A long time ago my pc was so buggy I decided to take it to my retailer. The next day I got a phone call: they said they could get it to start at all and they were unable to repair it, it was dead. I was so angry, because it worked 5 minutes before I left it there, and I went to a different retailer to buy a new one. I came home the next day with my new pc and my old one and I decided to try my old one one more time. At first it didnt work but after I pushed the powersupply at the back of my computer a bit deeper it booted like normal.
I went back to the store, I asked my money back(yes, they actually charged me for that), I demanded them to fix my PC for free and three days later I sold it on ebay for a good price.
So, what started as worst computer experience ever ended whit an, almost free, shiny, new PC.

on my first day of school my favorite computer crashed (hdd corruption error )

The magic of retail points of sale

@Duty Free Americas and Oracle and a bunch of SQL
On the POS there's a set of function keys. F5 is to start a 'loyalty customer' sale; F6 is to sign out. I have a habit of always signing off of my register when I walk away (instead of letting it timeout and auto-lock). I hit F5 instead of F6 - starting a sale. Unlike starting a Duty Free Sale (F1) or an Over-the-Limit Sale (F2), starting a loyalty customer sale must be either completed or voided.

To void I need my supervisor key (on my wrist at all times) and to sign off on the slip, sign a reason, and record all of this in a loss prevention book lest we get audited by corporate.

@McDonalds and the magic of Torex Retail / Restaurant Application Development / whatever companies NewPOS's development got rolled into in Brazil
Apparently the McCafe drink buttons locked up our POS for a couple days. The register I normally ring on has a faulty touch panel. I have to jam the screen. The cashless system messes up a lot. The computerized fryers love to beep like holy hell when they go into a low temp mode. The frappe machine locks up and is slow to respond to touch and is just an utte- I still don't understand why the hell a blender needs a computer in it, actually.

More like a hard disk failure led to a corrupt driver failing to load.




Why on Earth is NewPOS so slow? PC-POS runs great, even on 25 year old hardware... provided it's not failing and the cabling isn't ruined. On the panel that has the serve button for McCafe, try pressing the red button. I swear, right after we had it installed we thought it was broken, turns out the red button is On/Off. And, yeah, the blended ice machine GUI is slow as [censored]. Every model/software revision is like that.

Heh. The CBB KVS wasn't turned off by any means - some weird little menu glitch just caused NewPOS to crap the bed when you hit those buttons. I think the other blended ice machines I've seen are a bit nicer in terms of their GUI and their speed (the ones with the blend container rinser in the middle of the machine - not inside it next to the blender platform).

PCPOS and cabling - yep, I remember that. First thing to check was "are all the cables plugged in?" and that'd solve most PCPOS problems. //I own a PCPOS box. If I recall, they say they hit a "physical limit" at the number of pop up menus in the software for the "ever expanding menu of McDonald's" and needed to build something newer.

Resistive touch does /not/ work in the retail setting. Just going to get that out there. It's inaccurate, leads to calibration problems, and generally is a pain. I had to jam the screen with a pen just to get it to work.

Oh, and another thing -- if we can have these fancy Verifone terminals with the RFID and whatnot, why not just get the ones that do signature capture and save me from extra copies of receipts? And hell - most McD's don't confirm the signatures anyways, let alone check them when they get "same card used twice" errors.

//rant

Hmmm... where should I start... ah...
1. Bumped a Mac, and it kernel panicked.
2. On my old main PC, I had to activate XP again, and I didn't have the product key.
3. Virus fun on netbook... had to make a new account.
4. Vista failed on my first PC (it was a good PC too...)
5. PowerBook 540c screen had to be taped down near the bottom because it wouldn't come on.
6. Most Whistler and NT 5.0 betas hate me...
7. ATAPI.SYS blue screen, new account fixed that

Those were my worst computer experiences.

My worst experience was with my Desktop PC

I was trying to change the thermal paste and when I took the processor off (It was pasted with the cooling system) like 20 pins were BENT. I couldn't believe it. So I proceed to repair them, 1 by 1, and when I was fixing the last pin it BROKE. I tried putting the pin on the socket but nothing happened.

