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Most common ways a computer dies.

pcstats.com — PCstats guide to how computers are most likely to die. Unlike most computer death guides this one gives advice on preventing your computer's untimely demise.

Who dugg this? Made popular Apr 23, 2006

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  • Wireddd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27in 1999 I was working in a small computer repair shop when a lady brought in a computer. She said that when she went to turn it on that morning there was some smoke coming out of the back. So I took it into the lab and proceeded to take the cover off. Inside was a rat that had chewed through most of the cables. It had then proceeded to make what looked like a nest out of the pieces of cable. When she turned the computer on it cooked the rat (And pretty much everything else in the PC).
  • eclectro, on 10/12/2007, -6/+33Reason #10: Computer gets taken apart, and parts get lost. It never gets back together again.
  • ThomasCS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15The article is a good read, although I'm surprised that there is no discussion at all about random HDD death.

    I've managed to short the main house fuse by plugging a CD-ROM into a computer while it was running. Surprisingly, once the power was on again, the computer didn't immediately start, but 30mins later decided to run again without any intervention on my part.

    It ran for years after that, but it was a bit like when someone has had a stroke and they end up just a little bit off, even though they're mostly ok.
  • motis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Everyone knows that one of the biggest killers of computers is loss of magic smoke. All computers run on magic smoke, which we know by observing that when the magic smoke escapes the sealed confines of the components and/or wires, the computer ceases to function.
  • alski707, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13you sir, are a true geek!
    for those who are not, have a link ;) http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
  • libbydib, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12"routinely plugged one of his USB flash drives into a Pentium 4 system to transfer data when * pop * off went the computer in a silent flash of nothingness."
    This happened to me! I plugged my flash drive into a school computer and it died completely. I thought it was a coincidence at the time, and my flash drive was fine.
  • Rhaegal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Also be careful not to flip the switch to "more magic"
  • tuxmelvin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Wow! 3%: Computer Cruelty! I'm glad they included my personal favorite... intentional and otherwise. How many computers have I lost by dropping them, spilling things on them, and (back when I had quite the anger management problem) kicking them?
  • TomP, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15I think we have all ONCE made that "flicking the red switch on PSU" mistake
  • mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Ad-whoring your article by spreading it out over ten pages is why Mommy drinks.
  • breakfastpants, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Raid 0 doubles your chances of data-loss causing failure.
  • trylleklovn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I find that most computers don't die at all, they are just tossed by ignorant fools who are of the believe that their computer is either "broken, in which case it is mostly just a software problem, or tossed since the owner believe that it has become too slow :( sad, very sad indeed for me as a poor geek who gratefully would recieve old hardware which actually works.
  • Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I can't say I've killed an entire system before, but I did blow a chip off of a hard drive once. This is one of the dumbest things I have ever done.

    5 years ago, I was working on my computer trying to diagnose a problem. I figured out what was wrong (it's been so long, can't seem remember what the problem even was now) and I put everything back togethor and I started the thing up. And I soon realized I forgot to plug the power cable into one of my hard drives. I didn't want to reboot, so I plugged it in while the system was hot, what could go wrong right? Well, somehow I managed to plug a KEYED cable in upside down! I heard I loud pop, the system shut down, and a tiny chip literally went flying across the room. Whatever the chip was, it said %u201CNEC%u201D on it, and it now had a hole in the middle of it.

    Needless to say, I turn my system off when I'm working on it now...
  • FuManchu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Damn shame!
    All the toxic fumes from the burning computer probably poisoned the meat.

    I trust you did the smart thing and ordered out for lunch that day?
  • stark23x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6First time I built an Athlon system, I honestly didn't know about thermal paste or pads.

    Took three CPUs to learn.
  • locu543, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I would say the same thing about anything maxtor. I own a computer repair shop and in the last 5 years i've worked on some 8-10000 machines. Of the ones with failing or dead hard drives an overwhelming majority were maxtor. I remember once a couple of years ago I was building a customer pc, they needed it fast and I happened to be out of hard drives. I called up my closest vendor and all he had was maxtor, I sighed and said okay ship it to me. I thought to myself this was a bad idea. The damn drive failed one day after putting it in.
  • LethalGeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5To answer the which is worse, 115V vs 230V, question:

    Having 230V normally and putting the switch to 115V is a quick and voilent way to kill a PC.

