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

[Acanthus]

Link

I hate Iwills BIOS team, 7 hours...... read up and enjoy my pain

 

[InfectedMind]

This just happend minutes ago right after I read this thread. I was sitting here looking at some threads and look at some wallpapers at http://www.cognitivedistortion.com/ when I started to sneeze then out of know where I heard a sneeze (a person) come from my speakers then it kept doing it everyfew seconds.

The wierd thing is I was on these sites for about 5 mins before I sneezed and didnt hear it. I thought maybe I recorded myself? But no I dont have a mic and It didnt sound like me.

Anyways Im still kinda going "What and the hell....!!!" I shut down all windows all is well now though. Guess just some kind of coincidence (or not we will will never know!) maybe it was some banner/w sound?.
LOL

 

[DamienV]

my old 486dx2 was a very curious machine: after having it for 3 years, it began going like every 7 days it would fail. Why? nobody knows! What i do know is that every 7 days it would go beep-beep-beep - ya know no RAM present in the system. I never got to know what happened but i would get i up & running in 30mins! How? Very simple: dissassemble the case remove all ISA cards, IDE cables & all the *eight* 30pin mem module, stick a vaccum cleaner in the mboard & case and suck all the dust in there! Assemble all the cards & cables close the case. Boot up, power on ma 28.8k, dial to my buddy's place and fire up DOOM!!!! Yeee-ahhhh

 

[tsunek]

installing quicktime on my friends applebook
got 3/4 of the way through never powered on again

 

[bluemax]

Wierd stuff.... I just got an old IBM Pent.100 machine to use as a workstation (and help teach kids some computer skills) with no hard drive. Fine, I thought. I'll just pull the 200MB hard drive out of the 486 it's replacing....

It WILL NOT boot oof that drive! It'll boot off a smaller 120MB drive, but not that 200megger! I can boot off a floppy and look at the contents of that 200m, and it is still bootable.... technically. Maybe I should just boot off floppy and sys that drive.
Weird though.... maybe it juse doesn't like windows?

 

[harveydanger]

Ok,this one is a little out there.....

I was getting complaints from (L)user "Bob" that his PC was beeping at random times. I check it out twice at his desk and hear no beeps. He keeps complaining. I picked up the PC to take it to the PC room for a full checkout and I hear something moving around inside the case ( never a good thing ). Open up the box and what do I find? One of those cheap electronic organizers! The beeping was a reminder function on it.

There was a name and number scrawled on back so I called:

Organizer Man: "hello"
Me: "Hi, did you lose an electronic organizer?"
Organizer Man: "Ummmm.......Yeah,I think about 2 years ago I had one. I always wondered what happened to it."

Turns out he worked for a company that had help with a network upgrade here ( they had to replace some NICs on a few PCS ).

 

[Maggotry]

I had a problem about a year ago that drove me nuts. I was constantly getting .dll crashes for every single program I'd run. I replaced everything multiple times. Nothing helped. It would run SANDRA, 3DMark, and other benchmarks with no problems, though. It turned out to be a bad CPU.

 

[HGC]

A few weeks ago I installed a Radeon 8500. When I rebooted, I got lots of odd messages about WIN XP activation, about one important system file after another not being found, and many unintelligable ones. As the messages became faster and more ominous, and the hard drive started clicking, then banging, then it locked completly. Hard drive is now dead.

A few years ago I watched a mouse walk into my open case while the computer was on. Before I could get to the computer, he hit a fan with a loud noise and ran for his life.

 

[spanner]

Voices coming from my speakers (Creative pc 1000) even with the computer being off!!! My theory was it was picking up handheld radio signals. Anyway its not a problem with my new speakers

 

[lamga]

I got a couple strange ones, but definitely not as strange as some of you guys' stories!

My roommate could hear "voices" through his Cambridge SoundWorks FPS100 speakers. Was it a radio station? Nooo, it was picking up someone's phone. It was definitely a phone. While the sound was too garbled to make out words, you could hear a "click", the sound of tone dialling, and then two voices talking (usually a female and a male). Some chatty lady neighbour and her Radio Shack cordless, who knows.

