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Some of the worst I've seen:
Lightning surge
The computer connected to the internet using a dial-up modem. There was a bad lightning storm and a bolt struck around the house. Over the next 6 months, the owner kept bringing the computer into the repair shop to solve an always increasing number of problems. It cost her over $2000 in total. Her homeowners insurance covered the cost to replace the computer but would not pay for the other repair charges.
Cigarette Smoke
I once fixed a computer at a private residence that was so tarred up with cigarette smoke dust that fans were failing. Worst of all (but not computer related), there was a large yellow circle around her desk that overlapped onto her monitor. She sat at her computer smoking so regularly that the smoke had formed a yellow ring.
Data Loss
The worst computer problems are always failing hard drives. When I was working my way through school, I focused on helping local businesses with their I.T. problems. Consistently, accounting departments, sales departments, and worst of all management would rarely back up. Hard drives fail and when they do money is always lost.
It's surprising how angry people get when you tell them that short of (in 1998) data recovery was extremely expensive. One place I was working for lost over 5 years of accounting and sales data because a janitor accidentally knocked a tower case off of a desk. I sure didn't play the "I told you so" card, but I did... not a month before the trouble happened, I quoted a backup and recovery plan / system that would have saved them (what I expect) was almost $100,000 in overtime, lost sales, and recovery from paper records.
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Worst over-efficient problem I've ever had was an accidental "save" keyboard command. I'm pretty compulsive about saving my work whenever I get something done that's time consuming or took a lot of mental work. In this case, I'd sorted a database of 3,500 purchase order records by date. I intended to save the file, but still had the column highlighted and hit "delete" for some unexplained reason. Then I saved. AAARRRGGGHHH. So I spent the next workday going through 3,500 tissue copies of purchase orders and re-entering the date.
Source(s):
Bitter experience
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Once when I worked for a county public library, I was working on their RedHat web server, doing some maintenance on a Perl script a previous employee had created years before. At some point the root volume was running low on space, and I at some point did a MV (move) instead of CP (copy) on the /bin directory; as I realized just a little while later, the operating system doesn't work too well when it can't find any of its important little system programs. Luckily I was able to sign in with a bootable Linux diskette and undo my damage, but for about half an hour the library system didn't have their main web server. :-}
A near-miss nightmare, one day at this same library a sewage line had ruptured, and raw sewage was bubbling up into the basement. Unfortunately we had some routers and wiring down there, and though thankfully the routers were spared, some cabling was dangling low enough to get soaked. Our boss suggested we just take some bleach water and go clean them up, luckily we didn't have to follow through with that thanks to Facilities!
Another one, one of the OSD menu buttons for a then relatively new Compaq 15" LCD monitor was flaky, so I borrowed a big C-clamp from the Facilities department and used that to anchor the button in place; for whatever reason the button's circuit had to be closed so that it wouldn't pop up the OSD constantly. Returned at some point thereafter for warranty service.
A buddy of mine once took a power connector for a 2.5 GB IDE hard drive (this was around the time they still cost about $250 apiece) and somehow plugged it in backwards. This is that chunky D-shaped one which is supposed to not be reversible. Anyway, when he powered it up, this white glow emerged from one of the DSP chips on the drive's circuitboard, and the "soul" of the drive in the form of thick black smoke issued from it. Such a short life, it was just minutes out of the anti-static packaging!
This borders on the crazy, my wife's office was having issues with their Dell server, so Dell sends a technician. Somehow, inexplicably, the Dell guy was apparently *high* on something, and decided to screw up the RAID array on the server by just removing then reinserting the drives in no particular order.
Source(s):
Hardware, software and networking jobs for 10+ years.
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On an old iMac G3 running OSX 10.2.8 I got a Kernel Panic from a broken mouse. Yeah on a Mac we somehow find it a joy to encounter a kernel panic error. Problem was the logitech optical mouse was going flaky. If the lights on the optical mouse isn't tracking properly it will cause OS X to crash. It took me awhile to figure it out myself. As if its a known and documented issue? I googled it. During that hell of a time. I couldn't use the iMac for a few minutes and then suddenly it would freeze.
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Probably the funniest computer disaster I heard was back when I worked for Dell. A lady called in for a warranty exchange on a laptop that had been dropped. She had accidental coverage, so no problem. I was trying to get a feel for what was wrong and if it just needed some parts replaced, and she assured me it was the whole thing...it was in several pieces, and she had gathered up as many as she could find. At this point I just HAD to ask what had happened...Apparently, she was a reporter and had been doing a story from the helicopter. She stretched to reach her drink, her laptop fell off her lap, and slid out...falling to a sudden demise in the mall parking lot below. She had some friends who were down below go find it, and after landing went back to help them gather the pieces. To this day I wish I could have been the person to receive it...just to see the damage...haha...
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My DS,12, when he was about 15 months old, managed to erase our entire hard drive in about 30 seconds. We still don't know what he did. He was not allowed to touch a computer again until he was 6. He's now proficient in Photoshop and is learning Python.
