Your Biggest Scare?

[Smeyer40]

So I figured I might as well start this. I am not sure if there is already a thread like this. Sorry if there is!

 

Anyways time for mine and this is what made me think to make a thread like this. I was browsing Twitter and all the sudden my PC restart and nothing works. No display etc. So I restart it myself same results. I decided well let me open it up and maybe I can see what may be wrong. Well I see that my H100i fan has something that looks like grease on it and that scared me. So I hurried up and I took it out and inspected it as well the motherboard GPU etc, nothing wrong with anything. I have no idea where that oily stuff came from. Since I needed to RMA the cooler anyways I just added the stock fan on the system. I look around more really confused. I decided to start the PC and I notice that my CPU fan is not starting.. I try it on all the fan headers and noting. Then I notice that the Power LED is not working either. It was at that point I feared that my Motherboard failed. But one last go I decided that I would strip the PC to what it needed so I could do another test boot. Just hoping that the motherboard was not fried. So I remove my GPU's and plug it into the integrated GPU. All this time I had it in my GPU so I was thinking well maybe it is something wrong with my GPU and maybe that is messing with the rest of my system. So I tried to start it up nothing...... So I was like, "Well I might as well pack it up and get a new motherboard." So half way through the pack up I looked at the CPU power and the 24-pin power and seen that the CPU power cable was not on fully.......................... Excited and pissed at the same time I gave it a nudge and it went right back into place. I hooked up power and a monitor and what do you know? The PC starts up...

 

 I may be the biggest noob here but I had no idea to look at that considering that it just restarted out of nowhere and I did not think, "Well time to plug in the CPU power plug it came loose..." Especially with seeing that grease on the h100i fan.

 

 You have any stories that you thought would end in a tragic ending but turned out to be something so simple?

[Mightybaal]

I was changing a light bulb in the dark and was feeling for the socket with my finger. Then an almighty zapp threw me off the ladder into a glass table which smashed.  Thank good for electrical cut out switches and thank god i was in my full work mechanic work gear and overalls and didn't even get a scratch. Just a burnt ego and a truly shocking experience.

[Nuluvius]

...a truly shocking experience.

 

[Nuluvius]

Mine was when I almost exsanguinated from a rectal bleed and then following the operation developed an abscess followed later by sepsis.

[Applepienation]

Sometime last year I was walking home from school. It was a wet, cold, windy, miserable day and I had a fair distance to walk.

 

After about 35-40 minutes of walking through the downpour I finally make it home and change into some warm clothes. I take out my laptop, an with horror notice that it was in my backpack upside down. When transporting my laptop I would ALWAYS make sure the vent is facing down so no water could get in. This, the rainiest day of the year, I had accidentally put it in the wrong way.

I panicked and without checking if it actually ran, I removed the battery and left it to sit for the weekend.

 

Come Monday. I wake up and walk over to my desk. I plug the battery in, plug the laptop in. With bated breath I press the power button.

 

Nothing. Black screen.

 

Oh, well maybe I need to give it a few more seconds to build up enough of a charge? *Press*

 

The fan turns on, and the light on the power button comes on. I rejoice and start packing up my laptop. 

 

Then the fan and light went off. I pressed the power button again, and black screen.

 

"Oh fuck me"

 

See, I had a lot of school work on there. A huge project I'd been working on for 3 weeks, about 25 pages of psychology notes, 15 of biology, 8 of chem, and so on. I was flipping out. I had a lot of important stuff on that computer, and now I couldn't get it to boot.

 

During lunch that day I walked over to where I bought my laptop and brought it in. When I returned after school had ended for the prognosis, my spirit dropped even further. Motherboard? Shot. RAM? Shot. CPU? GPU? Screen? Shot shot and shot. I asked if any of my data would be able to be saved, but it didn't look good. The next day I spoke to my teachers about how my laptop had died and I may have lost all my work, current or otherwise, from the whole year. They weren't exactly sympathetic and made it clear that I would not get an easier time just because I lost all my work.

 

Anyways. I was stuck without my laptop for almost a month before I got a replacement laptop. It had still been under warranty so I got a replacement free, I only needed to pay for the time taken working on it. I asked if the HDD was salvageable, but the tech just told me that it was in rough shape when he dismantled it.

 

Disheartened I return home and open my new-ish laptop to boot it for the first time. But wait... What is this... This isn't the windows setup... This is my login screen! Name, password hint, profile picture, everything! Every last bit of data, saved!

 

Suffice it to say I was over the freaking moon. If I hadn't been able to recover that data, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have passed Chemistry.

[NeatSquidYT]

When my laptop black screened (it's a thing). Worked out in the end however. Just after hours of rebooting, Windows decided to tell me there was a problem and they wanted to fix it. WHY DIDNT YOU SAY THAT THE FIRST BLOODY TIME.

