Craziest things you've had to do to fix your software - Hardware & Software

I've had a vista install that couldn't boot to be fixed by only booting up a windows 7 disk.

Whenever i ran MW3 Multiplayer, it would get stuck on connecting to online services, and fail after a while. Then when i closed the game the process would still be running, but it was somehow now running from system32, and the only way to get it to stop was reboot. I eventually just reinstalled windows and that fixed it.

So I have a 24 port switch which I got for free from my old school. It would constantly overheat due to the fans being blocked. At the same time, It wouldn't turn on if the top of it was removed. I had an old thermaltake case with a 23cm, LED fan on the side of it. We ended up taking the fan off the case, angle grinding a hole in the top of it, screwing the fan to the top and then plugging the fan in to the fan connector on the switch's motherboard. Funny enough it works. [t]http://i.imgur.com/2jeWaGQ.jpg[/t]

[QUOTE=B!N4RY;40336404]Interestingly, I've had this same problem before. That was all the way back in 2002 though.[/QUOTE] I had this problem with an Athlon X2 4000+/associated mobo. I had to heat the cpu area up with the drier to get it to come on, and once it was on I had to run Prime95 to keep the CPU warm enough to run. If it dropped below a certain temp, it would turn off.

[QUOTE=Animosus;40355009]So I have a 24 port switch which I got for free from my old school. It would constantly overheat due to the fans being blocked. At the same time, It wouldn't turn on if the top of it was removed. I had an old thermaltake case with a 23cm, LED fan on the side of it. We ended up taking the fan off the case, angle grinding a hole in the top of it, screwing the fan to the top and then plugging the fan in to the fan connector on the switch's motherboard. Funny enough it works. [t]http://i.imgur.com/2jeWaGQ.jpg[/t][/QUOTE] My old shitty router overheated enough that the wifi would just stop responding until you rebooted. This was because it had about 2mm of clearance under it for any air to flow through I fixed this by taping coke bottle lids to the bottom [img]http://imgkk.com/i/470r.png[/img] Flawless

[QUOTE=kaze4159;40356636]My old shitty router overheated enough that the wifi would just stop responding until you rebooted. This was because it had about 2mm of clearance under it for any air to flow through I fixed this by taping coke bottle lids to the bottom [img]http://imgkk.com/i/470r.png[/img] Flawless[/QUOTE] I had a Netgear ADSL modem that overheated like shit. I tried to put it in a vertical position but nothing changed, so i removed the plastic case but it kept overheating. It was so shitty that it didn't even deserve a passive cooler. Solution? I started spitting at the damn fucker while it was running, and it ran fine until i decided to buy a decent router.

Well, this evening I achieved the most cruel computer abuse so far, I had my foot resting on top of my CM HAF 912 Plus, but my whole leg fell off, slammed on my WLAN stick and smashed the USB port, took some pliers while I had L4D2 running and ripped the complete USB port out to prevent shorting. Made me consider to buy a new case as I put in a new thread on this section.

I once had problems with my computer not starting so I chopped the 24 pin power connector off instead of taking it out then discovered it was a due to a jumper I had accidentally moved while giving it a clean, so I had to sit there and solder the plug back on wire by wire. Another time I bought this cheap ass case and the power supply did not match up with the screw holes so I had to bend the case so it gripped the PSU and stick in a bunch of screws. As you can probably tell my PC has a lot of 'custom modifications'.

[QUOTE=Chryseus;40360221]I once had problems with my computer not starting so I chopped the 24 pin power connector off instead of taking it out then discovered it was a due to a jumper I had accidentally moved while giving it a clean, so I had to sit there and solder the plug back on wire by wire. Another time I bought this cheap ass case and the power supply did not match up with the screw holes so I had to bend the case so it gripped the PSU and stick in a bunch of screws. As you can probably tell my PC has a lot of 'custom modifications'.[/QUOTE] I've always wanted to modify a PSU's leads so that it would be able to perfectly route around a case. Now that would be proper cable management

So my sister ran a Skype virus. That current one. Injects .dlls in drivers, doesn't appear in processes, spams in startup configs, spawns registry values, spawns .exe files, sends data over internet, constantly rewrites itself, makes attempts to overcome disabled permissions, copying itself to USB thumb drives ... Now after fiddling around for solid 6 hours I have removed virus itself, lost 8 GB of partitioned memory (but due to my own fault) and there's still a scan going and finding residue shit. It was just interesting watching it work... I disabled it's permissions to everything and it converted itself to a msdos program and made a shortcut that has allow all permission flags and ran that. Constantly tried a giant list of IP transfers. Startup values restting the second I change them. Registry values doing the same. Well malwarebytes and avg worked in the end.

[QUOTE=XL5;40326190]I had a power supply that would only work once it was warm. I had to heat it up with a hairdryer before it would power on.[/QUOTE] I would guess that it had leaking/failing capacitors and the heat was able to make them function barely enough to work.

MY GPU fan wouldn't go at full speed, which caused it to get very hot playing games. So to keep it cool, I plugged in a USB fan, balanced it on my old computer and then pointed inside my computer's case... It worked surprisingly well.

I bought this bluetooth receiver so I could wirelessly play music to my amp, and windows gave me a weird error and couldn't connect. I googled it and apparently windows can't connect to bluetooth devices with a hyphen in its name. So I renamed the bluetooth device and it worked

I spent eight hours of my life to make my system able to dual-boot Windows and Linux :v: It took so much time because I was so afraid of making any mistakes, since I almost lost all motivation to install any OS on my PC due to any error. That process to make my PC dual-boot would now take about 30 seconds :v:

[QUOTE=bohb;40362577]I would guess that it had leaking/failing capacitors and the heat was able to make them function barely enough to work.[/QUOTE] My theory was a dry joint that somehow would expand just enough to make contact when it was slightly warmer.

