What effect would a bent cpu pin have?

[pmv]

Ok, this is like one of those episodes of detective shows where the detective tries to solve a crime from 200 years ago or something purely out of professional interest.

The PC I'm talking about has long since gone, so I'm not really looking for advice as such.

But the worst PC I ever had, was one, pentium 4 based, that I paid a certain, still-existing, company to custom build for me. The damn thing never worked properly. Basically it was OK for 6 months to a year until the hard drive was 50% full, whereupon if I did anything hard-drive intensive it would totally corrupt the drive (full of damaged directories and other crap that scandisk couldn't fix).

I never did figure out what was wrong, and in the end couldn't be bothered trying to 'rma' it, just used it very carefully, leaving the drive half empty, and reformating and reinstalling more times than I care to remember, until I felt it was time to upgrade anyway.

I tried various memory testing programs, running them for 48 hours even, and the ram appeared fine.

I thought maybe it might have been due to continuing to use win98 (please don't point and laugh) long after everyone had switched to XP (I only finally got XP 2 months before Vista came out!). Win98 scandisk for example couldn't cope with a HD of that size.

Or maybe a fault with the mobo. Getting a new HD didn't help. It definitely wasn't a virus or other malware (unless you call win98 malware).

But when I finally did get a new machine, and got the (different) people who built it to cannibalise the old one, they claimed that the P4 had a bent pin on it. Maybe the new guys bent it getting it out, but is it possible that the b****** company that built the P4 machine bent it and hence sold me a lemon?

Would a PC even work at all with a single bent pin, and if so could it produce the kind of disk corruption issue this machine had?

(Next time I'm building my own. At least if it screws up it'll be my fault.)

 

[gregt29]

Usually, a chip with a bent pin will not fit in the socket, and most people
will just straighten out the bent pin when confronted with the problem.

So, I'm not really sure how or why they would have sold you a machine
with a bent pin when it is so easy to straiten them. But too answer your
question, since I have never seen a cpu with a bent pin actually install in
the socket, I'm not sure what kind of problems it would cause. My question
for you is why did you not just replace the harddrive??

 

[pmv]

I _did_ try a new hard drive (and also new sata cables), didn't help. Still got the corruption problem on either or both of them. Except that having 2 drives meant it was easier to avoid filling either more than 50% full, which was the only way to avoid the problem.

In fact, if I remember rightly, if you did lots of file copying on one drive it would corrupt directories on the other one - that's how screwed up that machine was.