So what was your worst PC problem ever?

Mine's a spyware warning that pops up when I go into drives. I have to WIPE them. Bye, good CoD4 files.

Oh, yay. Where do I start? *eye roll*

"This program has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down. If this problem persists, contact the program vendor."

My last computer did that to LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Even the bleeping screen saver.

Not to mention the blue screen of death. I lost count of the number of times I got that.

Not my PC, but a friends.

"AVG has found 1887 serious threats"

They thought AOL had built in virus protection................

1887? That's 2 numbers off of... 1337.

Anyways. I forgot to mention. It also makes me unable to acess my D drive. My fucking data is being jacked up.

My worse problem is when my motherboard started to die piece by piece. It eventually necessitated a new motherboard, processor and RAM, the re-installation of Windows and all the games I had installed.

Two Words... Windows ME

TheMightyAtrox:
Two Words... Windows ME

Yeah, but you just roll it back to your previous operating system. That's what I did after 10 minutes of ME.

When I was about 4 years old my parents gave me a magnet and told me to find what was magnetic in the house. The computer was magnetic.

Motherboards are my Achilles Heel. The first PC I ever bought for myself, custom job costing over $4000, died from severe Mobo Trauma. The PC had multiple problems crop up from time to time, and the numerous trips to the repair shop cracked the motherboard just enough that it would work as if nothing was wrong, but crash or fuck up at random times.

Faulty motherboard (and every other component) on my Dell laptop. Never wanted a Dell, but I wasn't the one paying for it so I had little say. The piece of shit never worked right, caused me all sorts of pain during my college years.

No real Mobo problems with my last PC, but the new one I bought just over a year ago, the motherboard went all Chris Farley on my ass, and died. I got a refurb replacement three months later, but had to shell out for a new board (which is currently in it) because I couldn't wait for the warranty fix. Cost me an additional $360 or so for a part that WAS warranty covered. I now have a spare, and bought the extended warranty service on the replacement, but I still feel sore in the ass from where the shop raped me of my money.

When Vista blocked my sound card drivers for no apparent reason; then, when I tried to reinstall them decided that I shouldn't be allowed to do that either.

One of my PC's doesn't like SATA drives very much, so once in a while it randomly decides one (or even both) of the SATA drives doesn't exist. It's a lot of fun to be working for a few hours and suddenly a balloon pops up saying "Cannot write to drive (C:). Any unsaved data may have been lost".

lol I can go on for hours here. I tend to be a walking computer crash.

My worst one would either be how I blew out the power supply of my new computer as soon as I set it up at college, or the time when I corrupted Windows XP. Yes, somehow I corrupted WINDOWS!

My friend once found the polarity switch on his PC.

That didn't end well..................

No huge problems for me right now. My friends motherboard did explode though. Fans got jammed.

I have a history of cracking laptop screens, and instant laptop hard drive failures, but the worst thing that ever happened to a computer I saw, my freind wanted to play Sims 2 so badly that he deleted Vista off his computer, downloaded XP from a torrent and tried to install it. his computer was down for like a month because he wouldn't let anyone who knew what they were doing near it

Pseudonym2:
When I was about 4 years old my parents gave me a magnet and told me to find what was magnetic in the house. The computer was magnetic.

Well, at least you didn't stick it on the TV leaving two pretty red and green dots on there like I did.

Worse computer problem I've ever had is having my tower PC's network card fry because of an electrical storm.

That same electrical also screwed up a TV so bad that you can't do anything with it without holding down the TV's buttons and commanding it with the remote.

I haven't had any terrible computer problems myself because I take good care of my computers. I used to work at CompUSA before they went under. As you can imagine, I've seen some terrible ones. The worst I've seen was a customer who brought in a hard drive and asked if we could get any data off of it. He said it had all his important work stuff was on it. When I took the drive from him, I noticed a curious rattling noise. I asked our lead tech if hard drives should rattle like a bunch of ball bearings in a can like that. He said the platters and drive arms were hitting each other and the drive was totally worthless. How would you like to have to tell someone that? His data was totally gone.

I have great luck with all computers. My friend, however, doesn't. One time me, him and another one of his friends were clean dust out of his computer when the power supply (we assume, never really found the cause) pulled some craziness and made pretty sparks come out of the fan. Everything stopped working at that point.

The only "good" thing about it (besides the awesomeness) was that it was one of his older computers he didn't need.

MRMIdAS2k:
My friend once found the polarity switch on his PC.

That didn't end well..................

Yeah, reversing the polarity only works in Star Trek.

Most of the computer problems I have are minor and boil down mostly to my ISP being run by narcoleptic gorillas. I've never had a good relationship with monitors, though, and they always seem to die in terrible and interesting ways. First one would get images 'stuck' - I could move stuff around and run my computer, but certain parts of the picture would just freeze and stay that way. I gave up on that monitor after turning it off and on again stopped fixing it. My second monitor had a black hole in the center of the screen that would suck up the entire display, flicker and vomit it back out again every five minutes. The next one just flat out exploded - blue smoke started pouring out the back and a few seconds later it cracked right down the side and started spitting sparks. Now this one occasionally fades to black and back again. It does not have long left.

