Computer Horror Stories

I'm sure we've all had our fair share of computer woes - I know I have. I remember once back in 2003 my computer was full of viruses. I hadn't defragged or anything in a long time (stupid, I know). I had Windows98 SE (cue joke here) and whenever I got to the damned desktop, everything would freeze. Couldn't move the mouse cursor, couldn't do a damn thing. When I would push one of the keyboard's letter keys the contraption would beep at me, like "Fuck you!" Needless to say I was very pissed off. At the time I didn't have a CD writer in the computer and couldn't save anything and I knew I was going to have to format. It made me a very sad person :(
I would love to hear you people's computer horror stories, I'm sure there's no shortage of them ;P

Around this time last year I was still using 98, not SE, and I didn't have any trouble with it despite it being a 3+ year old install. Never defragged my 80 GB HD either. I guess it was running on magic.

Can't say I have any horror stories as no hardware died on me since the MSI mobo in my previous comp that didn't survive the third consecutive fried PSU sometime in 2005 or 2006.

My new comp gave me a bit of a nasty surprise with repeated bluescreens when installing and trying to run Windows. Turned out the memory needed more juice than the default BIOS voltage setting was giving it.

I cannot start my computers, when the time of them is over. They are damaged and then I need a new one. I have external hard disk drives, because of it and everything is fine.

About half a year ago, my computer decided it hated me.

First, the System file got corrupted (this was on Vista, which had been running fine for a year until now). Some school acquaintances had been filling my ear with the glory of Linux for quite a while now. So I backed up my files onto a few flash drives, read up on partitioning, and burned a Ubuntu installation CD.

It was a nightmare. Not because of Linux, you understand. But my computer would go to sleep about every ten minutes. And I could not get it running again. The monitor would go to sleep, the computer would hum along and not do anything, and I would stare dumbly at it before working on it some more.

I even reset the BIOS to no effect.

So one of my most prized possessions is little more than a boat anchor next to my desk, and I'm stuck using the five year old family e-machine.

My seven year Sony Pentium 3 550MHz is dead.
My two year eMachines AMD Athlon 64 x2 2.1GHz is dead.
My six month eMachines AMD Athlon 64 2.4GHz is dead.
Around 5 hard drives have had the click of death.
A single SSD died and no longer works.
Two motherboards have been fried.
One computer got poured on by water from melted ice.
Some sticks of RAM blew up in the computer.

Everytime someone ask me for help with their computer. I scream inside. Then I smile and say... ok.

Hey Kristus, could you help me out with mah computer? I heard you were good with that stuff. It's totally okay if you can't, it's not like you're obligated to give aid to your fellow man. I'll totally understand if you can't. I'll just give you a dirty look and stare, lost, at my computer and make weird, confused noises until you take pity and help me.

Here's mine.
I had a Mid 2007 iMac with 1GB RAM and 250 GB HDD with 8GB left. On November 30, 2009, I was playing Map 19 the Kama Sutra wad in PrBoom+ full screen. I was shooting the cyberdemon, I started noticing everything was going slow. I was then going to shoot a group of imps, but when I pressed it, it froze for several second, it still shot, but then it froze for 2-3 minutes and then it faded to black. I turned it back on, only to get the dreaded question mark. I tried all the methods to get it working, but they failed. I took it to Best Buy, only to find out that the HD was toast and they had to reformat it. The only good thing that came out of it is they upgraded it with 3GB RAM and 1 TB HD.

Revved said:

Here's mine.
I had a Mid 2007 iMac with 1GB RAM and 250 GB HDD with 8GB left. On November 30, 2009, I was playing Map 19 the Kama Sutra wad in PrBoom+ full screen. I was shooting the cyberdemon, I started noticing everything was going slow. I was then going to shoot a group of imps, but when I pressed it, it froze for several second, it still shot, but then it froze for 2-3 minutes and then it faded to black. I turned it back on, only to get the dreaded question mark. I tried all the methods to get it working, but they failed. I took it to Best Buy, only to find out that the HD was toast and they had to reformat it. The only good thing that came out of it is they upgraded it with 3GB RAM and 1 TB HD.

