Wost Computer Disaster You've Ever Suffered

[McMullen]

I let someone convince me that IE's security problems were a thing of the past and went back to using it (it was also sorta-kinda a condition for employment) and I ended up getting a few drive-bys from ads. I remember one of them was AV 2009, another might have been Conficker. I went back to Firefox with the NoScript and AdBlock add-ons, haven't had a drive-by since, and am never going back to IE. The amusing thing was that Vista's UAC let the malware right in without ever raising a fuss, but denied me access when I tried to delete them. I had to delete the virus from a Linux OS that I had on a bootable CD.

Then there's the animation rig I paid a guy to build for me. I had built machines myself before, but didn't want to spend the time to research the various components this time. I also figured this guy had more market savvy than I did. Well, the guy delivered the machine six months late, but that was the least of it. He bought and installed the wrong CPU, purchased a bootleg copy of Windows off eBay without realizing it, got a hard drive off eBay that was marked as new but was used enough that it started squealing after a day of use, and didn't notice that the motherboard's RAM slots were faulty and caused worsening memory errors to crash the machine after about 48 hours of operation. All these things were issues that I had to diagnose, discover, and correct; he was oblivious to all of it. He accused me of trying to scam him, refused to refund me for the CPU, promised to refund me for the OS and hard drive, but disappeared before doing so.

 

[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.

That sounds like you either broke Paris Hilton's computer, or you got "excited" looking at pics of her and shorted the keyboard out.

It was around the time a certain home video came out...I went looking for it. The PC was never quite the same again. lol

 

[Zemaddog]

I was playing Skyrim when my computer just turned off and wouldn't turn back on. My 5 month old pc that my friend built me just stopped. I took it to a computer place and it turns out the graphics card had failed. Took it out and the computer was fine. I was able to get the card replaced although it took the supplier 2 months to give it to me. I still have no idea how a broken graphics card prevents a computer from turning on.

 

[Roxor]

Worst I've had happen was a graphics card go up in smoke about a year after the warranty expired. Got a cloud of white smoke blown out of the case in the couple of seconds it took to get up and switch off the mains. The card is still lying around the garage. It still stinks.

 

[antidonkey]

This is waaaaay back in the super socket 7 days. I was given a brand new shiny Geforce card.....as in first generation of Geforce cards ever. I was ecstatic. Slapped in to the pc, hit the power button and nothing. It turned on but didn't do anything beyond that. I did some reseating and dusting and inspection. Tried it again with no result. I left it on while I thought about the situation. I then smelled something burning. I popped of the side panel to case and saw a small orange glowing dot on my motherboard. As I reached to yank the power cable, I heard a small pop. It was the death of the motherboard. I got on my father's computer to try to figure out what just happened. It seems that card drew so much power that it was known to overload the AGP controller chip and fry the crap out of it. Had to do some more research to find a replacement board that would handle it. I was sad as this was the first truly powerful machine I had build myself.

 

[Zetatrain]

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.

HA HA, I once did the exact same thing on my parent's computer a long time ago and boy were they pissed.

Apart from that not much. I think the worst thing that happened to a computer that I actually owned was the video card on my laptop getting fried due to overheating.

 

[jowell24]

One day my hand-me-down custom mediocre computer decides it won't start up at all - no power supplied to the machine at all when you try and turn it on. So I open it up, have a look and can't figure out what was wrong (younger me didn't really know all the insides of a PC just yet). After checking out everything I possibly could I thought it would be a good idea to flip that red switch on the PSU from 240V (UK Voltage) to 115V to see what happens without even considering the consequences of my foolish actions.

PSU fizzled, popped rather loudly and black smoke and liquid poured out from the unit. Nearly shat myself thinking it would go up in flames unless I unplugged it. Thought it friend every single component in the case after sending double the voltage into the system but it was back up and running once my brother replaced the PSU. Didn't have much to lose on that comp since it wasn't connected to the interwebs so I used it for typing reports and Fallout 3