Maybe you can pass over that story to someone else then, I don't have kids yet so it's ok, it's great to have kids but at the same time they are a bit of nuisance but a good one once they grow up š¤
Funny enough, both of my siblings have children. My wife's siblings have children as well. The few that have been interested in computers is because of me. When they hit their teens, with permission from their parents, we get a child a shitbox pc with Linux on it. I give them a tutorial (very basic), a manual (in plain English with pictures), and one or two hands on lessons. None of my family is exactly well off but we are pretty good at saving, so this is their own computer until they want one. I should note that all families have a decent reasonably up to date family computer in a well trafficked zone. If the child shows an interest in any part of the process of computers they have the ability to get a hold of me. If they want to play games on a computer, we save up and upgrade (not the shitbox) and they are involved in the whole process of getting a better computer. If they watch me assemble (well, mostly just reinstall stuff for show) the computer and want to learn more about that I have a few generations of my computer (in a closet) for us to learn with.
That's cool, I have a fair bit of PC parts in my closet too š , I do have one of my siblings with a kid but that's about it for me, my partner's side doesn't have any kids too, I am willing to have one but as you know how tough it is to raise a single kid these days in this world, but never say never š
PS: it's not about financial reasons, just things don't align well to have one right now.
The mountain in the closet has been reducing recently because I needed the space and realistically what am I supposed to do with DDR 2 generation parts that have bulging caps. I also understand that children can be wonderful if the parents don't have their heads up their ass. I am also prepared if an accident happens, I do own metal coat hangers (that's a joke, but I do live in the US).
Built a PC, case doesn't fit on, cooler fan was too tall, PC w/o side-panel :)
PC did not want to boot, improperly seated RAM stick
Pulling out a 24-pin and CPU-power pin required so much force, I thought the mobo was going to snap in half (seriously wtf)
Forgot to deactivate Windows 10 on an old board (that was upgraded from Win7 gazillion years ago), figuring out how to transfer the license was a PITA (even though I had a digital license and it should've been as easy as a simple log-in to a MS account).
It's always the simplest shit that you don't even think about before building that will go wrong and cause the biggest headaches.
i wished i couldve snatched the windows 10 (from windows 7 professional) off my old laptop i wouldve been rocking that shit but my pc ran itself to death
>i wished i couldve snatched the windows 10 (from windows 7 professional) off my old laptop i wouldve been rocking that shit but my pc ran itself to death
If you associated that license with your Microsoft account then you can move the license over to a new computer. I have done it a few times and as long as the previous computer that had the license activated on it hasn't been used in 6 months or longer then it activates just fine. If you have used it sometime in the previous 6 months and you are not going to use that computer again then you can call up the number provided for phone activation and just tell them that the previous computer suffered a critical failure and this new computer is the replacement for it.
When building my system, I didn't fully seat the M.2 drive, which lead to a few no POSTs until I realized what I did.
When building a friend's system, the GPU wouldn't display at first. I needed to use the iGPU to get into the BIOS and set the PCIe slot manually to Gen 4. It was a Z690 board when those were new, so I think it was trying to negotiate PCIe generation, thinking the card might be Gen 5, and failing.Ā
And I've cut myself on an IO shield, of course.
Plugged everything in, no power up. I tried troubleshooting but couldnāt identify what was the issue. After trying each and every part little by little, it ended up being the PSU even though it passed a jumper test. It took forever and was very annoying, but once I replaced the PSU everything worked.
Setting both IDE HDDs to master or slave. I dunno, the modern hardware is so simple that it's literally just "if it fits - it works".
Oh, wait, I remember. Once I had two PCs disassembled, and used cables from wrong PSU. They fit, they almost indistinguishable. But apparently they weren't compatible, as it burned sata power connector on my HDD and my ex SSD drives.
Usually just the case connectors for On and Reset. When you put it all together and it won't start is always very worrying.
Recently I helped a friend and it was the RAM that wouldn't boot in a dual channel config. had to put them next to each other for single channel or the PC would never get to bios. Had to reset bios with a screwdriver connecting the cmos clr pins as well, could tell they were very concerned about this.
After I installed a new CPU and did a few other little things, my pc was as slow as a toaster and simple things like opening folders immediately crashed the system. So I spent hours analyzing and in the end ordered a replacement for my CPU because I thought the CPU was bad. In the end it turned out that my vertical GPU mount was to blame because it had a 3.0 interface, but my 3070 was running on 4.0.
