Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

[Mr. Q]

I have been absent from The Escapist forums and the Internet in general these past few weeks. This is mostly due to my old PC finally kicking the bucket. It had a good run for about 6 to 8 years. Thankfully, I was able to save my important files so nothing major was lost. It could have been much worse. Now I'm enjoying my brand new laptop and it runs like a dream.

So my question to everyone is this; what was the worst computer disaster you ever suffered?

 

[Toejam]

In my house it was known as The Paris Hilton Incident.

Didn't exactly wreck it, but I had some explaining to do...she found it funny luckily.

 

[Generalissimo]

One odd incident involved me diagnosing the wireless on a computer, then the MBR becoming corrupted. Don't ask me how that happened.

 

[BunnyMomiji]

My macbook was out for a couple of months as the hard drive went out, or so we assumed at the time. So I purchesed a new one and figured to update the ram at the same time.

When the parts arrived my very tech savvy friends but the parts in... and it wasn't accepting my OS disc. So it sat for a month or so until my friend decided to put the old ram back in. Then it worked! Turns out the ram I had purchased had something wrong with it.

I lost a couple of personal art projects and some music, but nothing too crazy in the process.

 

[Scarim Coral]

The one I had a few months ago. Some reason the computer freeze after it booted up and I didn't know the casue of it. Sure I had usual viruses but this was the only time I had to resort to putting the pc into safe mode. anyway it turn out that AVG was the cause of it (a file was corrupted which look like it was important during the start up) which I had that turn on and everything was fine. I end up uninstalling it and got Comodo instead.

Other than that the last one would be with my old pc when it started to kicked the bucket cos that one it used to take 10 minutes to be fully ready after booted up and it make some clicking like sound (final sign of the harddrive death).

 

[Mr. Charles]

Dropping my Alienware laptop - fortunately the free fall sensor kicked in and Spock (my laptop) was fine

 

[AustinN]

One computer had problems with the motherboard getting fried at least twice. The last time we had trouble finding a replacement part for it, so we took it to a local repair shop. Despite explaining the problem clearly, during the repair of the computer they wiped out all of my files and other saved items that I had built up over a 4 year period. They also changed my user name into an advertisement for the business. That was pretty upsetting at the time, but over time I managed to rebuild most of what I had before on my new computer.

Another problem I had for awhile was my computer suddenly going into sleep mode. I've had problems with my internet not working, but the entire computer suddenly shutting down was another story. The first thing we did was build a more powerful fan for the tower, which seemed to work. About a year later we started having similar problems, and this time we just got a new graphics card.

Ahh, computers. I've often said that they've replaced alcohol as the cause and solution of all of life's problems.

 

[Schadrach]

...and then both drives in the RAID 1 array and the backup of the array failed at the same time.

That really more or less sums it up. It was also last week.

Nowadays I just hope that the drives in my StarTech RAID cabinet are nice enough to fail one at a time, because I have 4x3TB WD RED drives in a RAID 5 in that thing. There's no way I'm backing that up to something else, I couldn't afford anything else with enough space (that thing was my hardware budget for that year).

 

[Cerebrawl]

Well... I had one where the mobo and CPU kinda burned a bit. That's sort of bad. It was getting kind of old too, so I had to replace it, completely new computer, I kept the harddrive though, only time I've had harddrive data loss was on my first SSD which windows hadn't installed/configured properly(and it was the system disc...), but all I had to do to fix it was reformat and manually configure it right, and of course reinstall windows, yay.

I've also had RAM become corrupt to the point where certain games would crash a lot, and a bad quality graphics card(a GF6600, don't remember the make anymore) where the capacitors on the card died and bulged out.

I still have an old 2.16GB HDD somewhere that should still work, I'll have to try pluging it in to one of my older computers and having a look at what's on it someday. It's from my first PC back in '97 (I had an Amiga before that).

 

[Phasmal]

My motherboard caught fire.

Do I win?

Yeah, my boyfriend plugged a frayed Xbox controller into one of my computer's USB ports and then the whole thing died and started sparking. Luckily it sort of sparked out.
Still haven't fixed it. Using his, occasionally, til I get mine fixed.

