PC Horror Story

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08-17-2005, 07:34 AM
[AK]StitchJones

PC Horror Story

Hey there, I wanted to put a post out there and ask about great/bad horror stories you've had with PC's in the past. I know we have all at least had one or two. Or if your Hylander, 10 to 15 ;)

One of my own stories was years ago back when Packard Bell was still a thriving PC company. I was still doing sales for CompUSA. I had a customer that was looking do deploy about 12 workstations for his support staff and he wanted a very cost effective machine. He saw the add that showed the Packard Bell and he called me looking to see if he could get some super deal on them, if he bought 12. After talking him into getting bigger monitors.. (upgrading to 15" instead of the normal 14" for 75$ more) And purchashing 3Com 10mb ethernet cards, along with having our CompUSA install and configure them. I was able to make a good deal for the guy.
Somewheres right after the two month mark, every one of the 12 machines started to have issues of various sorts. The most popular issue, was 'hard drive' failure. And after countless support issues I ended up having to take all the PC's back and the company gave him back the money which in turn nicked my paycheck that month. From that moment forward I made it my mission to curse out any Packard Bell machine I see.
Great irony of the whole situation. I STILL have a Packard Bell which was the same model as the other 12 I sold, and it's my smoothwall firewall machine. it has been running for just over 8yrs now without a single hardward/software related issue. Go figure :nerd:
08-17-2005, 07:37 AM
[AK]Bribo

My biggest horror story was my last home built machine (aka The LANBoy) and it's refusal to run WoW properly. (crashes, re-boots, in-game strangeness).

Other than that I've been pretty lucky.
08-17-2005, 07:39 AM
[AK]Choozoo

My old packard bell ate my turkey sandwich once. that was rough.

Actually, i had a tough time putting together a PC that I bought piece meal with stitch in Aug '01. I was using that up until a couple months ago....

Besides that, no real horror, couple shrieks, but no flat out, white knuckled fright.
08-17-2005, 07:44 AM
[AK]Bribo

I guess my biggest horror story was building my own PC several years ago, putting in the CPU and then setting the wrong voltage on the mobo. I powered it on, the screen blinked on ever so quickly then completely went dead. One fried CPU. Thank god the place I bought it believed my DOA story and sent me a new one free of charge.
08-17-2005, 09:16 AM
[AK]Nuts

Mind you that this was in 2004:

Remote office (oil tanker) was having a problem with a desktop (Windows 95A, Retail version) connecting to a Novell Server (Novell 3.1). The user kept saying that it wouldn't let him log in. So over the phone I'm trying everything I can to figure this out. Different computers, reboot the server, everything I can think of having this guy (who has no technicial expertise at all) do. Finally I go visit the vessel. After a few hours of banging my head against the wall, I look at little more closer at the network cable (Token-Ring). The connectors are good, the MAU looks good. Hmmmm. Out of frustration I remove the connector... and bingo. That's no token ring cable! It's electrical cable! It seems that when they ran the extra jack they figured that copper was copper!

Ouch
08-17-2005, 10:02 AM
[AK]Hylander

There was this time about a month ago I was building a Linux File / FTP Server and "SOMEONE" was trying to help me configure Pro-FTP and solve a slow SAMBA Performance problem and it wasn't working properly. Of course, the problem was I was trying to configure PURE-FTP, not PRO-FTP and the setting on the NIC was the SAMBA problem.... :uzi:

I was with Bribo for awhile with the WoW problems (and it was ONLY WoW.. but it hated any overclocking of memory) and after I replaced my 2.4C with a 3.0 with no overclocking, I rarely had problems with WoW.

However, the worst problem I ever had was when my wife and I first got together. I had a machine I had built when I was in college. 486 DX 66mhz I believe it was and my wife had a Compaq. Well, after we moved in together I sold my PC and kept hers. I think it was slightly faster and had more RAM iirc. This was back in like 1995 and I had never built my own PC, put RAM in, or even cracked open a PC case myself. At college most of my experience was working with SUN Sparc stations running UNIX / X-Windows on the Internet. Well I took it to a local shop to have them install my very first 3D accelerator so I could run Papyrus NASCAR Racing... it was a Rendition 3D video card (Stealth). Well when I got the machine back, the PC would crash all the time no matter what we were doing, it would just BSOD in the middle of it at random times. Well I took it back 3 or 4 times to the shop and they said they "fixed" it "definitely" the last time. I came home, plugged it in, started to boot, and C:. No Windows, nothing. Come to find out ALL of our personal info items, etc were whiped off the PC and they totalled hosed DOS and the 3.11 Install. I ended up getting some "free" hardware upgrades and a free copy of Win95 when it came out.

BTW.. although I bash Stitch and his "help" to no end, he has actually been very gracious with helping me learn, particularly with Linux. ;)
08-17-2005, 10:29 AM
[AK]StitchJones

Thank you for the Bashing and Praise. Your too kind. It's friends like you that make the days long and frustrating. LOL :cheese:
08-17-2005, 10:56 AM
[AK]Hylander

Quote:

Originally Posted by [AK]StitchJones

Thank you for the Bashing and Praise. Your too kind. It's friends like you that make the days long and frustrating. LOL :cheese:

It's "you're" not "your", and YOU'RE WELCOME. :angel:

:lol2:
08-17-2005, 11:05 AM
[AK]Gunny Highway

What about your power supply that caught on fire Stitch?
08-17-2005, 11:44 AM
[AK]Hylander

Quote:

Originally Posted by [AK]Gunny Highway

What about your power supply that caught on fire Stitch?

LOL - That explains this. ;)
08-17-2005, 11:52 AM
[AK]Squidly

I don't have any really funny ones. The fan on my brand new ATI 9700 Pro was bad, and that problem expressed itself as random graphics glitchyness and game crashes. I resolved it by returning/exchanging the card. Was a pain in the butt for about 2 days though, as that's a non-obvious thing to check on a new card.

Then one time a long time ago, I inserted a powered webcam (with a parallel interface) into an IBM computer. This was probably a PII or so... I don't recall. Anyway, the pc let out a big *crack* and died. The power supply fan wasn't working, so I purchased a new power supply online, waited for it to arrive. I did the install serveral days later, and the power supply started up fine, but the motherboard did nothing. Hrmmm...must have fried it too. "Guess what honey, time for a new computer!" That went over real well.

On a computer-related note, I bought a first gen disk based Nomad MP3 player. The rechargable batteries exploded one night and almost burned my house down. I ran the thing outdoors just as they melted through the plastic of the player and fell into the snow. Weird. Thankfully Best Buy accepted the return on that. Handing them the lump of melted plastic was worth a few strange looks.
08-17-2005, 12:37 PM
[AK]StitchJones

Quote:

Originally Posted by [AK]Hylander

LOL - That explains this. ;)

DOH!
08-17-2005, 12:42 PM
[AK]StitchJones

Quote:

Originally Posted by [AK]Gunny Highway

What about your power supply that caught on fire Stitch?

The was more along the lines of a 'classic StitchJones' moment more then a PC horror story. Granted not being able to play Medal Of Honor for those two nights did suck.