So I was in the middle of typing a post an hour ago when BAM! – dreaded blue screen of death appears. Fortunately, Chrome’s pretty good at autosaves and I didn’t lose a great deal of work.
But Christ, there have been times when things have gone real bad.
Here’s some glorious examples off the top of my head:
- I remember coming home one night after some rain and thunder. I turned on my precious PC, which I’d paid for myself, and then recoiled immediately once I saw blue and purple sparks start shooting out the back of the power supply. You guessed it: power surge. Fried every component in the system.
- I was in the middle of the finals of an online tournament when my machine, out of fucking nowhere decides to blue screen. I may have yelled. A lot. (I’m sure people can understand.)
- This one’s peripheral related, but was playing in a state qualifier for Counter-Strike 1.6 against what was then one of the best teams in the country. We were on the verge of winning the round, and the match, and it was about to be a huge upset victory. I’m looking after a mate who’s defusing the bomb, and I see the last enemy run past. He doesn’t look at me – it’s an easy kill. Then the sensor on my Logitech mouse has a heart attack and starts doing 360 degree spins in the air. The opponent, who didn’t notice me at all, goes and shoots the defuser. My teammate is confused by my immense screaming, which has filled the entire netcafe. I haven’t used a Logitech mouse ever since, and that was after playing national tournaments of CS and StarCraft 2 with one. Never. Again.
What memories do you have of your PC – or PC parts – dying at the worst possible time?
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24 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: When Computers Go Wrong”
World of Warcraft, Blackrock server in 2006. We’d been pretty active with the opening of Gates of Ahn’Qiraj. The event was just starting, horde and alliance, thousands of us hanging around together, and the spawns started – It was epic
My system suddenly froze, and crashed (Soltek 75 FRN2-RL, Athlon XP3000, 9800XT, 2×512 Corsair ram, and, 2 Samsung SATA HDDs in stripe raid)
Rebooted, and all signs pointed to a failed HDD. Freaked out, spent 3 hours trouble shooting trying to get it back going so I could return to the event. No joy, so I went to bed
Woke up next morning, determined to work out the issue. Pressed the power button, and it started up just freaking fine -_-
Aside from some faulty caps on the mobo which I was able to replace, never had any other issues with that system – Just decided to screw me on that particular night
To be fair, a lot of peoples machines probably died that day, the servers certainly did
I deserved it – I was responsible for Corrupted Blood getting in to major cities a few times
I was responsible for lethon and emeriss making an appearance in orgrimmar a few times too 😛
Emberstrife was a fun one to bring up too. Got King Mosh to Crossroads one day – Not quite to Org, but was still chaos
Now everything is on a leash :/
also attempted to pull thunderaan to org but didn’t go through feralas/desolace instead opting to head via 1k needles, resulting in an evade and despawn at the great lift
10pm Thursday, HDD died, the uni assignment due the next day went down the drain. I had no backup back then. I emailed my lecturer within minutes and luckily was cool with giving me an extension till Monday.
a valuable lesson learned in always keeping backups
I was at a lan party when the number of attached PCs exceeded the amount of power the connected port could supply, blowing the fuse.
At the time I was big into customizing stuff on Windows XP, using Windowblinds and custom boot screens, which involved modifying kernel files, there was a tool that let you use a random custom boot screen, and it avoided the modified kernel file by using a copy of it and updating the boot settings, when it changed the boot screen it would copy the original kernel file and update the boot screen in it.
Turns out that at the moment the power went out was the exact moment that this process was happening as my PC booted up (it changed boot screens each boot), somehow it corrupted both the original kernel file, and the copy, which mean it was a trip to Windows reinstall town for me.
I lost an enormous collection of porn to a hard drive failure in my laptop. I still have the HDD and sometimes consider getting it fixed, but last time I checked it would have cost many hundreds of dollars. Still, all that porn… it was hand-selected too 🙁
*Sympathetically pats you with a broom*
It’s okay. They’re still out there, somewhere. This is the internet after all.
I actually had a Macbook Pro blue screen on me a few years ago. Hilarious at the time, but less hilarious when by the end of the day it was refusing to boot any more (which turned out to be a busted logic board).
Last night I had a skype meeting with some overseas partners at 6pm. Turned up to the meeting room at 5 to, only to find the PC at 27 of 122 updates. We ended up just going back to my desk.
Stupid computers.
Last week in the middle of a DR migration for work when BAM… BSOD
Just about snapped the laptop in half while running around trying to find another computer because minutes are $$$.
I did manage to BSOD my psp once while hacking it, that was pretty funny
I’ve had my share but I’ll keep to the more recent and managable one.
