What is the worst tech catastrophe you have experienced?

[Coastqr]

On 7/24/2021 at 6:59 PM, Pickles von Brine said:

What is the worst tech catastrophe you have experienced? Dropped a drive with your PHD thesis and had to have it recovered? Spilt liquid on your laptop right before a meeting? Did a minor technical glitch at work take down your entire environment? 

Mine was when I had lost my RAID 0 on my gaming machine years back. One of the drives ate itself and I had a college term paper on it. Now? I am paranoid and have like 6 backups XD
 

got a dell xps 13, had a problem, then RMA-d it and got a blade 15, had a problem, razer sent me another blade, it was the wrong model, the model i ordered was the 1080p 144hz model, i got the correct model the first time, second time razer screwed up and sent me the OLED model. Gave up and built a custom pc, no problems so far and its been almost a year

[Rauten]

During the early '00s I was using my brother's old Pentium2, topping at a whopping 350Mhz.

Wasn't terrible but I did wish I could have some more power; specially on the graphics department, because the computer used a gpu integrated into the motherboard that was... uuhh... it wasn't a great experience. I even remember the model, SiS 6326. I remember trying to play Ragnarok Online on it and, while it did work, the GPU basically had a stroke whenever a wizard tried to use some of their spells in my vicinity. It didn't crash, but my screen would temporarily be invaded by black rectangles.

 

So anyway, my brother got an assortment of pieces from friends that they didn't want any longer; a couple mobos, 2 or 3 CPUs and some RAM sticks. I remember some of the CPUs being Pentium 3s, so that would have been a VERY noticeable upgrade.

 

My brother was gonna try to build a working computer in a couple weeks using those pieces, but impatient & stupid old me just couldn't wait that long. I needed the power NAOW1!!1!1

 

So I started trying out combinations randomly (I barely knew shit about PC hardware back then), and this is what I used as a test bench to put the mobos on and try to get them running (not my picture, stolen from anandtech):

 

So yeah, that was a bunch of dead mobos, a bunch of dead CPUs and a (very well deserved) berating that I got from my brother. I am forever haunted by the ghosts of the hardware I killed that day.

 

[Video Beagle]

Going on right now...

I'm trying to do several things on my windows pc (use several keyboards, each as a seperate input device; boost sound of a single program, not the whole system) that are perfectly simple to do on my macs, but because !@#!@#$ windows, it's a nightmare.

[Ragnarsdad]

First time attempt at liquid metal, everything was fine then 2 months later it leaked. Killed my ryzen 2700x, msi carbon 470 motherboard and my msi gaming 1080. 

 

I stick with paste now.

[atxcyclist]

One of the worst: I lent my office a workstation I built in order for us to run 3D renderings for architectural projects. During a 20+ hour rendering job, the PSU ignited and destroyed the whole system. Thankfully we had backup of all the files.

 

All other catastrophes have been hard drives dying, I’ve not really had any other significant hardware failures.

[da na]

I've had a CPU explode. It's a strange phenomenon. It only can happen on older chips with no thermal throttling and no IHS, if you take off the heatsink while it's running it'll just have so much heat build up that it will literally explode. Very unlikely under normal operation though.

[Quackers101]

On 7/25/2021 at 5:00 AM, Arika S said:

A powered USB hub shorting and frying:

 

Impromptu liquid cooling a laptop using a can of pepsi.

hub? oh god, anything you know about the situation?

 

Also about laptops, that is why I wish laptops could have more "spill resistance". some have open holes all around and just a small amount of liquid... boom gone in smoke.

[Touch My Hamm]

Years ago I had someone come into my first IT job where I was working front lines - Lady comes in with a laptop that was left in her car overnight where it got frost due to it being below 32 degrees. Note that this laptop was 100% covered even if there was damage due to negligence or water it would be replaced 100% for another machine. So I was writting up her issue and when I send it to the techs I noted down that the water damage indicators were triggered so they can make sure they need to fix that. And the lady freaked out watching me write it down saying to not do that. I explained that the damage being there or not wouldnt affect price or anything as its 100% covered regardless and its better for them to replace anything even if there is only a bit of damage since its free anyways and its easy to replace those parts. She wanted nothing to do with it calling us a scam. It took 3 people explaining that due to her contract we are not charging her and regardless of the state of the device we fixing or replacing it and I was noting down what I had to since the water damage strips where showing to have water leak. Even after I got the device back she brought her husband to yell at us as we gave them a brand new machine with all their data transferred over since the original machine had extensive water damage to where the mainboard wasnt worth fixing and the cost of the board was the same as a new machine. 

