Which of these internal computer parts have you had the most problems with?
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Its programs (Score:2)
Moving Parts (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. I dunno how "fans" is not miles ahead. Every case I've ever bought, without fail, has started having annoying fan noise after maybe half a year (usually less). It usually ends with me disconnecting the fan, or stabbing it through with a pair of scissors.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Invest in better fans. Fan bearings have gotten better over the past 10 years in a manner analagous to what's happened to automobiles in the past 20 years: $10-15 on something like a Corsair or Fractal Design or Noctua (the Redux line is grey, identica
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of time and money, hard drives have been much worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Recently (like the last 5 years), I have had memory go bad in both a laptop and a desktop. In the case of my desktop, it had been running about 8 years and had probably given me about what I could expect for it's lifetime. In the case of my laptop it was only 4 years old. I had asked work for more memory, and the IT people opened the system up to check what type of memory it was. At that point, the system stopped worki
20 years and not many failures. (Score:2)
I've had 1 CPU with a non fatal issue. A Motherboard where the front side bus failed when some capacitors died. An undersized case fan that failed when the bearings gave out. One graphics card that gave up after five years or so. I'm pretty sure I had a power supply fritz out on my also but can't remember for sure anymore.
By far the most troublesome part has been hard drives. I've had two go bad, one after 2.5 years and the other at 1.5 years. At least the second failure was a SMART drive and gave me enough
Re:20 years and not many failures. (Score:4)
I must be lucky. In over 20 years, I can count hard drive failures on one hand.
Of course, now that I've said that...
USB ports (Score:4, Informative)
MacBook Pros seem to have a problem with the USB ports flaking out. Both of mine are close to useless, and the same thing has happened to my daughter's machine.
Re: (Score:2)
MacBook Pros [snip] Both of mine are close to useless,
Of course. They're Macbooks. Heh.
Maybe I have just been lucky but USB ports wearing out is one problem I have never had on PCs or Macs. I've come across badly made USB ports that loose the connection if you bump into the plug but never USB ports that wore out from heavy use. I have, however had my fair share of crappy USB cables. Power connectors OTOH are another story. After Apple switched to metal cases it's mostly just the charging cables that wear out. I have never had any problem with the new MagSafe sockets on the machines themselves
Magic Smoke (Score:5, Funny)
They never stay inside the component.
--sf
Fans (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most problems or biggest problems (Score:2)
The question is about the most problems, and dying storage would be the right answer for me then.
The biggest problem I had however was with a cheap power supply. For some days I had a peculiar smell in the house. Then suddenly there was smoke coming from the back of the pc, and the start of flames.
I will only buy power supplies from main brand names now anymore, it scared me quite a bit.
Other.. (Score:4, Informative)
All of the above, in the past 15 years, with the exception of the CPU, that was pre-2000.
Made me hard to choose from.
* RAM - on occasion, mostly when new.
* Videocard - 2 'blown up'; bad capacitors or GPU defect
* Motherboard - bad capacitors. And cheap models suck - better spend more on mobo less on cpu.
* Fans - always an issue especially if you are a smoker
* Hard disk fail - 1 soft fail, replaced it before end of life. One very hard fail, on a brand new drive. Unfortunately it kept all my data as i was migrating.
* Power supply - again, i learned not to buy cheap stuff.
In general, failed components (apart the video cards) were indeed cheap / low budget. My current PC is ok, because i choose better quality parts (mobo+PSU mostly). Apart the harddrive which was acting 'weird' after 4 1/2 year and hence got replaced by an SSD disk, which was a good idea anyways.
Lessons learned: if the PC is acting weird, check the unobvious: the PSU. Older hardware: check capacitors. New hardware: don't trust memory, mobo and hard drive until proven (`burn-in`).
Storage (Score:4, Insightful)
A moving part that has electronics.
Well, until recently.
Re: (Score:2)
Still outpriced 10:1, just checked my local pricewatch.
