What's Your Tech Catastrophe?
Ever had a water-cooled system spring a leak? Power supply catch fire? Drop a screwdriver and bend CPU pins? Or maybe you just deleted System32.. because, you know... your friend told you to. Whatever your PC catastrophe may have been, we want to hear about it!
I'll go first!
So, when younger, I was upgrading the family computer, I was wanting to get better performance and trying clean up the system. I went and spent $100 on a 1GB RAM DIMM and was so proud of myself. Going from 256KB to 1GB was amazing. However, I was greedy. I needed more performance! Somehow, in my childish mind, it made sense to clean up the data on the computer, and what better way to do that other than deleting everything on the desktop, because everything on the desktop is a shortcut.. right? (I was so wrong.) Fast forward a day to when my family needed to use the computer and couldn't find any critical information they had saved on the desktop.
I learned a very expensive lesson, and my parents learned not to save documents to the desktop. 😊
Tell us about your terrible experience with tech. How did it happen and what did you learn from the experience?
Comments
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The worst thing I've ever done computer-wise is spill a ton of drink over a laptop probably 15 years ago now.
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I've definitely killed a keyboard that way. Instant dread. Luckily, I can say no computers have received a liquid death in my house.
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Yeah, it didn't work too well after the "accident"
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If I were to measure catastrophe in terms of $$$ then my story is this...Back in early 2013 I read a story about Bitcoin and thought it was interesting. Blockchain/crypto were still not terms used or understood by me (hell they only kind of are now...) but I wanted to do it. So I did! I solo mined 3 blocks back in the day! Fast forward to when these bad boys have value and I literally lost/reformatted 150 coins and some change from a pool and have been kicking myself ever since.
If the techastrophe is measured in irritation then I can tell you a tale of smoke and flames! A coworker of mine had recently assembled a slightly better piece of sh....production hardware. The problem he had was POST. Here I come, thinking I know better, to fix the issue! In this rare case I did find a problem. The 24 pin power connector was not completely seated. I pushed it in and suddenly the machine powered on. Seconds later a small flame and smoke shot up! As it turns out my coworker didn't remove/notice a stand off from another platform which shorted something and bricked the entire build. That ugly chassis still houses something functional today but boy did I feel dumb.
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Once upon a time in I want to say... 2011, an Alpha-test that I was absolutely ecstatic for came out. That test was for Battlefield 3 and I was playing on a mid-range HP that I recently upgraded with an XFX AMD card, upgraded PSU and Phenom processor.
I was having a blast playing this but the frames weren't up to par of what I needed... soooooooooooo...
I downloaded MSI Afterburner. And 20 year old me had ZERO idea how to overclock so... I put the slides all to the right and got a decent 10-15 FPS improvement...
...for about 30 minutes.
Then it was BSOD city from there. I couldn't play the alpha, I couldn't play BF2: Project Reality, or any game without the PC crashing. Fortunately, when BF3 was released, I managed to snag a refurbished Xbox 360 from Micro Center (one of my first purchases from MC actually) for about $150 and got to enjoy some good ol' BF3. But this was also the start of a long 2-3 years from the PC Gaming community.
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BSOD City sounds like a terrible map to play on
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I woke up to a clicking hard drive. About 8 days after Christmas... and I hadn't had time to back up my pictures since before Halloween.
The same year I had gotten custody of my two boys, so I lost Halloween pics, Thanksgiving pics, and Christmas pics.
Now I use OneDrive so I don't have to worry. I was devastated.
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I'll tell you about my Microcenter catastrophe. 7 days my order has sat 30 miles from my house. Why? FedEx, that's why. Future orders of filament will be Amazon. Why bother?
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I accidentally hit my monitor one of the first times playing VR. Thankfully I didn't damage it but I learned to respect the boundaries very quickly!
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Sounds like you might want to contact FedEx directly or a representative about this? That sounds less than pleasant! Whenever I have a question I just jump in the chat service they have on the website
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@Exador I'd definitely recommend contact Micro Center Online support or directly contacting FedEx about the status of your shipment. I totally get your frustration with shipping issues. Micro Center also sells many types of filament on Amazon as well if you'd prefer to use their shipping methods in the future.
If I can help in any way, I'd be happy to. But I believe that due to the private nature of this information, we can best help you by contacting Micro Center Online.
@GoatForHire Oof. Close one. I've had a similar experience with the boundary. I ended up backhanding a lamp and knocking it off the table breaking it. I too learned to respect the boundaries on that day. 😁🙃
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Well here we are and the order still hasn't arrived. It shipped on the 7th so it's now 14 days. 7 of which it sat 20 miles from my house. USPS has it now. Ordered some Sunlu grey for Amazon 3 days ago. Got it next day. Prints perfect so it's going to be my pla of choice.
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BTW, why would I spend any time contacting anybody. I didn't screw up. The fact is that I ordered 2 times from MC and they both took forever. I won't use them again.
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I'm sorry, I thought that you were trying to contact someone here. However, I can't directly assist you with this concern here on a public forum, so I was trying to offer a possible solution.
If you're not looking to contact anyone about this I'll say thanks for your contribution instead. :) I think we've all been there one time or another. Quite some time ago, I ordered a part on eBay and it took nearly 2 months to arrive and the seller shipped the item a day after the listing was completed. 😨 Crazy!
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First machine I ever built myself when I was 13 I was upgrading the RAM. I wasn't aware that wearing socks, on carpet, while not being grounded was a recipe for disaster.
I ended up shocking the motherboard and fried every component in the system. I've fortunately learned from my mistakes.
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The pain of the wasted hardware 😫
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A few weeks ago my PC just stopped in the middle of reading a website. The motherboard just up and died for no particular stimulus. ASRock is processing the RMA but it was a major hassle to take apart a custom liquid loop, the first time I've gone all the way in, to get the dead motherboard out and will be a hassle to rebuild when the replacement shows up.
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Minor disaster. Waking up early on a Saturday morning, looking across the room at a system I have in an open air case, and noticing the fluid level in the reservoir looked lower than usual. Slow leak between the res and pump. Small puddle on the table it was sitting on, no damage.
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Bought a new PSU and used the old cable's from the last PSU, fried ((3)) 1TB Sandisk Pro SSD's ( at the time they were selling for $280ea ) and a Bluray/ CD disc drive ( $150-$160 ). Luckily, the SSD with the O.S. was fine, but the damage was done. NEVER, NEVER use different cables with any other power supply unit!!
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When swapping out my old processor I was re installing my AIO.
I plugged the headers for the AIO into the wrong slot. A few minutes later, after turning it on, I smelled burning.. I fried the AIO..
LUCKILY all that burned up was my AIO. But I was a bit upset since it happened at 10pm...no work the next day... which meant no pc for the night :(
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My first build ever, with parts purchased from Micro Center of course, was an i7 4770k and dual R9 290Xs. That thing was an absolute beast for its time. One night I was playing For Honor, and within just a few seconds my screen was covered with artifacts and everything froze. Turns out, my power supply died and took the entire rig with it.
Rest In Peace, R9 290X cards. You will always be my first 😥
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last summer actually, I had a channel point redemption on my stream to take a shot of hotsauce (Think it was called dabomb). Someone redeemed it one night, and as I hopped around my room suffering, my arm smacked the open hot sauce bottle into my second pc ;-;
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Ouch...😓
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