    Having 115V normally and putting the switch to 230V will just create an undervolt in the system, which won't damange anything. Someone's probably gonna say they've seen it happen, but it would be a very rare occurance. ICs will just not function without the min voltage is all.
  • locu543, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I remember one time many years ago I had a dumb ass manager at a computer repair shop who knew nothing about computers. A customer brought in a computer because the fan on the psu wasn't spinning. We were slammed and I didn't have time to look at it so he thought he'd be a retard and look at it himself. He plugged it up and saw the fan wasn't spinning so he stuck a screwdriver in there to make it spin. Sadly he didn't kill himself.
  • Jolene, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Sounds like Humpty Dumpty... Poor fella...
  • elnerdo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Random HDD deaths have been the only reason my computers have ever died. I've gone through 3 pairs ( raid 0 ) in 3 years.
  • xaxa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Which way round is most impressive? I.e. we have 230V in the UK, so does that mean switching it to 115V makes a bigger bang than e.g. an American (115V) switching it to 230V?
  • acherion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I had done something similar myself, I was installing a CD-ROM into my computer many moons ago, but still had the power plugged in at the back. My finger must've rubbed up against something, because I saw a flash in front of me, and the circuit breaker kicked in and cut power to the house. I had zapped something on my hard drive (the cut-away bit of the circuit underneath) and it had managed to weld two metal notches together.

    Another time was when I was reinstalling my floppy drive while the computer was connected at the back to power, and had zapped my RAM. It frizzled two 'legs' of a corner IC, rendering the DIMM useless (this was when 64MB DIMMs were all the rage). My dad went and bought a huge ass magnifying glass, grounded a soldering iron tip to a fine point, filed a little bit of the corner of the IC that got burnt out, and soldered 2 solder bridges.

    Dodgy as hell, but that DIMM lasted me another year before I upgraded my machine again. I think I still have it somewhere...
  • j_bellone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Power going out during a defrag.
  • TheKillDoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I find a lot of them dead because the owner has the PC on the floor, under their desk, sucking up and collecting all the dog and or cat hair. All the vents get clogged, PC suffocates and over heats. POP! goes a capacitor.
  • fatalea1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"...I remember killing a 512mb stick of ram. It wouldn't quite fit in the slot, but a little filing of the notches and voila... nothing... ever again!"

    I thought I was alone in the world.
  • Emptythought, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@locu543
    i used to be a really really cheap bastard, i would buy _used_ fans from PC recycling places, i could get 20 or so 80mm fans for the price of one new 80mm fan(and i mean a cheap $3 brand-less AIRTEC 2000 one)

    i would peel the stickers off, squirt some 3-in-1 oil in, and then use a screwdriver to jump start them after i applied power. replaced all the fans in a alpha station 200 that i was using as a ghetto web server this way, and it still runs perfectly to this day(along with the $20 recycled 9GB ultrascsi hdd's). so although he may have been doing it wrong, the screwdriver method will actually get a stuck fan that hasn't run for along time going again.

    and the biggest cause of PC death here? power supplies not outright dying, but spitting out stupid high/low voltages and bricking everything connected to them. i think I've had that happen 5 times in 3 years, maybe more.(and none of them were the same brand either, from cheap to expensive. enlight or whatever to enermax). i also did the flip-the-red-switch-of-doom once. but only because i had an extension cord in a big parking lot, a busted up old pc that was just going to get trashed, and i wanted to see what happened. disapointing :(
  • gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This is a great article for those who don't know what they're doing when it comes to computer work. I could have saved myself a few headaches if I had read it years ago :)
  • cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+4I guess you've had bad experiences, but I've got 7 Seagates dating back from 1999 till now (6.5 , 3 x 40's , 2 x 120's , 1 x 250) and all are in perfect working condition. The 6.5 I am very surprised still works, as I used it mainly when I was "learning" PCs and taking it out nearly every second day. The ammount of wear and tear it has suffered is astonishing, yet it still works. Sure the 6.5 sounds like scrambled eggs on the stove, but it works perfectly. My only trouble has been with Western Digital and Maxtor..
  • dwhitbeck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This happened to me twice in one day. I had a device connected to my serial port with about 8 feet of wire coiled around on my desk. A friend happened to bring a home made Van deGraff generator to show me and had tested it out before I got to work. I came in and found the serial port not working. I had to get this project running so I grabbed a new computer off the shelf and continued working. A bit later he comes in and says "Hey Don, watch this." It was a nice show but after he picked up the Van deGraff generator and left I tried to resume my work. I observed that the serial port no longer worked on the new computer. We tried to use the 2 computers somewhere that didn't require a serial port but they had other problems and finally we scrapped them.
  • scstraus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I suppose hard drive crashes don't count? Almost every computer that I've had has died from a hard drive crash. But I suppose people think motherboards are the computer itself. Frankly I'd much rather fry a motherboard than a hard drive, but that unfortunately never happens.
  • UberNick, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5lol... now i'm tempted to try it
  • evilgod69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This article has a lot of writing in it, but it is a nice reminder of some of the stuff that could happen if we were to be lazy.
  • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Or forgetting to flick it. I used to live in Dubai and I ordered a computer from Canada, forgot to switch to 220 and blew the PSU. Luckily that's a mistake I've only made once so far.
  • TheSphinx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Power failure during a BIOS flash.
  • Darth_tater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ive done this before...but i caught it almost imediatly (like 5 seconds)
    and i was like
    O
    *****
    then
    just let it cool and then it worked (it wasnt incredably stable, but it worked)