SSD: 3649 NOK for 1 TB
HDD: 1379 NOK for 4 TB = 345 NOK/TB
With M.2/NVMe they keep getting better and better, but not so much bigger and bigger for the same price.
Re: (Score:2)
Size is not the only thing that matters.
(or, at least that is what I keep telling people)
It depends (Score:2)
Power supplies that tend to go in prebuilt computers. I think a big part of that is that most people have been trained to look at many of the other specs. But most companies toss in the cheapest PSU they think will last until just past the warranty expiration. I've seen a few that used one that didn't even meet the minimum recommended wattage for the CPU that was installed. I've also seen way too many power supplies come in prebuilt computers nuke everything else in the system when they die. Never had tha
At one time or another... (Score:2)
I've had each item on the list go bad at one time or another but ram and power supplies probably top the list despite using relatively good brand name parts: for memory Corsair, Crucial, Mushkin, PNY, Patriot all brands I've had bad parts at one time or another. For power supplies: Corsair, Thermaltake, OCZ (too many OCZ which is why I stopped using them)
As far as cpu's I only use boxed Intel cpu's and the last Intel cpu I had that went bad was a couple of Pentium III's and one was still under the three yea
Batteries and wifi (Score:2)
None on this list.
- Batteries - they get old,don't hold charge and even explode (I had an old macbook battery explode, or, rather - spontaneously "blow up" in size about 3-4 times, although it fortunately didn't leak)
- Wifi cards - reception gets wonky, and there is not much you can do about that (as they are now part of the motherboard and not easily replaceable)
It Depends (Score:2)
On my personal machines, nothing has ever broken - they've all been Macs. My work Windows machines tend to eat hard drives, I've also had one motherboard failure, and one dead laptop power supply. And these weren't no-name cheapo machines, they were HPs, Lenovos, and so on.
Cables (Score:2)
First thing I check is cables.
More than parts (Score:2)
I've likely had more power supplies fail than hard drives but power supplies don't hold my data.
Depends on what you mean by "problems" (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, for causing real problems, PSUs win by a landslide. They can range from extremely subtle, to system-destroying, but you very rarely have them just outright fail in a tidy, nondestructive way.
A lot of people said storage, which I find somewhat bizarre - I have maintained sizable (5-8 drives of the one-notch-below-cutting-edge size available at the time) home-built NASs for 20+ years now, and every few years I swap it out for a bigger, better model. I've easily run a century in drive-years. And no mistake, I've bought three or four drives that arrived DOA, but I've only ever had two fail after they had worked for a while (and one of those, I'd call "almost DOA", because while it lasted long enough to format it and bring it online, it didn't even survive trying to copy the data from its predecessor onto it). People love complaining about their HDDs dying, but in practice, they just don't really die all that often. Just watch your SMART data and replace failing drives at the first sign of trouble.
As for the rest of the options, again, I've had them arrive DOA, but they virtually never fail once they've worked for a few days.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
> Fans die like carnival goldfish.
I have never once had a fan die.
> Just watch your SMART data and replace failing drives at the first sign of trouble.
That would qualify as "trouble".
Re: (Score:2)
I have one Scythe Gentle Typhoon, that cost me nearly $20, but it has been running without problems for 7 years.
Re: (Score:2)
I've only once had trouble with a HDD and that was decades ago when the new drive I added smashed my data every time I shut down. It turned out that it would only work properly as the primary drive, not a secondary. However, I've had more CD/DVD drives fail on me than any other part, so that's what I picked.
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of sheer number of failures, PSUs take the cake. Hell, I once ran a computer lab that shared a circuit with some nasty lab equipment, each computer would burn through 4-6 PSUs per year. They tend to be easy to troubleshoot and quick to replace though.
I still think hard drives have caused the greatest number of problems for me. If someone comes to me with a dropped laptop it's almost an automatic 6+ hours of work trying to recover any data from it (because of course they don't have backups). If
My cup holder keeps breaking off (Score:5, Funny)
Every PC I've ever owned. It's like they don't even try to design the darn thing to hold the weight of a full cup of coffee...