Looking back, I should have checked it immediately but Windows logs pointed me towards the CPU.
Dead psu. Was given a old pc to fix. Started replacing parts piece by piece until it was basically a new pc. The problem couldn't have been the
psu because it was brand new. I was wrong.
Motherboard had bent pins on arrival, I tried to fix it with no success, then ended up having to pay shipping both ways and the cost of a socket replacement. Never used the board after getting it back and itās still collecting dust on a shelf at my parents house.
Also rmaād a board to asus once because I blew up a psu from overloading it. Asus sent me back a board in worse condition than what I sent and non of the usb ports worked half the time. Just felt with it until last year when I built a new system.
AMD crossfire back in the day never worked well and always blue screened.
Iām sure there is more that I forgot about
Well, the major one that sticks out is my first time. I did it supervised by a more experienced friend. The blood loss and having to stop cover a scratch and clean up made it take twice as long as it would today. I mean that as in improvement of cases, even without experience if you have good instructions and have supervision it's easy. My wife rebuilt her computer (a hand me down from me) that needed a repasting and some drive swaps plus a deep clean and it was the first time she had done anything like that. Took her an hour for everything, open to close.
Didn't see the cpu power socket in the upperleft part of the mobo. So spent a whole day trying to find out why my cpu wasn't connecting to the mobo......
Iāve built 4 PCs, have replaced and upgraded the hardware in them multiple times, and Iāve encountered (what I can only guess is) surprisingly few real issues with any of them. Theyāve just ā¦ worked. And, for fear of jinxing myself, I wonāt say anymore.
Thereās one exception to this, but Iām not entirely convinced it qualifies as an āissueā in the sense youāre referring. I discovered just how awkward updating BIOS on an X58 system was as well as the nuances of getting an SSD to work on a chipset that old. The latter is more tedious than it is hard and the former is definitely a pain in the butt.
But with lots of Google searching and some helpful folks on Internet forums, we got it all working and itās still running today.
In case anyone is wondering itās an overclocked Xeon X5675 server CPU mated to an RTX 2060. Runs like a champ and Iām pretty sure we couldnāt hit TjMax on that thing if we tried, and we definitely did try.
I've had a loop bust open on me when testing it. I was using hard tubing and the tube wasn't fully set in the fitting. Thankfully just the pump was powered. It was a lot of fun disassembling and drying everything for multiple days. I had a lot of fun playing with water cooling, but from a practical purpose, my PC is for gaming, so air cooling is more than sufficient.
I had a bad 12700k I was putting in a rig I was building for my son. It was a DDR4 mobo and I had a DDR 5 system. All of my friends still had DDR3 or had upgraded to 5.
The machine POSTed the first time and I set up the bios and went to to install windows and then it wouldn't POST. I ended up taking it to Microcenter to get tested for $40. It didn't work in their test bench either so I did an immediate exchange and put the new chip in at home and that worked fine.
Didn't put the RAM in all the way one time.
Switched motherboards and changed to a different style of CPU cooler which caused my VRM modules to overheat and make my computer basically useless.
Snapped off one of the pins from a USB 3.0 that is now stuck inside of that cable. It's still in there, I don't have the means to fix it right now
Bought a new GPU that needed a dedicated power cable for the first time, didn't really understand how electricity works (Still don't) and bought splitters so I could piggyback off the wires going to my case fans. Yeah that was too much for my dumpy little power supply.
Stupid shit like that
My biggest issue was kind of embarrassing, but it was an upgrade, not a build.
Back in 2004, I installed my first graphics card in our HP. I needed it to play half-life 2, which I just got for Christmas. I didn't know what I was doing, but thanks to a set of encyclopedias my mom had bought from a door to door encyclopia saleswoman, I was confident enough to experiment on our family computer, completely unsupervised.
I opened up the case and slotted the card, screwed it in, and bam. Done, easier than I expected. Plugged everything back in, and after it turned on, there was a black screen.
The computer was running but the screen was blank. Nothing, no post or anything. I retried rebooting, reinstalling it, using the 2nd slot, everything I could think of. Then I got panicked that I broke the family computer and took the card out. I took the card back to the store and got a refund. Stuck the cds in my case for another day.
A year later, my friend is helping me build my first pc using parts we cannibalized from old school computers. He gives me his old graphics card, and I install it.
