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What's your most horribly botched upgrade? Here's mine:

1. Buy new CPU
2. Remove old CPU
3. Install new CPU
4. Watch as machine fails to boot
5. Use a second machine to access the Internet, and discover that while your motherboard officially supports this new CPU, it needs a BIOS upgrade.
6. Realize that you need to reinstall the old CPU in order to boot the machine and perform the BIOS upgrade.
7. Remove the new CPU.
8. Install the old CPU. In the process, the new CPU, which you left laying on top of a stack of books, is knocked off the table accidentally (along with the stack of books).
9. Install the BIOS upgrade using the old CPU.
10. Remove the old CPU.
11. Closely examine the new CPU which you rescued from the pile of books on the floor. Notice that several pins are badly bent
12. Try to bend back pins into shape with your fingers. Fail. Try again with needle-nose pliers.
13. Apply too much force and break off one of the pins
14. Reinstall the old CPU.

Yes, this actually happened to me once, a few years ago.

Putting a GeForce4 GTS (AGP 2.x) into an old AGP 1.0 slot without knowing a lick about the different voltages the AGP versions run on. A $150 graphics card, completely HOSED. At least I'd gotten it for free (Thanks Kernel!)

P.S. if anyone sees Kernel on, tell him I said 'thanks for the Audigy too, it works great!'

For future reference, boxcutters ROCK for fixing bent pins on chips. As for my own experiences...this wasn't my own, but a customer brought a system in with a new chip they'd put in themselves. Wouldn't boot, I tested a few components, then went to pull the chip. Removed it....and stared. Literally at least 50 of the pins were horribly bent, at least one at a full right angle.

The crazy bit? We got it to work.

First time I ever built my own computer. Got a new case and mobo and everything. I get it all set up and boot it. POST was successful but for some reason I couldn't get any IDE drives to detect.

I took it into my boss at the time, who was a computer wizard. We spend some time diagnosing the problem until we find out what it was.

I didn't realize that those little screw things (risers) were to hold the motherboard off the side of the case...

Fortunately I didn't short out my motherboard.



I also tried to boot that same computer with an ancient 8GB Quantum Fireball out of a Compaq Presario. Yeah, no dice. Did you know that Presarios are very finicky if you try to put them back together again after ripping them apart?

My computer one day fail to boot up after adding some memory to it.
After I brought a new motherboard, CPU, and memory the computer still failed to start up.

Turned out my scsi card was bad. About $600 dollars to fix a $40 card.

Many, many years ago, we got a 10x CD-ROM. Goddamn, it was FAST! Anyway, I popped open the case and installed it. For some reason, though, I torqued the everloving shit out of the screws that hold it in the bay. This meant that the CD-ROM would open, but not close. If you hit the open/close button a second time, in fact, it stopped working and you had to reboot. This is on a 486/66, BTW, so rebooting was a ten minute adventure anyways. The only way to close it was to push it shut.

Fast-forward three fucking years, when I finally get a burner, I'm unscrewing the 10X to move it down a bay (our tower was like 6 feet tall), and lo and behold, I discover it works perfectly.

I put up with that hunk of shit for three years. That's a little less than a seventh of my life.

My current computer, which is built from parts and replaced my old one, is botched up enough for me...

1. Buy equipment.
2. Install everything.
3. Switch on, fans stop moving after 1 second, smell smoke, frantically pull power plug.
4. Uninstall everything. Note burnt IC on hard drive. Power supply not working anymore.
5. Race to shop (20 minutes before closing), let them test it. Result: HD defect, mainboard defect.
6. Go home, build replaced parts in, start computer, see graphic card not working properly. Use old card to test AGP port, works.
7. Get new card (this one actually took several weeks, had to live with the old one. X800XTs had a terrible availability).
8. Realise DVD-burner won't read neither DVD nor CDs. Get new one.

All in all, the only components that have NOT been replaced at least once, where the casing, the processor, the normal DVD drive, and the memory. All other components did fail at least once.
I was not a happy boy...

I didn't realize that those little screw things (risers) were to hold the motherboard off the side of the case...

I did that too, the first time I ever built a computer from scratch. Looking back, alls I can do is smack me forehead.

Probably took a kick to the crotch from the power supply when it went. Seen that happen before..hellfires, I saw a system that had soot all over the inside, from an /electrical fire/. The motherboard had welded itself to the case from the heat, couldn't even begin to unscrew the standoffs.

Not using proper grounding when installing a Voodoo2 card in my old Power Mac clone (which is probably recycled slag by now...). I touched a resister on the board and felt a *ZAP* in my fingers. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. I had just spent all my savings on this damn card! Well, I plug it in and hope for the best. Amazing, the card worked. It displayed some noise the screen for second for a couple of years when I fired up a 3D game, but it worked!

Darth Wong wrote:*snip

/me hugs Slot 1 Pentium III CPU...

I was adding a second hard drive which I picked up "as is" from a surplus store, for $10 I can't go wrong. My case at the time was a bitch to work on so I didn't feel like securing the drive when I didn't even know if it worked. Anyways, I had the case open and sitting on its side, then I hooked up the cables and left the HD sitting on the case when I went to power it up. Not hard to guess what happened, I shorted out the drive and let out the magic blue smoke, the HD was fried on the spot when the exposed electronic parts grounded out on the case. Oops.

This happened in December.

Install additional stick of RAM.

Watch RAM, motherboard, possibly CPU go up in very smelly smoke from dust apparently caught in RAM slot that wasn't taken out by the canned air.