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like you have a problem with your Java process.
Coffee (Score:5, Funny)
"But," you say, "coffee isn't an internal computer part!"
When it is, that's a problem.
I have the most problems with the user component. (Score:2)
CD drives (Score:2)
On my first computer that had a CD drive I could just finish Myst before the CD drive died and went to heaven. Many many drives followed until adventure games started to be run from the hard drive. Nowadays I hardly use my CD/DVD drive anymore.
Crappy fans (Score:2)
My casualty list... (Score:2)
One CPU (an AMD Thunderbird 900 which developed severe over-sensitivity to heat).
One graphics card (an Nvidia 7950GX2 - bleeding edge cards have a reputation for early-deaths).
One power supply.
Several CD-ROM drives (though my very first one is nigh-indestructible - a 2x speed drive from 1995 which still works, still sits in a PC in my parents' house and is still used occasionally to recover data from very old CD-Rs that, for some reason, it can read while modern drives just shrug).
And more hard drives than
Adobe (Score:3)
Adobe Reader causes me more problems than any other component, be it hardware, software, user, regulation, or program. This piece of software is such a POS, riddled with backdoors, bugs, "features", bad updates and other crashy nonsense that it makes me want to buy shares of Adobe so that I can burn them & then piss on the ashes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True. Even windows has it's own pdf reader that is 100x better than adobe in every way. Let us all just delete adobe now. It has dragged on long enough. Is it just me or does everything turn to shit once adobe starts doing their thing on it? Flash used to be good. Then it went shit. Same with pdf. Same with photoshop. Same with lightroom.
Re: (Score:2)
You know from all the problems with Adobe Reader freezing up, crashing, and having font/text aliasing problems depending on size setting of the page nothing frustrates me more than opening those rare PDFs from Intel and a few others where it completely disregards the user preferences and resizes the window to fit the PDF document size and repositions the Reader window to the center of the screen. And of course requires me to resize and reposition the fucking thing so I can actually read the PDF document on
Re: (Score:2)
If a document can change the settings of the fucking reader program then it means the standard is beyond fucked up. Imagine buying a CD that sets your CD player on fire.
Re: (Score:2)
It's the only thing holding me back.
PCI slot covers (Score:2)
The most annoying element is the propensity of these metal missiles to miss the retaining slot in the sheet metal case and disappear under the motherboard. Or other mischief.
Their most annoying feature is the ability to get lost and not be reinstalled back to cover an empty slot. Thus providing entryway to a warm and protected housin
Power electronics in USB caddies (Score:2)
The thing I've had most trouble with is USB caddies - they die, I presume because the stress of spinning up the drive gets too much for them.
Particularly 2.5" caddies. There was one point at which I was going through them every few months - they're all made from the same shitty chipset, so it doesn't matter which brand you buy, they all fail.
I eventually just went for an SSD for my portable storage needs and the problem stopped. They don't draw nearly as much current, and what you give up in storage capacit
Re: (Score:2)
Silicon Image or JMicron ?
Drivers! (Score:2)
I've had the most problems with Video cards, the expensive ones. Specifically the drivers.
The AMD cards I first bought in 2008 generated driver related blue screens on boot. DiamondMM tested them and found no problems. I upgraded drivers including the set that forced me to go into single user mode and roll them back. Nothing seemed to take care of it.
The nVidia replacements I bought in 2012 don't blue screen however the driver resets (Windows has restarted the video driver) pretty often. Doesn't seem to cau
Win-devices. (Score:2)
Trying to get win-modems, win-wifi-nics, anything that doesn't have kernel support has been the biggest issue for me. The latest thing was the broadcom wifi NIC on an HP laptop that anything other than broadcom blacklisted in the BIOS. Fortunately Broadcom has become much more Linux friendly, thank you Broadcom.
