Worst Tech Related Experience?

A few that come to the top of my mind...

My first computer, a Packard Bell (otherwise known as Packard Hell), that I spent about $2,500 on back in 1996. Right out of the box, about a third of the software it came pre-installed with didn't work. The computer was noisy as hell, slow as hell, loaded with bloatware, and as big as a house. All the hardware inside was proprietary and oddly shaped so you couldn't replace anything on it with third party products - if something broke you had to get a replacement from Packard Bell only. Speaking of hardware failure - per their warranty, if something did break, you had to ship the whole system to one of their repair centers, at your expense to and from, and wait for several weeks for them to repair it at their leisure.

My Canon 60D plus a whole slew of expensive Canon lenses and external flashes - all got water and mold damage when some bottled waters I had in the pouch on the side of my camera case leaked. I had set the case in my dresser drawer when I came home from a day of shooting, and when I opened it a few weeks later I saw all the damage that had been done - black mold on everything and all the battery compartments corroded. Several thousand down the drain.

 

Smashed? Ouch. That's rough.

The worst I can think of was the death of my laptop. I didn't appreciate how much laptops rely on cooling when I was in college, so when I was at home I would often use a pillow as a desk. By this time my laptop was already chugging, so the constant running of the fan did not, in my mind, correlate to the laptop's inability to cycle out hot air and pull in cooler air. The pillow smothered the intake, and, sure enough, one day my hard drive fried. It was totally my fault, and I lost everything on the laptop.

Now I have a proper laptop desk, and another with built in fans for games that are graphically-intensive. I take overheating very seriously. Don't want to waste another thousand bucks on another laptop.

 

This isn't too bad due to the fact that the hardware was extremely cheap. No one takes the 'Eject flash drive safely' mantra seriously so I, like most people, just pulled my flash drive out. Eventually, all the files corrupted. I lost a lot of hard work that wasn't available anywhere else. From then on, I saved everything in my desktop as well. A few weeks ago, despite ejecting my flashdrive safely all of the time, it corrupted as well. Flashdrives piss me off.

 

I've had the same problem with removable drives/disks. I've lost important files because Windows prompts me to format the disk. At times it's not because the disk isn't properly ejected. It just happens. Could be I buy defective removable data storage devices.

But the worst experience I had was when a 1TB hard disk died. One day it is working, the next day . . . Windows doesn't recognize it.

 

I have lost many important data and media because of computers not booting or malfunctioning, but so far the most expensive and not fixable one was a $130 phone that I have only used for 8 months. It was expensive to send it back, so it's just here gathering dust. I think the motherboard is broken already because the technicians can't fix it.

 

I jumped into the lake with my Verizon cellphone in my pocket and killed it. I tried putting it in rice when I got home, but no go. That cost me a lot of money, as I was not elgible for an upgrade or anything. After that experience, I would recommend if insurance is available for your phone affordably get it!! It might safe some money I also had a situation where my laptop started buzzing loudly...like a smoke alarm! I couldn't turn it off!

 

@Ke Gordon, Did you turn on your phone while it was wet or in less than 24 hours after it got soaked? I read that the phone might get grounded if you do that. I have also dropped my phone into the water, it worked ok for a month, then the LCD got screwed up after a month.

 

My worst was when a close friend gave me a tablet as a gift, and within an hour, it just slipped out of my hands! It had no grip and the screen broke, but it still worked though. It was really hard telling my friend what happened.

 

When I first bought a iPod Touch 4 I was so excited that I carried it everywhere with me. Well, I only had it for a week and thought I had left it on my desk to charge. I took my clothes off to wash them and went back to my room. I wanted to play some app games so I went to my desk and my iPod Touch wasn't there. Started searching around and suddenly realized that I had left in the same pants I put in the washing machine. Since our machine has a auto lock you can't open it until it is completely done. Thankfully, after doing the rice method for about a week it started working good as new. Plus, it was very clean at the same time.

 

I nice had an hp laptop that got very slow only after a year of use, which was already very disappointing in itself since it was already slow to the point of being almost unusable, but on top of that, I tried to open it and the case around the monitor cracked since the plastic was cheap. I guess that was sort of like a blessing in disguise though since I didn't feel obligated to make the most use out of it anymore after that and I just bought myself a better laptop instead and from then on I swore never to buy hp products again.

 

I never really broke anything but it's more of an awful experience because the phone itself is really awful. The first time I bought a Windows Phone way back, like 4 years ago or something, it was an awful experience and I never knew how much Windows Phone 7 sucked back then, especially when you're coming from an Android device.

The phone itself is pretty decent actually, the problem is with the OS itself and the lack of basic fundamental functions that every smartphone with a touchscreen should have.

First off, there's no option to lock the orientation of your screen so you're forced to use the phone in landscape mode even if you don't want to. Also the Wi-Fi automatically disconnects when the phone's screen turns off and the worst part is you don't have the option to turn off this "feature".

Second is the lack of support when it comes to popular apps like Youtube or Facebook. I mean if Facebook itself is having trouble maintaining a nice enough app to support your phone then it's pretty much a safe bet that the phone has some serious issues. There isn't even a File Explorer built in to the phone!

Third and final is the lack luster performance, the phone almost always stutters, apps load so slow and on top of that, everything seems to be really iffy and stiff. The only way you can make this backwards butt phone bearable to use is if you jailbreak the thing and install third party apps that would fill in those basic and fundamental functions.

 

The worst tech experience I had was when my hard drive decided to crap out on me in the middle of a project. I was working on a commissioned project and it was pretty much 95% done and I was getting ready to retire to bed and then BAM! My computer went crazy and then turns itself off.

At first I thought a good old restart the system would fix the problem but when I did, the damn thing won't start back to Windows and keeps giving a Blue Screen and after a few tries trying to fix the damn thing, it worked! But all of the data on my hard drive was gone. Literally wiped out. I almost smashed my computer into a million pieces.

 

The worst tech experience that I have ever had was when I accidentally spilled hot chocolate on my laptop. I tried my best to clean it up, but it was really sticky, as I had put quite a few spoonfuls of sugar in it. I then proceeded to use Cif spray to remove the stickiness, but that just ended up rendering my laptop keyboard useless. Even after getting the inside of it cleaned, all of the numbers on my keyboard are all jumbled up. So if I press the 7 key, 6 will appear, and so on.