Khell_Sennet:
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.

Dude, if you're a gamer you really need to build your own computers. It's ridiculously easy nowadays as long as you are a bit cautious and take your time. Everything's Plug-N-Play and there are loads of on-line resources to help. You don't save much (any, really) money for a general purpose computer, but savings for a gaming computer can be significant. You can put in exactly what you want, and most problems are easily fixed without paying some sixteen year-old an arm and a leg.

Now I remember back in the day, when there was no Internet and no books or magazines and there were no standards and you were on your own and -

Yep, rocks was just heavier back then.

one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

I was moving a partition on my C: drive and had left the computer alone for a few minutes. My son (two years old at the time IIRC) came over and held the power button down long enough for the system to shut down.
That memory still makes my stomach churn a little bit. There were files on that disk that I hadn't backed up yet, and I'm still annoyed that I'll never see them again.

The worst problem I ever had was my logic board frying on my iBook a few years back. I've also had miscellaneous problems, but that was the worst. Oh, and once I spilled coffee on my laptop. That was a bad week. Oh well, I got it back by Thursday.

i spilled orange juice over my computer and it set fire :(

Alotak:
one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

Yeah, you can still buy it in stores. Even better if you're a student, you get a huge discount when you order through your University's bookstore. I've heard that Service Pack 3 may have alleviated the Vista headache, have you downloaded it?

I'm so intelligent.

I plugged my router in one day. Unfortunately, I plugged the 250v 140mA cord for the old modem into the 12V 25A router.

BANG.

My sister ran into my room, telling me that my mother's new laptop has broke, I got over to the laptop, pressed space... *screen turning on from standby* No, it did not say that

For me it would either be one of 3 things: 1)PSU dying in a spectacular fashion (flashes, sparks, copious amounts of smoke) which thankfully didn't do any further damage. 2) Motherboard dying, while playing morrowind, which basically spelled the end of my first PC (It was pretty old anyway (Not to mention beige)). 3) Adding a sound card (Creative X-Fi) to my new computer only to have it corupt my entire Windows XP install. Not. Happy. Jan. (The card was later replaced free of charge)

I managed to corrupt the bios chip on my motherboard when an overclock failed and I had to hit the power.

My Dell laptop is beloved, but a handful. The keyboard is messed up, if I press "a" it somehow strokes several buttons, including page down. I use a USB keyboard, effectively making it a desktop. The battery life lasts about long enough to mock me by booting up, then going into hibernate to keep from powering down. The wireless card doesn't work properly. Lately it's been bluesceening, and failing the DST tests in diagnostic. Since it came preloaded from Dell (that's a mistake right there), I can't fix it with a boot disc unless I effectively steal one off the internet, and even that might not do the trick; I could end up having to get a new hard drive. It's now crashing several times in a row before deciding to work, apparently at random. It works fine after that, but you have to wonder if playing the restart-dance is worth your time when all you want to do is check your email.

Vista screws the hell out of me. The worst one is when it wouldn't let me use microsoft office properly. I couldn't open any save files from word, excel, powerpoint or any of them. What's worst is that I can't even open word without going into safe mode. It just pissed me off so much even when I reinstalled it 5 times! As a result, I went to open office, which saved my life since I had a huge amount of paper due.

Now I reformatted my laptop and now everything works properly now except for 1 big ass annoying problem.....it freezes......in the most random time ever. I'm not doing anything, leaving nothing open. I leave my laptop alone for 5 mins and BAM I come back only to find out it froze. Other times I play my music and it randomly freezes and it gets so annoying cause the sound is still there and its playing that 1 tone over and over again like a broken record player. I don't even get the damn blue screen of death which I got alot before I reformated.

Oh just remembered another one. My dad once shut his laptop whilst his in ear headphones were resting on the keyboard, bye bye screen.

TheMightyAtrox:
Two Words... Windows ME

I was going to say when my new gaming system blew a power supply but well... that wins...

Trying to browse the forums when a video is being uploaded.

Bearing failure on a hard drive, for me. Smelled kinda nice, actually, except for the undertone of "OMG everything's gone and I'll never get it back".

-- Steve

edited to add: It was only a 20MB hard disc... but this was back in the early '90s, and the few backups I had were on 5.25" floppies (500kB each, IIRC), and I couldn't find a compatable replacement drive for that obsolete clunker.

Back in the day, I somehow managed to overwrite windows boot sequence with Micromachines 2. So as soon as you turned the computer on, just after bios and dos, straight into Micromachines. Lucky for me it was still dos though, fixable in the end.

Also, the internal soundcard in this PC had a 'driver update' that caused windows to bluescreen whenever it tried to play any sound. Gave me an excuse to finally get round to buying a new card heh.

I once fried an HP laptop's motherboard once...

See, the power cord was broken and you had to hold it in place, with one of the wires going into the port and the other to the ground on the USB port.
Thing is, I was typing something up and then my finger slipped, (Cause that wire couldn't be soldered in or something and you had to hold it in place) and all of a sudden, I heard a loud POW and the screen turned off.

