StarDestroyer.Net BBS

People here talk about stability issues and serious electronic problems (ie. faulty hard drives, MB's, etc. etc. etc.) quite frequently. Doubtless there ARE going to be flaws with some components, and some computers are going to be lemons. People also talk up the reliability of certain components or brands, and certainly with good reason--no one wants their $1000+ investments to crap out after purchase. But in personal experience, I have never had a serious problem with any system that I've purchased. I had to replace a power supply once, after about a year and a half of operation, and I had to get the speakers on my HP pavilion lappie repaired after two years, but other than that I haven't had ANY computer related problems aside from the normal upgrades and switching out mice and keyboards. I've had about 8 desk tops in my lifetime, and 5 or 6 laptops, and I seriously cannot remember any serious problems with any of them other than the ones I just mentioned. How endemic, exactly, are "catastrophic failures?" By that, I mean problems which prevent the system from running or require the replacement of a major component. I'll count massive virus infection, or even spyware if that's a serious issue, but I honestly can't say that I've had any of that ever.

What time period are we talking about on the equipment? Failure within what time frame? I've had alot of parts fail over the years, but that's because I have this tendency to run them until they die.

Only ever minor niggles. Unless you count old canibalized 486s which now no longer run, having been gutted.

We've owned a total of four computers ever. Yeah, you read that right. One's hard drive failed over the summer. So 25%.

Edit: And for some reason, the board refuses to mark this thread as read.

Hmn.... hardware related? the new one was pretty annnoying, nevermind the To-Built one but aside from that...that makes it 25%.

Harddrives are moving parts which spin at least 7200rpm (A 5200rpm harddrive in a desktop in just stupid) for thier entire active lifespan.

I expect them to fail more regularly than any other component in a computer. CD/DVD drive is also a contender if an idiot hits the tray or the latest copy protection doesnt work with it.

I had a problem with one of my harddrives spontantiously powering down, but that was because the powercable had a loose contact with the drive(I built my own computer, thus my fault)

I am an agent of chaos and thanks to way too much body fur, and long clothing, I kill computers. I just generate too much electricity and am too accident prone. For me computer componets have a life span, my present computer is hitting it's half life mark.

2 out of 4. The old Tandy 1000SL (1987) still worked when my parents threw it out two years ago (Damn!) and our first Pentium (1997) is still on the go, but my dad's HD and monitor crapped out last year, and my video card died this summer.

i bought an abit motherboard that plain wouldn't boot up once. but the people i bought it from were quite happy to refund my money.

thats the only problem i've had that i haven't caused.

The only things that has ever broken in any of my computers was the 42x CDROM in one, and one of the 180 GB harddrives in another. Apart from the Sound Card occasionaly jumping out of its place in one computer, that's all. Unless you count software problems. I have that every time I start any computer here (except maybe that win98 one, but win98 itself could be seen as a huge problem). As well as unsolvable networking problems and a certain CD creating program that is impossible to remove... But that's software.


Edit:
Ah yes, lightning struck our modem once and fried it real good (we were unable to use our phones when it was plugged in), but luckily nothing in the computer itself was destroyed.

Only a small fraction of the parts I've ever owned have failed. Namely: A brand new DFI motherboard, an HP motherboard (it was produced by Asus, based on the K7M, but HP had it all hacked to shit), my ATI 9700 Pro (it still works, but randomly crashed because it has a flakey power regulator), a bad 512 MB PC3200 stick, and 3 Macintosh external HDs (they were Quantum drives, probably all from the same batch). And the floppy drive on my old Mac Plus (and as of two years ago, when I last booted it up, everything else on it still worked).

Everything else I've bought has out lived its usefulness. So, 0-15%.

I have an aura of destruction. Electronic things tend to die very quickly around me. I've had to replace my PC every year.

Of six computers owned in total, I've had five equipment failures: two hard drives, a modem, a motherboard, and a video card cooling fan. Of these, the hard drives, motherboard, and fan could be termed critical failures (the fan because you don't want to run a modern or even semi-modern video card on only passive cooling).

Every machine I've ever owned has met a horrible and painful death. The one I'm using now has a crap video card that tends to explode completely at random (except for certain games or even websites which make it crash after about 10 minutes).

I currently have three systems that have been retired from 'primary', so they're still good. However every system I've ever owned has fried some memory, crashed a HDD, blown board caps, destroyed a soundcard, or something. So 100%.

