Tiger433 wrote:

I saw few times dead harddrives because are mounted too near each other, I also see here on vogons that hard drive mounting, why people mount hd`s with no space between them ? That deadly for them, I see two from Maxtor died that way and also from Seagate. I always mount hd`s far from each.

In my experience if you have good case cooling it does not matter so much, but in some of these old cases I agree. My matx server has a 120mm intake in front, 92mm intake on the side and 92mm exhaust on the back. In that particular instance having 5 hard drives crammed together is no problem 😀

Considering death by electricity, in Russia 220V is known to be lethal due to the lack of good safety equipment, general ignorance and hit-and-miss attitude of electricians. It's not the voltage that kills, it's the amperage. There is a well-known type of accident when a welding operator tries welding a half-filled vial while standing inside. Anything more than 12V in that case is considered lethal.

By the way, there's a dumb thing I've heared recently that's connected to the topic. A man installing new "Euro" type wall sockets did not know what to do with the grounding pins as we don't generally have grounded power lines in Russia. He only had two wires: phase and zero. So he decided to plug ground to zero "just because it was zero as well".

That worked until their power station changed commutation scheme from "star" to "triangle" for reasons unclear to me. So now he had 2 phases instead of a phase and a zero. His fridge, PC, TV and several other more or less complex devices went up in smoke.

Having done a bit of DIY electrical work in the last few years I'm kind of horrified by what can go wrong. At least in the UK pretty much all appliances, light fittings etc are earthed to guard against a live conductor coming loose and touching the metal enclosure. Even if the earth comes loose, the RCD at the consumer unit should trip.

The only time I ever electrocuted myself with 240V was by touching the contacts of an AT case switch while it was plugged in. Those things are really unsafe.

This past weekend I went to visit an old HS classmate I hadn't seen in years (he and his family moved to Canada in 2004 and came back to Southern California just recently). As we were catching up, the conversation changed to the time both of us used to build PCs out of his garage for friends, neighbors, and the occasional 3rd party; at the same time, we remembered some rather strange situations with our "clients" back then.

- A woman wanted us to install MS Word. When I asked for the install disks, she handed me her PC's Restore and Recovery disks.

-A neighbor came to us one day to ask a simple question: "Do I need a computer to use Windows 2000?"

- Another neighbor had an OS issue and I asked him for the Windows 98 CD; he gave me an Office 97 CD instead. When I told him I need the CD with the Operating System that came with his PC, he said "Can't you get it off of that?"

- A family member had a file corruption problem every time the PC was turned off. When I asked to show us how he did this, he promptly pulled the power cable from the PSU.

- One time I was shipping some defective software CDs back for replacement. As the Postal clerk was filling out the insurance form he asked me what was inside the box; I told him it was PC software. He promptly asked "Pajamas or underwear?"

Looks like my classmate was right when he said once "The mere presence of a computer can sometimes short circuit normally intelligent people's brains" (I hope no one feels insulted 😊 ).

Tiger433 wrote:

I saw few times dead harddrives because are mounted too near each other, I also see here on vogons that hard drive mounting, why people mount hd`s with no space between them ? That deadly for them, I see two from Maxtor died that way and also from Seagate. I always mount hd`s far from each.

Just reminded me of my old desktop... crazy rather than stupid...
It had: Stacked in 3x 5 1/4" bays ... CD-ROM (later DVD-ROM), 5 1/4" floppy, CD-RW
In 2x vertical 3 1/2" bays ... 3 1/2" floppy and Iomega Ditto 3200 tape (had to dremel the case as the top plate of the Ditto exceeded form factor)
In a hanger off the PSU - 2x hard disk - and since there were extra mounting holes, I staggered the HDDs so they weren't completely sandwiched

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Looks like my classmate was right when he said once "The mere presence of a computer can sometimes short circuit normally intelligent people's brains" (I hope no one feels insulted 😊 ).

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

brassicGamer wrote:

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Looks like my classmate was right when he said once "The mere presence of a computer can sometimes short circuit normally intelligent people's brains" (I hope no one feels insulted 😊 ).

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

Now there's a site I used to visit frequently but lost track of back in 2005 (too many difficult real life issues including two family tragedies). Thanks for the link brassicGamer 😀

I know this is going to sound strange but... I've never intentionally or accidentally done anything to severely screw up an electronic device or computer. :o

I've been extraordinarily careful with these things since childhood and as a result, I've never encountered any situations which would really qualify as "dumb things I've done on a computer". I've done things which have caused problems for sure, but that's the result of doing something which SHOULD have solved an issue, only to result in a new issue being created in the process which made no sense. (Like trying to install a video driver update on Dad's system and breaking access to almost everything in the Control Panel in the process despite not doing anything wrong.)