 

[JoJo]

Back in 2012 my old laptop got invaded by 'ransomware', malware which basically tries to hold your computer hostage until you pay the hacker money. Regrettably I had a lot of tabs open at the time, so I'm not entirely sure which site I caught it from but I think I might have accidentally clicked an advert which it came out of. Anyhow, luckily when I rebooted it my AVG anti-virus managed to hold the lock back long enough I was able to research the virus, download malwarebytes to track down the offending file and nuke it from orbit. My laptop was saved, though in an unrelated incident the hinges broke a couple of months afterwards, ending it's four-year run as my main PC :-/

 

[Remus]

My niece. She is a walking computer disaster. My mother's poor computer, that I built myself. I would never let her on my computer, and for good reason. She's one of those people always looking for free stuff, doesn't know a deal from a scam, and loads up computers with tons of pirated movies, music, and all the viruses and malware that accompany them. I had to completely wipe, /format c my mother's computer on multiple occasions after my niece bricked it. I say not to let the disaster on the computer again, but of course that does not apply when I'm not around, or maybe because I said it. Anyway, that level of abuse took a toll until eventually I could not fix the computer without replacing half the parts, so we left it and bought a laptop, which my mother then let my OTHER niece use as a nightlight *grumble*. That stopped after a white line was burned across the screen. Live and learn, sometimes.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Second semester, senior year of college. I was in the process of writing a research paper for my big senior project.

I had two laptops with me. One was an Alienware M9750 that I basically used in place of a desktop gaming PC (I travelled a lot, so having a full desktop wasn't practical) and a little HP laptop that I carried around with me to class for taking notes and whatnot. I also had an external hard drive that I used to transfer stuff between the two.

I took the little HP laptop with me to the library and whatnot to gather up research material for my senior project, but I wrote the actual paper on the Alienware. I did this because the HP was more portable, and I liked being able to have it open next to me so I could just glance at my notes while writing the paper.

Anywho... the Alienware laptop ended up having a massive overheating problem that came on very suddenly and resulted in the motherboard, the graphics card, and the hard drive all getting fried. I lost my research paper, with just a few weeks left before the deadline. Thankfully I still had all of my research material on the HP, but I still had to start the paper over from scratch.

Never bothered to get the Alienware laptop fixed up, because they put an $800 price estimate on it which is ridiculous for a laptop that was already like two years old. Fuck that. Built a gaming desktop instead after graduation.

 

[Legion]

I once deleted System 32 in order to save space on my hard-drive.

... I wish I was joking.

Needless to say I am significantly more tech savvy than I used to be.

 

[Madame_Lawliet]

A few years back I got hit with the System Tool virus, y'know, the one that masquerades as an anti-virus program in order to infect your computer and then tracks your keystrokes and steal your identity.
Fortunately I was able to sort it out, thank the goddess for tech forums, but I was kicking myself for MONTHS after falling for that one.

The funny part is that I was actually running anti-virus software at the time, then again it WAS Mcafee...

 

[TaboriHK]

Back in my Windows XP-using days, I'd have to basically start over from scratch every 2 years or so. One of these times (right as I was swapping in a new hard drive, luckily), my existing hard drive's contents became largely unreadable for no apparent reason. As a wannabe writer with backups that were out of date, this sent me into panic mode, especially when it came back that less than 2% of the drive's contents were retrievable.

By some miracle, that 2% included my writing folder. Needless to say, that's not a thing that can happen anymore.

 

[michael87cn]

I was drinking a can of coca cola and had it far away from the laptop I was using. I thought it was perfectly safe to do so. But then I thought to myself the laptop was a little too far away from me, so I pulled it forward a little. The charge cable was just behind the can of coke... and it tipped over right on top of the laptop. (I pulled forward a little too fast, and the force yanked the soda can toward the machine).

Sparks flew. It made loud crackling noises, and black smoke emitted from it. It started to catch on fire, so I unplugged it.

It was a week old laptop that cost my Dad $1200.

I learned a lesson that day, you may think you won't spill your drink.... but it can still happen!

 

[Gaijinko]

(deep breath) This is a bad one for me, I recently built a gaming PC using high end parts so I could play all the latest PC games on my steam library. It worked beautifully for over two weeks before one day just not starting, all the lights came on, but nothing moved. I took it apart examined every single piece and put it together again, checked the power supply, checked EVERYTHING. Still nothing, bit the bullet and took it to the local PC whizz, when I told him the symptoms he examined it for half an hour before saying even he had no idea what the problem was. It was lost. Had to scrap it and sell what parts I knew were working and lost over 500 pounds in the process. On the plus side though I got a ps4 with the remaining money so I win there.

 

[Meinos Kaen]

That was probably when I had to install Origin, and then I downloaded Dragon Age 2. My PC still feels unclean... That, and when I coughed while drinking chocolate milk. I spent hours cleaning monitor and keyboard. How they didn't just fizzle and die is beyond me.