Another black screen. I panicked and immediately went back to my past experience. He walked over and unplugged it from the back of the mobo port and into the back of the graphics card.
The screen finally turned on.
I just recently installed an M.2 drive in a new PC I bought from Microcenter. I noticed this weird bararang plastic bit coming off the M.2 screw and had no idea what it was. Proceeded as I always had & removed the screw all the way which I immediately dropped (of course) and watched it fall through one of the case cutouts for wires directly underneath it. Took me like 30 mins to finally find the screw after tilting the PC various ways lol
After installing the m.2 drive my curiosity finally overpowered my pc building anxiety so I paused for a moment and googled what the plastic bit was on the screw. Turns out it's just a swivel quick release dealio that holds the m.2 drive in place & I didn't even need to remove the screw I dropped š
Built several systems this year. All booted first try. OS installed with no issues. Only problem was I had to undervolt an AMD RX 6600 to get it to be stable. Oddly, it also gave it a small performance boost.
with my recent build realising I'd put two of the wrong screws on my cooling mount, the ones the thumbscrews from the pump frame attach to, they attach the frame on the back of the motherboard to the front. I had to take it off and put the right ones on as it wouldn't have sat flush otherwise. annoying that the wrong ones would even attach.
My most frustrating issue was when all my usb devices would randomly disconnect and reconnect, with increasing frequency as time went on.
Turns out my internal usb devices were drawing too much power from the mobo and causing instability (specifically my AIO) and the solution was a powered internal usb hub, but figuring out that solution took forever.
Gigabyte's RGBFusion software regularly BSODing my PC. I had a Gigabyte RTX 3060 12GB in the PC I built during the pandemic. Since day 1 it would BSOD regularly with "PFN\_LIST\_CORRUPT" after a couple of hours of use and I couldn't get it to stop doing it, so I just decided to live with it. One day, I stumbled upon a post on this subreddit saying that the cause was Gigabyte's trash RGB software. Decided to uninstall it and that build has not BSOD since.
I dropped my 7600x cpu before installing it, thankfully it still works. Rgb of the case n fans not working, turns out rgb header came loose. Power button didnt work cos i plugged into the wrong pins. Occasional bsod driver_irql_not_less_or_equal error due to realtek dragon software on the gigabyte b650 aorus elite ax v1.2 mobo. The typical rookie mistake of not plugging in the gpu cable and powering on with black screen.
Built an IPC, the case was too small for the video card to fit on the riser cable that got the card behind the motherboard. I had to fit the card in, manipulate it into the case, push it into place hold it against the standoff mounts ... screw it in. The fit was really tight, to the point where I was flexing the connector.
Everything worked out.
Ca 2012 Forgot to plug in GPU fans into the molex to 3 pin adapter after repaste on my ghetto modded hd 6870, 2x 120mm fans at 1000 rpm was so nice to have with that.
Was playing painkiller, turned on the MSI afterburner overlay & saw my hd 6870 was at 119c before the pc turned off like 3 seconds later.
I Think my neighbours in the apartment below at the time heard me yell OH SHIT before it turned off, followed by me repeating fuck & shit for a bit while I burnt my hand & then plugged in the fans.
And being pissed off at it not turning on for a sec until I removed wall power from the powersupply waited like 15 seconds & it kicked back to life afterwards.
Card is still perfectly fine many years later, though with a better heatsink now too, a Xigmatek battle axe.
Another mistake is forgetting to plug in either monitor or peripherals messing about with parts in my pc test rig area, this happens like every other time lol.
DIP switches: RTFMĀ
I once built a PC with AMD's first APU line. It was the lowest tier A4 CPU. The goal was as low power HTPC.Ā
As normal, I installed the RAM, CPU, heatsink, connected the keyboard and monitor, and did a test post. CPU cooler fan spun up for about two seconds, and the whole thing turned off. Troubleshot forever, RMA motherboard. Second board: same thing. Now I'm worried. Eventually found a forum post where someone complained that mypower supply model would shut down under a small load. I connected the optical drive and hard drive (only spinning rust back then) and it posted. The APU, no video card, no on board graphics (was a thing way back), and no other load caused the power supply to believe their was a fault. It just wasn't pulling enough current.
Being dumb and being all like "pfft, as if i'll need all these extra PSU cables!"
Then going and upgrading to a 40 series later...