Also, when I corrupted my mums account on her laptop, and I tried to edit registry files, and that corrupted my dads. Once again, rebooting multiple times comes to the rescue. Never again will I touch registry files. Ok, I will but on my own computers.

[Smeyer40]

I was changing a light bulb in the dark and was feeling for the socket with my finger. Then an almighty zapp threw me off the ladder into a glass table which smashed.  Thank good for electrical cut out switches and thank god i was in my full work mechanic work gear and overalls and didn't even get a scratch. Just a burnt ego and a truly shocking experience.

Ouch

[Smeyer40]

Sometime last year I was walking home from school. It was a wet, cold, windy, miserable day and I had a fair distance to walk.

 

After about 35-40 minutes of walking through the downpour I finally make it home and change into some warm clothes. I take out my laptop, an with horror notice that it was in my backpack upside down. When transporting my laptop I would ALWAYS make sure the vent is facing down so no water could get in. This, the rainiest day of the year, I had accidentally put it in the wrong way.

I panicked and without checking if it actually ran, I removed the battery and left it to sit for the weekend.

 

Come Monday. I wake up and walk over to my desk. I plug the battery in, plug the laptop in. With bated breath I press the power button.

 

Nothing. Black screen.

 

Oh, well maybe I need to give it a few more seconds to build up enough of a charge? *Press*

 

The fan turns on, and the light on the power button comes on. I rejoice and start packing up my laptop. 

 

Then the fan and light went off. I pressed the power button again, and black screen.

 

"Oh fuck me"

 

See, I had a lot of school work on there. A huge project I'd been working on for 3 weeks, about 25 pages of psychology notes, 15 of biology, 8 of chem, and so on. I was flipping out. I had a lot of important stuff on that computer, and now I couldn't get it to boot.

 

During lunch that day I walked over to where I bought my laptop and brought it in. When I returned after school had ended for the prognosis, my spirit dropped even further. Motherboard? Shot. RAM? Shot. CPU? GPU? Screen? Shot shot and shot. I asked if any of my data would be able to be saved, but it didn't look good. The next day I spoke to my teachers about how my laptop had died and I may have lost all my work, current or otherwise, from the whole year. They weren't exactly sympathetic and made it clear that I would not get an easier time just because I lost all my work.

 

Anyways. I was stuck without my laptop for almost a month before I got a replacement laptop. It had still been under warranty so I got a replacement free, I only needed to pay for the time taken working on it. I asked if the HDD was salvageable, but the tech just told me that it was in rough shape when he dismantled it.

 

Disheartened I return home and open my new-ish laptop to boot it for the first time. But wait... What is this... This isn't the windows setup... This is my login screen! Name, password hint, profile picture, everything! Every last bit of data, saved!

 

Suffice it to say I was over the freaking moon. If I hadn't been able to recover that data, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have passed Chemistry.

WOW!! Now that is luck!

[alby800]

On Christmas day 2012, at around 4pm, a young boy the age of twelve was swimming in the pool with his cousins and his older sister (15). He felt a strange tingle on one side of his body and he told his sister, she said to "get out of the pool if you don't feel good" or something along those lines.

now of course the little boy didn't listen, he stayed in the pool and didn't get out until later when the strange tingling got worse.

He told his mum about it and she just said "it was probably because of all the excitement."

The boy continued on his merry day until a headache appeared. He had been getting headaches all term in class but this was like no other, this headache was the worst headache that he had EVER gotten.

He writhed and writhed on the couch with his aunties and his mum trying to calm him down and get him to take a painkiller, but alas, the pain continued.

After about 10 min of him writhing in agony, his parents decided to take him to the hospital. They left their 15 year old daughter to look after the home until they came back (as the party was at their house) or until they had to leave to go the other party at night (at their other aunties house). On the way to the hospital the boy threw up in a bag that the parents had prepared just in case. The parents stopped where they could on the side of the road to help the boy (or something like that). Once the boy had finished throwing up the resumed their journey to the hospital. When they finally reached the hospital the nurses put him in the emergency room. Unfortunately this hospital couldn't take care of him for whatever reason and they rushed him to the other hospital in town. . .

 

The boy wakes up later that night in a hospital bed, having no clue what is going on. He is hooked up to a drip and other stuff that had things on it. It turns out he had meningitis, they never found out what kind it was. He stayed in the hospital for a bit over a week recovering. Some friends came to visit and taught me how to play chess to pass time. When he got out of hospital, he went and played with the toys that he got for Christmas and had a ball of a time. 

Now almost two years later, he has built two pc's, done something else impressive and done something probably not so impressive.

 

That, my friends, is the story of my Christmas in 2012.

