Scary computer problem I just had.

well, no, a local computer shop could repair it for less than that.

And besides, the casings around a motherboard atre pretty durable. what you might have done is simply shook it enough so that it went into a "sleep and save" mode to prevent something from going short circuit.

Unles of course you're talking about "I have legs the size of redwoods and can kick the cat across the yard by simply wiggling my big toe"

then. ok I can see that being problematic with the whole....kicking.....thing.

:P

I dropped my laptop once...that's the best story I have, except for when a computer actually FUBARed on me.

@wastelander75 I barely tapped it, haha. It was the front of the case.

Well, most of the scary moments I've had with machines I've caused and fixed myself. I've accidentally formatted the wrong drive once. I do all the computer work around the house and at work, so it's kind of expected that I don't take things to the repair guy...

then you might have hit the power button

I was carrying a laptop around in a backpack, and carefully set the backpack down on a coffee table at the church when I sat down to watch the news. Someone else sat down next to me, wanted to clear space for his feet, and just tossed my backpack on the floor as though it couldn't possibly contain anything but socks. That laptop never worked again.

i need to make a book of problems with my and others machines that i fixed ^^

@LordXenophon Wow, that sucks. @wastelander75 Nah, I didn't hit the power button.

I hope he paid for the damages.

I once hit my laptop with a broom stick, repeatedly...it still booted after, but I needed to replace a few keys. Actually, I'm on the same laptop right now!

You can't get blood from a stone. He wasn't worth a floppy disk.

@Firedorn why did you beat a laptop with a broomstick?

It was a rough day. =P
Long story...but suffice it to say, I flirt with insanity...A LOT!
But it scared the crap out of me after since I did have all my work on there.

That's why I don't go around kicking expensive equipment! :P

once I smelled a burning smell, and found out the power strip to my pc had died. I got a replacement one and everything worked fine (but it took the burning smell a while to go away)

I've gotten confused swapping floppies while copying a disk more than once. The worst time was when the source disk was a one off development systems that I needed to remake it. Luckily, it was back when my man-hours were cheap, and I didn't have anything else to do besides go to school, watch cartoons and play Yar's Revenge on my best-friend's Atari.

Well one time my mum's computer kept restarting and overheating, it turns out it...

Had to much cat fur stuck in it lol

@dowekeller i LOVED Yar's Revenge!

OH! While I was still a junior tech, after "re-assembling" a server, I turned it on. All of a sudden...smoke. Well suffice it to say, I was able to plug the power supply's connector backwards on the motherboard. All I needed to do was get the power supply replaced because it caught on fire. And this was a customer's server. =P

Just upgraded my system a few weeks ago. When I got the new motherboard, cpu and DDR3 in I forgot to plug my gfx card into my PSU lol! Took me a couple minutes to figure out what the high pitched noise was squealing inside the computer!

Worst one I had was the guy who spilled bong water on his portable. o_O

I bet that portable was very interesting to police dogs after that.

lol. It was interesting to many stoners as well. :P

When I worked in a tech shop at CompUSA we got all kinds of strange things, including a computer infested with cockroaches. We refused to work on that one, it was pretty nasty.

Recently I had a power supply die on me after moving all my furniture. Since I have a very high performance system I'm glad that is all that went out.

The top of my laptop had a remote control thrown into it but it managed to survive. The remote did not though, it went into about 2,000 little pieces

@Anomaly271 How the hell did someone get a computer(Case I assume)full of cockroaches? Did they leave food in the case?

They probably had plenty of food and food-like trash in the house around the machine, and the machine was a nice dark warm place for little bugs to live. Most computer cases have holes in them that roaches can squeeze in through. It doesn't really surprise me. Kinda makes me a little sick, but no real surprise.

Hence the term "Computer Bug"...yummy!

A computer case shouldn't have much food in it, though they will eat the grease on some of the parts. They are much more interested in the fact that your case is a warm, dark place to sleep and nobody ever turns on the lights in there.

Actually, cockroaches eat the circuit boards in computer cases as well. Apparently, this lady worked at a very nasty place, or next door to one. This was her work computer. Plus yes, they love dark warm places like that.

Trust me, I've seen many horrors inside computer cases - insect infestation is one of the nastier ones.

I worked at a Gateway Country store for a short while and they had a customer come in that very clearly had strapped fireworks to the inside of the system. Tape shaped marks where the metal wasn't black and dents where they obviously went off. Despite being obvious we couldn't "prove it" so Gateway replaced the system any way. Any wonder why Gateway couldn't afford the retail locations any more? I've seen a few bug infested ones. The worst are the really old computers that have been chugging away in a heavy smokers home for years. Gag!

I have an 'office pedestal'-type SPARCserver 630MP that worked very well for a few years, until I decided to power it down for a month while moving things around. When I booted it again, it emitted the most hideous cloying, rancid smell, and I shut it down. A few months ago I tried again and it still stunk, so I took it apart and found that the power supply had been infested by spiders, which had lived, spawned young (that'll be why there was suddenly an explosion of spindly, long-legged spiders around the time that I moved the equipment) and the remaining spiders had died and .. er.. rotted. To its credit, the power supply continued to work perfectly while the smell was being blown around the house, but it made me sick to the stomach, so I didn't do much with that computer then. This is one of the hazards of living in the country.