 

Their issue: Screen not working.

Actual issue: Due to water damage on board nothing was working and screen did technically work.

Fix: Replaced entire device for free due to their contract.

Client: Yelling and being mad as we gave them a brand new machine....

[FruitOfTheLum]

On 7/25/2021 at 2:59 AM, Pickles von Brine said:

What is the worst tech catastrophe you have experienced? Dropped a drive with your PHD thesis and had to have it recovered? Spilt liquid on your laptop right before a meeting? Did a minor technical glitch at work take down your entire environment? 

Mine was when I had lost my RAID 0 on my gaming machine years back. One of the drives ate itself and I had a college term paper on it. Now? I am paranoid and have like 6 backups XD
 

Personally, my worst catastrophe was when, after saving up for ages, stashing away my pocket money, birthday money, Christmas money, and doing odd jobs, I was finally able to buy myself a completely new system to fit in the bones of my old one - motherboard, CPU, graphics card and all. My old, 1998 Packard Bell case was actually too small to accommodate the new stuff, so I had to dismantle the family PC and swap the cases around, as their beige box was slightly bigger than my beige box.

 

Unfortunately, in my excitement to get it up and running, I forgot to plug in the CPU fan.

 

The CPU I was installing was an Athlon XP. Those things ran hot, and in those days thermal throttling wasn't really a thing yet, and it absolutely didn't appreciate being run without a fan on its puny little heatsink. A puff of smoke later, and I was out of one very expensive (for me, anyway) CPU. It would've taken me ages to save up enough to buy a replacement. Fortunately my dad felt sorry for me and bought me another one.

 

The worst tech catastrophe I've seen was in my very first job. I worked at a local newspaper, and one of the main sources of revenue for that newspaper was job advertisements, so the jobs website was quite a big deal even if people at the time didn't care much for the main news site (it was pre-smartphones and the company was run by old people who thought the Internet was a fad - unsurprisingly, there were lots of layoffs later on). Every week the site was updated with the latest batch of new adverts, and as an added bonus companies could pay to be 'featured recruiters', which would have their logos plastered everywhere. The CMS was clunkly and it took a long time to actually get those setup. Thankfully the new adverts were automatically cross-pollinated from the sales database - we just had to go in and tidy them up a bit for the web. It was a full day of work for a few people.

 

Unfortunately, just before the weekly refresh, the Internet department's boss (who was also the developer of the site) somehow accidentally deleted the entire database, and there were no back-ups. A group of us all had to stay late into the night manually re-inputting each and every job advert from the paper copies the sales team had thankfully printed out every time they made a sale. I got a bottle of wine out of it, though.

[jasovanooo]

fan failure on a 1.4gz thunderbird clocked at 1.6ghz (didnt have thermal protection....literally ran itself to death) that was a few days old

[GDRRiley]

On 7/25/2021 at 2:41 PM, VFXGuy said:

Unrelated but how do you back your stuff up. I can't find an affordable, quick way that can handle the kind of storage I use (6-8TB)

backblaze. its 7$ a month (may still be able to still get their 6$ pricing)

 

I've yet to kill any hardware in a crazy way

[VFXGuy]

On 9/20/2021 at 10:25 PM, GDRRiley said:

backblaze. its 7$ a month (may still be able to still get their 6$ pricing)

 

I've yet to kill any hardware in a crazy way

I tried it and I liked it but they're based in the US which is an inconvenience if they need to send a backup in a hard drive and its not fast enough for 6-8TB.

[GDRRiley]

12 hours ago, VFXGuy said:

I tried it and I liked it but they're based in the US which is an inconvenience if they need to send a backup in a hard drive and its not fast enough for 6-8TB.

they've got an EU data center, do they not send it back from there