When was the first time you got a small scratch on your baby (PC)?

[thedemoncowboy]

I just noticed a small scratch on my baby, I feel like it’s like a car so now I’m upset. Hopefully I’ll get over it, does anyone else have anything like that on their beasts? 

[TempestCatto]

From shipping, yeah. I have the Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra, it's huge and a massive pain in the ass to carry around. I didn't bother trying to return it (the whole top part is broken). The case is the least of my worries, I'm more concerned for my PC parts. Even then, the very first time I screwed down a motherboard I slipped and put a huge scratch in the PCB; took a whole ass layer off. Gigabyte makes great motherboards because that very board still works to this day.

[it_dont_work]

Probably when I drilled a hole in the front of it to mount a switch, when I got it out of the box. 

 

First pc I built was in the age of plain beige boxes, The closest I got to a fancy case was an antec 900, which ended up with a scratches window the first time it was cleaned. I kinda see why tempered glass is so common now since its much harder to damage. 

[thedemoncowboy]

Mine is cause I have ocd and tapped the glass against the chassis I was like great now I have to return my computer  ocd for the loooooose

[SenKa]

16 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

From shipping, yeah. I have the Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra, it's huge and a massive pain in the ass to carry around. I didn't bother trying to return it (the whole top part is broken). The case is the least of my worries, I'm more concerned for my PC parts. Even then, the very first time I screwed down a motherboard I slipped and put a huge scratch in the PCB; took a whole ass layer off. Gigabyte makes great motherboards because that very board still works to this day.

The blackhawk ultra is an amazing case, I sold mine off and miss it almost every day.

 

Though, it is much too large to put on my desk...

[Jurrunio]

I scratch the black paint on the screws in the building process, does that count?

[goto10]

10 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I scratch the black paint on the screws in the building process, does that count?

of course that counts!

 

my case is white, nzxt decided to screw those screws so hard that when i removed them, white paint came with them, well done nzxt!

 

i have to decide if paint that area on top of the case and with what paint, this is matte white, all to change a noisy stock fan..

[thedemoncowboy]

17 minutes ago, goto10 said:

of course that counts!

 

my case is white, nzxt decided to screw those screws so hard that when i removed them, white paint came with them, well done nzxt!

 

i have to decide if paint that area on top of the case and with what paint, this is matte white, all to change a noisy stock fan..

My little scratches fit inside a .5 pen and I’m devastated  lol

[Bitter]

I remember when my 19" Trinitron monitor tipped off the stool it was sitting on in my room and landed against the window of my Koolance PC2 tower and had it not been for the Slot A Athlon tower next to it, my PC2 would have gone right over on it's side. There's still a big white gouge on the Lexan case window but no other damage really.

 

Also I had a hard drive catch fire once too.

[SuperNerd Kid]

1 hour ago, thedemoncowboy said:

I just noticed a small scratch on my baby, I feel like it’s like a car so now I’m upset. Hopefully I’ll get over it, does anyone else have anything like that on their beasts? 

i have an hp pavilion dv9000 with a small crack on the right display hinge and another small crack to the left of the three indicator lights. but it's still kickin

[SuperNerd Kid]

48 minutes ago, goto10 said:

of course that counts!

 

my case is white, nzxt decided to screw those screws so hard that when i removed them, white paint came with them, well done nzxt!

 

i have to decide if paint that area on top of the case and with what paint, this is matte white, all to change a noisy stock fan..

dell used to do this to and it makes me mad. i cant get one of those stupid screws with a air driven screw gun

[goto10]

1 minute ago, SuperNerd Kid said:

dell used to do this to and it makes me mad. i cant get one of those stupid screws with a air driven screw gun

something tells me they put those screws not by hand, a robot or a person using a electric screwdriver or something like that, that doesnt have any control on the strength that should be used to screw those screws

[SuperNerd Kid]

1 hour ago, it_dont_work said:

Probably when I drilled a hole in the front of it to mount a switch, when I got it out of the box. 

 

First pc I built was in the age of plain beige boxes, The closest I got to a fancy case was an antec 900, which ended up with a scratches window the first time it was cleaned. I kinda see why tempered glass is so common now since its much harder to damage. 

i have a desktop and it has a big ol crack on the PLASTIC transparent side panel 2 months after i built it and i sure ain't gonna replace it because it will just crack again.