Mind you, if we go back to when I was like, three or four years old, I used to stick pennies into the slots on the back of our TV set. Resulted in techs coming out a couple times to deal with that. :P

However, when I was a kid, I had to bear witness to some extremely stupid scenarios due to people around me (or more so my mother) who were supposedly "more experienced" than me with computers, thus my own opinion and recommendations would be ignored. One time was when we had one of Mom's friends out to try and fix the CD-ROM on our system as it was giving random bit errors. While watching him work on it, one of the "fixes" he tried was changing the "keyboard refresh rate" in the BIOS. That's seriously the only setting he changed before trying to reboot the system and test the CD-ROM. His initial conclusion was that the games I was trying to play were "too powerful for the CD-ROM drive to handle". Later on we had a floppy drive problem which appeared out of nowhere and when he tried to fix that one, he concluded that the motherboard was physically chipped and needed to be replaced... and when we got the computer back from him the CD-ROM was working properly for the first time ever... somehow. More on that later.

This is what led to our upgrade to a P120, back when 166 MHz was considered top of the line, but due to another of Mom's friends, it almost didn't work out that way, as this other friend suggested going with a cheaper 33 MHz board with more RAM under the suggestion that, "You'd be surprised how fast the system will go with more RAM." Luckily for me, that motherboard didn't physically fit into the case... something you'd think someone with some level of computer hardware knowledge would've been able to figure out without actually trying to do it first. He let us keep the RAM though, so we ended up with 16 MB of RAM on top of the 8 MB already in the system, thus 24 MB RAM at a time when 8 MB was more than enough for most people. :)

Eventually, the first of these two friends went silent after screwing one of Mom's other friends over and Mom slowly realized I knew what I was talking about much better than her friends ever did despite being a teenager and less experienced. This ultimately led to me being the one to replace the CD-ROM drive in said P120 when it failed for good. This was the first time I opened up the P120 on my own accord and when I was attempting to take the CD-ROM out I noticed how tight the power cord stuck into the thing and the sheer amount of force it took to remove it. When I went to put the new drive in my hand merely brushed against the power cord for the hard drive... AND IT FELL OUT. o_O;

If the person who had worked on Mom's system all those years couldn't even plug in a power cord properly, that might've gone a long way to explain the random bit errors the CD-ROM had when it was first installed which ultimately disappeared without explanation, as perhaps the power or data lines simply weren't plugged in perfectly and he had inadvertently knocked one out and put it back in or something? *shrugs* :P

But yeah... even building a system from nothing but components for my very first time, leading to my current 4 GHz system, ultimately succeeded without issue. The very first boot saw no smoke or sparks or blown components or anything.

I have yet to do anything stupid when it comes to electronics or computers and after over 20 years of practice I'm not about to start anytime soon. ;)

That's a nice set of stories there - absolutely brilliant when someone young and unassuming comes along and makes an absolute fool of everyone. I have been that person. When I was about 15, I'd been using computers for years and had just built my first computer (and overclocked it). At this point the Pentium had just been released and everyone and their brother was buying a PC for the first time. My mate's family had got one from Encom (I think that's what it was called, rather than Escom - can't remember) and it was crashing a lot so he asked me to take a look. I worked out fairly quickly that the system was overheating for some reason, making it unstable. I removed the heatsink to find the 486DX4-120 he thought he had bought was actually a DX-100 - these guys were actually selling overclocked machines to increase their margins! Imagine their surprise when a gang of teenage lads turned up in their shop for an explanation. They immediately issued my mate with a genuine 120Mhz CPU and looked VERY sheepish. Makes me wonder how many people actually fell for it! If only they'd spent a few more quid on proper heatsinks they might have got away with it!

However, the funniest thing I've seen all week is this. What's worse: someone who thinks a sticker saying "Designed for Windows 98/ME" means you have to install BOTH operating systems, or the people that tried to help him do it?

Stiletto wrote:

I'm still mystified as to the actual problem. How do PCI cards start misidentifying? What exactly is going on there? Weird.

I had this happen once, but the details are hard to remember.
There was some card that had a corrupted PCI identification that I eventually noticed on the POST screen. It was preventing the driver from recognizing the card. I think the card misidentified in a lower PCI slot, but it identified correctly in one higher up. I think I decided it was because of bad voltages which I attributed to a weak PSU, but I'm not sure if I remember that correctly.

AidanExamineer wrote:

But then we check the user's network drive. It turns out they clicked and dragged everything from their desktop into the network drive. But since the Recycle Bin and My Computer were also selected (and you can't move those), a batch of shortcuts to their files were created in the network drive. Instead of copying a few GB of desktop files, they copied a few KB of shortcuts.

I have a deep mistrust of clicking and dragging files. I never know what it's going to do. Move the files? Copy the files? Make shortcuts? I hate the vagueness of it.

My family's first home-built PC was configured by calling local shops and finding the cheapest motherboard. And that's how we ended up with a PCChips 486.

I started working inside my K6 system while it was running. When my screwdriver contacted the board, I heard a loud pop as it shut off. Everything survived.

I had several Dell P3 GX150 boards. A few had Tualatin support, but all the heatsinks were intended for CPUs without heatspreaders. I didn't get the significance of that at the time.
I was excited to try out a P3-S 1.4GHz, so I installed it and clipped on one of the heatsinks. It latched a bit tight but I didn't think much of it. I powered it up with the new CPU and booted into Windows. Cool, it works. A few minutes later I suddenly hear a metallic TWING! - CLATTER. The heatsink clip had snapped the socket and launched itself several feet into the air and hit the ground somewhere behind me.

