Computing Horror Stories

[techno_race]

Share your computing horror stories!

DAY 1: Start Windows Vista installer.
DAY 4: Windows Vista installer finishes.
DAY 5: Start data transfer.
DAY 8: Data transfer finishes.
DAYS 9-99: Everything works!
DAY 100: CD drives kill themselves.
DAY 300: Windows Vista kills itself in such a way that it would need working CD drives to fix.
DAY 301: Downgrade to Windows XP.
DAYS 302-549: Everything works!
DAY 550: Today. Everything still works.

Over the last week, I installed a new graphics card. Today, I got it to work right. (Don't forget to flip down the little white tab!)
This is the end result:
2492
LOL, ultra-widescreen, high-resolution (2560x1024), and recursive. My favorite things! :p

[Twey]

Argh! How many icons do you have in your tray? Is that thing running like treacle?

[techno_race]

How many icons do you have in your tray?
1...2...3...27.

Is that thing running like treacle?
(looks up definiton) No. Even though I only have 2GB of RAM and 2 cores.
And that's right after bootup. [taken from a recent IM session] Typical workload:
[07:46] doggitydogs: dreamweaver
[07:46] doggitydogs: photoshop
[07:46] doggitydogs: notepad
[07:46] doggitydogs: firefox (67 tabs)
[07:46] doggitydogs: IZArc (4 instances)
[07:46] doggitydogs: BabelMap (2 instances)
[07:46] doggitydogs: Realtek HD Audio Manager
[07:46] doggitydogs: Task Manager
[07:47] doggitydogs: Windows Explorer (5 instances)
[07:47] doggitydogs: Thunderbird
[07:47] doggitydogs: Flash
[07:47] doggitydogs: Windoows Movie Maker
[07:47] doggitydogs: Karen's Calculator
[07:48] doggitydogs: FormatFacory
[07:48] doggitydogs: iTunes
LOL. Also:
Trillian
Inkscape
FreRAM XP Pro

[Twey]

That's astonishing. Nice machine :)

[techno_race]

Thanks. I forgot to mention IcoFX.
There was one time I was working on a Mac and the CD drive stopped reading correctly. I tried to get it to spit out the disc, but when I pressed eject, it spit out this error instead:
"Error -10."
I pressed eject again. Nothing happened. I rebooted. It finally ejected.
Guess what? The disc was just fine. No problems with it since.

[Twey]

On the subject of unhelpful errors, I've got a bunch from my Windows days. Back when I used to 'program' Visual Basic 6 (shh, don't tell anyone) we used to get a lovely 'Error 0: Unknown' error... IE6 liked giving 'Unknown Error' as well.

I don't know if you ever played it, but there was a fun game called 'Oni' for Windows... when it crashed it took a somewhat more original approach: the principal error was 'Blam! Oni crashed.'

One of the more frustrating was when I was at college. We were studying assembly programming, and given a 'safe and simplified' environment in which to program: it had a basic x86-like instruction set, memory-mapped the keyboard to 0x2 and an eight-character on-screen ASCII display to 0x3-0xA, and caught errors from running programs. The 'safe' environment, however, liked itself to segfault randomly, especially on entering any marginally complex instruction, making it effectively impossible to use. A warning against becoming too enamoured of low-level languages, perhaps?

[Schmoopy]

Oh yea Oni was awesome, I loved drawing the picture on the front cover of the game :D