Graphics Card - Software Support (Score:2)
Killer screen.. (Score:2)
Working in a repair shop at the time.
Water leak (Score:2)
I took it into an Apple store for repair. They declared it non-repairable, and gave me a brand-new, quad-core Mac Pro Intel, for free. On a five-year-old computer with no warranty.
Re: (Score:2)
My casualty count: (Score:2)
Over the course of say the last 10-12 years
5 hard drives
1 motherboard
2 PSUs
no video cards, BUT I tend to change those out fairly often, probably upgrade every 1-2 years.
Raid card (Score:2)
My computer was nice and quiet, no humming at all, until I installed a raid card. Now it hums all day.
Re: (Score:2)
Missing option (Score:2)
Graphic card's fans.
If it were possible to pick two, those two would have been the choices.
P.S. But the nastiest problems I ever had were once cause by PSU (caused memory problems). Spot #2 goes to a motherboard with cracked memory bus lane: system was working when MB was in horizontal position and failing in vertical. Took ~5 people to figure that out. But that took only few hours compared to the PSU trouble which took couple of weeks, to replace systematically every component to narrow down the proble
BIOS/SATA/UEFI Not sure? (Score:2)
After 4 years, still not sure what/who is causing the problem, but I've an Asus Rampage IV Extreme with a main SSD and 3x whirling platters (in a RAID config). If I do a soft-restart (i.e. Windows->Shutdown->Restart), all knowledge of my SSD is lost (which is a big problem, because that is my boot device). As soon as I see this (I see the drive missing in the onboard Intel SATA bios), I just do a hard power-off, wait a few seconds, then power on, and everything is back to normal. Pretty sure the SSD i
Power supply hands down (Score:2)
Missing option (Score:2)
My daughters computer started crashing. It took a while to figure out what it was, but it was a short in the reset switch.
If not for "capacitor plague" era caps... (Score:2)
...I suspect my results would have been quite different, especially with regard to Pentium II era motherboards.
I tend to re-lube fans with a mixture of light grease and light oil, and that seems to extend their life considerably.
But the biggie is hard drives.
If you stretch the definition of computers... (Score:2)
...to include TiVos and their power supplies, then "capacitor plague" is an even bigger factor, although, again, hard drive problems are prominent as well.
Depends (Score:2)
There's only one answer, and it's obvious (Score:2)
Look at how you build a computer for casual home use, where downtime means that no astronauts will die, nor will you lose a million dollars per day in sales, but there will be some inconvience and maybe an angry wife. One of these components is so expected to fail, that your initial build will have redundancy for that component. You start out thinking not "that would suck if this failed, because it's critical and will be expensive to replace," but rather "when one of these goes, we'll be fine until the re
I wish I knew (Score:2)
I still can't get a new build to reliably resume from hibernation mode.
Cases (Score:2)
I vote for poorly-designed, badly-ventilated cases, because they cause other components to fail. Pretty much all of the component failures I've had can be traced back to improper cooling, so you could say that I have had the most problems with cases. For years, my secretary used an old Dell that had a terrible case -- it was basically impossible to ventilate because it was almost airtight. You could put your hand on it and it felt warm to the touch. It was awful. Sure enough, the HDD crapped out.
I also buil
CD/DVD Drives (Score:2)
Fan short (Score:2)
Once I had a fan short on a graphics card and the currency spike burnt a hole down the power wire and melted a hole into the PCI Express socket. Mobo was whacked, Ggraphics card was fine.
Shame, cause the Mobo was less than a week old. And the morons refused to replace it.
Mostly a Tie? (Score:2)
3 Monitors CGA (12+ years before it gave up it's magic smoke), SVGA (2+ years), LCD (8 years)
4 Harddrives: (40MB - bootsector virus, 600MB failed to power up,
--- 160GB random write failures until a bootsector fail, and a 1.5TB WD Green with almost no usage 1 PSU that wouldn't post - out of the box.
