What are the scariest tech-related things you've ever experienced?

[Jtalk4456]

when i got a seagate 1tb, backed up EVERYTHING, reformatted my drive and went to put it back on and it was gone!

After about 1 hr with seagate support, found out it put all the backup in a hidden folder, not sure why

Edit: this is way before i got into tech and would know to check the volumes or check for hidden folders, and even given that, there's still no reason for it to have hidden the backup in the meantime

[DrThots]

15 hours ago, AskTJ said:

Drooled on my motherboard while building on carpet. 

Having some rather Interesting dreams there pal

[Drak3]

Diesel truck would randomly refuse to go above 40mph after a sensor triggered.

[Canada EH]

The Zipper (has been retired)

https://globalnews.ca/news/3584996/end-of-an-era-as-the-zipper-ride-retires-from-calgary-stampede/

Awesome piece of technology!

 

 

[Majinhoju]

Windows ME?

[r2724r16]

I had some bent socket pins and had to bend them back into place, but unfortunately a pin broke off. I wished for the best and put my CPU into the socket and tried booting up, but I ended up frying my CPU. 

[Majinhoju]

One of my old Pentium 4 PCs back in back in the way would power on by itself.  That was kind of spooky.. lol

[flibberdipper]

Just a video card that caught fire and a pair of HDDs that touched and also caught fire.

[Jurrunio]

4 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Diesel truck would randomly refuse to go above 40mph after a sensor triggered.

limp home mode?

[Canada EH]

5 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Diesel truck would randomly refuse to go above 40mph after a sensor triggered.

Middle of the desert in the Sahara?

[Guest]

5 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

GTX 480's lol

 

CPU is an FX 9590

 

They run hot at like 80-90C but they do that without being in SLI...

Thats a heater not a computer. 

[kokakolia]

That feeling when you read about Linux for weeks...so you install Ubuntu on your computer...and it sucks major balls because Linux has abysmal hardware support...so your screen is at 200% brightness and can’t be turned down, your fan is spinning at 100% and your CPU is at 80% and you can practically fry an egg on your laptop...but you didn’t do a Windows restore DVD...so you have to buy a copy of Windows 7 for $150 to fix your laptop. 

 

That at was me in 2011. Thankfully, Linux sucks wayyy less in 2018. I am currently using Linux Mint on a cheap old refurbished Dell laptop and it’s fine. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Trying to remove a CPU heatsink too attached through thermal paste to the CPU, and succeeding only to find out that the CPU was still glued to the heatsink. Never lifted the socket's lever, yet the CPU came off clean.

To my relief, no pin damage in the process: both motherboard and CPU continued to work till this day. But until I could test them...

[Darkman]

38 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

Thats a heater not a computer. 

It consumes as much power as an electric space heater but you can do more than produce heat with it cause it's a computer

[Andreas Lilja]

PC would boot but not display.

 

Scary thing is that I paid money for it to be fixed.

 

Guess what? I was plugging the monitor into the wrong HDMI.

[Erkel]

The ongoing disaster that was decided to go with intel SSD's.  Have a few million dollars worth of industrial electronics manufacturing equipment that I look after and experiencing ~20% failure rate.  This week swapping out 5 intel SSD's that are failing.

If you have an SSD I would recommend checking it with something like HD sentinel.   Intel 535 and 540 series.

[Devin92]

years back when i am in high school, i was troubleshooting a kitchen appliance with it plugged in the wall. and then i experienced how electricity going thru your body feels.

[Ambrusius]

Back when i had a job fixing apple computers i once got a pretty large electric shock from brushing against an imac power supply. This made me drop the display (it didnt break) the motherboard connector the display was attached to was torn out though. My boss was not impressed and i never wore conducting shoes while changing parts in imacs again,

[iris7]

I was adding more sticks of memory to a hp server while in an university datacenter.  I popped in all the sticks of ram into the server.  When I powered on the server, it would post and showed that both cpus have failed.  It took arranging the sticks of memory into certain slots, in a special order, to get the machine to power on.  Was not a fun time.  10/10 would never want to do again.  I guess I am grateful that there is iLO and iDRAC that make remote management tolerable so I will never need to physically go to a datacenter.

[Just Monika]

Got a brand-new GTX 1080 within a week or so after it was just released, happily threw away my old and aging R9 280X and popped in the 1080, fired up Overwatch and threw all the graphics settings to Ultra.

 

As I was enjoying a few games of max-settings + max FPS gameplay, I faintly hear though my headphones a sharp POP sound, but think nothing of it since it could just be a loose cable or something expanding from the heat inside my case. I hear about 2-3 more POPs and on the last one, all video cuts out. Fearing the worst, I opened up my case and immediately smelled something burning. After swapping back my old 280X, I confirmed that it was my 1080 that had suddenly died.

 

I was super bummed out as I had barely had 2 hours of gaming with my brand-new 1080 before it died. Fortunately, EVGA was extremely cooperative with their support and I was able to arrange for a cross-shipped replacement at no cost.

[Jurrunio]

7 minutes ago, Weird Face said:

Got a brand-new GTX 1080 within a week or so after it was just released, happily threw away my old and aging R9 280X and popped in the 1080, fired up Overwatch and threw all the graphics settings to Ultra.

 

As I was enjoying a few games of max-settings + max FPS gameplay, I faintly hear though my headphones a sharp POP sound, but think nothing of it since it could just be a loose cable or something expanding from the heat inside my case. I hear about 2-3 more POPs and on the last one, all video cuts out. Fearing the worst, I opened up my case and immediately smelled something burning. After swapping back my old 280X, I confirmed that it was my 1080 that had suddenly died.

 

I was super bummed out as I had barely had 2 hours of gaming with my brand-new 1080 before it died. Fortunately, EVGA was extremely cooperative with their support and I was able to arrange for a cross-shipped replacement at no cost.

aww too bad

[Giganthrax]

It just happened tonight. While doing cable management, I lost one of the screws and was terrified that it might be stuck behind the motherboard in such a way that it wasn't rolling around, but could still mess up the mobo. Thankfully, I found the screw later on another spot.

 

I also poured coffee over my razer blackwidow ultimate classic. To razer's credit, it survived it without issues. 

[Shreyas1]

Took out a HDD and suddenly computer didn't work when HDD was installed again.  No power, nothing. Problem would only be fixed if I removed the HDD and then reseated the cables. Scared the heck out of me at first. My HDD works now, after I switched out the PSUs. 

[Zodiark1593]

On 6/12/2018 at 2:58 PM, Majinhoju said:

Windows ME?

Given my first owned PC had Windows ME, I'm still rather surprised it hadn' scared me away from tech...

[veli2501]

Knocked over a desk & draws with a graphics card sitting on it and the desk landed on top of it.  Smashed the cooler off the board, this was a (long time ago) Geforce 4 4200ti so it didn't have much weight to it and didn't damage the board its self.  Luckily a week or two prior I noticed a local computer store was selling aftermarket coolers for them so I could repair it and it worked fine.