Computer Horror Stories

[Guardiandevil21]

I have been joking with friends lately that I should have a blog and a counter saying how long my computers stay up and running.  Since the beginning of my school year this is all that has happened, in about this order.

1.  Windows contracts virus because of my dumb ass
2.  Tried installing Linux, screws up Windows Partition
3.  FFXI randomly doesn't work on internet anymore and reinstalling windows doesn't    
     matter
4.  Buy Half-life 2, find out my DVD-ROM no longer works, have to buy new one
5.  Laptop dies, had to buy a new one
6.  Windows Craps out yet again (usb stops working)... oddly I have no idea why
7.  Monitor makes burning smell, borrowing gf's spare until can afford replacement.

Sadley most of this has happened relatively recently.  I know that some of it is self inflicted, but why should I have all of the crappy luck.  I will try to come back here every so often to possibly update tell me what you think if I should or not?  To for warn everyone I will be going through some major over halls, formatting and reinstalling, once my summer starts in about a week or so there will be some stuff soon to come it could be uneventfull.

[Guardiandevil21]

BTW other people post your stories as well!

[Shmi]

hmm, havent had a horror story with my PB, but I have a friend who asked me to fix his PC since it was slow, and after scans it showed i think 6,000 viruses and spyware, adware, etc. I cleaned, quarantined and deleted my way through them, and even then some would remain, and IE popup windows would pop up literally every 3 seconds, like 10 at a time (had to scan in safe mode)... 10-20 would remain each time, no matter what I ran or tried, and the popups came back, so we just backed up his stuff and reformatted the HD. so now he's got a firewall, constant antivirus, and ad-aware... and security fixes.

fun.

[yalborap]

hmm, havent had a horror story with my PB, but I have a friend who asked me to fix his PC since it was slow, and after scans it showed i think 6,000 viruses and spyware, adware, etc. I cleaned, quarantined and deleted my way through them, and even then some would remain, and IE popup windows would pop up literally every 3 seconds, like 10 at a time (had to scan in safe mode)... 10-20 would remain each time, no matter what I ran or tried, and the popups came back, so we just backed up his stuff and reformatted the HD. so now he's got a firewall, constant antivirus, and ad-aware... and security fixes.

fun.

it's stories like this that make me consider a mac.

Then I realize I need game access too much, and I damn you mac-ites for not doing some homebrew ports for the works of ABA games and SCWU. Do that and you'll have me sold on a mac.

[Shmi]

it's stories like this that make me consider a mac.

Then I realize I need game access too much, and I damn you mac-ites for not doing some homebrew ports for the works of ABA games and SCWU. Do that and you'll have me sold on a mac.

To be fair, we are on a college always-on connection that hits up to 3.6mb/s download speeds at night, and he was running it nonstop, no restarts at all, without antivirus or firewalls, or system updates.

funny.. if i do that with the PB its... fine.  

[echopark]

I have a few.

Last time i was up-grading i got a Asus brand new motherboard it was amazing it one of the first ones which has a customise POST speech errors. Well i was happy stuck it in and brought a new Althon XP 2800, everything was placed and switched it on and got my first errors. Something about the CPU i cant remember what. What i discovered was the Processor fryed, so i thought it was a dodgy chip, so i went back and got another one ... the same, so i got my last one. And did a bench test .... this is when i have everything out on the bench with a towel for putting everything on and it worked al right .... put in the case .... the CPU fryed again. I discovered the Motherboard had a hair line factural in the board so when the board moved it caused a surge big enough to kill the processor ^^ so now i'm on my 6th AMD Alton XP 2800 .... one died of over clockin to ... oops. Soon to be getin my 64bit series one.