DEATHLY Fatality.

Everytime I close down my computer and it tells me

"Program X Has Failed to Close Properly"

End Now? OR Cancel?

Yeah, which am I going to choose? Fuck XP, just select End Now for me so I don't have to feel bad about closing Windows Clock before it's saved all my preferences.

My XP does that too, my worst computer problem would be, well, in comp maintence one of my partners unscrewed the HDD. That was funny, then, he dropped it, while it was exposed. It bounced off the table and onto the carpet. Teacher still doesn't know it was us. We swithced it out with another computer's and acted as if nothing happened.

Alotak:
one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

You can't buy XP, but depending on the version of Vista you have, you can downgrade, as long as you have access to a Windows XP disk. Vista Home Basic is the only one, so far as I know, that has no downgrade rights. Some computer manufacturers have downgrade disks available, and if you have a regular copy of XP that is installed on another computer, you can install it on your Vista box and use the Vista key to activate it. This, of course, entails a call to MSFT's activation support, and XP probably won't have the drivers if your computer was built for Vista, but you can get XP compatible drivers for most Vista units these days.

Didn't happen to me but did happen to my friend, on his XP when he booted up he got this program which normally hides in the background, but today it decided to be Rambo.

It blocked every single .dll file, all of them, it was like a virus made by Microsoft, but it was epic, it even kept running and doing the same thing when we restarted in safe mode. Bastard thing took us an hour to sort out.

Right: In my time I have had all sorts of strange, often not fully explained and expensive PC problems:

1. Dodgy HD gave up every few weeks and meant I had to reinstall windows every time
2. Bad RAM catching fire ("Is it supposed to smell like that?")
3. CoolWebSearch spyware. Took a good few days of solid HijackThis grind to shift it
4. Destroying my graphics card with static discharge (I can't think of any other reason)
5. Shorting out PSU and getting some nice electric shocks
6. Trying to reformat a pair of RAID1 discs to work normally (had three machines running case off...and got nowhere)
7. I think I've had most possible BSoDs over the years
8. Wireless networking

Moral of the story? 2nd hand PCs = bad.

My dad blitzing the ram by putting it in BACKWARDS, i didnt think you could do that

BlazeTheVampire:

Alotak:
one word, Vista.

can you buy Xp in shops still as this SUCKS!

Yeah, you can still buy it in stores. Even better if you're a student, you get a huge discount when you order through your University's bookstore. I've heard that Service Pack 3 may have alleviated the Vista headache, have you downloaded it?

The end date for XP sales has been extended to June 30th, 2008. From what little I've read, I'd guess it's unlikely to be extended again. OEM sales may continue however for very low end machines, where Microsoft recognizes that Vista is too resource-hungry for the hardware, and possibly for large corporate entities where support and software compatibility issues dominate and sheer volume (and the chance these customers might otherwise buy - gasp - Macs!) lends power. But us ordinary mortals will be SOL. Also, most OEMs have ceased offering XP, as other than in a few limited special situations selling XP hurts your quantity discounts from Microsoft, who really wants to move everyone to Vista.

As mshcherbatskaya mentioned, most versions of Vista come with step-down rights. This would obviously be cheaper than buying a new copy of XP (currently $90US at New Egg.) However, Service Pack 1 is out for Vista, which is said to resolve most of the issues with Vista. (Service Pack 3 is for Windows XP.) If you have enough RAM (at least 2GB) and moderate processing and graphics power, then you should be able to get Vista working satisfactorily as long as your hardware (video card if present, motherboard chipset, special controllers, printers, and other hardware) has good Vista drivers available. Laptops are probably in the worst shape, as many have less than 2GB of RAM and also share it with onboard integrated graphics.

You may have to do a repair or even a re-installation, but there's no real need to drop Vista now unless you have a very low end computer or you have older or non-Vista compliant software you need to run. Of course, there's really nothing new or special that Vista brings to the table, either, at least so far.

This whole Vista thing has been a fiasco, but it's about fixed now. Windows XP had similar teething problems, but brought a slew of improvements to compensate. I don't think many people see Vista in that same light. Had Microsoft been smarter, they would have offered only two versions, Basic and Pro, both 64 bit and differing only in the add-ons. Then other companies would have had to write only one new driver and one new version of software, and Vista would have had at least one compelling reason for adoption. In trying to force universal Vista adoption, MS forced Vista on machines not nearly powerful enough to run it, and as a consequence bought themselves a class action lawsuit. But hindsight is 20/20.

Also, I needed to reformat my mothers laptop. At 64 percent, it gave up work and did not want to come back to it. I think it went broke when I turned it off. I still chuckle at it from time to time.

Ok not actually a computer fault but rather one with a phone system (I used to repair them for LG) on one of the old analogue systems I was getting a strange intermittent loss of power and odd smells, checking the resistance across the PSU indicated that it had half shorted so I take the psu board out and underneath it is a mummified mouse which had somehow managed to crawl in there and jam itself between the live rail and ground (messily evacuating it's bowels in the process)

The little guy then became the office mascot for a while before he eventually got shrunk wrapped and stuck in a jiffy bag and then sent through the internal post to one of the girls who worked upstairs.