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Answered Question
M$1
March 12, 2009 04:16 PM
What is the worse computer problem you have experienced?
Misery loves company, I guess.
I've had a computer meltdown that actually kept of OFF Mahalo for a day. I am still in the process of fixing it--looks like I'll be doing a clean install once I back up my files. Once again, I've been attacked by the Vundo virus.
What was your worst computer nightmare? Did you lose files? How long did it take you to fix it? I'm on day two of my nightmare but hope is in sight!!
I've had a computer meltdown that actually kept of OFF Mahalo for a day. I am still in the process of fixing it--looks like I'll be doing a clean install once I back up my files. Once again, I've been attacked by the Vundo virus.
What was your worst computer nightmare? Did you lose files? How long did it take you to fix it? I'm on day two of my nightmare but hope is in sight!!
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Best Answer Chosen by Asker
| March 12, 2009 04:37 PM |
Lightning surge
The computer connected to the internet using a dial-up modem. There was a bad lightning storm and a bolt struck around the house. Over the next 6 months, the owner kept bringing the computer into the repair shop to solve an always increasing number of problems. It cost her over $2000 in total. Her homeowners insurance covered the cost to replace the computer but would not pay for the other repair charges.
Cigarette Smoke
I once fixed a computer at a private residence that was so tarred up with cigarette smoke dust that fans were failing. Worst of all (but not computer related), there was a large yellow circle around her desk that overlapped onto her monitor. She sat at her computer smoking so regularly that the smoke had formed a yellow ring.
Data Loss
The worst computer problems are always failing hard drives. When I was working my way through school, I focused on helping local businesses with their I.T. problems. Consistently, accounting departments, sales departments, and worst of all management would rarely back up. Hard drives fail and when they do money is always lost.
It's surprising how angry people get when you tell them that short of (in 1998) data recovery was extremely expensive. One place I was working for lost over 5 years of accounting and sales data because a janitor accidentally knocked a tower case off of a desk. I sure didn't play the "I told you so" card, but I did... not a month before the trouble happened, I quoted a backup and recovery plan / system that would have saved them (what I expect) was almost $100,000 in overtime, lost sales, and recovery from paper records.
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Other Answers (7)
March 12, 2009 04:37 PM
Well, a few years ago I was in the process of doing a backup. What I was going to begin to do was burn everything to disc, then back up to two different external drives that I had bought that day. At least that was the plan. Up to this point I had very little data backed up. So I fire up the pc and no windows, nothing! I would get no beeps, nothing at all. I think the bios chip fried on the board. So down to the tech shop we go. Well, I am not a tech so I am at the mercy of those who say they are. I get to the shop and after a few hours I get a call telling me that the drive is dead. Immediately I feel the sweat beading on my brow. I ask, what do you mean dead? They say, dead, as in dead. What about my data I ask. I am sure it was much like when the doctor comes out of the ER and all the people rush up and the doctor days,, sorry there is nothing we can do. The tech tells me nothing on the drive can be accessed. I ask about the bios chip, he tells me the chips is fine, it is not the mobo it is the drive, it just simply died. I had songs, short storied, poems, movies, tv shows and about 1,500 pictures. All gone, gone and dead never to be seen again. On the day I bought two external drives a pack of DVDs and was going to spend the rest of my day off backing it all up. Now that is tragedy. No paper copies of anything I wrote and no prints of any of the pictures. And the pictures were mostly of family and special occasions that can mever be repeated. So yes this is my big computer horror story. Needless to say I do very regular back ups and am always replacing my drives probably more often than I need to or should, but once bitten, twice shy.
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March 12, 2009 04:44 PM
Worst computer nightmare was the dreaded death tune of Mac OSX on my previous computer. It couldn't find a system to boot. That fairly innocent tune causes the guts to turn to jelly. I don't remember what the final solution was, but I lost a few, unimportant files. This one was the worst because of the uncertainty of whether I'd be able to recover anything at all! Worst over-efficient problem I've ever had was an accidental "save" keyboard command. I'm pretty compulsive about saving my work whenever I get something done that's time consuming or took a lot of mental work. In this case, I'd sorted a database of 3,500 purchase order records by date. I intended to save the file, but still had the column highlighted and hit "delete" for some unexplained reason. Then I saved. AAARRRGGGHHH. So I spent the next workday going through 3,500 tissue copies of purchase orders and re-entering the date.
Source(s):
Bitter experience
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March 12, 2009 05:41 PM
I've had a fair number, some mine and others I've heard about second hand. Once when I worked for a county public library, I was working on their RedHat web server, doing some maintenance on a Perl script a previous employee had created years before. At some point the root volume was running low on space, and I at some point did a MV (move) instead of CP (copy) on the /bin directory; as I realized just a little while later, the operating system doesn't work too well when it can't find any of its important little system programs. Luckily I was able to sign in with a bootable Linux diskette and undo my damage, but for about half an hour the library system didn't have their main web server. :-}
A near-miss nightmare, one day at this same library a sewage line had ruptured, and raw sewage was bubbling up into the basement. Unfortunately we had some routers and wiring down there, and though thankfully the routers were spared, some cabling was dangling low enough to get soaked. Our boss suggested we just take some bleach water and go clean them up, luckily we didn't have to follow through with that thanks to Facilities!
