There’s no doubt about it, PCs are easier to use than ever before. But we didn’t always have it this good, and even in this day and age there’s bound to be something to occasionally trip us up. We’ve all had it. The graphics card which just won’t be detected. The fans that won’t spin. The game which just won’t boot. It’s part and parcel of being a PC gamer, and I think most of us probably enjoy the secret satisfaction of solving these problems.
Occasionally a problem comes along which reduces you to a dribbling wreck though. The sort that leaves you frantically turning your PC on and off; reinserting wires, or hurriedly looking through registry files for something, anything, that can get your PC up and running again.
For me, the most trouble I had was setting up a pair of drives in a mirrored RAID configuration. This was about 14-15 years ago and I was coming at it with next to no knowledge and a painfully slow dial-up connection. YouTube didn't exist. Suffice to say it was a long afternoon of soul searching, but I made it in the end. Six months later my PSU blew out and my hard drives caught on fire though, so my joy was a bit short-lived.
Over to you now then. What’s the biggest problem you’ve ever faced when trying to fix your PC? And what do you think is the largest issue we could still face today, despite the massive simplification of PCs?
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My PSU smoked because of dust, and I opened it to clean it. I still remember the joy I had ripping that 'warranty void if removed' sticker.
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every single component on my pc has failed miserably at some point in its miserable life.
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Lol, that's unfortunate.
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I have 3, a core glitch within Windows 10 on startup where I had to dig through diagnostics for 4 hours troubleshooting resulting in a rollback, I nearly had to completely reformat my drive
the second one was when magically one day when my archival drive lost all its data
the third was when I installed avast years ago on a laptop, which caused a boot loop, data was cloned and drive reformated
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sure it is cooler master hyper 212... i have small matx and its hard for cable management
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My current problem has been hell for me. I haven't been able to get my Blu Ray Read/Write Drive to work for the past 6 months or so. The drive shows up, and it takes the disc, but then it never recognizes the disc, and if I tell it to try again it just ejects the disc. I have only used this Blu Ray drive like 4 or 5 time in the past 3 years, but it still sucks that it is not working anymore. I have tried everything that I can think of. There are no lower or upper filters in the registry, I have uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, and I have uninstalled the device & reinstalled it as well.
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a defective motherboard that wasn't recognized by the store warranty, no usb or ps2 ports working and random shutdowns
had to fix with a soldier and a lot of wires, now works flawlessly
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Trying to make games work with AMD Crossfire setups...A nightmare!
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You know what i do when i have a hardware problem, like the damn PC not even booting up?
First Google, then contact the man upstairs XD
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This would be the too hasty installing of my cpu.
Some pins did bend when doing that, and i had to bend them back in them original position to actually mount it.
But in the end, it works like a charm now :)
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Way, way way back in the day when I got my first PC it was a 386, it took me a year to install a CD ROM drive. Back then the drive had to be connected directly to my Sound Card and no where in the instructions (back then there was no googling anything either) did it say that, just a diagram showing where to connect the IDE and sound cable to the motherboard. Luckily one of my older friends who was more experimental figured it out.
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one of the fan i plug directly to the PSU somehow stuck and the PC won't boot.i freak out cause it can't even get to the bios screen and that was the front fan. but somehow i still figure it out and unplug the fan. lucky me
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" Six months later my PSU blew out and my hard drives caught on fire though" LMAO. o the 90's
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my greatest problem was fitting the msi gtx970 in my small pc box.
i got a wrench and started collapsing the box sidways. took me 4 hours to make it fit.
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Installing my first water cooling loop (custom loop). It leaked twice and the PC wouldn't boot after.
Luckily a BIOS reset did the trick (removing, waiting and reinserting the battery)
I worked 12 hours straight on that damn thing.
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Does "I dont much money" count as a problem? XD
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First off, we tried fitting a H212 evo in this PC, but the case was just about too small (literally an inch or less), so we settled for an Alpine 11 Pro instead (but there are better coolers for less than 148mm, the 11 pro still cuts it though)
Next up, I accidentally fried the motherboard just because the upper part of my arm lightly touched it, so we had to get a replacement for that
Don't remember any other true difficulties, all's been smooth and is running great!
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How did touching your motherboard with your upper arm kill it?
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I'm guessing it's static discharge that unluckily jumped to a spot on the mobo which ended up frying it
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Never had any problems on my desktop PC (gaming), only on my laptop. For some reason on all my laptops something went south. Toshiba - HDD exploded and caught fire, took out the mobo with it. Acer - motherboard got faulty for some unknown reason. Asus - Motherboard also got faulty for some unknown reason. My current HP is running smoothly thank God
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Games are just too cheap and I'll never get to play my library....
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Last year i ran a Furmark test,and my gpu went to 92 C.I changed my thermal paste,after that my fan didn't work anymore.I changed the power cable for the fan,but after that my fan worked only on 100% all the time,I cant change that anymore.First few weeks i was worried,but it's been almost a year now and my GPU works.
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With 100% constant fan speed i have 40 C in idle,and 68 in full load.
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Some Cable Management is a sore if you ask me.
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My psu isn't modular. So yeah, a god damn pain in the arse.The main reason why a bought the case I have now (corsair air 540) was cable management.