[QUOTE=XL5;40393237]My theory was a dry joint that somehow would expand just enough to make contact when it was slightly warmer.[/QUOTE] PSUs are pretty much made entirely using through-hole components, that's physically impossible to happen.

[QUOTE=supervoltage;40389388]I spent eight hours of my life to make my system able to dual-boot Windows and Linux :v: It took so much time because I was so afraid of making any mistakes, since I almost lost all motivation to install any OS on my PC due to any error. That process to make my PC dual-boot would now take about 30 seconds :v:[/QUOTE] Ubuntu has an exe that you can run and it does everything for you, and then to remove the dual boot you uninstall the program. Its called WUBI

[QUOTE=11am;40394628]Ubuntu has an exe that you can run and it does everything for you, and then to remove the dual boot you uninstall the program. Its called WUBI[/QUOTE] NEVER use WUBI. You should just manually install Ubuntu if you do.

[QUOTE=Lerlth;40394700]NEVER use WUBI. You should just manually install Ubuntu if you do.[/QUOTE] I have and it works great

It would work greater if you didn't use WUBI though :p

[QUOTE=Lerlth;40394700]NEVER use WUBI. You should just manually install Ubuntu if you do.[/QUOTE] As much as I agree upon doing fresh installs, I do disagree on the [I]NEVER use WUBI[/I] part. It's not the most optimal solution but it is a functioning one.

WUBI's a total crapshoot. For some people it might work fine, for others (eg my brother) it breaks both Windows and Ubuntu.

[QUOTE=lavacano;40406626]WUBI's a total crapshoot. For some people it might work fine, for others (eg my brother) it breaks both Windows and Ubuntu.[/QUOTE] Worked several times for me, it uninstalls easily too

Wubi's fun in a pinch but I would never trust it compared to shrinking a partition and manually loading Ubuntu onto that.

In order to play BF3 for more than like 10 minutes, I have to restart my printer as soon as I join a server. Otherwise I get kicked off after about 5 minutes of playing.

When I worked for my town hall I was doing a project in source engine over an xbox 360, we had some 2009 devkits (the ones that are blue chromed) and for some stupid reason I couldn't update it. When I opened it up there was a switch in the NAND memory write pin, I still don't know why it was there. I just pressed the switch to fix that

1,5 years ago I bought a new graphics card for my PC so I could play Battlefield 3, didn't have any experience buying new hardware and building it into my PC and heard many stories about RMA etc. So, I bought my graphics card, Battlefield 3 and started playing it, was in a vehicle and it was being hit (you get these stripes in the screen), when I saw the stripes I thought my graphics card was fucked. Also reinstalled Windows and posted my "problem" on a couple of forums for help. After a day or so I finally got a response that it was the game and not my card. Edit : People told me to reinstall my drivers but first remove the old ones, did that with Drive Sweeper but also removed DirectX and all the other files from windows, because of that I had to reinstall Windows.

my wireless mouse would get very laggy when i played games on my 13 inch MBP. but it worked flawlessly if i used it in my left hand turns out the motherboards in 2010 13in MBP's are incapable of providing full wattage to the cpu, gpu, and i/o at the same time. my mouse's wireless receiver was being undervolted and thus shrunk the range to 3 inches. and of course all the USB ports were on the left side so i had to grab a usb extension cord so i could move the mouse receiver to the right side, and so i ended up with a wired wireless mouse. macs, not even once.

[QUOTE=meppers;40447781]my wireless mouse would get very laggy when i played games on my 13 inch MBP. but it worked flawlessly if i used it in my left hand turns out the motherboards in 2010 13in MBP's are incapable of providing full wattage to the cpu, gpu, and i/o at the same time. my mouse's wireless receiver was being undervolted and thus shrunk the range to 3 inches. and of course all the USB ports were on the left side so i had to grab a usb extension cord so i could move the mouse receiver to the right side, and so i ended up with a wired wireless mouse. macs, not even once.[/QUOTE] Never heard of that problem before.

I guess the craziest things I do to fix broken stuff is to replace parts on the component-level to fix broken things. Here's a Dell Precision 650 motherboard I repaired (and I hope I never have to again, it took 6 hours of solid soldering.) Bad: [thumb]http://imageshack.us/a/img528/255/img0147g.jpg[/thumb] Good: (after 6 hours) [thumb]http://imageshack.us/a/img152/9434/img0148dq.jpg[/thumb] I'm currently working on converting a 19" Hyundai LCD monitor to run on a external power brick (since the internal power board and inverter are dead and no replacement available.) Here's it running off a computer ATX PSU: [thumb]http://imageshack.us/a/img109/3514/img0256st.jpg[/thumb] I have one of the lower CCFLs being powered by a computer case CCFL inverter :v: [thumb]http://imageshack.us/a/img22/3167/img0257ls.jpg[/thumb] [QUOTE=B!N4RY;40394294]PSUs are pretty much made entirely using through-hole components, that's physically impossible to happen.[/QUOTE] There are a number of things that can cause through-hole components to detach. 1) The joint could have been defective from the factory (cold solder joint.) 2) Some failure condition (overheating, etc.) can cause components to de-solder themselves. 3) Thermal creep can cause through-hole parts to mechanically work themselves out of their joints if the joints are defective.