@lexthehex, I guess those spiders should have known they would be burned up in the center of the Sun ;-P It's a bad joke, but I have no shame.

@dowekeller (groan!) Yeah.. I miss the spiders a little, since I live in the town now. I haven't had any insect infestations since moving here, where it is much drier and cooler (they don't like that).

If you have actuall bug damage to your board, it's probably not from the roaches. It's more likely ants or silverfish. Roaches can remove the wax coating and some kinds of varnishes, though. That can be bad enough. Ant damage can totally destroy the board.

Man reading all of you guys issues with bugs makes me damn glad I have a lighted interior! I spent an arm and a leg building this comp and many days I'm more and more great full.

I do have a few times with computers. Like Dowe though I tend to be the one fixing them and rebuilding them constantly. >.> Unless it's my laptops.
@LordXenophon I just wanted to say I may have murdered that dude if he hadn't bought me a new laptop for something like that....

I've had my own issues with dropping laptops. Only mine are never pushed off the desks or tables because of people. My glorious lard arsed Maine Coon cat has pushed at least two laptops off of a table or desk that I am aware of. Yes that cat has seen death by me many a time, but he somehow still has all 9 lives. Or close.

Although recently I had one that literally scared me. I have an older motherboard I know I need to replace in my PC. So this was my freak out. My boyfriend and I had just pulled my computer apart and cleaned it thourghly. I'm talking all the way down to nearly rebuilding it just to see it was clean. [I have 3 dogs and 3 cats to see to getting too much hair in and around it.] Well when we plugged it back in all we could smell was smoke. Naturally I'm the computer geek and freaks out over my precious that's apparently dying on me. I unplug the PC and the smell remains. I look up from under my desk and my flat screen monitor is smoking from the back with nice little plums of black smoke with this GAWD awful smell. After pulling it apart I find out I was right. It was a motherboard on fire. But it was the monitors and not the PCs. The joys I went to on that one.

No, I doubt it's $2000 down the drain, maybe for what you payed for it, but retailers are dickweeds, and if it's from dell or the such it's probably a piece of crap anyway ;)

@PatchA Nope, I pretty much put it together myself, I'd never buy from Dell or anybody like them.

It actually started around $750, but I've upgraded almost every part by now, the only thing that is the same is the case by now.

When I switched cases and my computer stopped working. I took it all out, put it back in, still nothing. put it back in my old case, worked fine. back in new case, and it was fixt. WTF? i didn't change anything lol. That was the weirdest moment for me.

It always makes me nervous when stuff fixes itself, it all to often unfixes itself later on.

@xterrain15 You hooked up one of the cables wrong the first time.

@lotusthefallen My cat used to love sitting on or near my computer and monitor. The monitor was a big old CRT and countless times, I had to move that moggy off the thing, in case it overheated (the monitor, not the cat, that is). Fortunately the cat got the hint and moved to the keyboard instead, causing a few applications to lock up but other than that, not doing any harm. I had a pigeon too, and it would sit on the laptop keyboard and peck at the screen when the screensaver kicked in.

Ups raped my PC when I sent it from Thailand(where I lived at the time) home to Ireland when I came back after 2 years in and around Thailand...and it was a beauty,I paid the highest Postage,packed it myself,and when it got to Ireland it looked like a forklift truck had crashed through the box,and through the front of my tower and HDD's and mobo...they then refused to pay me the compensation cos they claimed "paperwork had been filled out badly on the Thai side" amazingly enough because it was a Thermaltake Kandalf Aluminium tower it took most of the force and I was able to get my PC up and running again(the CPU,memory and mobo were alive and I only lost one of 4 HDD's,I still use the case for my QX9650 on a Maximus 2 build,lol you should see it,anyone who knows feck all about PC's assumes its a pos because the case has no front or sides :) that was my worst incident/accident...

@schiz0phren1c Wow, I'd be so pissed.

@EarthboundX I was man,I was,Ironcally I shipped it with them because I was afraid the baggage handlers on the flights would throw it around :(

@schiz0phren1c I'd be screaming my way to the top of the UPS food chain. o_O

same here. it shouldnt matter what happened where as far as shipping, they still damaged your shit..

@Torinir I'd have been screaming with a parrot-like lawyer on my shoulder the whole damn way.

Suffice it to say that I eventually,and I mean EVENTUALLY got enough compensation to build my QX9650 with,but I had to threaten to bring it to the press to get that,in short,Ups or (OOPS) as I christened them will do everything in their power to avoid compensating you if they damage your goods...

I've gotten a lot of fragile computer parts from UPS, from Newegg. I've been lucky so far, nothing came damaged.

I also get a lot of parts from Newegg and have only had one problem with UPS so far. The box my new monitor came in had a gash that looked like it had been made by a fork lift. Luckily the packaging saved it. Not even a dead pixel.

The weirdest computer problem I've had recently was when I was playing games a few weeks back. I heard a loud, sharp POP. The unmistakeable sound of electronics blowing up. I looked everywhere and couldn't find any problems with anything. Then a week later I heard another loud pop. Still nothing wrong anywhere. Two weeks after the first pop my monitor started acting up. I had two large capacitors that had blown up. At least now I have a better video card.