Beginners Guides: Most Common Ways to Kill a PC

[qubit]

Computers should be essentially immortal right? They are just a collection of circuits and signals, and as long as power flows to them, they should continue to operate; there's nothing to break down, nothing to age... uh-huh. Anyone who's ever owned a computer knows that this is not quite true.

Computers and their component parts do have a finite life span, and just like us, they have a list of afflictions that are most likely to claim their digital existences. Also just like us, most of these problems stem from careless handling, neglect, unhealthy environments and old age. Toss careless manufacturing into the mix, and you can see why the average computer system rarely survives more than ten years without some sort of catastrophic failure.

This is a great article and has many humorous gems like:

"...a friend of mine bought a new 1.3GHz Pentium 3 processor and installed it into his PC. He then plugged everything in and turned the power on. After realizing he could smell something burning, he noticed he was still holding the processor's heatsink and fan in his hand!"

What's your favourite bit?

pcstats.com

 

[DirectorC]

I once pencil-modded an Athlon 900. It fried upon boot. Then I bought and installed a Duron 800 on to that same board (An Abit K7 board or some kind) and fried it too. I figured the board got fried from the CPU mod going bad, or that when I was installing the heatsink and the screwdriver slipped and nicked the mobo that it killed the board. Either way, I threw away like $600 in hardware in one day, attempting a pencil mod that may have netted me a couple extra hundred MHz. I went back to my Celeron 366@550 til I got an Athlon XP 2000+.

 

[eidairaman1]

Killed an Athlon XP 3200+ (Before Week 39 in 2003) by crushing it and accidently caused a card to start artifacting, a heatsink fell on it.

 

[Jetster]

About 5 years ago i tried to clean off the thermal compound when the CPU was in the socket. The alcohol ran into it and when i turned it on the sparks flew.

 

[MRCL]

I melted an Athlon 64 once... was my first oc experience, and I was like 15, and I was far from being the PC God (lol) I am now Anyway, I overclocked it but it didn't occur to me that overclocking = more heat, so... and upon inspecting what went wrong, I tried to dismount the heatsink with a screwdriver, slipped off and killed the mobo, too.

And my most recent fail is when liquid dropped on a running 5850. 400 bucks down the drain. And RMA is hardly an option. I cleaned the card, but even a blind fetus would notice immediately that this is no ordinary fault. Mainly because the barcode sticker has suspicious water marks, and brown spots indicating oxidation are all over the place.

 

[human_error]

managed to kill an x1950xtx and the rma'd replacement over a 1.5 year period - was in an xfire setup (back in the old master/slave days) and i killed it the first time adding a new HDD - as i was putting it into the hard drive cage it slipped and dropped into the back of the card - tiny chip in the PCB and a few tiny components missing from the ram circuit control. Then it was RMAd and it's replacement was very happy, until i was modifying my water cooling loop and dropped a screwdriver onto the back (again almost the same spot as before ). Killed that card too and got me a 3870x2 - i will never buy a graphics card without a decent backplate again as they're just too vulnerable otherwise

almost managed to kill my 4870x2 last year as well - had a leak on my cpu block after another wc loop upgrade and got coolant all over the back of the card - didnt notice until i'd tried to get the pc to run 5/6 times after it shut down mid benchmark - didn't notice the massive puddle of blue coolant over the back of the card. Had to disassemble the cooling (damned backplate got in the way this time ) and dried it out - it ran fine for months afterward until i replaced it and even the stickers which were stained blue and now pure white again thank god for non-conductive coolant is all i have to say about that...

 

[codyjansen]

im so happy i have not killed anything yet!

i have only built one system

 

[eidairaman1]

Now I know why you call yourself human_error

managed to kill an x1950xtx and the rma'd replacement over a 1.5 year period - was in an xfire setup (back in the old master/slave days) and i killed it the first time adding a new HDD - as i was putting it into the hard drive cage it slipped and dropped into the back of the card - tiny chip in the PCB and a few tiny components missing from the ram circuit control. Then it was RMAd and it's replacement was very happy, until i was modifying my water cooling loop and dropped a screwdriver onto the back (again almost the same spot as before ). Killed that card too and got me a 3870x2 - i will never buy a graphics card without a decent backplate again as they're just too vulnerable otherwise

almost managed to kill my 4870x2 last year as well - had a leak on my cpu block after another wc loop upgrade and got coolant all over the back of the card - didnt notice until i'd tried to get the pc to run 5/6 times after it shut down mid benchmark - didn't notice the massive puddle of blue coolant over the back of the card. Had to disassemble the cooling (damned backplate got in the way this time ) and dried it out - it ran fine for months afterward until i replaced it and even the stickers which were stained blue and now pure white again thank god for non-conductive coolant is all i have to say about that...