My m8 just got his own flat and he needed a PC, but all i had spare was a E-Machine. I hated those machines but he only wanted it to go on the net so i didnt mind let him have it. He got it and he put a more RAM and a new hard drive. And then broadband installed into the flat. We were happy. After a month i had to clean his hard drive of virus and spyware ... the next month his windows partition fucked up so he only had 80gigs left. Theres no way to fix the partition i have tryed everything so its just stays there unused. Then the bottom 2 PCI slots fuck up ... then the USB ports go bye byes ... then half the RAM ..... then he lost the Net and then the rest of his hard drive ...... The E-Machine was dead ... so i took it to the building site across the road to ask if they can drop something heavy on it ... they said aye ^^

At college my friends have loads of fun. We were doing Server OSs and we were partitions the drives cause the college still needs there Win2000. Cause we have to share the PCs with other students. Well half of my class fucked up and wiped Win2000 .... some had the power to destory the hard drive ... i wsih i knew how. And some poor guy has to reinstall Win Server 2k3 every week cause he breaks it every week. And i managed to make a Mac not load up anymore ^^

[Knightslugger]

me too.

Mac OS9... Need i say more?

[Varth]

6,000 viruses and spyware, adware, etc.

My friend had over 13,000 when I scanned his PC. Then when I deleted all of them, somehow his TCP/IP install got deleted. That's what I get for not running it in safe mode...

[Liratheal]

I attracted 1,500 virii in two days of running without a firewall... That machine always has a virus on it, no matter what I do.. I think it's got virus pheramones on it or something...


Those exist, right?

[Guardiandevil21]

Wow that's a lot of viruses.  My gf's laptop had a bunch on it recently and I figured it would be a good idea that she should install windows.  It's a dell inspiron 5150 and for some odd reason I couldn't get the wireless working.  Apparently she didn't listen when we had an entire conversation about how she didn't need it right now anyways.  when she couldn't use it she decided to give me a call and yell at me about not getting it to work.  So no I need to figure out why dell has to make the gayest drivers disk ever.  Not only do you have to unzip everything apparently they don't want everything to work correctly.

[yalborap]

Wow that's a lot of viruses.  My gf's laptop had a bunch on it recently and I figured it would be a good idea that she should install windows.  It's a dell inspiron 5150 and for some odd reason I couldn't get the wireless working.  Apparently she didn't listen when we had an entire conversation about how she didn't need it right now anyways.  when she couldn't use it she decided to give me a call and yell at me about not getting it to work.  So no I need to figure out why dell has to make the gayest drivers disk ever.  Not only do you have to unzip everything apparently they don't want everything to work correctly.

Yeah, dell's pretty good at support but their drivers suck.

[SCaRa]

I hate creative
worst support ever.

had to go through a thread on their forums of a few hundred pages to solve a problem on my previous pc with the audigy 2

other then that
I had a cd-writer die on me after a year of use (my first one also)

and a hard drive that died after many years of service (it was due to be replaced)

[imyourhuckleberry]

Yeah, m boss was setting up his new office, he wanted to hang these "hanging file" holders up on his wall.  The building is fairley new, and has metal studs instead of wood, so we had to use the screws that butteryfly out behind the wall, to support whatever you have up there.  I was weary, but he was payig the bills.  We hung them up, and everything seemed fine, so we decided it was lagit.  Well we came in the next morning and all the files, file holders, and a good portion of the drywall came down, right on his Toshiba laptop.  Needless to say, he was pissed, but got over it when he got his new laptop, insurance was a good thing in this case.

[Konflict]

Haven't really had any major problems of that sort. On my old old laptop (a Gateway Solo 2100 running at Pentium 1 MMX 166MHz with a grand total of 32MB RAM and 2GB capacity), the screen is slightly broken. When you open the laptop, it feels as if the screen is going to fall off because it's loose, but it tightens itself at a decent angle for viewing.

The connections are definitely loose because the screen gets spazes every so often. I've never used it since I got my iBook though, and I've never had a problem with the iBook myself.

For those who feel that Macs don't have enough games, it's true. But they do have quite a few. Here's an idea though - how about using a Mac for everything, and just have a Windows machine for games?

[Shmi]

how about using a Mac for everything, and just have a Windows machine for games?

yep... thats what im setting up for this summer.