    and i wasnt stoned....
  • grayfox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Its a problem with intels ICH5R/ICH56 southbirdge chipsets.
  • icexe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i always advise people to NEVER, EVER skimp on the power supply. it's one the most overlooked components in a system, and lots of people think the cheapo PS that came with their $30 case is good enough. But when those suckers go, they tend to take several components with them. I learn that very hard lesson a couple years ago when the cheap powersupply in my spanking new system fried itself and took the motherboard, 1 Gig of RAM, by P4 2.8 Ghz CPU and my 80G harddrive with it.
  • starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i think smoking ranks right in there too. take apart the computer of a smoker and you'll see a film... that all the pet hair... the dust... gets stuck to and causes general over heating. can't tell you how many times i've fixed my smoking friends computers by just cleaning the crap out of it.
  • IronChef, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The only thing scary is people saying "Dupe" all the time. I like to be reminded of things that get forgotten. Parents please watch your computers and don't let the kids on them so they don't get on information sites saying "Dupe" all the time!
  • endlessoul, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Amen to that.

    If you have multiple pets (2 cats in my case), dust accumulates much quicker than it would otherwise.

    It's not the hair so much for me, though.

    Regardless, my 2001 PC has dust all over the components.
  • bilangew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So do I, but luckily there was a thermal overheating protection on the motherboard (Asus A7v8x). I thought it was strange that the computer just shuts down because of overheating, even if I had a powerful but noisy Thermaltake CPU Fan!
  • fredinator, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5yes... i did it last week lol
    i might get a mac now finally :)
  • mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Damn, something crazy happened to me with a really old computer. I turned the monitor on (when the computer was off) and the power light was glowing reaaallly bright green and there was this little hum and then part of the monitor caught on fire for a second (!!!). Made my whole house smell terrible for about an hour or two. Anyway, some of the power went straight to the computer's motherboard through the VGA cable and left a nasty burn right in the back. The VGA cable was a little bit melted at the end. Damn scary.
  • Darthmalt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was working on my computer around 3 am and managed to plug the power cord into the dvd burner upside down. Now it doesn't fit in there but because I was stupid and didn't turn off the computer first the pins managed to touch and it released the magic smoke. Somehow it also screwed up the HP motherboard and getting that replaced was an ordeal in and of itself. I finally wound up buying an ASUS P4P-800mx mobo to replace it.

    I don't suppose anyone knows how to make the fan on said motherboard spin faster when the cpu heats up. It spins at a consistent 4720rpm. With the old hp mobo it would throttle depending on the cpu temp. But won't with the new ASUS one.
  • bluedino, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The only time i've ever killed a computer i installed one of those old "convert your 486 to a pentium" kits. I powered it on and nothing happened except for that nice burning hair smell. yum
  • marcan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Back in the day of 8GB maxtors. Had 4 or 5 of them around in several PCs. ALL are dead now (massive quantities of bad sectors).

    Also, I had a 40GB seagate die prematurely on me (bad sectors on - take a wild guess - the main idex of my home directory. Yes, everything else was fine. Except everything that mattered. Murphy's law strikes again.)
  • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2FTFA: "...a friend of mine bought a new 1.3GHz Pentium 3 processor and installed it into his PC. He then plugged everything in and turned the power on. After realizing he could smell something burning, he noticed he was still holding the processor's heatsink and fan in his hand!"

    Honestly, was he stoned?
  • jsp317, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1anybody can build a PC with just a little know how. the big thing is make sure your CPU heat sink is seated right the the fan is plugged in. if not you got to buy a new chip. i have never burnt a chip. i saw a friend smoke one. toke about 2 seconds. forgot to plug in the the fan for the CPU to the mother board. 160.00 bucks gone like the wind. stupid little stuff like that will cost you allot of money. I'm not calling him stupid but he made the mistake. when you build a new PC don't check one time do it 3. make damn sure its plugged in.ram will only go in one way make sure it snaps in . you will see the holder snap in. other devices you should do the same thing. make sure its seated good then put the screw in it. as far as hard drives go i like maxtor and wd . damn there is a good fight on TV so I'm gonna watch it. later
  • danielbower, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2it's an odd situation.

    only 77 people dugg it that time, suggesting that there is a benefit to a good majoirty it reposting it. Never-the-less it scares me that a year old article is being represented as news.
  • marcan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1same thing here, except no parts actually had visible damage. I blanked a known good identical HDD, switched the PCBs over, continued using the now-repaired HDD, and sent in the one with the defective PCB in it (now blank) for warranty repair.

    Another time I managed to short out the PC Speaker with the case. Turns out one side is constant 5V, and the other is switched GND for the sound. computer turned off. I turn it back on and it works fine, except huge clouds of smoke starts coming out. The PC Speaker cable plastic sheath melted, burned, and vapourised. Everything else was fine.

    I hate those Molex connectors. worst. connectors. ever. Thank god we have the SATA plugs now. Much better.
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