What is the worst computer glitch you have ever experienced?

i never experienced this but i feel it is the worst that has ever happened. there are machines that shoot beams of radiation into cancer patients, the idea is you shoot it at a lot of different angles all the healthy tissue gets a minimum dose but the cancerous tissues gets a heavy douse, thus killing it

well a programmer made an error and it some times multiplied the intensity of the beam by several 100, or even 1000s of times more then it should have, needless to say people died and where seriously burned and hurt by this, the company is no longer in business

http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html

Windows is the worst computer glitch I have ever experienced. Mac OS-X would be the second worst computer glitch I have ever experienced. lol

Worst glitch: SCRATCHING noise from my first 80GB HD just the time I booted up to make a full backup.

Second worst glitch: thermal defect on my first GF4200 - all works fine beside the colours. Every 16x16 pixel block is flickering in another colour pattern. The second one simply decided to melt the fan and right after that itself...

Most frequent "glitch": soft drinks on my key boards. Don´t know, how many I sent to IT heaven already. I definetely need a warp-mug ;)

Strangest glitch: Broken LCD sreen after closing an old i286 Laptop. (To call this thing a laptop is pure sarcasm, it weighs about 7kg without the battery and 12kg with)

Most dangerous glitch: accidently switched an power supply to 110V during transport and plugged it on 230V... Well, I remember a fascinating shining blue light and a lot of black smoke...

Most stupid "glitch": Screwing one joystick after another playing Summer Games, Winter Games or California Games on the C64.

Strange messages: "An error occured: There has been an error!" - Quite self explaining... BTW: Mac :)

Almost as strange: "Not enough memory to save." - Well, screw that missing memory and save to the HD what you got! (Windows)

"Files can not be deleted: All files have been deleted" - We don´t have any cookies left. Do you want a cookie? (BSD)

"File could not be loaded" - Fine, then tell me, why the whole program is in memory and ready to execute... (Robotron KC85/3 KAOS, loading from micro cassette)

So many memories of more "glitches" and accidents:

• my dog, actually eating my PlayStation controller
• SEVERAL 5 1/4" floppy discs melting in the sun, strangely mostly the white ones.
• ZIP and 3.5" discs stuck in drive
• same with DVDs in my first DVD burner...
• a disintegrated mouse on my tech rooms wall
• ...

Could fill a book with 22 years of computer near-catastrophies :) Don´t tell me I´m a geek. Just found that out by myself :P

I would have to say this one, there is no way to recover from it, it happens spontaneously, and the only thing you can do is press the left mouse button or Amiga + Amiga + Delete.

i was playing the sims 2 once and my sim was able to walk through objects and walls and then he died

What, you don't recall the blue screen? Affectionately taglined "of death"? Second place goes to "winword fault protection error" - although that one might place first if the criteria were unintelligibility. I love my mac.

I once had a CD shatter while being read by a 96x drive. There's a reason drives generally only read up to 52x.

Selfe inflicted.

I was looking for some sample Java code to copy folders to one location to another. I tested some that I found and it created a folder structure that windows nor linux could delete. Windows reported it at about 1000 + folders deep and let me get down through 60 of them.

You were able to move them around the hard disk but explorer would crash and you could not physically move them to any other disk.

The stupidest thing is that because the program crashed the first time, I tried it again and it crashed... Only then did I realize my problem. I now had 2 1000 + file structures that I could not get rid of.

I did learn one thing. There is a folder structure limit. It may be a long way down, but it's there.

System restore soon cleared that up though!

1. Ubuntu kernel panic. After rebooting, POST refused to detect my SSD. $500 down the drain.

2. Busked some code for my myspace account back in 2003 or 2004, so that I could display an image that indicated my online MSN status. I was at the time in love with C, so that's the language I (stupidly) chose. I overlooked a buffer overflow before starting it. A month later someone had exploited the flaw in my code and subsequently run nmap over a large IP subrange to collect a list of vulnerable computers. oops!

The worst glitch I've ever experienced actually happened when I built my first PC. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, the one that did was a largely undocumented Windows 95 installation error. I was installing Windows 95 on a 1Ghz Slot A Athlon machine that I had built. Everything seemed to be going well, until Windows setup went to reboot after installation had finished. The PC rebooted...and then...nothing. The machine would no longer post, it was bricked, completely.

After Googling the issue a bit, I came to find out that the Shuttle motherboard that I had used in the build had an undocumented glitch where the particular version of Windows 95 that I was installing basically wiped/corrupted the BIOS ROM chip upon completing installation. This was later verified by Shuttle. I ended up buying a replacement ROM chip off of eBay and replacing the dead one off the board, and installing Windows 98 instead of 95 (98 hadn't been available to me initially, and I was impatient). That installation went without a hitch... I've never seen any glitch quite like that since.