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What was your worst computer install/upgrade experience?

Ketchup

Ketchup

Elite Member
OK, we have all had these: a cable was too short, a part blew up when you installed it, got several bad parts in one order, water spilled on the new $500 video card. What's your best story?

The one that comes most readily to mind was a repair several years ago on a HP desktop. Everything went fine (found a good comparable Asus motherboard) except that the cheap heatsink would not come off the CPU (darn grease)! Finally pulled it off, and got the CPU with it. Forgot how long I spent straightening pins, but thankfully it all worked in the end. Still, it is hard to straighten pins while being frustrated the entire time!

Your turn!
 
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I installed an 8800GT in my system and promptly found pink lines streaked across my screen. Luckily EVGA was going to replace it, but after some testing, I found that somehow, my Dell monitor had gone bad the very moment I upgraded the video card. Whether somehow it shorted when connected to the new card I have no idea. Dell actually replaced the monitor under its excellent 3-year warranty, and everything was good to go.

But for a few days there, I was very, very upset!
 
I haven't had any huge issues, but on my previous build I had all the parts ready to go and was extremely excited. It was going to be my first DIY gaming machine. Well, I open up the motherboard box and the NB heatsink is loose because one of the retaining pins is broken.

Newegg was great and let me ship it back to them for free.

Once I got the motherboard back and got everything hooked up the computer wouldn't boot and it took me all afternoon to figure out that a screw had slipped under the board and was shorting it out. With that taken care of I proceeded to discover that the hard drive was DOA.

Once again, Newegg took good care of me, and I finally had the machine up and running 7-10 days after originally planned.
 
DSF said:
I haven't had any huge issues, but on my previous build I had all the parts ready to go and was extremely excited. It was going to be my first DIY gaming machine. Well, I open up the motherboard box and the NB heatsink is loose because one of the retaining pins is broken.

Newegg was great and let me ship it back to them for free.

Once I got the motherboard back and got everything hooked up the computer wouldn't boot and it took me all afternoon to figure out that a screw had slipped under the board and was shorting it out. With that taken care of I proceeded to discover that the hard drive was DOA.

Once again, Newegg took good care of me, and I finally had the machine up and running 7-10 days after originally planned.
Click to expand...

That's a pretty good one. And by good I mean bad! Can definitely identify with the screws too. Nothing like shaking a case all around for a computer that won't get out of its little crevice!
 
Once upon a time,in 2003(or maybe 2002,memories are blurry from back then),I bought my first custom PC.Up until then I was too young to have my own PC (Maybe I was still young,but still...).So I was super excited,we ordered the parts with my father and put everything together.It worked fine,it was super fast and it played all games I wanted (NFSMW FTW!) without a single issue.I don't exactly remember the setup,but I think it had a Gigabyte mobo,and it sure had an AMD Athlon 3200+ and a NVidia 6800GT.After a month of gaming the hell out of it,one day it decided to shut down on me.I thought there was a power loss,so I tried to turn it back on without much hesitation.It made a strange sound,and then there was a flash (Turned out to be a wire that caught on fire) and smoke.I opened it up,and the GPU was fried somewhere on the edge of the PCB.I called e-shop (The vendor I had bought the PC from) and they offered to exchange the GPU for a new one,if it was indeed a defect as I thought.They sent me a new GPU,which unfortunately was defective too and the PC didn't turn on at all.I called them again,they had me send them the GPU and they informed me they had problems with their stock,so I'd have to wait for a replacement.A full month passed,and I received a package with an NVidia 6800 Ultra (The beast had 256mb of VRAM!!!Woohoo!) which was about 100€ more expensive.I called them to sort out the difference in the price,and they said that they were sorry for the inconvenience,that they hope I enjoy my new GPU and that they hope I'll buy from them again.Best phone call ever!

PS : There may be technical inaccuracies here,I was 10 years old then.The GPU models may be wrong or something,but even so,that's about it.
PS2 : The aforementioned PC is in KIA status since November 2011.I overclocked the CPU to 2.1GHz with the stock cooler and it produced something that must have been excess heat.Or so my intuition told me when I saw that plastic parts of the cooler had melted and that the CPU itself had grown a boobie.It was a good ride all these years... 😛
 
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