[A Bubble]

On Christmas day 2012, at around 4pm, a young boy the age of twelve was swimming in the pool with his cousins and his older sister (15). He felt a strange tingle on one side of his body and he told his sister, she said to "get out of the pool if you don't feel good" or something along those lines.

now of course the little boy didn't listen, he stayed in the pool and didn't get out until later when the strange tingling got worse.

He told his mum about it and she just said "it was probably because of all the excitement."

The boy continued on his merry day until a headache appeared. He had been getting headaches all term in class but this was like no other, this headache was the worst headache that he had EVER gotten.

He writhed and writhed on the couch with his aunties and his mum trying to calm him down and get him to take a painkiller, but alas, the pain continued.

After about 10 min of him writhing in agony, his parents decided to take him to the hospital. They left their 15 year old daughter to look after the home until they came back (as the party was at their house) or until they had to leave to go the other party at night (at their other aunties house). On the way to the hospital the boy threw up in a bag that the parents had prepared just in case. The parents stopped where they could on the side of the road to help the boy (or something like that). Once the boy had finished throwing up the resumed their journey to the hospital. When they finally reached the hospital the nurses put him in the emergency room. Unfortunately this hospital couldn't take care of him for whatever reason and they rushed him to the other hospital in town. . .

 

The boy wakes up later that night in a hospital bed, having no clue what is going on. He is hooked up to a drip and other stuff that had things on it. He stayed in the hospital for a bit over a week recovering. Some friends came to visit and taught me how to play chess to pass time. When he got out of hospital, he went and played with the toys that he got for Christmas and had a ball of a time. 

Now almost two years later, he has built two pc's, done something else impressive and done something probably not so impressive.

 

That, my friends, is the story of my Christmas in 2012.

 

Appendicitis, right?

[alby800]

Appendicitis, right?

meningitis, I already had appendicitis in 2010

[ManWithBeard1990]

I once got threatened with a knife by a person who wanted "20 euros or my life". I only had 5 on me. I still genuinely don't like to stand near people I don't know.

[elecxonica]

When I built my sister's machine I spent about 5 minutes trying to remove the GPU (because ASRock doesn't know how to design PCI slots for ease of use). I got it out, put it back in and finished the build. Then I hit power... and nothing. I started freaking out, thinking I'd just killed either a $130 MOBO or a $200 GPU. I ended up unplugging almost everything and it started working. I put everything back in and it kept working... The only thing that didn't was ram that needed to be reseated.

[Simmytu]

-snip-

I definitely know how this would feel, because I've been in the same type of situation.

 

Here is my story,

I was terrified as **** when my previous Samsung Chronos laptop decided to give up its life and die with all of my important school documents and reports that I've been working on for the past 4 months (some 3 40 page fully written documents about fire hazard and fire prevention). 

Firstly I told to myself it was just a random blue screen and everything should be working normally after I restart my laptop. Everything was normal, just like what I've expected but then another blue screen came along with a very high pitched screech sound coming from the main speakers after just 3 minutes of runtime.

I've panicked because of the sound. Then I realized my laptop is dying after 5 months of ownership.

What could I do, told I to myself. I couldn't just open it since it would void the warranty and have a 3 kg slab of aluminum stuck forever.

I turned it back on and plugged a thumb drive in it and started to save as much as possible and after 4 attempts I had recovered most of the important data in that laptop. (I did lose couple of folders full of family pictures unfortunately ).

Later on that same week, I RMA'd the laptop to the shop and they gave me full refund of the product after they fully verified that I didn't cause anything by myself.

 

Since then I've learned my lesson and now I'm always backing up my files at Onedrive cloud storage, school server and at home to prevent myself stuck again with this nasty situation.

[Nuluvius]

-snip-

 

Couldn't you simply have extracted your data directly from the HDD. Or if concerned about warranty made the store do it for you?

[SeriouslyMikey]

Skiing accident in 2008. Has nothing to do with tech, but this looks like more of an off topic thread anyway, so I assume it is relevant. 

 

It was the first day of my holidays in a Italian resort called Pila, it was the first year of meeting my step dad and in my mind, I assume I just wanted to impress him in some amazing way. First run of the day/week should really be relaxing and not over the top. But being my stupid young age and just wanting to show off to my step dad, I decided to go up to a red run. The run started off steadily, calm and normal. Though as I hadn't skid in about a year, I had forgotten a good amount of technique from the previous year. As the slope got steeper and steeper, eventually I was hitting a speed that I couldn't control. I immediately went into the snow plow position, however at the speed I was going, I should have began turning too, instead, I just kept going straight and by this point I had began to panic, when suddenly my skis were torn out from under me and the last thing I felt was my head hitting the slop below and then just black. According to my mother, I was out for five to ten minutes. After that, I cant even remember having to ride down the slope, again, apparently in terror and crying down the rest of the mountain.  