My first laptop had a habit of randomly freezing for completely unknown reasons. But it never did this after I changed the autosave times on word 98. Never understood why.

As for my current laptop... at first it would just randomly turn off, but leave an annoying whine going. Then it stopped liking the battery. Then it simply refused to turn on at all, making just a depressed whine.
Turned out that the power supply had stopped reducing the current to 19v, completely ruining the battery, and frying the motherboard. The motherboard damage has been fixed (it apparently needed resetting and a tiny bit of soldering), but I haven't replaced the cables yet.

As for my desktop, I think somethings going wrong with the heat sink, it keeps turning on a siren-type-thing and shutting down post haste. Advice?

My brother managed to spill iron brew over his computer...which was funny. From reading this thread it would seem that I have had pretty good luck with computers. Since upgrading to vista though I have not been able to use my recording gear because there are no drivers...really wish I had researched it better.

The day I discovered the file registry on my mom's computer. She never thought of backing it up or even knew it existed until I screwed it up.

Considering I've been a professional computer tech from the age 16-25 (now i'm studying radiology, though).. I've seen all kinds of shitty computer problems. But none ever seem worse then my own. Recently I purchased a new system.. quad-core, 4 gigs of ram, yadda yadda, whatever. But the ram was apparently incompatible with my motherboard.

The problem is that it took awhile to figure that out, because the problem was so intermittent, and the actual symptoms ranged from.. CTD's, to BSOD's, to just full on shut down of the computer. And every stick of ram I tried of the 4 sticks would cause the same problem. I RMA'd the motherboard and it still didn't fix it.

Now I have a new motherboard then from what I started and 4 completely different sticks of ram and I'm finally good to go. It was a costly and lengthy process. When it's a customers computer I have spare parts right around the corner. When you're waiting a week or more for a particular part it's a real pain in the ass.

Of course, not realizing that spell-check isn't functioning in MS Word 2007 until you've written a paper or two is also a pain in the ass. But no software problem can hold a candle to an intermittent hardware problem.

And to those still lampooning Vista. It's been out for awhile now. It works fine. You have to start wondering if perhaps your problems aren't just a User Error? I have no idea how many times I've heard peoples complaints about Vista this or Vista that, when they could have helped themselves the entire time.

Our first family computer(bought near the end of 1998 I think, all I know is that it had a 3,2GB HD and 322mhz processor)
It had the normal first time computer user problems, multiple blue screens and random errors, nothing that actually did any damage and until last year it still worked until my dad decided to replace it.

Our second computer had some problems with crashing, but no real problems, we wiped it every month or two because anti virus software refused to work properly. But when it got older(after nearly 7 years I replaced it with the computer I'm using to type this) it got some interesting problems. It decided to randomly ignore one of the sticks of RAM, it refused to recognize new RAM(which led to two 1gb and a 500mb stick getting wasted). In the last few months before I replaced it, it started to randomly crash but it never got any blue screens.

This current computer.. Well, it already had more problems than both previous computers combined.
My dvd player is called a "cd-ram player" and refuses to play any cd or dvd, it still refuses to work after completely removing and reinstalling anything that was related to the dvd player.
My video card doesn't work like it should(atitool artifact scanner should have a black background, mine has a lot of colors) certain graphics options, which it should display refuse to work.
For some reason older games get lower fps than newer games(CoD1 gets 40fps, CoD4 averages at 60fps)
This computer also has a nasty habit of randomly uninstalling programs, drivers and sometimes recently installed or downloaded programs.(I've had it randomly uninstall steam, my video card drivers, winamp, firefox, game patches and driver updates from a cd, some of those are on my computer for months before they're deleted)

werepossum:

This whole Vista thing has been a fiasco, but it's about fixed now. Windows XP had similar teething problems, but brought a slew of improvements to compensate. I don't think many people see Vista in that same light. Had Microsoft been smarter, they would have offered only two versions, Basic and Pro, both 64 bit and differing only in the add-ons. Then other companies would have had to write only one new driver and one new version of software, and Vista would have had at least one compelling reason for adoption. In trying to force universal Vista adoption, MS forced Vista on machines not nearly powerful enough to run it, and as a consequence bought themselves a class action lawsuit. But hindsight is 20/20.

the only thing that's fixed is they're stopping xp support so that "fixes" the issue that ppl have with not wanting vista, they aren't given a choice

the fiasco with xp was they rushed it and had to issues tons of patches, which they "fixed" by only releasing patches once a week and then once a month.

corps are NOT going to vista, which is the big thing. i know we have no plans of going to vista.

Kais86:
My worst problem is one I'm having all the time right now, the computer will go up until a certain point and then will just freeze, only happens when I am playing DoW or watching a movie on WMP, and while I've worked my way around the second problem the first one is persistent.

check the cpue temp, sounds like an over heating issue or problem with the cpu

either that or you have a ram problem

From what I hear, Vista is going to be canned on the first quarter of 2009. They simply cannot get the support for it.