Security software is essential to ensure that your online experience is hassle-free and your personal data is safe. We’ve got 20 copies of Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 to give away — a great way to protect your computer.
We know that many Lifehacker and Gizmodo readers end up acting as tech support for friends and relatives. So for your chance to win this prize, we want to know: what’s the worst tech disaster you’ve had to help someone fix?
The 20 stories we find the most amusing and interesting will win a copy, so tell us your tale in the comments. The competition is open until October 3. You can check the full terms and conditions here.
Matt
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:09 AMI vouch for Kaspersky, terrific program.
Been using it at home for about 3 years now – never had a single problem.
Even when I chuck my computer on DMZ it stops those pesky hackers.
Sarah
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:13 AM( I helped my brother help me.. ) In the middle of a late night gaming session, there was a bright spark from my desktop and my Pc and all the flat lights went out. After a moment of panic in the pitch black and a reset of my lights I got my flat lights back on but the PC wouldn’t boot, and the power point wasn’t even powering my monitors. Got my brother who is more techy then me out the next day and I suggested that the power supply had been blown ( location of the spark) we opened it up, and found a black scorch mark on the inside casing and a matching one on the board. A little bit of shaking found two halves of a cockroach that had managed to crawl into the power supply ( can provide pics if required)Luckily enough one new power supply later fixed my pc.
Simon
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:22 AMI suggested a friend to buy a computer which he asked me to setup. He told me when he brought it they said something was wrong with the motherboard or something. I went on to installing windows and other applications but i couldnt get windows to obtain the ip address automatically i went on to reinstalling windows xp again and everything which still didnt work later i tired entering it manually which worked. So i was like that was odd i did some googling and did everything i could find still did not work. I gave the computer back to my friend and said i think you should get a new motherboard because i cant seem to get it to connect automatically. I later decided to port foward some ports and found out i didnt enable DHCP
Brave
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:07 PMcool story bro
olearymo
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 3:02 PMThen I went for a walk, and fed the birds. The birds ate some of the seed I threw, but then someone walked past and they flew away. Then I walked home, and made a cup of tea. It was Earl Grey. I drank it and it was very nice.
dbliss
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 12:48 AM@olearymo you just made my day lol
JAKE
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:13 PMHelping out a friends dad with a virus-ridden PC, take a quick look at web history and wouldn’t you know it…SO MUCH PORN! And then I’m troubled with the difficult decision to tell him what is causing it or just fix the problems in another few weeks time when it happens again to save him (and me) from embarrassment!
Sean C
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:14 PMMy mother and her boyfriend – they can use computers for work functions and thats about it.
Whilst visiting over Easter this year my mother spoke up about some “weird red warnings” appearing on their home laptop they bought 3years ago and asked me to look at it.
Turns out those “weird red warnings” were the antivirus program telling them to run a full system scan. Turns out that there had never been a scan done!?!In 3 years!! EEEK!!
Of course I ran the scan and setup a weekly auto scan – sadly the scan pulled up a few different things including a rather disturbing xxx style tracking cookie…eww!
Andrew
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:45 PMI used work for an electronics retailer and had two very loud mouth customers returning a motherboard/cpu/case combo claiming it didn’t work. One of them went as far as to say he was an engineer for a large computer manufacturer and knows what he is talking about. I popped open the case to find that although they had managed to screw everything in place they had not connected any of the power cables. I asked what looks wrong to him and he told me “The fans aren’t spinning”. A couple of cable connections later and a press of the power button had two very embarraseed “engineers” leaving with their tails between their legs.
Az
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:46 PMMate had built a computer –
Computer had been sitting on the ground for over 6 months “not functioning” as there was no video output. Discussed at school every now and then, a new graphics card was purchased, every possible solution failed. I went there, couldn’t work it out either. Then had a look at the back of the TV it was connected to, and instructed it be set to HDMI 3 Rather than PC. Suddenly it worked. Pants were shat. And this was rather interesting as we probably both have similar skill levels working with computers. All that time – 6 months – it was the TV set to the incorrect input.
Isaac M
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:48 PMOur computer system at work had been having quite a few issues and a friend at work decided he could get us off early on Friday afternoon if he temporarily disabled the servers so the boss sent us all home (like any good boss would on a friday)….. After advising against it and seeing everything go fantastically wrong, I proceeded to spend 4 hours recovering large amounts of work we had spent all morning doing as the idiot definitely pulled out the wrong cable… needless to say he owed me quite a few beers that night!
anonymouse
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 1:27 PMMy mother had downloaded an attachment from an email. It was some stupid spam thing like “Get Rich Quick!” or something along those lines, and a virus had occupied our computer.
All it required was a simple format and re installation of Windows, but backing up all the important data when 95% of your RAM is being used, and holding a standup fan at the correct angle to try and stop the computer from overheating was painful.
Gabriel
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 3:40 PMBoot from CD dude
Nick
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 1:29 PMOur first computer was put together by a friend of my dad’s when I was 13. It was running windows 95 and functioned normally for a year before it suddenly crashed one day and the PC Speaker inside began to play Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” over and over again until it was turned off. We were stumped for months until finally we realised it was the CPU fan failing that caused it to play the song. To this day, if our current PC’s ever crash or show an error, we sing that song :P
Leigh
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 1:56 PMA new employee joined our team and was given a new laptop I had built for him the day before. All was fine, everything installed. He takes it home and about 2 hours later I get 10 emails from the epolicy server, Virus Found! Virus Found! He brings it in the next day, with some crazy internet spoofing virus that casually redirects every 5th request to some phishing site and populates your screen with “PC Security Essentials 2011″ windows. Ran a combofix scan, ccleaner, all was well. He comes back the next day with another virus! In disgust I just downloaded the Kaspersky bootable virus scanning distro, ran a scan and everything has been fine since! Love Kaspersky!