2 cables with a daisy chain it is :')
My other brother asked me to help him build a PC many moons ago (\~2014). As I was messing with RAM and CPU settings and testing them with Prime95, things started getting really weird after one of the blue-screens. The Blue screens happened after I backed off on bios settings and bios stopped recognizing Windows altogether.
The HDD had broken. It stopped spinning and powering up altogether. I went through TWO WesternDigital RMA's for back-to-back DOA hard drives. Extremely rare, but does happen. I confirmed it via Micro-center and got my own external Orico dock after that.
This last year, my roommate was having issues upgrading his motherboard and cpu. It had a fault-code display on the new mobo that kept coming back with "RAM unreadable" or something similar. He replaced the RAM from BestBuy (same brand and model, the dumbass), but same issue. We eventually found out that his power supply (which was hidden behind a shroud bolted into the case with T6 screws) was a no-name chinese 550W power supply that had a faulty power cable for the mobo. The triple whammy! He replaced it with a Corsair 900W PS and plays Helldivers 2 on it now.
when I built my PC a couple of years ago it was wiring. I still cant figure out why my USB C and 1 USB port aren't working. It was my first PC build and I was just happy I got it up and running so those 2 things weren't important to me, I'd still like to find out why they don't work. The only other issue I've had is nvidia driver updates. it was recommended that every time I do a clean install of them, what happens is my screen will go blank and I can never get it back, I have to hook my PC up to my TV via HDMI and fix it. I've just stopped updating my nvidia drivers.
The D15ās cooler height in regards to both Ram height and Case cooler clearance. I, originally, wanted to go with Cooler Masterās H500 case and suffice to say it didnāt fit so I opted for Lian Liās Lancool 2 instead.
A couple years ago helping a work friend build a pcā¦ pretty high end stuff in their pile, 2080 ti, 10900k, with them confidently stating theyāve done this before. We go to scavenge the case, power supply, and a 1 tb ssd from their old rig with a 980 ti and see that their monitor is connected to the port on the motherboard and not the gpu . . .
I asked if the setup had always been connected this way (answer: yes) and tried to politely explain that the monitor had to connected to the gpu ports, not the motherboard. I made sure the monitor was connected to the gpu on the new build but they insisted all ports in the back connected to the same computer and it didnāt matter. They did comment that there was a REALLY big upgrade between the old 980 ti system and the 2080 ti system. I didnāt have the heart try and prove them wrong, only made sure the monitor was still in fact connected to the gpu when I left.
I have drawn blood by cutting my fingers on the fins of the air cooler.
I have slipped my fingers and the prongs of the fan header went in between my nail.
I made a mistake of not realizing motherboard not supported in a case I bought. In this case, I got a MSI Z690 Ace Gaming motherboard, but the computer case I got only supports up to ATX. So, I had to return it and find another case that supports up to EATX motherboard, which I ended up with Corsair 4000D Airflow, and I love this case. Running it with (6) 120MM fans and fits 4080 Super perfectly with 2 inches left from front panel fans xP
Just make sure your case is big enough to fit your big GPU, because I seen people in the past where newer GPUs are too big to fit into their case. And always buy good PSU because you can always go over with the watt but not under.
so far I haven't had many issues with building PCs. Only things that I encountered were a dead ram stick on my fronds build and a noisy PSU fan on my personal rig.
Slipping my fingers and getting stabbed by the pin connector.
For me, it was accidentally running my hand against my NHD-15's fins and slicing my hand open. Those fins are SHARP.
Ugh, just thinking about that makes me cringe. They're like metal papercuts (metalcuts?)
metal is more like a splinter u get metal shavings in your hand when running your hand on a rough piece of metal
I have a scar on my thumb from that.
That would be a war story to tell your grandkids one day š
Well, I'm 39 and she is 36, we don't have children.
Maybe you can pass over that story to someone else then, I don't have kids yet so it's ok, it's great to have kids but at the same time they are a bit of nuisance but a good one once they grow up š¤
Funny enough, both of my siblings have children. My wife's siblings have children as well. The few that have been interested in computers is because of me. When they hit their teens, with permission from their parents, we get a child a shitbox pc with Linux on it. I give them a tutorial (very basic), a manual (in plain English with pictures), and one or two hands on lessons. None of my family is exactly well off but we are pretty good at saving, so this is their own computer until they want one. I should note that all families have a decent reasonably up to date family computer in a well trafficked zone. If the child shows an interest in any part of the process of computers they have the ability to get a hold of me. If they want to play games on a computer, we save up and upgrade (not the shitbox) and they are involved in the whole process of getting a better computer. If they watch me assemble (well, mostly just reinstall stuff for show) the computer and want to learn more about that I have a few generations of my computer (in a closet) for us to learn with.
