OK, I know everyone has to have had one of these. Its time to come clean. What is your worst day(s) dealing with your computer you ever had?

 I'll start with mine :

For awhile my motherboard in my system had been acting strange. I would get random freeze ups and failed POSTS and failed video beeps. The problem would always go away after a few restarts. But without being able to prove it was the board acting up ASUS would not RMA it. So one month ago I decided to do some birthda upgrades for my system. I purchased a 2x 1GB memory kit to bring my memory up to 4GB and buy a new sound card for my system because I thought my audigy was dying since it stopped working ( I will explain later). So I headed up to Frys and purchased the new sound card and memory. One big mistake I made was trying to be frugal and bought a returned Sound Blaster XFi. I Go home, Install all the new hardware and boot up the PC. As soon as I installed the audio drivers I started hearing satanic subliminal messages behind every sound that was made. After awhile it stopped making all noise all together. I tried installing the card in my moms machine and it did the same thing. So it was a bad card, I returned the card to frys and they replaced it with a new one. So I head home and install the new sound card. This one works great. I started up wow and was going to play for a bit and all of a sudden my machine locks up. I restart the system and it locks up on boot. That dodgy motherboard issue is back again. I finally get windows to start and it is giving me IRQ errors in the device manager about the sound card. I once again install the card in my Mom's system and this time it works. I tried a few things to correct the woes on my system like updating the BIOS but had no success. Finally the board gave out and would just turn on and then turn off immediately. 

At this point I had been spending about 6 Hours on trying to fix this which included several clean installs of Windows and hardware troubleshooting. I called my old job and told them I would be coming by to steal (i mean borrow) a board from them. so at around 5:30 PM i come running through the door in the pooring rain. I briefly greet my old coworkers and run to the back and slap a board in there so I can atleast use my system that I just upgraded for my birthday. It was the last thing I really wanted to do on my Bday was Take my whole system apart and put it back together. My CPU even want to play a trick on me by getting stuck to the bottom of the HSF as I removed it (thank god for screwdrivers :P ). The board I'm running now is an Asus M2A-VM. Not the best board in the world but at lest it has 4 SATA ports and 4 Memory slots which isn't bad for an mATX board. I was a little ticked at them because they actually are charging me to loan the board from them since I purchased the orignal motherboard through them and I am a former employee. I'm still waiting on ASUS to return my board to me. So concluded the most stressful and irritating day I had ever had with my system. At least it is running now.

OK so that is my horrible story. Now what are some of yours?

Well,I do not buy that much hardware because I don't have money but my worst hardware experience is the following:

 I want to tell you a story about the problems i had with my Western Digital 80GB JB hard drive.After buying a new computer that contained this drive,9 months passed,and after a reboot,Windows Xp was not loading at all and was missing some files.

OK mine is I had an old Compaq system I forget the model but it had completely proprietary components. I wanted to upgrade the modem, and noticed the ISA cards were reversed, the brackets were on the opposite side as those in a standard system. And compaq didn't even have an upgrade option for it. To makea long story short I took a standard ISA card and removed the bracket that held the card in place so i could use it, it wasted 2 ISA slots but it worked.

Second worst was with a motherboard from a company called Mustang called the Stallion, what crap but it was the only Pentium 2 mobo i could find at the time that fit in an baby AT case which had AGP graphics. I learned a valuable lesson if you need specialty components you are probably sacrewed to begin with either you pay through the nose for the good stuff or you aredoomed to deal with crap that doesn't work properly.

Currently working with this clunker Im using right now! :(

 on my old amd athalon tbird..... well i was doing a bit of cleaning, and after i got done putting it back together i start it up... everything seems fine. boot into windows... then CRASH. i start it up again, CRASH right after the windows logo, start it up again DOESNT WORK. i open up the pc.. and find out i fried my athalon... i forgot to attach the hsf... :-( 

 Thats pretty harsh. I had an old hp Pavillion, don't remember the model off hand. One of the first few to come with a dvd burner in late 90's. Back when all oc'ing was done with jumpers on the mother board not in bios. Anyways me and my buds went to town obn this thing installed my pci voodoo5 5000 gfx card, oc'd the proc (celeron) to somthing silly like333 or 533 mghz. Anyway we put he rig back together and fire it up. It runs grand for about 45 minutes, then shuts off and dies. Reeboot takes minutes. Shut it down and rety hours later boots on power up propgram loading takes forever! I decide to look under the hood. Turns out in reseating the hsf we unplugged the fan part of the cpu's hsf, no cooling on the cpu! Fried!!!  I had to work with that peice of garbage for nearly 1.5 years untill I could afforn a new hp!

 I won a graphics card here from HH. A real powerful one that sucked up loads of electricity (X1900XTX). I ordered an Antec Sonata II case which came with a generic 400 watt power supply. It was a bad move thinking that somehow it was going to power it. However once my new rig arrived I tried powering it up but no avail. I learned from my mistake posted it up here in HH and everyone confirmed that even if I held a gun to the generic PSU it was not going to work. I sucked up my pride an bought an Enermax Liberty 600 watt power supply from an Irish high street retailer with money I borrowed from a friend. €300 it cost me.

For me it wasn't the €300 or the delay in getting my system run, it was a blow to my ego. I always preached never to buy generic power supplies, and of course, I broke my own rule and felt like a right knob.

-Dev

Once I was drinkin malt liqure and workin on a computer.  So I just downed my 5th  22oz bottleo and I was also on mushrooms (1/4 oz) and was smoking up(weed).   I was completely intoxicated and feeling pretty weird all around.   Short story: I knocked over a cup and it spilled all over everything.  I was so wasted I couldnt really deal with it at the time so I just decided to deal with it later.   the next day I took rubbing alchohol with q-tips and cleaned all the spilled beer off a p4 prescott rig insides the motherboard/video card/processor ram.  I'm just luky it wasnt on.  The motherboard went first but it lasted a good 3 years granted for a 250$ plat edition mobo not long.  I was just luky it wasnt plugged in mostly I think.

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