So you shot a Cyberdemon and then it took revenge on you by destroying your hard drive. That's nasty!

My story? I had spyware that made popups appear like every second no matter what and also blocked Google and Yahoo. Tried to remove it in every way i could find(Managed to get on Google thru a proxy) but still it didn't work. A day later i just gave up and formatted my PC.

I have a horror-ish story that turned out good in the end, plus I learned some shit. I posted this b4, but not here on Doomworld. Will do a copy pasta and edit some of it...

Last Halloween I remembered that Guild Wars was running the Halloween event, so I decided to boot my gaming PC to check things out. All I got was a blank screen..... and some clicking noises.

My Western Digital, Sata 250GB HD had died. I checked cables and tried replacement cables and everything I could think of. Going into the Bios showed the comp wasn't even detecting the drive.

I needed a new drive so I checked online for a decent price. I found a Seagate, Sata 500GB for $65 at a local shop. I just happened to have a $50 certificate for the store because I won it online (had to go to the shop to pick it up at the time). So I buy the Seagate and with the sales tax, minus the $50 I get the HD for $23. At this point I kinda gave up on the dead drive, thinking it's history.

A few days later... I burn a Linux - Knoppix CD, to see if I can get on the drive, since Knoppix boots directly off the CD. Knoppix loaded on the PC but it wasn't seeing the drive (no surprise there). I decided to read up more on data recovery. So after reading about freezing drives, I decide to try it. I took my HD and put it inside a zip lock bag and stuck it inside the freezer alongside the frozen waffles and bread.

Over 24 hours later I put the frozen drive back in the PC. I pop open the CD tray and put my Knoppix CD in and then take my external 1TB HD from my other comp and plug that in to the USB port on the front of the game machine. I power on and Knoppix loads and TA DA!!!! I can see my drive! OMG! I moved everything I could find, game files, saves, wallpapers, icons and other assorted stuff. I was able to access the drive for an 1½ hours and saved about 15GB of stuff.

So I ended up with a larger drive for $23, learned something and got all my files back. :D Not bad considering a drive died.

Thanks to the freezer, I ended up playing Fallout 3 where I left off. :D

Heh. I went through my own horror story back in early 2008. One day after coming home from school, I went upstairs to find that my computer had.. stopped functioning (screen was black, no BSOD, computer was still on). That wasn't a good sign. I booted it cold, and it didn't even POST. Fuck. At that point I decided that the problem was either the CPU, the RAM, the PSU, or the dreaded motherboard. Over the next month and a half I went through the process of RMAing each part, with each part contributing nothing to my situation except further grief.

Now the punch line: The problem was my faulty heatsink that had decided to stop sitting on the motherboard properly, causing some sort of.. thing. Yeah, weird, I know. Got a new one and everything was hunky dory again.

But it doesn't end there. Since then, I had that brand new heatsink fail again, and my brand new motherboard short out. Fuck fuck double fuck. That all happened over the course of 2008, and I haven't had a problem since.

The only threatening virus that I've ever had to deal with popped up somewhat stealthily on my old lap top. For some reason, after having flown 21 hours from Melbourne to Heathrow, the whole thing started working again unassisted. Flawlessly too.

Is it possible that the cabin pressure killed the virus?

Do viruses feel pain?

I issued a shutdown command on a server, neglecting to check that I was on the correct server. Bye bye multi-terabyte GIS production system.

Another time, I needed to restart a server, but somehow managed to shutdown the box instead. It had no management interface (allowing you to connect to the KVM regardless of whether the server is on or not) so I had to get an engineer out to power it back on. Easy enough. Except I sent him to the wrong datacenter at the other end of town (1 hours drive during rush hour).

baronofheck82 said:

whenever I got to the damned desktop, everything would freeze. Couldn't move the mouse cursor, couldn't do a damn thing. When I would push one of the keyboard's letter keys the contraption would beep at me, like "Fuck you!"

I feel like that happened to everyone in 2003, back when spyware was new and exciting.

Perhaps not a computer horror story, but I didn't buy a printer from 1995 to 2008 so in that interim period I printed at Kinkos.

I've had a lot of trouble with display chips, especially nVidia cards with built-in power supplies.