Another one, one of the OSD menu buttons for a then relatively new Compaq 15" LCD monitor was flaky, so I borrowed a big C-clamp from the Facilities department and used that to anchor the button in place; for whatever reason the button's circuit had to be closed so that it wouldn't pop up the OSD constantly. Returned at some point thereafter for warranty service.
A buddy of mine once took a power connector for a 2.5 GB IDE hard drive (this was around the time they still cost about $250 apiece) and somehow plugged it in backwards. This is that chunky D-shaped one which is supposed to not be reversible. Anyway, when he powered it up, this white glow emerged from one of the DSP chips on the drive's circuitboard, and the "soul" of the drive in the form of thick black smoke issued from it. Such a short life, it was just minutes out of the anti-static packaging!
This borders on the crazy, my wife's office was having issues with their Dell server, so Dell sends a technician. Somehow, inexplicably, the Dell guy was apparently *high* on something, and decided to screw up the RAID array on the server by just removing then reinserting the drives in no particular order.
Source(s):
Hardware, software and networking jobs for 10+ years.
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March 12, 2009 06:14 PM
*shudder* I've heard horror stories of the onsite techs from dell...lol. Their problem is that the little companies they outsource to are just plain bad. It got to the point that our support center was actually keeping score on a wall. Did you recover the array? lol
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March 12, 2009 07:57 PM
Holy crap, guess Dell better work on taking a closer look at who the hell they outsource to!!
nativenerd they finally recovered from the mess, but the only good backup they had was 2 full weeks old so they had to fall back to that (the office had a half-assed contractor maintaining their setup and they hadn't been keeping a close eye on backups).
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nativenerd they finally recovered from the mess, but the only good backup they had was 2 full weeks old so they had to fall back to that (the office had a half-assed contractor maintaining their setup and they hadn't been keeping a close eye on backups).
March 12, 2009 06:08 PM
Here's a weird problem you wont encounter daily. On an old iMac G3 running OSX 10.2.8 I got a Kernel Panic from a broken mouse. Yeah on a Mac we somehow find it a joy to encounter a kernel panic error. Problem was the logitech optical mouse was going flaky. If the lights on the optical mouse isn't tracking properly it will cause OS X to crash. It took me awhile to figure it out myself. As if its a known and documented issue? I googled it. During that hell of a time. I couldn't use the iMac for a few minutes and then suddenly it would freeze.
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March 12, 2009 06:10 PM
Actually, this was a recent one. My old computer just wasn't cuttin' it anymore. So I went out, got a barebones kit and a nice new 1TB drive. I grabbed everything off of an old external which was starting to make noise and I figured about to fail, everything off my old hard drive...and MOVED it all to this brand spanky new drive. During moving, several files failed a few times...formatted the drive and tried moving more stuff...same thing. I figured it was bad sectors. Played around some...decided the drive sounded like it might be borderline DOA. So I flattened out the drive, then ran back to Frye's, they exchanged it for a new one, and I went happily back to upgrading my computer. Got it all setup and ready to go when I realized...you remember before when I said I had moved everything, not copied...but MOVED? Doh! 80gb of music, ton of pictures, my resumes, a few old business plans, some research...all poof...and all MY fault, lol. The worst thing is, the drive wasn't even bad...after I had some more problems, I checked out the RAM and found out I had a bad stick. After replacing, it ran like a champ...=( Probably the funniest computer disaster I heard was back when I worked for Dell. A lady called in for a warranty exchange on a laptop that had been dropped. She had accidental coverage, so no problem. I was trying to get a feel for what was wrong and if it just needed some parts replaced, and she assured me it was the whole thing...it was in several pieces, and she had gathered up as many as she could find. At this point I just HAD to ask what had happened...Apparently, she was a reporter and had been doing a story from the helicopter. She stretched to reach her drink, her laptop fell off her lap, and slid out...falling to a sudden demise in the mall parking lot below. She had some friends who were down below go find it, and after landing went back to help them gather the pieces. To this day I wish I could have been the person to receive it...just to see the damage...haha...
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March 12, 2009 08:56 PM
I had a problem with a Logitech mouse and a Dell laptop running Win 2000. One of my kids tripped over the mouse cord, which unplugged the mouse...and somehow also fried a memory slot. After that it was like dominoes...the OS crashed, and when it came back, the keyboard registered everything one key to the left! My DS,12, when he was about 15 months old, managed to erase our entire hard drive in about 30 seconds. We still don't know what he did. He was not allowed to touch a computer again until he was 6. He's now proficient in Photoshop and is learning Python.
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For the cost of hard drives these days, it's well worth it.
Data loss happens to all of us at some point. I lost a bunch of family photos a couple of years back. My wife is still a little mad at me.
Now, I copy photos from the memory card to my computer and immediately to an external hard drive. Once every 3 months, these photos are compressed and stored on the web.