I've killed one motherboard (went up in smoke when added new RAM - very weird) and my old server had one of the twin Pentium 3 processors go bad and the other start registering at half it's rated speed, so I replaced that with a single 1.6 Celeron system.

Overall, once things are running smoothly, they tend to stay that way though.

I've had relatively numerous problems with just two computers.

The first one had a serious hard drive problem, sounded like the ball bearings had gone to shit and it made a horrible screeching noise all the time while in operation. I bailed out and bought a new one before it gave completely, so that there was no data loss. Currently it's sitting around somewhere gathering dust. That comp is now at my gf's parents' place.

With my current rig, I've had one blown power supply, one fried processor (the original one, over five years old), and it's a good thing my brother got me a second one last spring so I had a double rig to begin with or I'd have been up shit creeek without a paddle. Still need to get another Celeron 500 PPGA processor, or two 533 or even two 466 ones, right now this machine is slow as molasses. Oh, and I've had one monitor quit on me, the RGB controller chip went haywire. Both the power supply and processor went this year, the power supply in July, the processor two weeks ago, and the rig has seen heavy daily use, so that's normal wear killing them.

Additionally, my motherboard (Abit BP 6) causes all kinds of weird problems with Windows XP (the OS doesn't see the UDMA 66 IDE controllers at all, so my other hard drive that has Win98 on it is invisible to the XP side) and with hard drives in both types of controllers (UDMA 33 and UDMA 66), installing Aureal Vortex as sound card for the Win98 side knocks out the primary IDE controllers completely even though it used to work just fine way back when with the same drivers.

I've also done a lot of tech support for my gf's friends, and one of them had three blown memory cards on the same rig and some other problems that necessitated an OS reinstall on at least two occasions.

Edi

I have had serious problems with only one out of the six or so computers my family owned so far and I had the privilege of using. The computer in question was annoying to say the least. Over the years it was operational it would hang, crash or fail to boot up on random occasions. The causes of the problems varied from bad hard disk, a faulty RAM chip, a damaged video card, bad power button. Eventually it was deemed to be worthless and it's hardware was removed and the casing and monitor was used to build a new PC.

All of them. Every single one fucks up sooner or later. There are rumours my house is built on an ancient lovecraftian monster. My current one was going good for several months, but now the sound card has fucked up, as has the hard drive. a load of information is in those "found.000" folders at the moment, and I have no idea how to replace it all.

Can I include servers at work?

Of cause I can I am a mod in this forum! HA!

Of all the servers and personal comps I have and administer it is only one that has ever given me a big headache

It was a IBM server running W2K and the RAID failed and I did not have any spare drivers.

Two days later I got the spare and replaced it but the resync failed and I got a major BSOD that took me four days to fix.

Restore a server to dissimilar hardware is no easy task…

Excluding things that I destroyed through my own stupidity or clumsiness I've suffered very few component failures. I've had a couple of optical drives fail (but one of those was simply age catching up with cheap components) and a couple of power supplies proved to be rather inadequate even though they should have been fine. Can't think of much else other than the expected problem of fans wearing out.

Luckily the one component that would drive me into a frothing rage if it failed (the hard disc) has never broken.

I've had a few PSU failures, and old age seems to have killed a number of older 486s. I just lost a Compaq Deskpro 33 because of that--damn thing just refused to boot one morning. I'm not sure if it was the mobo or the PSU, but I don't have a compatible PSU to test with that proprietary piece of junk so I'm going to scrap it. Fans also die pretty regularly since there's a lot of dust around here, but I try to keep them clean so they run fairly long.

One of the two computers in my home has had constant problems, from cooling fan failure that nearly melts the inside, to a monitor that randomly changes its color settings and resizes to fit a linked four-monitor bank when there is none there whenever it feels like.

I don't even think it counts as the same computer considering the replacements that were bought for it.

So, 50%.

Of all the computers I've owned or built since 96, I've only had the following problems:

1) Catastrophic hard drive failure 6 weeks after buying my first PC
2) I've had two monitors go dead, but both where my fault. Each
was dropped or damaged in a move.
3) I've had a few power supplies die from old age.
4) My older laptop has a dead LCD and battery.

The last time I had a computer crap out on me was like in 1996 and that was a 4 meg ram packard bell with a harddrive as loud as a motorcycle. At the end of it's life, the only way to turn it on was to press the power button while simultaneously plugging it in.

Since then, I've gone through a couple of compaqs, a micron, and I've been using a dell since 2003 all of which were 100% reliable and never had a hardware problem.