[SuperNerd Kid]

1 minute ago, goto10 said:

something tells me they put those screws not by hand, a robot or a person using a electric screwdriver or something like that, that doesnt have any control on the strength that should be used to screw those screws

the only other way this had happened is if the screw melted due to the heat from groud shipping because it shipped in the summer of louisiana and it gets to 100 degrees F

[SuperNerd Kid]

Just now, SuperNerd Kid said:

the only other way this had happened is if the screw melted due to the heat from groud shipping because it shipped in the summer of louisiana and it gets to 100 degrees F

plus radiation of heat by metal

[SuperNerd Kid]

4 minutes ago, goto10 said:

something tells me they put those screws not by hand, a robot or a person using a electric screwdriver or something like that, that doesnt have any control on the strength that should be used to screw those screws

idk but i have to get the screw out so i can replace a part and it real close to a circular saw

[TempestCatto]

29 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Also I had a hard drive catch fire once too.

You're really just gonna leave us with that and not finish the story!? I've got my popcorn, I'm ready!

[Evolution.]

well, I got a prybar trying to open a sff hp you can probably guess what happened from there.  Those design when the side panel was stuck were a major PITA to open 

[Bitter]

12 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

You're really just gonna leave us with that and not finish the story!? I've got my popcorn, I'm ready!

Well I mean there's not much more to tell.

 

It was the late 90's or early 2000's, before USB portable drives were anything more than a few dozen megabytes in size. I needed to move larger amounts of data between computers at two homes because divorced parents, so I had a 4GB Maxtor hard drive that fit just perfect into an empty leatherette CD storage pouch. I'd plug the drive into the IDE ribbon, boot the PC, get what I needed off it or play whatever games were installed on it, then when it was time to go to the other home I would shut down and take it with me.

 

Well it was an internal drive of course without any enclosure so it got bonked around in transit through the school day somewhat. Now back then an external hard drive was always nearly a desktop drive with a little padding in a box, you still needed to handle it gently. Except of course external drives cost a bunch more and were generally substantially slower unless you got an external SCSI drive but those were very expensive, you needed the adapter card, and the cables, no thanks too costly. Or you had a USB 1.0 which was still kind of new or an old parallel port drive which was almost pointlessly slow. So my solution was to transit an internal drive back and forth multiple days a week in my backpack in a CD pouch because that was the best solution at the time.

 

So anyway the drive was sitting out on the top of the desktop PC which my dad had been given by his friends brother from the University of Chicago, his friends brother's lab was researching cancer in rats with a MRI machine in the lab basement and had a network of PC's upstairs to crunch the results. So this PC was a bit of a mis-match system. It was a socket 7 board with a K6-2 that took either SDR or EDO or FP RAM, it had APCI power management but was running an AT power supply which had a big red recessed flip switch at the back corner of the case, it had 80 pin ATA 66 IDE which was awesome, and an AGP port. You could populate both SDR and EDO/FP in at the same time but it would run at the speed of the slowest one of course. But I digress....

 

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

 

So this 4GB Maxtor drive is laying upside down on the top of the former lab PC's chassis as I've just connected it and flipped the AT power switch round the side of the case, the system booted, then that hard drive started to make a weird noise and not more than a few seconds later as I looked over there was smoke coming from one chip on the circuit board which then snapped loudly, ejected some epoxy casing, and sprouted a small birthday candle like flame. I quickly blew the flame out, and reached what seemed like 1/4 mile around to the AT power switch to kill the system. Likely the heads crashed and stopped or slowed the disc platters causing the spindle motor power transistor to overheat and go up in flame.

 

And that's the story of the time a hard drive caught fire.

[NineEyeRon]

I usually take a screwdriver to something after I get it out the box.

 

Once the first scratch is made I stop worrying.

[Guest]

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[goto10]

19 minutes ago, Oso Sin Nombre said:

I don't care about small scratches, but I can't tolerate fingerprints. The Intel NUC is glossy black on the top, so you can see your fingerprints for miles

my case is matte white, so no fingerprints here, but the left panel is glass, that one requires a microfiber cloth to keep it presentable