see them back in the store fuming about how their computer wouldn't work anymore after 2 months. Then some of them would even throw fits at me because it was MY fault their computer wasn't working--I sold them a faulty one of course. Most would end up shelling out $100+ for Norton Internet Security and Spy Sweeper plus another $80 for us to clean up their pc for them. It utterly amazes me how many morons out there decide they just don't need AV software and just open every email they please and go to whatever sites they can to screw up their pc. They should require a test before you buy a prebuilt computer!

Don't even get me started on the porn freaks, either, they were huge money makers for us. They bought a $220 solution each time (NIS, SS, and Malware Removal). They always had naked chicks on their desktop (had to change that before we even started working on their pc) and we'd always find porn dvds resting in the dvd-rom tray. Caught a few pedos that way, too, with their kiddie porn laying all over the desktop...

 

[Harper]

Many many years ago back in my early win 95 days. I was a PC n00b, however a very big Mac User.
After aquiring my first PC, I remember that there used to be a SCSI Card. So since my father booted me off the Mac, I started using the PC.
I need to move my files over. Floppy disk was just not practical. However I did have an external Scsi Zip disk for the Mac.

Since Mac External Scsi Ports look just the same as PC Parralle Port, I mist stoke the parralle port on the PC for a Scsi port. Back then, I did not know better.
So for a while I was trying to install an external Scsi Zip drive onto a parralle port.

The scarey thing was that the PC did dectect some thing.