At a place I used to work, they had a cheapo Daytek 15" monitor. For some reason, if you whapped it from the top, you could adjust the T-hold on the monitor. If you hit it by the side, you could adjust the amount of green colour. It died a couple years later.

 

[Arrgghh]

Got two quick ones. One was a person at work called me in her office because she thought her speakers were bad. I take a new set over, and she has me listen for a grinding noise that seems to be coming from the speakers. I replaced the speakers, and it happened again. I then turned all the computer equipment off one by one to see if the noise would go away, but it kept happening. After completely shutting down everything, I finally gave up and told her to call maintanence. She called later to inform me her pager was in a drawer of her metal desk and had been the culprit.

The other is that I cannot install Windows 2000 or XP on one of my home systems if the ide zip drive is plugged in. It will start up fine, but then complain the HD pertitions are corrupt even if I let windows create them. I made my wife use linux for a week before I finally figured that little problem out.

 

[Jesta]

Wierdest one I ever had was a computer I had built for a guy, went fine no problems. He picked it up and took it home, lived about an hour or so away from me. As soon as he got home and hooked it all up he called me to tell me it didnt' turn on. Worked with him on checking a few things and finally asked him to bring it back to me. By habit, I open it and look inside to check if anything is loose, don't see anything so power it on. Works fine, not a problem. He takes it back home and same thing, does not turn on. After two more times of him bringing it back to me and working fine, he is losing his patience with me. So last time he takes it home (4th time now) it does not work. I head out to his house and sure enough, computer won't even turn on. Check well outlet, surge strip, everything. Take the case off look inside and nothing out of the ordinary. Turn it on and it works. Put the case on and it worked. Put the screws in and it didn't work. Eventually turned out to be a single screw holding the case cover on was causing a short somehow. So we left that screw out and I never heard from him again.

 

[acidvoodoo]

mines not really weird, but it's pretty stupid that happend today

i ordered a new pre built system from mesh a few weeks ago, and it came today. the reason it took so long was cause this company apparently tests it before they send it to you to make sure it doesn't mess up. So the courier arrives, i unpack the computer and check everything is there, then i plugged everythng thing in. i hit the power button. nothing. i switch round some power cables, try a different wall socket, open the case and see if everything is plugged in, nothing. no fans, no beeps no nothing. so icall there technical support and they go through all the things i already tried and then say 'oh it must be a faulty power supply or motherboard'.
that's amazing. a computer with no power somehow made it through there quarentine tests. in fact, looking at the invoice, it was checked twice by two different people. i still can't belive it, i mean after the engineer put it together he at least should have tried turning it on.
so, they have to ship a box out, i put the case bit in, and they bring it to there HQ, THEN ship it back. i expect that'll take another week. this is SO annoying, i've been waiting to upgrade this k6-2 450 for months, now i have to wait longer, aghhhhhhhhh

 

[slackware1995]

<< About two months ago I was putting my computer together, and my dog defecated into my case which at the time only had a mobo (An Abit btw).

This wouldn't have been a big probelm had my dog not been a german shepard. I ended up spending about two days cleaning the board and selling it on Ebay. Apparently it wasn't damaged, as I haven't had any complaints from the buyer.

I think my dog was jealous that I was spending so much time with the computer. >>



Remind me never to buy from you off Ebay.. lmfao

 

[MWink]

I had a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! suddenly turn into a video card. It worked fine for a year then just turned into a video card. Never worked again in any system. It was detected as a "PCI Early Video Device". I sold it on Ebay for $22 (and yes I made its problem VERY clear).

 

[Chadder007]

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.

We have IBM intellistations at school/work .. they have matrox cards too, they fail from time to time as well .. hmmmm

Welp....at work we have maybe 100 or so Compaqs with the Matrox cards....they are failing like crazy. Each one I find now I have to run the Compaq update on that fixes a problem with the Matrox cards BIOS flashed away. Matrox cards are suck!!!

In other problems...Ive had a keyboard that wouldn't let any computer POST with it attached. Also Ive had a compaq computer turn itself on during the middle of the night after being shut down, all power management was off, a BIOS password was created for it too.....during the middle of the night, it would cut on ....boot up, go past the BIOS password!!!!! and just lock itself up in the screen saver. (the place where this computer is where a supposed ghost is, literally)