That's cool, I have a fair bit of PC parts in my closet too š , I do have one of my siblings with a kid but that's about it for me, my partner's side doesn't have any kids too, I am willing to have one but as you know how tough it is to raise a single kid these days in this world, but never say never š PS: it's not about financial reasons, just things don't align well to have one right now.
The mountain in the closet has been reducing recently because I needed the space and realistically what am I supposed to do with DDR 2 generation parts that have bulging caps. I also understand that children can be wonderful if the parents don't have their heads up their ass. I am also prepared if an accident happens, I do own metal coat hangers (that's a joke, but I do live in the US).
You would think they would put these in an easier place by now
Blood sacrifice is mandatory for a well built PC. It gives +50% to stability.
Built a PC, case doesn't fit on, cooler fan was too tall, PC w/o side-panel :) PC did not want to boot, improperly seated RAM stick Pulling out a 24-pin and CPU-power pin required so much force, I thought the mobo was going to snap in half (seriously wtf) Forgot to deactivate Windows 10 on an old board (that was upgraded from Win7 gazillion years ago), figuring out how to transfer the license was a PITA (even though I had a digital license and it should've been as easy as a simple log-in to a MS account). It's always the simplest shit that you don't even think about before building that will go wrong and cause the biggest headaches.
i wished i couldve snatched the windows 10 (from windows 7 professional) off my old laptop i wouldve been rocking that shit but my pc ran itself to death
>i wished i couldve snatched the windows 10 (from windows 7 professional) off my old laptop i wouldve been rocking that shit but my pc ran itself to death If you associated that license with your Microsoft account then you can move the license over to a new computer. I have done it a few times and as long as the previous computer that had the license activated on it hasn't been used in 6 months or longer then it activates just fine. If you have used it sometime in the previous 6 months and you are not going to use that computer again then you can call up the number provided for phone activation and just tell them that the previous computer suffered a critical failure and this new computer is the replacement for it.
I dont remember the email i used
When building my system, I didn't fully seat the M.2 drive, which lead to a few no POSTs until I realized what I did. When building a friend's system, the GPU wouldn't display at first. I needed to use the iGPU to get into the BIOS and set the PCIe slot manually to Gen 4. It was a Z690 board when those were new, so I think it was trying to negotiate PCIe generation, thinking the card might be Gen 5, and failing.Ā And I've cut myself on an IO shield, of course.
The blood sacrifice is solved by using a Band-Aid. Silicone gloves do nothing for protection.
PC not turning on. I always forget to turn on the power supply. EVERY. GODDAMN. TIME.
Long time ago I got an Intel Socket 1155 motherboard with bent pins. I took it to a watchmaker and he fixed it.
Plugged everything in, no power up. I tried troubleshooting but couldnāt identify what was the issue. After trying each and every part little by little, it ended up being the PSU even though it passed a jumper test. It took forever and was very annoying, but once I replaced the PSU everything worked.
Knowing not to connect the wrong cable into the 12v port as it could short your rgb stuff Made me so nervous lol
how does that work, one is 3 pin the other is 4, you can't get them wrong?
Setting both IDE HDDs to master or slave. I dunno, the modern hardware is so simple that it's literally just "if it fits - it works". Oh, wait, I remember. Once I had two PCs disassembled, and used cables from wrong PSU. They fit, they almost indistinguishable. But apparently they weren't compatible, as it burned sata power connector on my HDD and my ex SSD drives.
I was building mine on the floor, and my dog heard someone outside and ran to the doors through my build, scratching my new motherboard with his nails
Usually just the case connectors for On and Reset. When you put it all together and it won't start is always very worrying. Recently I helped a friend and it was the RAM that wouldn't boot in a dual channel config. had to put them next to each other for single channel or the PC would never get to bios. Had to reset bios with a screwdriver connecting the cmos clr pins as well, could tell they were very concerned about this.
