[ale] OT: My Biggest PC Build Blunders

[Jim Kinney]

I got a call about a dead pc in a doctors office. This one was mission critical so away I went. 

It booted fine. Ran for about 2 minutes then shutdown. Rinse and repeat. Opened the case to find a large palmetto bug jamming the cpu fan.

Had a new system on the build bench in boxes. Lightning storm hit my street. It hit a tree less than 5' from the wall I was next to. Packaged fluorescent tubes glowed so hot they melted the plastic shrink wrap to themselves. The EMP induced a voltage in the network wiring that destroyed every computer nic instantly and everything else in the case failed over the next week. 20+ systems and all hard drives, backups, tape controllers, monitors, every part. All TVs and radios failed within 2 weeks. Luckily, the brand new first gen 64-bit AMD server for a customer was spared. Too bad my workstation with same parts was not.

On August 10, 2020 5:18:13 PM EDT, David Jackson via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>In case anyone else would care to share, here are my top three:
>
>1)  One day I noticed a recent (2-yrs ago?) build was running hot.  I
>checked the fans and power and BIOS OC settings.  Hmmm.  No problem.  I
>removed the cooler from the CPU and then I noticed there was a thin
>plastic
>"peel-off" sticker on the bottom of the copper heat plate with the
>words
>"remove before use" in bright red on the plastic.  I noticed this after
>I
>cleaned the thermal paste.  Oops.
>
>2)  I purchased a spiffy new GPU entry-level gaming GPU.  I installed
>it,
>and turned on the power, and no video or POST.  I looked and looked
>again,
>couldn't find the problem.  So I returned the card to Microcenter,
>bought
>another copy of the same card, and installed it again.  This time when
>it
>didn't "work", I hesitated before returning it to MC.  I noticed that
>this
>card had an auxiliary 8-pin power connector I somehow hadn't noticed. 
>Oops.
>
>3) Before I learned about negative vs balanced vs positive case
>pressure, I
>installed too many LED exhaust fans on cases and couldn't understand
>why I
>had so many dust bunnies around the intake filters.  They were pretty
>and
>color-coordinated LEDs, but, um, it got hard to see the colors through
>all
>the dust bunnies.

-- 
"no government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.” - John Dewey
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