2 Keyboard failures.
3 Graphic Card failures from Sapphire and XFX --- attempting MFG replacement was a joke. I no longer buy from those two.
3 Motherboard
Network switches (Score:2)
I've had two network switches that gave me problems. (I don't necessarily count a component "breaking" as a problem—just normal long term system operation.)
Electrolytic Capacitors (Score:2)
along with the occasional tube, relay, or tunnel diode.
OH, and CRTs
Tape drives (Score:2)
If you include BIOS problems under "motherboard".. (Score:2)
.. then this wins for me, hands down. I have been relatively lucky with HDDs over the years; only ever had one failure which I didn't see coming, and even that didn't result in any data loss (though it did result in an interesting afternoon's work [mangobrain.co.uk] resurrecting the drive). I had an overheating GPU once, but again, I was able to see the failure coming a mile off and replaced the card before it became unusable.
Anyone who has assembled their own machine and never had a BIOS or UEFI related problem - even if sel
Click of death and Blurays (Score:2)
I've had one hard drive unexpecdedly do click of death, thought all data was gone forever. After some months and reading about possible solutions, I tried heating the top of the drive (label side) with a clothes iron then connecting it. I worked, so copied everything.
One case fan, a power supply, and a BluRay recorder.
I count the BluRay drive as I stupidly did a flash update in Windows, and when I booted in Linux, none of the encrypted BluRay discs that played before played. So to me that's a dead drive. I
Re:LED's (Score:5, Funny)
It is the blue ones I have problems with. The problem is they work fine and shine this blue flashlight in my eyes and light up the entire room.
Fuck blue LEDs. I want to switch them all with DEDs (dark emitting diodes).
Re:LED's (Score:5, Informative)
I always use a black marker on them. Luckily the blue LED craze is more or less over now.
Re: (Score:2)
From the trend I'm seeing with prototypes that pass through work, it looks like white is the next fad.
Seems to be whatever the most expensive light is at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Can confirm. ALL the LEDs on my laptop are white. At least my cellphone has user-configurable colors for the LED.
Re: (Score:2)
Amen.
Re: (Score:2)
Double sided foam tape, wrapped in the aluminum foil so the edge goes a little way under the sticky side.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but mainly it's giving you the middle finger.
Re: (Score:3)
I've had all sorts of things die but never before I felt I got my moneys worth out of them. The sole exception to that is laptops, especially laptop motherboards. $2000 Macbook Pro? $1000 in broken parts before it died within 18 months. $1000 Toshiba? 2 motherboard failures in 3 years. $2200 Dell XPS? Overheating problems within 6 months, virtually useless within a year even after warranty repairs. $950 Acer VA70 (current laptop) the RTFGCB keys randomly stop working, about 2 years old now.
I put the
Re:Anecdotal of course (Score:5, Insightful)
With that kind of record, it has to be something to do with your use. Still anecdotal, but I've never had anything but HDD and inverter failures in my laptops (mostly Apple) across multiple models, years, and beatings.
But if laptops failed at your rate across all users, they'd have to cost three times as much to cover warranty repairs.
Re: (Score:2)
With that kind of record, it has to be something to do with your use. Still anecdotal, but I've never had anything but HDD and inverter failures in my laptops (mostly Apple) across multiple models, years, and beatings.
But if laptops failed at your rate across all users, they'd have to cost three times as much to cover warranty repairs.
The laptops are not all mine or I'd definitely agree that it was my use. The Dell was my mother's; the Toshiba my fiance's. Among my immediate family (7 ppl) our average survival rate is 2 years for a laptop. The only exception has been a single Toshiba business laptop which is going 4 years strong.
Re: (Score:2)
The Dell ... Toshiba ... average survival rate is 2 years for a laptop. The only exception has been a single Toshiba business laptop which is going 4 years strong.