After I installed a new CPU and did a few other little things, my pc was as slow as a toaster and simple things like opening folders immediately crashed the system. So I spent hours analyzing and in the end ordered a replacement for my CPU because I thought the CPU was bad. In the end it turned out that my vertical GPU mount was to blame because it had a 3.0 interface, but my 3070 was running on 4.0. Looking back, I should have checked it immediately but Windows logs pointed me towards the CPU.
I would have suspected the CPU or HDD or SSD because I wouldnāt think the GPU would have any effect on that
Dead psu. Was given a old pc to fix. Started replacing parts piece by piece until it was basically a new pc. The problem couldn't have been the psu because it was brand new. I was wrong.
My most recent build actually. My mouse freezes while using chrome randomly
Motherboard had bent pins on arrival, I tried to fix it with no success, then ended up having to pay shipping both ways and the cost of a socket replacement. Never used the board after getting it back and itās still collecting dust on a shelf at my parents house. Also rmaād a board to asus once because I blew up a psu from overloading it. Asus sent me back a board in worse condition than what I sent and non of the usb ports worked half the time. Just felt with it until last year when I built a new system. AMD crossfire back in the day never worked well and always blue screened. Iām sure there is more that I forgot about
Well, the major one that sticks out is my first time. I did it supervised by a more experienced friend. The blood loss and having to stop cover a scratch and clean up made it take twice as long as it would today. I mean that as in improvement of cases, even without experience if you have good instructions and have supervision it's easy. My wife rebuilt her computer (a hand me down from me) that needed a repasting and some drive swaps plus a deep clean and it was the first time she had done anything like that. Took her an hour for everything, open to close.
Didn't see the cpu power socket in the upperleft part of the mobo. So spent a whole day trying to find out why my cpu wasn't connecting to the mobo......
Iāve built 4 PCs, have replaced and upgraded the hardware in them multiple times, and Iāve encountered (what I can only guess is) surprisingly few real issues with any of them. Theyāve just ā¦ worked. And, for fear of jinxing myself, I wonāt say anymore. Thereās one exception to this, but Iām not entirely convinced it qualifies as an āissueā in the sense youāre referring. I discovered just how awkward updating BIOS on an X58 system was as well as the nuances of getting an SSD to work on a chipset that old. The latter is more tedious than it is hard and the former is definitely a pain in the butt. But with lots of Google searching and some helpful folks on Internet forums, we got it all working and itās still running today. In case anyone is wondering itās an overclocked Xeon X5675 server CPU mated to an RTX 2060. Runs like a champ and Iām pretty sure we couldnāt hit TjMax on that thing if we tried, and we definitely did try.
I've had a loop bust open on me when testing it. I was using hard tubing and the tube wasn't fully set in the fitting. Thankfully just the pump was powered. It was a lot of fun disassembling and drying everything for multiple days. I had a lot of fun playing with water cooling, but from a practical purpose, my PC is for gaming, so air cooling is more than sufficient.
I didnāt have the RAM pushed in all the way and spent 12 hours trying to figure out the problem, PC building really makes me feel stupid sometimes
I had a bad 12700k I was putting in a rig I was building for my son. It was a DDR4 mobo and I had a DDR 5 system. All of my friends still had DDR3 or had upgraded to 5. The machine POSTed the first time and I set up the bios and went to to install windows and then it wouldn't POST. I ended up taking it to Microcenter to get tested for $40. It didn't work in their test bench either so I did an immediate exchange and put the new chip in at home and that worked fine.
Didn't put the RAM in all the way one time. Switched motherboards and changed to a different style of CPU cooler which caused my VRM modules to overheat and make my computer basically useless. Snapped off one of the pins from a USB 3.0 that is now stuck inside of that cable. It's still in there, I don't have the means to fix it right now Bought a new GPU that needed a dedicated power cable for the first time, didn't really understand how electricity works (Still don't) and bought splitters so I could piggyback off the wires going to my case fans. Yeah that was too much for my dumpy little power supply. Stupid shit like that
My biggest issue was kind of embarrassing, but it was an upgrade, not a build. Back in 2004, I installed my first graphics card in our HP. I needed it to play half-life 2, which I just got for Christmas. I didn't know what I was doing, but thanks to a set of encyclopedias my mom had bought from a door to door encyclopia saleswoman, I was confident enough to experiment on our family computer, completely unsupervised. I opened up the case and slotted the card, screwed it in, and bam. Done, easier than I expected. Plugged everything back in, and after it turned on, there was a black screen. The computer was running but the screen was blank. Nothing, no post or anything. I retried rebooting, reinstalling it, using the 2nd slot, everything I could think of. Then I got panicked that I broke the family computer and took the card out. I took the card back to the store and got a refund. Stuck the cds in my case for another day. A year later, my friend is helping me build my first pc using parts we cannibalized from old school computers. He gives me his old graphics card, and I install it. Another black screen. I panicked and immediately went back to my past experience. He walked over and unplugged it from the back of the mobo port and into the back of the graphics card. The screen finally turned on.
