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Weirdest puter-related thing that happened to you?


Ropera

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I used to do in-home tech support calls on the side (still do a bit, but i just can't stand people asking me such basic questions like how to use a mouse anymore)...

I once had a client who called me saying that her computer kept freezing for no reason. So I went over in the hopes of simply doing a windows fresh re-install.

I walk up to the computer, bend down and hit the power button. As soon as I hit the power button...

POW!

So loud in fact that the client screamed, I fell on my a** and got to watch a nice smoke show from the back of the tower.

Turns out that the power supply shorted because she has three cats and she smokes heavily. The combination of cat hair and cigarette ash just shorted out the power supply. I just happen to be the lucky victim to witness it's loud death. It took almost everything with it too. It killed the motherboard, the hard drive, the cd-rom, the cd-writer and the floppy.

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Damned no. It's not MY neglect, so she had to fork out for all new components and being that it's was an older computer then she had no choice but to change her CPU and RAM as well since there were no more boards in existance that supported her CPU.

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Back in 2000, when I was a real dumb novice in PC hardware, someone made me a PC, and when I had to reinstall Windows, I had no concept of thrid party drivers. The result was I attempted to install a PCI modem in the PC when it was on, assuming it didnt work because it wasnt being detected properly, and that it would magically work if i plugged it in with Windows running. It was actually a driver problem, I got away with plugging it in and removing it a few times, but i didnt find that out til replacing the hard disk which was destroyed when i shorted the computer.

Well those were all my fault, totally not of my doing was running Windows on a Pentium II PC and the processor caught fire! The horrid smell of the sindged CPU socket and melting motherboard and smoke stays with my today.

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Back in 2000, when I was a real dumb novice in PC hardware, someone made me a PC, and when I had to reinstall Windows, I had no concept of thrid party drivers. The result was  I attempted to install a PCI modem in the PC when it was on, assuming it didnt work because it wasnt being detected properly, and that it would magically work if i plugged it in with Windows running. It was actually a driver problem, I got away with plugging it in and removing it a few times,  but i didnt find that out til replacing the hard disk which was destroyed when i shorted the computer.

Well those were all my fault, totally not of my doing was running Windows on a Pentium II PC and the processor caught fire! The horrid smell of the sindged CPU socket and melting motherboard and smoke stays with my today.

Why did you even DO that with the PC on!? :lol:

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if you tell someone this i'll kill you!

about 7 years ago or so i was a noob on this world and i tried to insert a LAN PCI on an old ISA slot... that was hard but with a screwdriver and a hammer(!) i diiid it!! :lol::lol:

after boot i thought... hey this isn't working! :whistle:

finally i checked that all my PCIs were busy and only the ISA slot was alone... the hole was f*** but i still use the LAN card :lol:

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I see from all other posts that, alas, I am becoming very very old.

:no:

I used to work in a big construction company, and though being just an amateur at PC, often my colleagues called me to help them.

We are talking about the good old DOS 3.3 to DOS 5.0 times.

Our company bought a few "New" IBM PC's (if I remember it correctly they costed at the time, circa 1988÷1990, something like $2,500 dollars apiece, 286 or 386SX 25Mhz with 4 Mb RAM), and they were the first ones with 3 1/2" floppies.

The PC guy just replaced the PC's without saying anything, and a few days later a secretary called me saying she couldn't read from the floppy.

After trying an "A:" and getting "Device not ready" error, I realized she had somehow forced a 5 1/4" 1.2 Mb floppy in the GAP between the 3 1/2" floppy drive and the PC cabinet!

:w00t:

I had to use a pair of pliers to extract the poor little thing! :thumbup

jaclaz

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About 5 years ago I worked with a small IT consultant company here in Norway. We had installed a business solution software (finance, mps, production etc). We had set up backup routines etc. for the IT dept to follow. Everything looked fine.

1 year later, this customer had a major crach on one of the servers, and we were called in to clean up the mess concerning the business solution. We asked for the backup (5 1/4 '' floppy) to restore data. The IT executive handed us a folder. We opened it, and - this is true - the floppies were neatly dated and perforated with two holes to fit in the folder :wacko:

Needless to say, there was no backup from that FY...

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1 year later, this customer had a major crach on one of the servers, and we were called in to clean up the mess concerning the business solution. We asked for the backup (5 1/4 '' floppy) to restore data. The IT executive handed us a folder. We opened it, and - this is true - the floppies were neatly dated and perforated with two holes to fit in the folder :wacko:

Needless to say, there was no backup from that FY...

You've got to be kidding me... How stupid can some people be!? :w00t:

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The worst thing that had hapend to me, is that i put a full 3 1/4 inch disk in the drive, opend windows explorer go to the a drive, and after about 5 hours a message popped up saying to me "The disk in drive A: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?".

i went completly nuts over it, because it took 5 hours

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Hello All!

My weirdst thing was fixing a computer for a client. My buddy and I were trying to get a mouse to work under win95. It took us 2 days for figure it out it was the ribbin cable that connect to the mobo and different set of pin outs. We made a custom cable w/ the correct pin outs. It worked perfectly. We had a whole much of cables from other mobo spare parts laying around. Non of them worked, that's why we made the custom cable.

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GH knows about this, once, on the macs at school, when we tried to click on an icon, they would jump to another spot on the screen, and make a sound, really quite wierd, until gh showed us the program that did it, and that led to other serious problems.....

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GH knows about this, once, on the macs at school, when we tried to click on an icon, they would jump to another spot on the screen, and make a sound, really quite wierd, until gh showed us the program that did it, and that led to other serious problems.....

That was priceless! :lol: The looks on those grade 2ers... Trying to figure out how to open the **** program! :w00t:

We eventually got caught! :whistle: Wasn't THAT serious... ;)

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