Dust gets caught in the fan, the adapter shorts out and the screen goes black, usually taking out the hard drive after a few of these episodes.

Also, my CD-Rom drive had a "code 19" error for a while, but all it needed was a quick registry fix. No explosions, fatal viral invasions, acrid smoke, stolen identity, etc., just hardware failure and driver issues.

Looks like the brain termites got you those days. :p

A friend of mine bought a rather expensive computer build from a store here. The thing is nightmare in itself. Both ethernet ports on the mobo are dodgy and the store claimed they couldn't find an issue. I ended up sticking a $15 NIC in there to fix it. Then the huge Zalman cooler on the CPU died. If you've never seen them, Zalman coolers tend to have a fan built into a huge radial heatsink. If the fan dies you're fucked. I helped him replace it with the stock heatsink that came with the CPU. All is well now, but he has a three-pound lump of copper with no use. The guy's other ancient Dell computer is a nightmare too. It's on its third PSU and its third video card. At one point when we didn't have another decent card to put in he was using an olde 8 MB Rage 128 Pro I gave him. That's the first time I've ever seen a sluggish XP desktop on an ATI card.

Well, the only computer I've ever owned is still going strong, with the original motherboard and hard drive still doing their jobs, so I guess nothing that's happened to me could qualify as a "horror story." However, there is this thread, which details the story of how I spent $200 on a graphics upgrade which never quite upgraded my graphics, thanks to some absolutely freakish hardware incompatibility. (I was also too late to return the video card that I bought, so there's a brand-new, unused 9800GT sitting in one of my dresser drawers.)

My brother had an odd problem with his DVD drive that randomly disappeared - every time he put DVDs in the PC would bluescreen. CDs were fine (even holding shift to prevent autorun wouldn't stop it). Never worked out what was causing it.

I bought from Dell.

Three times.

I haven't had a problem for four years. A few weeks ago, XP wouldn't even boot anymore, so I just reformatted it. I guess the guy who sold me this computer made a copy of his XP Pro CD, because now mine isn't genuine.

Heh. I worked at army tech support for a year, and since I was left in lieu of the actual Informatics Company commander most of the time, I had personal responsibility for most of the stuff that came in and out, so I literally went through hoops trying to resurrect dead mobos with bad caps, replacing fuses and transistors from blown PSUs, trying extreme voodoo to repair and upgrade a windows installation without deleting as much as a single file etc.

I estimate I must have personally repaired about 150 PCs in that period, and yeah I saw some pretty fucked up shit. I've already posted a few here and there on DW, I may dig some up later and/or think of some new ones.

I'll only mention a few recurring themes: almost all PCs that were brought in were extremely dusty, and we had a LEAF BLOWER to clean them up before going anywhere near the innards. I had one smoking dust for almost 2 FUCKING MINUTES.

A lot of those PC came in with very vague descriptions such as "malfunctioning", "not booting", "BSODing", "freezing", "too slow" etc.

The most common actual ailments were dying HDs, bloated installations (when you only have 192 MB for an XP machine, even basic services are bloat), bad caps on certain models of mobos (I got to the point of diagnosing the problem just by looking at the back of PC and identifying the bad mobo, without even opening the box), extremely outdated windows XP installations, lost passwords, drivers that had never been properly installed etc.

I also had a few horror stories on my PCs, but I'll digress on that later.

My Dell Computer's hard drive started to die last year. Websites took five minutes to load, and several files were unalterable. I wasn't able to recover all the files I needed. Since I had already spent well over $100 total fixing the problems the Dell had every month, I decided to build a new PC instead of getting a new hard drive. And I think it was a good idea.

I had just started college and was pretty excited to get a new kick-ass computer to play Counter-Strike with my dorm mates. I asked my uncle about getting a new computer and he recommended me a computer guy who could build one for a fair price.

Two months later, it started to malfunction. I would play CS for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes before the computer froze and looped the last sound it was playing. It got so bad that the desktop was showing artifacts at bootup and the computer wouldn't even let me play freaking Solitaire without freezing. I brought the computer back to the computer guy to see if he could fix it. He said it was an overheating video card and stuck a fan onto it. He installed Unreal Tournament and played for a few minutes to show that the fan fixed the problem. Yeah, it worked for about a week then started malfunctioning again. Finally I said "screw it", put it in my closet and took over my sister's HP computer.