2 months later I bought another processor but it didn't turn on. So I left the computer until suddenly after another 4 months I connected the computer to another power socket with only monitor, mouse and keyboard; the old processor too (without anything on the broken pin) and it turned on!! OMFG. I have to say that it's still alive and running

But I could never got to boot with the other processor so it's lying there ...}

EDIT: My 2nd worst experience was the infamous NTKERN.VXD driver error on Windows 98. It was the sound driver so I couldn't ignore it. Solution? Installed 95c, then the drivers and upgraded to 98 SE. No issues since then.

My most recent one was when DWM.exe in Windows 7 crashed. I used System Restore but that POS just corrupted the system. Did a recovery partition repair and it shut down a few minutes into the repair. The boot manager was missing...

But the worst experience of all was that and having to use Windows Vista. The computer I use now currently has XP and it is GREAT.

Vista just screwed everything up for me on two of the computers I have.
The first, a Compaq Presario SR2125UK. Roblox lagged and crashed the video driver, Team Fortress 2 crashed, it kept crashing, Office 2010 Click2Run corrupted during beta and was unremovable, Minecraft was terribly slow, Chrome would not download anything and Firefox (3.6 at the time) WOULD CRASH a lot.
And then, there was the mouse problem. This was the reason I moved to Ubuntu 10.10 (I hate 11.04), I had to take my mouse somewhere on a visit while bringing my laptop. This was a common problem in Windows (had it in XP, too) but at least in XP it was FIXABLE! I plugged in any mouse (even a Microsoft-branded one) and Vista kept popping up that the drivers were for "Windows 95"...
...Bullcrap.

And then there's my Packard Bell. I know how many people will flame me for this, but Vista sucks on ANY machine. This one, however, has been through crap. Office 2010 will NOT install on this PC. You can even try a cracked version if you want, it wouldn't work. The blu-ray drivers don't work on this. System Restore worked 3 times but corrupted any drivers that reads+writes discs. How would I know? I bought an external CD/DVD drive, did it work? NO.

The only thing Vista does better is System Restore. I swear, if I repair any Windows 7 PC, I will just slap Ubuntu on it.

(I am however looking forward to Windows 8.)

A little bit old, but I want to say:



Nope.

It tellls me during boot that this VXD file is missing. I though I can run Windows then locate the missing file. I forget why that file wasn't copied correctly to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, mostly because of bad driver installation.

When I ignored the file and Windows booted, it BSODs. Ignoring it let the Windows seek for along time within the Hard Disk. I've got bored after 15 minutes of seeking and rebooted the computer. Then suddenly .... everything gone

The first PC that I bought with my money was sold with ME.
So many BSODs.
I had to pay €150 for 98SE.
It was so much money.

when im open the laptop's it turn to black screen and just Fan boost up! fast run.. sound like gonna explode! but at the end im just change part of RAM.. turn the primary to the secondary.. that 's all.. not so worst but i don't like sound FAn gonna blow like that..

When I installed McAfee onto Windows 98, and it got depressed and blue-screened and would not start again...

And when I put my external 3.5in 320gb hdd on top of my computer tower and it fell 3 feet into a concrete floor...

In late April, 2011, I was going to reinstall Windows, mainly because everything was slowing down and starting not to work. No big deal.
I insert the installation disc and restart, go through the prompts, etc. When the "Expanding Files" phase begun, however, Windows gave me an installation error.
I tried a few more times, however I got the same error (even with a different disc). At this point, I'm almost to the point of giving up and installing Linux... when I reboot and see "SMART FAILURE PREDICTED on Hard Disk 0". Cue swearing.
Luckily, as my laptop was still covered by an extended warranty, Dell replaced my hard drive for free.

During most of 2006 until ~2007 I ran my desktop computer with the MAXMEM parameter and the equivalent Linux command because I had bad memory at a specific location (pretty high up) and returning the DIMM would be pretty expensive.
That's a pretty bad thing to have to do, eventually I came across spares for free and the desktop lived on as a server.

Also until 2005 I had a Packard Bell desktop, 600 MHz AMD and 64 MB RAM was simply painful with Windows XP. It improved significantly when I put another 128 MB in it, then it died a few months later.

This was my worst computer experience.

12/95 I bought a Micron Pentium 133 MHz Powerstation ‘B’ PC, mail ordered from Micron.
7/98 the cmos battery died, but it was soldered to the MB!

