Ooooo ! d'uh ! I 'broke' it again ! ...

[confus-ed]

We all know a mechanic who ought to fix his car, or a hairdresser who needs a new haircut, or a decorator who needs new wallpaper, whatever ... so like many of you, I quite often use my own beast to 'fix stuff' this however has the usual 'unexpected consequence' of breaking it

So in percentage terms 'roughly' how often is your machine suffering from 'self-inflict-ed deadness' ? I killed mine 'good' at least twice, this week, and its only Monday afternoon !

[kato2274]

We all know a mechanic who ought to fix his car, or a hairdresser who needs a new haircut, or a decorator who needs new wallpaper, whatever ... so like many of you, I quite often use my own beast to 'fix stuff' this however has the usual 'unexpected consequence' of breaking it

So in percentage terms 'roughly' how often is your machine suffering from 'self-inflict-ed deadness' ? I killed mine 'good' at least twice, this week, and its only Monday afternoon !

I think the percentage is fairly small. I can remember a few things though.
I can remember a bios flash gone bad . . . . . a dead athlon T-bird thanks to "then pencil trick" and an overly snug fitting heatsink. I remember a dead abit board thanks to a proprietary compaq power supply that I didn't know was proprietary (like the dell controversy)

surprisingly though most time I do things and immediately yell "oh no" thinking I had just officially killed a machine (like plugging a NIC into a machine I was sure was powered off, but wasn't) end up causing no ill effects . . . . weird.

[Matridom]

I've had very little downtime over the past year. Occasionaly i'll reload the os due to bloating, but for me, that's once or twice a year, rarely more. I've had down time due to 23 hour power outage (my biggest single downtime for the year), i've had down time to hard disks going bad, I've had downtime cause i've used my system in a way that it was not designed for (a reboot usualy fixed these). All other downtime i experience is from hardware upgrades/modifications to the system. Like most Techs' I succumb to upgrades and the all popular "Mods".

Additionaly, I currently run public servers that NEED a constant connection ALL the time (see chat here) and as such a disconnection from the internet affects many more people then just I

I voted 1-20% cause i count my "uptime" in weeks, not days or hours

[Cleetus]

My worst was when I was losing time as the OS really needed to be reloaded(Win98 and 2 years) got pissed off when something wasn't loading(actually ended up being something with the network) punched the machine really hard and crashed the HD. Lost lots and lots of stuff, that was dumb. But forthe most part, my machines work fairly well, they just get real slow cause I never defrag and wait forever to do much and constatly expirement withdifferent programs on my own machine.

[Stalemate]

Apart from the occasional goof and the expected Windows reloads I've been fairly lucky.

The one thing that gets to me is that I install / uninstall lots of applications (allright, games too - but they're for the kids!) which gradually slows down the PC to the point where an OS re-install starts to look like a better idea than actually waiting up for the OS to load.

That, and the constant tweaking and optimizing makes whatever image I had originally mande to become completely useless.

[Ferrit]

Not too often occasionally a virus gets loose scanning customer drive in my machine but not often
But I do remeber testing a GForce TI200 in this system when it was running a radeon. Of course I just switched cards DOH. MAJOR EWPS. I nearly lost the whole dam thing. Saw some of the strangest things I ever seen. Lost my sound completely off the cmedia 8738 till I pulled out a usb plug then it came back. Scared the crap outta me cause I had it turned way up trying to sort it out.

[King Grover]

never. only down time is when i get a new PC. i don;t do nothing to my pc's to screw them up. standard factory/network crap here. Plus, I'm more greaterlyist!

[ScorpioIlya]

You guys need to quit accusing others of being incompetent and jumping up others' asses, and look inward to root out your own incompetence...........I am shocked how many people screw stuff up....I thought I was bad....but geeez.......what's wrong with you 'professionals'.

[FatalException0E]

Quite a bit of my downtime is self-inflicted, but I don't have much downtime. The time the metal braket around a 3com NIC's port touched the back of sound card I had a good bit.....but that was a long time ago. The closest to self-inflicted downtime I've had recently was reloading my laptop with Win2k to find out if the new driver for my wireless NIC would actually make it work. It didn't, so I put XP on it. That whole thing took about 2 hours. Ghost is loverly, ain't it?

[FatalException0E]

You guys need to quit accusing others of being incompetent and jumping up others' asses, and look inward to root out your own incompetence...........I am shocked how many people screw stuff up....I thought I was bad....but geeez.......what's wrong with you 'professionals'.

Woah......think ya need to cut back on the vodka when you're in a bad mood, mister RCVC.

[jaeger]

You guys need to quit accusing others of being incompetent and jumping up others' asses, and look inward to root out your own incompetence...........I am shocked how many people screw stuff up....I thought I was bad....but geeez.......what's wrong with you 'professionals'.

Stow your **** or add a smiley.

[Titchski]

Not really a screw up but, my P/S went out on Saturday night...

I gave my only spare to a friend who also had one die on him, so I'm PC-less till I get home tonight and bung in the new spare I just acquired

However, this is the excuse I need to get a new case, with flashy light fans and windows and furry dice and racing stripes and.. and.. well you get the picture.

One mans f-up is another mans opportunity to upgrade

Cheers

[Cleetus]

You guys need to quit accusing others of being incompetent and jumping up others' asses, and look inward to root out your own incompetence...........I am shocked how many people screw stuff up....I thought I was bad....but geeez.......what's wrong with you 'professionals'.

Just who are you talking to?

[gazzak]

I learnt a long time ago what NOT to fix!

If it aint broken, walk away. (and no I didn't click 0%)

[TripleRLtd]

Geesh Scorpio...what was that all about?
I said 1-20, but the only thing about it being self-induced is upgrading hardware or adding new hardware, so it would be more like 1%. Now, outside related events or MS caused? Well that is an entirely different matter.
PS
Hey Titchski, all you had to do was call me mate.