Within the past year, I had an MSI 875P board rigged up somewhat precariously on a piece of cardboard, balanced on top of another PC case. It had an AGP card installed and nearby was a hard drive and a PSU+DVD stack.
I bumped something. The board fell, and thanks to the wires, all the components toppled down after it. They hit the video card.
I found the AGP slot severely bent. I twisted the AGP card until the slot was straight again. It still works.

I once got a phone call from an acquaintance. He was on the internet researching memory upgrades for his computer. He decided he needed to look at what kind of RAM he had, so he absent mindedly popped out one of the modules. Now, at this point, he realized he had just done something dumb. However, the system stayed running. I didn't see it, but he told me that Windows XP popped up a friendly warning message, saying something like "Memory Size Reduced". I'm kind of blown away that Windows recognized what was happening and tried to deal with it like that.
This message led to a tragic misunderstanding. He thought "wow, so it's okay to do this!". He stuck the RAM back in the PC, still running, and this time didn't get so lucky. He scorched the DIMM socket and killed the RAM.

shamino wrote:

He stuck the RAM back in the PC, still running, and this time didn't get so lucky. He scorched the DIMM socket and killed the RAM.

This has become like The Darwin Awards, but for computers.

brassicGamer wrote:

However, the funniest thing I've seen all week is this. What's worse: someone who thinks a sticker saying "Designed for Windows 98/ME" means you have to install BOTH operating systems, or the people that tried to help him do it?

OMG that topic is epic!

Just remembered another one.
When cleaning my C2D for the first time, I decided to remove the cooler and look at the pocessor (I've never touched a S775 CPU by that time). I took it out, rotated it in my hands and put it back in. After I installed everything back in place, the system stopped POSTing! For three days I tried to find an answer, tearing the hair on my head and not getting results. On the forth day I found a dog hair between the CPU and the socket 😁 We had a beautiful Collie back then, Cassie's the name, and hair got everywhere including food and beverages... The next time and LGA machine does not POST, if nothing helps, look under the CPU! 😀

shamino wrote:

My family's first home-built PC was configured by calling local shops and finding the cheapest motherboard.

Heh. When I skimmed your post, I actually read this as "My family's first home-built PC was configured to call local shops and find the cheapest motherboard". And I was like - "Wow, that was a smart PC!" 🤣

Back in 2004, I had just gotten a new digital camera, and was trying to figure out how to hook it to my custom-built computer, which at the time lacked front USB ports (Limited funds unfortunately forced me to go as bargain-basement as possible on the parts). I purchased a small pocket USB hub and stuck it to the top of my computer case to add makeshift front USB ports. Unfortunately, it was an unpowered hub, and thus wasn't able to provide enough power to run the camera while connected in USB mode. The hub DID have a DC power input on it though, I just lacked the proper adapter for it.

However, a few years prior I had purchased an external PCMCIA drive enclosure for my laptop that also drew power from the PS/2 port using a special cable. One day, I noticed the drive enclosure's PS/2 power cable just so happened to fit the power input on the USB hub. I knew the hub required 5VDC input, and I knew the PS/2 port put out 5VDC...

...I think you can figure out what happened next. :p

No big loss though, it was an ECS motherboard. 🤣

brassicGamer wrote:

My mate's family had got one from Encom (I think that's what it was called, rather than Escom - can't remember) and it was crashing a lot so he asked me to take a look. I worked out fairly quickly that the system was overheating for some reason, making it unstable.

I blame the Master Control Program. 😉

Stiletto wrote:

I blame the Master Control Program. ;) […]
Show full quote

brassicGamer wrote:

My mate's family had got one from Encom (I think that's what it was called, rather than Escom - can't remember) and it was crashing a lot so he asked me to take a look. I worked out fairly quickly that the system was overheating for some reason, making it unstable.

I blame the Master Control Program. 😉

Nice. Opportunity not missed.

Well I once put 333 MHz DDR RAM in a 400 MHz slot... forgetting that I had manually set the motherboard to 400 MHz. The motherboard and RAM went up in smoke.

ncmark wrote:

Well I once put 333 MHz DDR RAM in a 400 MHz slot... forgetting that I had manually set the motherboard to 400 MHz. The motherboard and RAM went up in smoke.

I find that highly unlikely.

There is no such thing as "400MHz slot". The clocks are set in the BIOS and are for all slots at once. Furthermore, I have never seen, or even heard of, RAM or motherboard being damaged by trying to run at clocks it can't handle. It simply won't POST.

Either you made this up, or you had an unrelated issue (maybe you put it in wrong, or maybe used the wrong physical type of RAM, or shorted something in the process), or you had the luck of owning what is probably the crappiest hardware ever made.

If the latter is the case, then you didn't do anything stupid. It's just that whoever engineered that hardware should have his arms cut off and shoved up... you know where. 😀

Here is a new entry. I feel bad for the guy but I don't know what to suggest.