I called & Micron sent me another MB, I paid the shipping; I installed it but it didn’t work so I called Micron back & they sent another replacement. that one worked.

more about that desktop crash... Well it was my first day of school i already got punched in the gut that so i wasn't having the best day and on my way home my parents tell me umm.... your computer isn't working oh joy! so i get home problay just fixable by James's friend (james being my dad) i got home some crazy error about the hardrive simply great it kept reebooting then the o'faithful BSOD *sits on couch and yells* that was it his friend fixed but all my favorites were gone same with my music so.... that computer has had so many probs
my mom had lost the flash drive with the favorites on it sooo..... there is the story

My old PC (Athlon XP 2400+) was working just fine when I went to fix a 478 Celeron which keeps beeping and gives no video. Insert DDR400 RAM from old PC, still doesn't work. Put RAM back on old PC, power it up, beeps and magic smell. Did I just notice the 478 (a MSI board, the PC itself fell from a resting motorbike) has turned into a RAM bricker?

Another one involving the same PC: In February I was resizing the NTFS partition (containing my tell-tale XP installation which dates back to December 2007) to make room for Linux, a replacement for a Server 2003 CD (none of the drives I have work, can anyone spare me a IDE CD reader) or something like that, when it BSODed (it was BSODing and freezing, and according to a debugging ninja (Kenneth) they were related to NTFS despite pointing to ntoskrnl, so I thought a reinstall would be the best way to go) while PartitionMagic was doing its work. Bad idea, NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM on boot. I proceeded to load up my BartPE with Diskinternals over PXE, only to find my user folder completely empty. I had a backup of all critical data on my new PC, which was on repair back then, and luckily came back home with its partitioning intact. What a lucky person I am.

You put a magnet on it?

That's the worst thing. I've had that experience where a computer would burn up components and during troubleshooting actually ruined some more hardware before realizing what was happening.

Normally I don't have as many problems with hardware as I do with software.

Wow. What caused it to do that?

Nope - I never bring any magnets anywhere near any of my computers.

Had a number of head banging experiences recently. I recently just moved house and (as you all probably would know) you do not want to damage a PC during the move. Turns out I did. I damaged my speakers and they crackled a lot when I plugged them in. Next I replaced my Creative X-fi XtremeGamer sound card with X-fi Titanium but had to return it after a day of realising it didn't work on Windows 7 and having sound errors all over the place. Next I damaged my two 2.5 inch external drives (luckily it was just both external cases USB bridge and a USB cable) so had to get new external cases for those. I fixed em thank goodness. I got a 1.5TB HD to back up them onto which I am about to do.

Next since my speakers no longer worked, got new ones, Logitech z506 5.1 surround sound and now have issue with interference when you listen to them up close and I am not very pleased with them. I first before installing them, reinstalled my X-fi XtremeGamer and moved my card to two PCI slots away from the PCIE slot to see if that might help but I plugged in speakers, turned on PC, no sound. I had then realised I had to uninstall and reinstalled the sound drivers but the PC crashed half way and BSOD appeared, nice! First I have had in a long time. Next I had to restart and ran creative updater, installed up to date drivers.

I have sound now but not pleased with many things, so may have to backup all I need and format my HD and reinstall everything from scratch. Bit annoyed since I am currently working with videos and professional quality sound files and need proper sound with no problems and have a lot of work on compuer I need to catch up with and its currently not happening and running behind with stuff and a bit stressed. Need to calm down, redo my PC from scratch and get back on track. Nothing ever works how you want it to huh?

First very bad computer experience were, when I was 9 years old, and Amiga 1200, on which I was playing Lotus II, restarted suddenly and showed me yellow screen at startup. I was a bit amazed, because for the 12 years, Amiga was running at full throttle!

The second was tomorrow, when I was lazy and wanted to plug IDE drive in, while the computer was running. One spark, one noise and... Computer turned off. No smoke, nothing. Tried panicly turn it on, but nothing. I calmed down and unplugged the power completly, waited 5 minutes and plugged it in again. Pushed the power button - computer started, and I started praying for not damaging it by this accident. And suprisingly - It started perfectly as it was running before ahem... Episode...

I was never, ever afraid more than tomorrow.
That was a lesson for me, to TURN COMPUTER OFF WHEN PLUGGING INTERNAL COMPONENTS IN! Everyone who haven't tried this yet - Don't try it at home. Really, don't.

Your Amiga problem might be this:

From "Kickstart" page.