I've never had any major problems, my dad's a big computer guy and fixes anything that might pop up. I'm only computer literate to an intermediate level. But I have this funny story:

My (ex) roommate was a complete idiot when it came to computers. She only ever used it for writing papers. In college, I developed the sleeping habit of staying up late, getting a few hours of sleep, then napping after or between classes. I was doing the napping thing when my roommate wakes me up, panicking. She's totally freaking out because her computer's "doing something funny." I drag myself out of bed, stumble down to the desk and off of that onto the floor, make my way through her piles of clothes to get to her screen, stuff my glasses on my face, and take a look; only to find that she was in Microsoft Word. It all looked fine to me- no error messages, everything was typing fine, no strange noises, nothing.

Her: "That's not what it normally looks like."
Me: "What do you mean? It looks like Word to me."
Her: "No, there's usually like gray stuff around it. And my typing's not so big."
I look down in the corner, switch it to page view. "Is this what it normally looks like?"
Her: "YEAH! How'd you do that!?"
Me: "Next time your computer "breaks", wait till I wake up to tell me."

Seriously... the lack of knowledge of a lot of people at my University when it comes to computers astounds me. We're at an age where computers are not only popular, but necessary for writing papers and stuff. Learn to use a fucking computer- they even have a basic computer class where you learn things as simple as CLICKING! My roommate saw me using Visual Basic for my Intro to Programming class and thought I was a miracle worker.

On my first 386 DX60 I installed the processor upside down. That was back when you could still do that.

I know someone who deleted windows and wondered why he couldn't trun it on anymore.

Mnemophage:
Most of the computer problems I have are minor and boil down mostly to my ISP being run by narcoleptic gorillas. I've never had a good relationship with monitors, though, and they always seem to die in terrible and interesting ways. First one would get images 'stuck' - I could move stuff around and run my computer, but certain parts of the picture would just freeze and stay that way. I gave up on that monitor after turning it off and on again stopped fixing it. My second monitor had a black hole in the center of the screen that would suck up the entire display, flicker and vomit it back out again every five minutes. The next one just flat out exploded - blue smoke started pouring out the back and a few seconds later it cracked right down the side and started spitting sparks. Now this one occasionally fades to black and back again. It does not have long left.

I'm in tears laughing at that.

My laptop won't run Kotor 2....

"No one's answering the phone, and we still need an operating system. Someone call that other guy, what's his name... Billy Doors, or something like that."

When a games not responding and you open up Windows Task Manager to close it... then you get a message saying that that's none responsive as well. Happened once, it was quite annoying. The only fix- reach for the power point.

My old laptop crashed and deleted XP, and wouldent let me reinstall it, so I had to use Linux. Then it crashed again and I had to replace the hard drive. Then the battery stopped working, so I had to keep it plugged in all the time. Then it got infected by alot of viruses and crashed. Again.

Due to my shitty RAM (512mb), and generally shitty computer, I've had loads of computer problems... One time, I ended up downloading XP SP2... it was buggy, and I had to reformat the computer... One time, Norton decided to not uninstall, so when I upgraded (through disk), it caused a world of problems, making me eventually reformat the computer... Yeh, my computer's shit, and my only solution to its many problems are to reformat the bloody thing.

O yes and I cant forget the entire computer system at school. The whole things a problem.

The worst computer trouble i had was in a computer repair class, i get a comp with everything hooked together. It looks alright on the inside, but i can't get it to even get to the bios. Everything else seemed in order so I had to check the mobo and cpu. It turned out a pin from the cpu had broken off inside the motherboard. When i told my teacher this, he told me to try to take it out with a pair of pliers. :(

that's an easy one vista

I used vista ultimate 64bit edition and yeah its ultimate alright, ultimate resource hog that is... playing bioshock/crysis on medium is somewhat possible on vista vs. my tiny xp pro with directx 10 i can play both bioshock and crysis on very high graphic settings with no problems... not to mention my driver issues(vista compatible, what does that mean in theory its compatible but in practice you never know)... I have a geforce 8800gts 640mb, and 1gb of dual ddr2 800mhz memory, also x-fi sound card... and it runs any game at max settings you through at it...
Note I am never buying a nvidia chip based motherboard again for they don't work properly out of the box.(memory settings...etc needs some modifications).

So far my Vista is a year old. Not a problem at all, 'cept for the occasional ctrl-alt-deletable carsh, and the very obscure happening of an uber-crash where I forcefully restart my computer. (Has happened in total like 5 times) I have yet to see this 'Red screen of Doom'.
(I am a lucky guy.)

Ok, let me think...

*Strokes Macbook*

ill have to get back to you on this one.

Ultrajoe:
Ok, let me think...

*Strokes Macbook*

ill have to get back to you on this one.

Great, your macbook is in your hands.

Now try doing summat with it.

Like installling somthing that FUCKING WORKS!

but I jest, if you want a games machine, get summat that runs Windows.

*You want somthing that'll drive you round the fucking bend while getting shit thats works on windows without all the fuss, get a mac. *(my brothers opinion)

End of the day, from what he's told me, Windows has got me sold, at least it tells you why it's crashed as oppposed to the mac whic just goes "lockup for no fucking reason, youre fucked".