Purchase new RAM/motherboard/CPU. Wait over a week for delivery from Newegg.

Bang head in frustration as motherboard does not detect RAM properly.

Return RAM for replacement. Burn up a day going to Fry's and back (that's where I got the RAM).

Bang head in frustration as motherboard does not detect RAM properly.

Return motherboard for replacement. Wait ~two weeks for shipping there and back.

Borrow some 99% pure isopropyl alcohol from old chemistry teacher with which to clean othermal goop off beautiful Athlon64 chip and heatsink. Pain in the ass.

Bang head in frustration as motherboard does not detect RAM properly. During this session of self-inflicted pain, realize that a BIOS flash may be in order.

Bang head in frustration as motherboard detects RAM perfectly and I could have been fully operational weeks ago if I'd just tried flashing the BIOS.

Breathe sigh of relief as new components boot properly. Smile wide upon seeing a full gigabyte of RAM as the computer POSTs, and continue grinning seeing Windows 2000 boot up damn quick.

happened to me in las year

you have to screw up to learn sometimes...


Motherboard burned out, couldnt get keyboard to work


bought new motherboard, cpu, me and friend put it in case.

had trouble with CPU, blue screen came up.

took out CPU and put it back in

accidentally broke one of the fan clips, thought of using CPU without fan clips but he told me it would burn out.

Bought new motherboard with CPU installed.

lesson: don't buy CPU and motherboard seperately...

I've been lucky. My new 6600GT video card. It has a conflict with my VIA motherboard that is simply unresolvable for some reason. Many games simply crash.

- KOTOR 1: crashes
- SW Battelgrounds: crashes
- KOTOR 2: used to crash, doesn't crash anymore (post-format)
- Chronicles of Riddick: crashes

Vympel wrote:I've been lucky. My new 6600GT video card. It has a conflict with my VIA motherboard that is simply unresolvable for some reason. Many games simply crash.

- KOTOR 1: crashes
- SW Battelgrounds: crashes
- KOTOR 2: used to crash, doesn't crash anymore (post-format)
- Chronicles of Riddick: crashes

VIA motherboards used to have problems with SBLive cards. Severe problems that could actually cause fucking hard disk corruption. I've been skittish about VIA chipsets ever since.

Darth Wong wrote: VIA motherboards used to have problems with SBLive cards. Severe problems that could actually cause fucking hard disk corruption. I've been skittish about VIA chipsets ever since.

Fuck. How the hell did they manage that? One thing's for certain, I'm never getting another VIA chipset- those games I mentioned above, with the aforementioned exception of KOTOR 2, I simply cannot play. Nor can I play Doom 3, for that matter, forgot about that one. The most annoying thing is my new videocard would be great for all those games.

If it had happened with R:TW, I would've thrown a complete utter fit (more so than the fits of rage that I had when I encountered the identical crash/hard reboot bug above time and time again). I wonder how much business the chispet manufacturers lose when consumers have problems with their products like that.

While trying to plug in a brand-new mouse, my laptop slipped out of my hands and fell down a flight of stairs, shattering the screen, destroying the disc drive and probably causing all the other numerous problems I've spammed this forum with.

My most horribly botched upgrade is actually very similair to Wong's. Except I ended up bending the pins on my old CPU. Thinking that I had straightend it out correctly I proceeded to boot up the computer. Didn't have very satisfying results.

Darth Wong wrote:
Apply too much force and break off one of the pins

I had to laugh out loud at this one. I broke a CPU in a similar manner myself. Except it was at a temp assigment. I was supposed to work through a stack of IBM NetVista's to find out which ones were still good. I accidently knocked the CPU off the table and bent a pin. I tried to bend it back with pliers and *pooop* it broke off. I put the CPU back into the slot, called IBM and RMA'd the motherboard.

At home I really screwed up earlier this year when I bought a new case. I transfered all my components from one case to another. When I booted my RAID 1 was jacked up. It was then that I realized I didn't pay attention to which drive was in which slot. Since I have a High Point RAID controller it does matter. So, I played around with cables and such until I got the RAID back up and the OS booting properly.

With my first home-built PC.

Build everything.
Boot. Nothing happens.
Keep trying to boot.
Watch an IC on the mobo melt.

I have snaped a Video Card in half before with my bare hands, not only was it painful, its was moronic

Luckly it was a Savage3d card, thus I was out just fifty dollers and a few stiches.

From a friends effort way back when...

Get entirely new computer - all top of the range in mid-98.

Put it together. Plug it in.

Turn it on.

Feel heat blast. Watch flames. Watch smoke. See scorch marks appear on the wall behind the case.

Examine interior of case when it has cooled. Find slagged heap of metal and plastic where the RAM should be.

Realise that like a fucking moron he'd put the RAM in backwards... And forced it in when it hadn't fit perfectly.

erm strangely enough it didn't harm the new CPU chip...

but someone spooked me and well...

It required stiches (I slit my thumb too the webbing)

Vympel wrote:Fuck. How the hell did they manage that? One thing's for certain, I'm never getting another VIA chipset- those games I mentioned above, with the aforementioned exception of KOTOR 2, I simply cannot play. Nor can I play Doom 3, for that matter, forgot about that one. The most annoying thing is my new videocard would be great for all those games.

Back in the KT266A days, VIA's PCI implementation wasn't very good. The SBLive was also unusually demanding about comformation to the PCI specification and as a result those two would not play nice with each other. VIA has supposedly cleaned up their act but I don't trust them with motherboard chipsets.