A few years later, I was learning about building my own computer when I decided to look at my malfunctioning computer and see if I could salvage it. I took parts from it and stuck them into compatible computers to see if they were still working. The ram, HD, video card, mobo and sound card were working just fine. I found out the power supply was the problem. It just didn't provide enough juice to do anything. Even the el cheapo PSU from my sister's computer had more wattage than the POS the computer guy had stuck in my computer, and they were purchased at around the same time and had similar specs.

That damn PSU gave me a lot of grief and had I known about it before, I would have replaced it in a flash. Still, it was one of those situations where experience comes just after you need it and it sticks with you.

If you want to have a good laugh at other people's computer horror stories, coupled with the infamy of being associated with a rather overpriced (for its capabilities anyway) piece of shitty hardware, go to Creative Labs forums: nearly every one of their products is broken in the hardware, in the drivers, in the software, or all of them together.

Especially the PCI line of Audigy sound cards, from the 1 up to the X-Fi, seem to be the most unreliable, temperamental and non-compliant expansion cards ever made, leading from "Hiss, Crackle and Pops" to BSODs to outright hardware damage.

And what's funnier is the constant flamewar between angry customers, forum admins, obvious paid shills and trolls. One of those shills was particularly hilarious, as he claimed that only HE had the super-stable "golden system" on which the CL shit worked perfectly everytime, and practically everybody else had a broken computer and just didn't know it.

A couple harddrives pooped out, nothing major, no real loss since I back up shit. My doomy win98 machine built in in 2000 still running, and my Athlon 64 built in 2004 is still well.

Boot nuking a computer and forgetting where the drivers are.

Losing loads of work on a Doom wad and RPG Maker 2003 game due to an endless series of screwups on my old XP computer, it would just suddenly say "the installation is corrupt, perform a repair...... oh yeah the repair involves a format, vital files? sucks to be you!". Mind you it was acting stupid before that, changing user profiles and making new ones with random names, so i should have taken the hint and backed everything up.

Also i had a spate of wierd crashes with Zdoom, one incident i remember was playing that cool wad by Lil' White Mouse where you have to escape a mine at the end, i ran into some tunnels and saw some demons, then the computer reset itself.

Also once my parents got me to "just quickly" get some photos off a USB stick, and my computer chose that moment to 'disagree' with the USB stick and go wrong when it was put in. You know when you click something and the computer appears to do something and then just does nothing? It was doing that whenever i tried to open anything with this stick plugged in... for five restarts! I only meant to take a minute or so to copy some pictures.

Also my really old scanner used to un-install itself every 10th use (i was making a regular webcomic then... JOY). You had to start up, see the screwup, restart, uninstall the drivers, unplug the scanner, restart, restart, install the drivers, restart and plug the scanner back in. If you missed any of those steps from complete "nope, no scanner ever installed and plugged in here, bub" to installed again it would fuck up.

In the end i took the bastard outside and hacked at it madly with an axe... that felt good. Same with the keyboard where the T and Y stopped working (but only when the computer was fully booted... if you pressed them while it was starting it would beep the same as any other key).

Maes said:

Rant about Creative Labs

Hahahaha! Dell sells a lot of Creative cards. The nastiest ones are the kind that go in the ExpressCard slots on laptops. On Vista they never work! I spent two hours trying to get one to work for a customer one day. I told her to send it back. Turns out they use the same chips as the el-cheapo Sigmatel cards Dell puts in anyway. The only difference is the software. This is re-enforced by the fact that you can buy Audigy software for regular Sigmatel cards from Dell. It's a scam. As it turns out the way to get these things to install on Vista is to disable UAC. Too bad Creative has nothing to say on the matter. They'd rather just rape you up the ass.

I think my hard drive may be failing.

So run a chkdsk /p on it. If it is failing try a chkdsk /r to fix the errors. If it's physically failing then now is a good time to back up. :/

Oh yeah, chkdsk /r on a big drive takes hours to run, but it scans for bad sectors and tries its best at a repair.