What's the weirdest computer problem you've ever dealt with?

[Martin]

Well, since I just had my weirdest problem a few hrs ago, I though this thread would be nice.



Anyway, my top one would be this:

I had to RMA my old HD and for a few weeks, I had both old and new HDs in the system, but had to unplug the floppy. Everythign was going great with the new drive, until I took out the old one so I could return it and plugged the floppy back in. When I botted, the HD was EXTREMELY slow, 10000kbps average, high access and low burst times.
After some fidling I found out that everything went back to normal once I simply unplugged the floppy.

Now that's weird, weirdest thing I've ever dealt with. (needless to say, the floppy is now unplugged and will stay that way)

 

[RSMemphis]

Matrox G-450 in a HP Vectra just died. Just like that. Never found out what it was, but was replaced immediately by HP.

How odd is that?

Also, my computer used to crash whenever my sister walked into the door. Hee hee!

 

[IndyJaws]

<< Matrox G-450 in a HP Vectra just died. Just like that. Never found out what it was, but was replaced immediately by HP. How odd is that? >>



Believe it or not, not that odd.

Before we switched to Dell at work, we had a huge fleet of Vectras. I had no complaints about them (other than being ridiculously overpriced) with the exception that we were constantly replacing the Matrox vid cards.

As good a company as Matrox is (quality-wise), it almost makes me think that it was somehow HP's fault.

 

[Texun]

Had a Dell in the office that would shut down - OFF- as soon as the home page in IE would load. Not sure what it was but once of the techs got it fixed pretty fast.

 

[kuk]

Well, that coffee cup on monitor thread was pretty amusing ... who else remembers?

 

[Gunbuster]

Old acer laptop that would turn on (green LED) then after 1 second turn off, replaced every part and cable still did the same thing

Only computer I was not able to fix, so we junked it out

 

[dkozloski]

In an old DEC mainframe, one of the cooling fans flew apart and scattered little ball bearings all through the backplane. We spent hours trying to find them all but they were still showing up months later.

 

[BD231]

Heard an easy jazz radio station through my computer speaker, took me 3 days to figure out where it was coming from

 

[manwithplan]

<< In an old DEC mainframe, one of the cooling fans flew apart and scattered little ball bearings all through the backplane. We spent hours trying to find them all but they were still showing up months later. >>



lol

currently trying to fix a friends system that spontaneously will or will not detect all the drives attached to it if all 4 ide connections are used...

 

[Goosemaster]

Heard an easy jazz radio station through my computer speaker, took me 3 days to figure out where it was coming from



The question is, was it a good station?




Seriously, what was it? picking up radio waves?

 

[bluemax]

<< Heard an easy jazz radio station through my computer speaker, took me 3 days to figure out where it was coming from >>


I had the same thing. Got a country station (yecch!)... it was poorly shielded and very long audio cables connecting my piano keyboard to the amp/speakers.

Replaced with better and shorter wire and was clean as a whistle again.

 

[optimistic]

<< After some fidling I found out that everything went back to normal once I simply unplugged the floppy.
>>


I too, had so paranormal mishaps with floppy drives

 

[DieHardware]

Formatted a HDD, installed w98se and found files from the previous install in the new clean intalls recycle bin. :Q

 

[CraigRT]

Had a strange problem just recently.. friend brought his old P233 system by cause he was using it one day, it locked up, and it never recovered... no post after he rebooted at all.. after swapping CPU's, memory, and video cards, multiple times I was about to pronounce the mobo dead because of the temperature of the components on the board. they were cold to the touch after a few minutes of power.. then for some strange reason i felt inclined to yank the NIC... and guess what? the machine booted fine... he put a new NIC in the computer and it works perfect now.

personally, I thought that was SO strange... the NIC causing the PC not to post.... whoa...

 

[Wolfsraider]

the weirdest..hmm

the one going on right now lol

my internet will hang while loading and all of a sudden a siren goes off it was doing this and locking but now it just shuts down the offending web page and goes on so i am assuming a self healing wound

oh yeah formatting repartitioning and reinstalling never changes it in 98 or xp pro?

 

[BFG10K]

The weirdest problem I've ever had was one computer displaying a JPEG image in a corrrupted state despite the same image coming out perfectly on every other computer I tried. I tried everything I could think of to fix it but in the end I had to give up.

Now when I think about it, it could well have been the AMD JPEG bug but at the time I didn't know about this problem.

 

[Jeff7]

First thing coming to mind is when an Epox 8KTA3 board detected 2 videocards, even though there was only one video device anywhere in the system. Still don't know what the heck it thought it was seeing. Removed NIC, modem, RAM, and CPU, and put them back in. Now it works fine.

 

[Mingon]

Had a problem where I couldnt connect to the internet at anymore than 1.3kbs, turns out the slot fan I had installed inbetween the modem and the vid card was causing interferance - 12 hours of frustration for a £5 slot fan.

 

[Finite]

I would have to say my wierdest experience would be a problem I had in XP. I had had all but two of my usb ports turned off in the bios because I was overclocking my system. When I set the fsb back to normal and turned my usb back on saved and restarted XP was telling me that I had a printer hooked up, only I didn't. It would pop up saying I had a printer (new hardware wizard) 4 times and then It would stop (even showed up in the device manager). If I rebooted my system it would do the same thing (over and over again). After trying everything that I could think of I finally gave in and reinstalled windows. Needless to say that took care of the problem. I could list all the things that I tried but that would be a really long and boring post.

 

[neuralfx]

I've seen a lot of wierd things .. recently, I saw a machine that would not post if the Keyboard and Mouse were connected. BUt if they were disconnected it posted fine, except for the keyboard errors .. replaced board and all was well ..
-neural

 

[flood]

buggy dimm socket.
couldnt narrow it down any further than the mobo/chip/ram.
finally found a loose lead on the dimm socket... carefully inserted ram and told him never to remove it.

 

[dj4005]

This isn't one I've had, but a story relayed to me:

A tech support guy for a local computer store took a service call - the problem? The computer would reboot every time the toilet flushed.








It turned out that the owner lived in a rural area. In addition to computer problems, it turned out that his home had low voltage coming in from the local co-op. Low enough that when the toilet flushed and the well kicked in to refill the toilet bowl, the resulting voltage drop was enough to cause the computer to reboot.

A good UPS resolved the problem.

 

[mcveigh]

<< This isn't one I've had, but a story relayed to me:

A tech support guy for a local computer store took a service call - the problem? The computer would reboot every time the toilet flushed.








It turned out that the owner lived in a rural area. In addition to computer problems, it turned out that his home had low voltage coming in from the local co-op. Low enough that when the toilet flushed and the well kicked in to refill the toilet bowl, the resulting voltage drop was enough to cause the computer to reboot.

A good UPS resolved the problem. >>



DAMN! we have a winner! that is funny

 

[microAmp]

Was working on my computer because I was losing internet connection with a cable modem. After trying several software routes, I figured my NIC was going bad, pulled out the old one, put in the new one.

Luckily the computer was still open and on it's side when I hit the power button. About that time, one of the wires from the internal case speaker decided to fry itself. Quickly unplugged all those power/reset/HDD light/speaker wires and shut off the computer. The wire to the speaker had melted itself and it's connection to the case speaker.

Ended up taking that new Netgear NIC out and putting old Linksys NIC back in, no fires....

Haven't been bold enough to try the Netgear in another computer.

 

[jim64477]

Worked in a call center that took laptop calls. Turns out a guy was sitting on his bed and somehow caught a testie in the CD-ROM. The eject button wouldn't work so we had to talk him thorough using the emergency eject hole with a paper clip. I have the tape to prove it!