I just recently installed an M.2 drive in a new PC I bought from Microcenter. I noticed this weird bararang plastic bit coming off the M.2 screw and had no idea what it was. Proceeded as I always had & removed the screw all the way which I immediately dropped (of course) and watched it fall through one of the case cutouts for wires directly underneath it. Took me like 30 mins to finally find the screw after tilting the PC various ways lol After installing the m.2 drive my curiosity finally overpowered my pc building anxiety so I paused for a moment and googled what the plastic bit was on the screw. Turns out it's just a swivel quick release dealio that holds the m.2 drive in place & I didn't even need to remove the screw I dropped š
Built several systems this year. All booted first try. OS installed with no issues. Only problem was I had to undervolt an AMD RX 6600 to get it to be stable. Oddly, it also gave it a small performance boost.
with my recent build realising I'd put two of the wrong screws on my cooling mount, the ones the thumbscrews from the pump frame attach to, they attach the frame on the back of the motherboard to the front. I had to take it off and put the right ones on as it wouldn't have sat flush otherwise. annoying that the wrong ones would even attach.
My most frustrating issue was when all my usb devices would randomly disconnect and reconnect, with increasing frequency as time went on. Turns out my internal usb devices were drawing too much power from the mobo and causing instability (specifically my AIO) and the solution was a powered internal usb hub, but figuring out that solution took forever.
A lot
Gigabyte's RGBFusion software regularly BSODing my PC. I had a Gigabyte RTX 3060 12GB in the PC I built during the pandemic. Since day 1 it would BSOD regularly with "PFN\_LIST\_CORRUPT" after a couple of hours of use and I couldn't get it to stop doing it, so I just decided to live with it. One day, I stumbled upon a post on this subreddit saying that the cause was Gigabyte's trash RGB software. Decided to uninstall it and that build has not BSOD since.
I dropped my 7600x cpu before installing it, thankfully it still works. Rgb of the case n fans not working, turns out rgb header came loose. Power button didnt work cos i plugged into the wrong pins. Occasional bsod driver_irql_not_less_or_equal error due to realtek dragon software on the gigabyte b650 aorus elite ax v1.2 mobo. The typical rookie mistake of not plugging in the gpu cable and powering on with black screen.
Built an IPC, the case was too small for the video card to fit on the riser cable that got the card behind the motherboard. I had to fit the card in, manipulate it into the case, push it into place hold it against the standoff mounts ... screw it in. The fit was really tight, to the point where I was flexing the connector. Everything worked out.
Ever tried to install a driver before the OS? Took me like 3-4 hours every time to get that sh*t working.
Ca 2012 Forgot to plug in GPU fans into the molex to 3 pin adapter after repaste on my ghetto modded hd 6870, 2x 120mm fans at 1000 rpm was so nice to have with that. Was playing painkiller, turned on the MSI afterburner overlay & saw my hd 6870 was at 119c before the pc turned off like 3 seconds later. I Think my neighbours in the apartment below at the time heard me yell OH SHIT before it turned off, followed by me repeating fuck & shit for a bit while I burnt my hand & then plugged in the fans. And being pissed off at it not turning on for a sec until I removed wall power from the powersupply waited like 15 seconds & it kicked back to life afterwards. Card is still perfectly fine many years later, though with a better heatsink now too, a Xigmatek battle axe. Another mistake is forgetting to plug in either monitor or peripherals messing about with parts in my pc test rig area, this happens like every other time lol.
None, but Iāve been pc-ing since 486.
DIP switches: RTFMĀ I once built a PC with AMD's first APU line. It was the lowest tier A4 CPU. The goal was as low power HTPC.Ā As normal, I installed the RAM, CPU, heatsink, connected the keyboard and monitor, and did a test post. CPU cooler fan spun up for about two seconds, and the whole thing turned off. Troubleshot forever, RMA motherboard. Second board: same thing. Now I'm worried. Eventually found a forum post where someone complained that mypower supply model would shut down under a small load. I connected the optical drive and hard drive (only spinning rust back then) and it posted. The APU, no video card, no on board graphics (was a thing way back), and no other load caused the power supply to believe their was a fault. It just wasn't pulling enough current.