Geez, here's some anecdotal bits, personally, IBM Thinkpad lasted 1.5 years, a couple of Toshibas 1 year or less each, 1 Dell 6 months, a three other Dells in 3 years, not a single battery survived. OTOH, a Powerbook lasted 5 years and was sold in perfect condition with a free new battery, a first gen (2006) MBP is still running, with a SSD now and a replaced fan, a 2009 MBP's sata controller became unreliable after 5 years and caused the machine to be recycled, and 2 retina MBPs, one had to be returned bec
Re: (Score:2)
I'm still using 8 year old Dell Latitudes, (we have 20 of them at my school) No failiures at all more expensive initially but very well made. Buy cheap, get crap.
$2000 MBP and $2200 Dell XPS are not exactly "cheap", especially in the age of >$500 laptops. They were still crap though
Re: (Score:2)
With that kind of record, it has to be something to do with your use
That reminds me to the "know it all" and "you are not my real father" kindof kid of my ex.
He sat frustrated and angry, throwing his laptop in the sofa. I inquired "what is wrong?" while his mother signed me I should let it go.
"THE STUPID THING WONT START UP!!!!", he proclaimed. And powered up again while grunting in frustration.
"When was the last time you...", and before I finished my sentence, he saw a commandprompt and jacked out the battery to "force a reboot". Which, I gathered, he was doing for quite a
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, my old laptops like my Pentium 120MHz from 1998 still runs just fine and blows hot air out just fine.
As a mechanical engineer, I'm telling you, it's not the goddamn user's fault.
I've turned quite a few of these crappy laptops into desktops by t
Re: (Score:2)
If the doors on your damn car fell off after 3 years, you sure as hell wouldn't be calling it a user problem.
Certainly not on my car. But if it was Bob's car, and his car was a Hyundai Elantra he was trying to drive up the side of a mountain on an unimproved road, I would be calling it a user problem if his doors fell off (or any other of a number of mechanical problems).
Re: (Score:2)
Of my 3 Apple computers, all three died with power supply failures. One I didn't count in my personal inventory because it happened after I sold it to a friend, but I diagnosed the failure and he replaced the component and used it at least another 3 years. On the plus side, my Blue and White G3 ran my web server from ~2000 to 2014 before its power supply failed. It got upgraded to a G4 but was switched to Linux around 2007 due to Apple ending support. My current web server is actually running in a Linux VM
Re: (Score:2)
$950 Acer VA70 (current laptop) the RTFGCB keys randomly stop working, about 2 years old now.
The V key did it
Re: (Score:2)
LOL - V wasn't working at the time I typed that [sigh].
It's excess heat build up underneath the key sensors from the CPU that cause them to stop registering keystrokes. Nothing to be done, it's just a bad heat situation... scary thing is that's not the hottest part of the system. That is directly under where you'd rest your right hand/right side of the touchpad - gets scorching hot due to only the left side of the touchpad being ventilated. An extra 4-8 heat slits on the front and it'd be so much better.
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5 power supplies, 5 hard drives, 2 video cards (one laptop), 1 north bridge (motherboard - would overheat and crash the computer every 2 minutes despite the heatsink/fan, and no, it wasn't the HS/fan, I tried replacing that), 1 fan.
Missing option - display. I've lost display on 3 laptops and only one was video card related. It wouldn't win due to my rotten luck with power supplies (at least 3 died in warranty, two of those were on laptops and ZERO were on home-built machines - all were shitty components fro
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Always a fun time with Linux.
My grampa-box has a Realtek wireless card. It used to make the 4-core CPU, 8 GB RAM, SSD, middle-end GPU machine freeze, so I don't use it anymore.
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CPU: It always executes what my programs say to do, instead of what it is really supposed to do.
That's why I got out of the programming biz.
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My Nvidia laptop shit the bed I used a heat gun to reflow the solder but it died again. I also had a AMD 5770 that shipped shitty so both are 50% failure rate in recent machines ~10 years.