[ale] OT: My Biggest PC Build Blunders

[jhubbslist at att.net]

Same thing happened to me once. Work PC built by a mom-and-pop; kept 
crashing in the middle of a WinNY install but not always quite in the 
same place. Paper covering a square of heat compound on the bottom of 
the heatsink left on.

Way even before that: worked late shift at Robins AFB; quartet or 
quintet of DEC VAXen. Row of disk drive cabinets and disk controllers - 
controllers about the size of a big dorm fridge. Everything screeched to 
a halt one night. Went upstairs to see if I could figure out what 
happened. One of the disk controllers was off - stone dead. Looked 
around inside and a paper label on a airflow detector inside a blower 
duct had come loose and covered the holes in the side of the detector. 
That was either one of the best or luckiest troubleshooting jobs I'd 
ever accomplished. :)

On 8/10/20 5:18 PM, David Jackson via Ale wrote:
>
> 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.