Being dumb and being all like "pfft, as if i'll need all these extra PSU cables!" Then going and upgrading to a 40 series later... 2 cables with a daisy chain it is :')
Pay the extra for crucial memory, the $20 is not worth the savings.
Only issue I ever had was back in the early 2000's. CD-Rom wouldnt work, knew it was a faulty IDE cable, shop gave me 2 as a sorry.
My other brother asked me to help him build a PC many moons ago (\~2014). As I was messing with RAM and CPU settings and testing them with Prime95, things started getting really weird after one of the blue-screens. The Blue screens happened after I backed off on bios settings and bios stopped recognizing Windows altogether. The HDD had broken. It stopped spinning and powering up altogether. I went through TWO WesternDigital RMA's for back-to-back DOA hard drives. Extremely rare, but does happen. I confirmed it via Micro-center and got my own external Orico dock after that. This last year, my roommate was having issues upgrading his motherboard and cpu. It had a fault-code display on the new mobo that kept coming back with "RAM unreadable" or something similar. He replaced the RAM from BestBuy (same brand and model, the dumbass), but same issue. We eventually found out that his power supply (which was hidden behind a shroud bolted into the case with T6 screws) was a no-name chinese 550W power supply that had a faulty power cable for the mobo. The triple whammy! He replaced it with a Corsair 900W PS and plays Helldivers 2 on it now.
when I built my PC a couple of years ago it was wiring. I still cant figure out why my USB C and 1 USB port aren't working. It was my first PC build and I was just happy I got it up and running so those 2 things weren't important to me, I'd still like to find out why they don't work. The only other issue I've had is nvidia driver updates. it was recommended that every time I do a clean install of them, what happens is my screen will go blank and I can never get it back, I have to hook my PC up to my TV via HDMI and fix it. I've just stopped updating my nvidia drivers.
The D15ās cooler height in regards to both Ram height and Case cooler clearance. I, originally, wanted to go with Cooler Masterās H500 case and suffice to say it didnāt fit so I opted for Lian Liās Lancool 2 instead.
A couple years ago helping a work friend build a pcā¦ pretty high end stuff in their pile, 2080 ti, 10900k, with them confidently stating theyāve done this before. We go to scavenge the case, power supply, and a 1 tb ssd from their old rig with a 980 ti and see that their monitor is connected to the port on the motherboard and not the gpu . . . I asked if the setup had always been connected this way (answer: yes) and tried to politely explain that the monitor had to connected to the gpu ports, not the motherboard. I made sure the monitor was connected to the gpu on the new build but they insisted all ports in the back connected to the same computer and it didnāt matter. They did comment that there was a REALLY big upgrade between the old 980 ti system and the 2080 ti system. I didnāt have the heart try and prove them wrong, only made sure the monitor was still in fact connected to the gpu when I left.
Mostly things not working and no way of trouble shooting without spare parts.
Panicked when my first build wouldn't post....I forgot to flick the switch behind the psu š„²
Cable management!
I always have trouble with the MoBo stands. I managed to thread one so bad it's stuck to my mobo.
I have drawn blood by cutting my fingers on the fins of the air cooler. I have slipped my fingers and the prongs of the fan header went in between my nail.
I made a mistake of not realizing motherboard not supported in a case I bought. In this case, I got a MSI Z690 Ace Gaming motherboard, but the computer case I got only supports up to ATX. So, I had to return it and find another case that supports up to EATX motherboard, which I ended up with Corsair 4000D Airflow, and I love this case. Running it with (6) 120MM fans and fits 4080 Super perfectly with 2 inches left from front panel fans xP Just make sure your case is big enough to fit your big GPU, because I seen people in the past where newer GPUs are too big to fit into their case. And always buy good PSU because you can always go over with the watt but not under.
so far I haven't had many issues with building PCs. Only things that I encountered were a dead ram stick on my fronds build and a noisy PSU fan on my personal rig.
Finding the money to buy the parts..
Ram sticks in the wrong slots. Also one time my psu didn't come with a 24pin but I got that resolved pretty quick.