Name the source of your last HARDWARE problem
I'm doing a bit of research for an article I'm writing and would appreciate some input from the SM community.
For the guys that repair PC's all day as a living and of course the members that come to SM for help and advice and the Guru's that help them, I would like to know what the most common hardware problem is.
More importantly how many of those problems were caused by running the system from a cheap and inadequate power supply.
More than one option is allowed in the Poll.
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For the guys that repair PC's all day as a living and of course the members that come to SM for help and advice and the Guru's that help them, I would like to know what the most common hardware problem is.
More importantly how many of those problems were caused by running the system from a cheap and inadequate power supply.
More than one option is allowed in the Poll.
<o></o>
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EDIT: OOPS, forgot -- killed two motherboards at extreme overclocking. Both were RMA'd. I consider this hardware failure, not user mistakes, because the boards had 'overclocking' BIOSes, to include CPU and Northbridge voltage adjustment.
I'm hoping that members who post here take the time out to list specifics rather than rely exclusively on the poll. It doesn't have to be a single event or single hardware failure and if it spans a period of time thats also fine
An IBM Deathstar, to be precise. I must have been tempting fate to keep using that drive after fixing a failure elsewhere in the rig
Only 2 cpu's (1 intel, 1 amd), few psu's, few harddrives and a couple of graphics cards.
Had some 120mm fans fail, but that means very little.
Voted "motherboards".
- the USB's go bad
- power supply fails
- video card goes bad
With a desktop all of those cures don't involve a mobo.It was my fault though, not the mobo's. I knew going in that I might fry the mobo, but since I had spare parts I figured it was worth the risk.
But complete failures are different. This is not a complete list probably, but the major hardware failures I can remember are the followings.
Lost two sticks of Kingston DDR after using several years.
Lost an ASUS motherboard since mosfets fried while overclocking. Actually, I do not remember maybe I was not overclocking at all
Destroyed one Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 while soldering for vcore mod. I keep practicing soldering on it now.
Lost 3 PSU's (Coolermaster, Fortron, Enlight) possibly due to manufacturing defects and aging.
Lost 2 WD IDE harddisks after using about 2 years.
Not too much hardware loss compared to the truck load of hardware passed from my workbench during all those years.
All of the other problems I have been constantly fixing are due to my modifications and overclocking. For example, the last problem was experiencing random reboots on my main computer and it was my fault. It was fixed by increasing vdimm of the Crucial Ballistix DDR DIMMs.
Second most common problem Dead maxtor slim drives. (Yes I gave a brand and class its own category there that bad.. we sold so so so very many in the past its all seagate now not dead ones yet.)
third most common - Defective ram (We replace it with Kingston as its only slightly more expensive then the garbage brands and it offers far far far better reliability *never had defective Kingston returned*.)
fourth most common Defective motherboard (Almost always pc chips or jetway sometimes ecs rarely anything else once we had a dead asus come in).
edit: For personal parts failure just hard-drives. (Drives don't like getting dropped when in an enclosure ) (I RMA'ed it and received a 200GB drive back)
(I selected hard-drive)
I have lost two PSUs. One just went dead, the other went flaky.
But the winner in HDD. I have lost three deathstars, an done other drive.
This does not count stuff that was killed by my actions. That is called fun.
First pair failed Memtest after about 3 months. The second they sent to replace them with had one board fail to even POST.
When I was in Korea fixing other peoples' computers, though, I was given pretty much everything. Bad motherboards (the Dell SX270 was notorious for these, and pretty much every one we had needed to have its motherboard replaced), corrupted hard drives, broken cooling systems (that computer was disgusting, I'll link to a video of it later), failed hard drives, bad power supplies (it's fun when this happens as you're working on the computer, you just go to eject the CD and when it's sticking out about half an inch the whole system dies and doesn't come back), laptop touchpads... that was fun stuff.
The most likely component to fail (in my personal experience) has been hard drives. This is skewed somewhat by my lengthy experience with a couple of notorious duds. These include the infamous IBM DeskStar debacle (times four, in my case), and the 80GB Maxtors which also liked to die premature deaths.
In second place, I would put PSU's, though I've had nowhere near the run of bad luck with them that I've had with hard drives.
I have had 1 harddrive go bad on me, but Seagate support was excellent, and my new drive was twice the size returned back to me. I may have a Maxtor going now, it seems some parts/sectors are not working properly, but usually eventually do work, just a little picky and pokey.
Granted, I've only really used/worked on computers in this millenium, and I use good powersupplies and usually good memory. I don't care who makes the GPU or CPU.
Actually, I did have a Belkin Router (*caugh* crap), a no-name router (*ahem, didn't deserve to live), and a Khypermedia CD-RW drive go bad, all returned or sent for warranty, as well as the occasional PATA cable that quit. Oh, I almost forgot, I chipped a cpu once too in which AMD said tough luck, and bent some pins on a my brand new pentium 4 Northwood, in which Intel gladly replaced free of charge, being a "first time customer and all"