Stroke of bad luck? It's a damn highway of bad luck
 

Get this.

At a lan party one of the guys' computers suddenly kills over and fries. He puts in a new CPU but it looks like his motherboard eats it for breakfast and no longer functions. He shrugs and gives his parts away. why bother? He won't need them. I snag his fancy CPU fan. I go home, and put it in

I can't start up my computer. I take it out and put in the old one, same problem. I look in and find that, during my shoving of the stupid fan clicks on the A-socket, I broke off a diode. Well that screws my motherboard up. I call up and get a new motherboard, hook it all up, and, guess what? I have SD RAM, not DDR.

So, I go back - a good 20 minute drive - and buy new RAM too. I get home and pop it in, still won't work. I go BACK, find out my PROCESSOR isn't working since I spilled some heat paste on it, and throw my hands up and give it to them. I don't want it back till it works.

They give me a new computer and charge me for a new CPU, and also it looks like the power source fried too, so I had to pay to fix that. Now I'm running up a bill of 250$. I go home and start my computer, printing out an essay an hour before my class, then I go to the class and back. I get home, I'm looking at a blue screen of death.

My video card, an older model, is a GeForce MX 440 and is incompatable with the motherboard I just bought. I uninstalled the new drivers and let windows run it's own drivers.

Now I'm running this on a shitty video card with a 250 dollar bill, soon to be 350 when I need to replace my video card with a newer one.

And you know what?

I still have the SAME GOD DAMN CPU FAN.

At avariel.net forums we have a rant forum just for the purpose. :B

Yes, I share a story like this. A friend of mine sent me a cpu once, he didn't know if it worked or not. I popped out the old one and stuck in the new one, which was incrementally faster. Nope, didn't work, no matter what I tried. Puter wouldn't even try to start up. So I popped it back out, stuck in the old one again. Only, I messed up on the heatsink a little. 15 seconds later my old CPU was smoking, so I had to go tget a new CPU. But it wasn't compatible with my old mobo as it was a much faster CPU. So I had to upgrade my mobo as well, which then required DDRAM.

It was a circus.

Similar, but nowhere near as bad...

I was to get a new CPU from a friend, and we decided to replace my old motherboard right along with it since we knew the CPU wouldn't be compatible with the old one. So far, so good. We open the PC, take out the old motherboard and CPU and fit in the...

... try to fit in the...

... we find out that the new motherboard is too wide for my case. Awesome. So my friend phones around to see if someone he knows might have a fitting case. Fortunately, a friend of his agreed to swap a case he had lying around for my old one. Of course, after we went and got the case, we had to move every single component from the old case to the new one, CD/hard drives, graphics card, power supply and all. Fun.

Quick story. A guy I know from high school was pretty much the "computer guy" at the school. The school hired him to install new components and operating systems on the machines they bought or were having trouble with.

So one day a friend of his tried overclocking his CPU and ended up melting it or making it smoke or setting it on fire, I don't remember exactly. He brought it in to the school and they both started working on it together, trying to remove the busted processor. The non-techy guy dropped the screwdriver he was working with into the case. I wasn't there, but what they told me was that all they heard was a pop and everything was busted.

Meh, I didn't really like that guy anyway.

Mirai Gen, that sounds like a royal pain. I would have tried to solder the busted diode back on. That's just me though.

I have yet to run into any computer hardware problems. I've had my share of bad experiences with conflicting drivers, viruses, and other software problems, but the physical parts of the comp always work fine for me. I'm sure that'll change in the next month or so though. I'm buying parts on ebay to build a computer from scratch. I'm asking for trouble now.

My apologies. I kind of left the 'Shitty computer stories' topic implied, felt it kept up with the punchline.

hah. i bought this 800 dollar dell and i don't touch it. i dont work on it. i don't change anything at all. because i know if i do, something will happen. knock on wood, too.

So? The fan on my graphics card made grinding noises for several months before it got on my nerves enough for me to get my arse up and get a new one. Incidentally, it turned out the plug on the card was of a kind that is rarely used (thanks, nVidia) and the plug on the new one didn't fit. And that was the only kind of fan the local electronics store had, too.
Me and a friend ended up simply tacking the plug from the old fan onto the new one using the next best thing after duct tape:

http://img47.exs.cx/img47/7141/l0574106ft.th.jpg

Still works like a charm.