[Simmytu]

Couldn't you simply have extracted your data directly from the HDD. Or if concerned about warranty made the store do it for you?

Nope, I didn't select any extra warranty service on that laptop, just the standard 2 year warranty that came with the laptop. I couldn't extract the HDD because the back cover was factory sealed if I opened it it would void the warranty entirely and I wouldn't have any RMA rights.

[alby800]

Skiing accident in 2008. Has nothing to do with tech, but this looks like more of an off topic thread anyway, so I assume it is relevant. 

 

It was the first day of my holidays in a Italian resort called Pila, it was the first year of meeting my step dad and in my mind, I assume I just wanted to impress him in some amazing way. First run of the day/week should really be relaxing and not over the top. But being my stupid young age and just wanting to show off to my step dad, I decided to go up to a red run. The run started off steadily, calm and normal. Though as I hadn't skid in about a year, I had forgotten a good amount of technique from the previous year. As the slope got steeper and steeper, eventually I was hitting a speed that I couldn't control. I immediately went into the snow plow position, however at the speed I was going, I should have began turning too, instead, I just kept going straight and by this point I had began to panic, when suddenly my skis were torn out from under me and the last thing I felt was my head hitting the slop below and then just black. According to my mother, I was out for five to ten minutes. After that, I cant even remember having to ride down the slope, again, apparently in terror and crying down the rest of the mountain.  

yikes

[Nuluvius]

Nope, I didn't select any extra warranty service on that laptop, just the standard 2 year warranty that came with the laptop. I couldn't extract the HDD because the back cover was factory sealed if I opened it it would void the warranty entirely and I wouldn't have any RMA rights.

 

I don't know how things work over there but if this sort of thing occurred over here then the customer would be well within their rights to demand data recovery.

[NeilFX]

It was a regular Sunday for me and that day, I decided that I would clean my desktop. I grabbed my soft brush, cleaning cloth and screwdriver and went outside with my pc. I unscrewed my GPU and removed it from the socket, placed it on top of the desktop (Huge mistake). Unscrewed the rear fan as well as the PSU. Cleaned it from top to bottom and I noticed that some dust was residing on the motherboard and wouldn't budge when I used the brush. Grabbed my cleaning cloth then tilted my desktop about 25deg. Unfortunately, my GPU plummeted about 3 feet down to the ground (cement). 

 

It was horrifying. I'm pretty sure my heart missed a beat. I grabbed it quickly, noticed that the part where the screw attaches was bent. Thinking it would be impossible to screw it back in (or work for that matter), I quickly finished cleaning up then re-attached my GPU. It was a bit rough when screwing it back because of the deformed metal. I got it about a minute later and plugged in the 6-pin power for it. A bit skeptical at first whether it would work (I was sweating excessively), after about a minute plugging all the connections to their proper places, I turned it on hoping for it to work.

 

I'm glad it worked!

[ObilvionNizer]

Playing Tomb Raider and the computer Shut off and wouldn't turn on. So went in to the system and checked everything turned out the power cable was loose. 

[juretrn]

Skiing accident in 2008. Has nothing to do with tech, but this looks like more of an off topic thread anyway, so I assume it is relevant.

It was the first day of my holidays in a Italian resort called Pila, it was the first year of meeting my step dad and in my mind, I assume I just wanted to impress him in some amazing way. First run of the day/week should really be relaxing and not over the top. But being my stupid young age and just wanting to show off to my step dad, I decided to go up to a red run. The run started off steadily, calm and normal. Though as I hadn't skid in about a year, I had forgotten a good amount of technique from the previous year. As the slope got steeper and steeper, eventually I was hitting a speed that I couldn't control. I immediately went into the snow plow position, however at the speed I was going, I should have began turning too, instead, I just kept going straight and by this point I had began to panic, when suddenly my skis were torn out from under me and the last thing I felt was my head hitting the slop below and then just black. According to my mother, I was out for five to ten minutes. After that, I cant even remember having to ride down the slope, again, apparently in terror and crying down the rest of the mountain.

I guess you wouldn't like skiing with me then (I feel bored if I can't do at least 80 km/h going downhill) :D.

[SeriouslyMikey]

I guess you wouldn't like skiing with me then (I feel bored if I can't do at least 80 km/h going downhill) :D.

 

I wouldn't want to ski, but snowboard, sure. I don't go slow any more and I am rarely on the piste. 

[juretrn]

I wouldn't want to ski, but snowboard, sure. I don't go slow any more and I am rarely on the piste.

Snowboard peasant. Skiing master race.

Jk

[SeriouslyMikey]

Snowboard peasant. Skiing master race.

Jk

 

Shhh, posh man.