Computer Horror Stories

Wait, what?

They CHARGED you to fix that age-old bug?

****ing ridiculous.

I mean, I've got the same hard drives, and patched the firmware just to avoid that bug ages ago, but it should still be free. Their ****up.

 

Hard drive failure whilst turning it on to make backups

Got most of the data for a box of chocolates and some flowers.

 

I got the 'Cool Web Search' virus a few years ago, the most awful virus/malware/trojan/whatever I've ever run into. It was impossible to defeat (tried literally everything, from all the big and small apps and utilities that supposedly get rid of that stuff to Uncle Jimmy's home remedies found on random internet forums), and it eventually brought my system to its knees, leaving me no choice but to reformat the system drive, reinstall the OS, and start over from scratch.

If I could find the guy who created it, I would leave my old life behind and go capture him just for the satisfaction of sharing with him the misery he caused.

 

A teenage girl is babysitting one evening. The children have been put to bed and the babysitter is in the living room watching TV. The phone rings, and she hears an eerie laugh. She, at first dismisses the calls as a practical joke, but she soon becomes scared when a short time later, the caller asks her to "check the children". When she asks who the caller is, the phone line goes dead. The stranger calls back this time states, "I've got the children now I'm going to get you.".

The girl calls the police, who ask her to wait for another call, and they will trace the call. When call come, she manages to keep whoever it is talking, for a few minutes. The police break into the line, they tell her that the call is coming from a second line, inside the house, and to get out immediately, as they have already sent some officers over.

She runs outside, into the waiting arms of police, who go into the house. They then search upstairs and find the computer on with pictures of the children on the screen saver along with one empty frame that simply says "babysitter."

 

The funny thing is, when I first saw this thread, I thought about posting something along the lines of T2's, but I didn't have time to come up with anything funny.

It looks like T2 didn't have time either.

 

Rsync might be just what you need. That tool is a real gem. It comes with most Linux distros, but it has also been ported to Windows.

That's why I stay away from hardware RAID.

As for my horror story, it involves some poorly-documented BIOS beep codes. I thought my motherboard (whose warranty had expired 1 year before) had issues recognizing the graphics card. In fact, one of its memory slots was a little loose and didn't make proper contact with the DIMM. It took some digging through multiple forums to find out that its beep codes were different from the somewhat de facto standards.

 

I build a pc for stepmom who only speaks spanish. I do not.

The motherboard is brand new Asus. It is so new that windows cannot get along with it. It kept putting the pc in sleep mode, nothing worked so I brought it to a repair person. After two weeks, a new processor, power unit, graphics card and a dozen windows re-installs still did nothing.

The debates I had with the repair-man took long. I knew that al the parts he replaced were fine, but dad kept on panicking.

And suddenly with a windows update mentioning the motherboard all was resolves within one tiny update.

The parts found their way into other pc's. I still have the processor. (e 6600 conroe)

 

— I own an "overclocking" system with a BIOS that won't ever save and survive PC shutdown. Have to press F2 almost every boot.

— My graphics card (GF 460 GTX), same as the previous one BTW (ATI 4850), crashes in semi-random ways, returning memory errors that don't always make sense (bottom line: mornings are best for gaming... good thing I went freelance ); so I've had this problem for several years now.

— For a short while I had an AMD system with an ABIT mobo (successor of the honourably serving previous P4 system in which the mobo got friend in a storm) that would either start or not; the last owner was my brother and didn't have this problem, I think (and, despite being based on socket 478 and DDR1 tech, stuff could still run the newest games, I'm pretty sure of this).

— There were bad issues with early support of Hyperthreading processors (sort of early semi-software Dual Core), leading to awful crashes and even installation problems.

— I remember horrible issues caused on my Pentium 2 mobo, probably by the integrated soundcard; crashes aplenty, several times daily, it was making me paranoid.

— One day I typed an autoexec.bat in from console without a monitor attached, reboot and it worked. It might even have been an autoexec.bat on a floppy system disk for all I remember. I think I just needed some file operation to be done on that computer.

— Some other day, an early Windows password protection program went rogue on me and forgot my password. Had to break it from DOS level.

— A small fire in the case. It was an old CD drive.

— Several bad-looking non-boots that probably got solved after a while but cost me some nerve (including mobo capacitors needing a break in summer and everything spontaneously returning to order in a couple of days).

 

I have many server and infrastructure horror stories... but I'll spare you all the fright. I wouldn't want to be responsible for SP community getting spooked, and becoming afraid of being in the dark with their computers. I, on the other hand, must live each day in the knowledge of how horrible a computer can truly be. It's okay to shed a tear for me, really -- I know that many of you are holding them back.

@Bruno - I think I heard about that particular story before. I can't quite put my finger on it (virtual or otherwise), but that tale sure sounds familiar!