Like some here, I use VMs to do my coding work and I kept them in an external RAID-5 enclosure.
What I found was some drive failures can still go unnoticed. In my case, the second drive had ceased up thus having very long read times yet didn’t count as a failed disk.
Had me out of action for the day as I raced to get a copy of my dev environment from my NAS to an external USB while waiting for replacement drives (I got two just in case) to arrive.
Always check your power!! I remember blowing up my computer and my brother’s computer as I miscalculated how much power I needed for the PC.
Nowadays I calculate, and at +100W just to cover for expansion and upgrades 🙂
My wedding day.
Booted up laptop to queue up music for ceremony.
Windows is now updating.
Didnt finish for another two hours. Managed to get by with streamed music from brothers phone in to stereo but still. Almost ended in disaster.
So many to choose from;
Was using an old Patriot SSD to move files as I was rebuilding my PC and wiping the old HDDs. Finish the rebuild and go to copy from the SSD and it’s dead. The controller has died, can’t even recognise the drive any more. Yeah no other backup at the time because I wiped both HDDs and SSDs in the PC to do a full clean >_<
Logitech sucks. For so long they’ve made great devices, MX510/518 mice, G15 keyboard… So I was buying logi peripherals almost automatically. But more recent ones, or maybe more accurately more recent drivers and software – not so good. G910 keyboard, G300 mouse and G930 wireless headphones don’t play nicely together on my system. Fire up PC to raid in WoW and no audio, the headphones keep appearing and disappearing from the device manager. Didn’t matter whether I was using them in wired or wireless mode. Would happen randomly, sometimes no dramas, other times it’d go on for 15 minutes (always seemed to be when I wanted to raid and needed voice chat). In the end I dumped the headphones and switched to plain old 3.5mm jack ones from Kingston (HyperX Cloud) and haven’t had a problem since.
Bought a quality PSU because I realised that some of the weird crashes on my PC were the result of a cheapo, underpowered, PSU that just wasn’t good enough. Plugged the PSU in and BOOM! Pulled it out and found someone had set it to US voltage not AU. Bye bye brand new quality PSU 🙁 Side note: Always check to make sure the voltage switch is set right before plugging in a new PSU.
Had another PSU die (about six months in) and replaced it under warranty, or tried to. The computer store I returned it to went broke while I was waiting to get it back. No way to get a result. I tried contacting Thermaltake direct and they wouldn’t even talk to me. Main reason I no longer buy any thermaltake gear.
Plenty more, but those are the ones that bug me most.
Ah crud with Logitech. I got G633 headphones, and a G502 mouse. My old G15 (Orange) died over xmas, and I’ve ordered a G910 to replace it – Hope they don’t muck up like yours
The keyboard and mouse together are perfect. It was only when I added the headphones it started giving me grief. I honestly don’t know (after hours, even days of trying to sort it out) whether the problem was to do with the headphones themselves, the motherboard, something in windows or what. All I know is they worked perfectly until Logitech merged all their software into LGS.
I believe (but could be wrong) that because the headphones were connecting and reconnecting the drivers would time out. And because they shared resources via LGS it meant the mouse and keyboard would lag out while the headphones did their thing.
So, you may be lucky and they work perfectly. I hope so.
I’ve got a G910 paired with G35 headphones and G700 mouse. No issues with any of them.
At work my G15 and G400 are still serving me well
Never had a real issue. A previous PC, the GPU died & the motherboard had some serious warping due the stress off the massive fuck off heatsink I had on it. But that computer did die at a shit time, when I was between jobs & all I had was an ageing MacBook as a back up.
Also the normal dead hard drive, or corrupted beyond repair Windows install. I did have a copy of Vista Business (I think) registry corrupt to the point, it wouldn’t shut down or update. It worked fine other than that, heh.
For years I always told my friends I have never scene the blue screen of death… cause my video card dies/crashes etc. Always the graphics card.
Had an anti virus go full defcon 5 on some benine advertising tracking bot because it was not in its library… by deleting the browsers and then half the windows system folders related to networking including the drivers.
For years I always told my friends I have never scene the blue screen of death… cause my video card dies/crashes etc. Always the graphics card.
Had an anti virus go full defcon 5 on some benine advertising tracking bot because it was not in its library… by deleting the browsers and then half the windows system folders related to networking including the drivers.
That screen makes me sick and is all sorts of wrong. You’re not allowed to restart your PC until microsoft says it’s ok now?!! wow.. just wow…
You always have that one experience that teaches you to constantly save your work. Mine was losing 4-5 hours of a complex design project for uni when the PC BSD’d. I simply couldn’t find in me the energy or drive to do all that over again so I just gave up that assignment.