PsyKoMunKy
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 3:10 PMWorst disaster I was called upon to fix that was completely preventable was for a school a number of years ago.
We had just delivered a classroom full of new PC’s and they were claiming that the keyboards were faulty on every single one when they unpacked them.
Turns out that plugging (forcing) the AT keyboard connector into the bnc network port
inhibits keyboard usage… Showed them the errors of their ways and they somehow worked… And this was from the school’s IT teacher…
Azze
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 6:11 PMI used to a computer instructor about 9 years ago, teaching students the computer basics from Microsoft Office to Internet. One day a student calls me from school and tells me that the syntax I gave during one of my lesson of Excel is not working. It was about Nested IF function. He was there with bunch of students around and emailed me the entire formula of the example I gave to him which was absolutely correct but he still could not make it work. Finally I had to ring up one of my colleagues in the school to look what’s happening. After half and hour, my colleague rang me to inform the issue has been fixed. Apparently the problem was the student entered ‘ (apostrophe) key twice rather than ” (quotation) for the true and false values. :D
DanDave
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:03 PMI’m in an ongoing turmoil of being the “tech support” for my uncles laptop, ever since I chose which laptop to buy there have problem after problems. Bluetooth died, wifi doesn’t work, help me find something completely unnecessary, I want windows 7, my computer is slow, fix it (FULL OF STARTUP PROGRAMS AND WIDGETS) and the list goes on. If you guys had to drive up to a house everytime a small problem comes up, you will know the extent of how annoyed I am. so please give me this Kaspersky so I may give it to him, to ensure that his laptop is not consumed by viruses.
(Mine is fine I have AVG premium and MSE running together in perfect harmony)
Ashhar
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 7:33 AM10 years ago, a friends computer got infected with the Trojan Horse virus. It was the old times with Windows 98 so I went to his aid and discovered the .exe file somewhere deep in his windows folder, I couldnt delete the file for some odd reason (was too young to know, other than use the recycling bin) so i convinced him to format his computer and save all the data on several floppy disks. Problem solved! We spent hours saving the files and then formatted the computer, it worked perfectly after that.
Harsu
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:32 AMYear: 2000
Internet (Dial Up connection) started booming in my small city of India. I was working for a local computer shop and had to go to a house to fix an interesting internet issue. The girl had bought a monthly subscription for dial up and was unable to connect to the internet. I tried calling the number but no response. I asked them if there is phone is working. She said yes, I thought must be the faulty modem. Rotated the massive computer table to find out that there is not telephone cable attached to the modem. I asked them, Me: “Where is the telephone cable”
Girl: “We use cordless handset !”.
Me: “Thats fine but modem needs cable connected to it”
Girl: “What thats just dumb”.
I connected the cable to the modem. Charged 300 rupees for the dumb internet troubleshooting and spend rest of the day laughing…
welbot
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 2:08 PMworst one I ever had to fix was several years ago I got a callout to an old guys place. He said his computer just didn’t want to turn on anymore. So I head on out to his place to have a look. Get there and the pc is on the floor under his desk, buried under mountains of crap. This guy was a hoarder. :| After 10 minutes of pulling crap out of the way so I could get to the case, I finally managed to drag it out, took the side off, and was greeted with a rotting rat carcass :| I almost hurled! The rat had gnawed its way through the back of the case and made itself a nice little home in there :0 No idea how long it’d been in there, but that was way more than I needed to see.. I told him to clean his place up and call me when he learned to respect his computer and himself a little better ;)
nathan
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 12:14 PM+1 this is soo funny :P made my day
woodsdog
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:30 PMI love it when everyone calls you up to fix the computer. No prob’s, drop it off and I’ll get to it when I can. Oh I had to format it to remove all the bloat, malware and addon’s on your computer cause someone’s been looking up p0rn. Oh, really, they look at the dad… mmm dad doesn’t use the computer… oh shit it must be inocent little Johnny. His only 12… well thats my job done, you explain to him looking up p0rn will destroy you computer, thats not my department. good luck with that…
B3n
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:50 PM+1 HAHA
You deserve AT LEAST 2 copies!
This is so true! Everytime I have had to help people to clean up their PC, the reason has always been the same. “Whatchu been looking up?” – “..nothing”
Dan
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 6:09 PMMaybe 12 years or so ago now, i was helping an old friend fix his computer. Having been complaining of unusual sounds i though i would investigate. Having been sitting under his desk for over 10 years it was in a horrible condition. Upon opening the case i was met with a blanket of dust. Coughing and spluttering I ventured in with my hand. Upon sticking my hand into the computer i was met by a pointy object. I faltered backward. Mate… theres something in there?. My friend looked back at me in amusement. Certain as anything the pointy object i grabbed in the dust was the mysterious perpetrator i thrust my hand in. Shaking, fumbling, i grabbed it! I had it! Slowly i drew the object out…. just as i almost had it out in the open…. a unicorn jumped out!
Paul
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 9:48 PMMum asks me why her USB stick is not working. I go and check where it was plugged in her laptop. She plugged it in the Ethernet jack.
Chris
Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 4:12 PMMy father in law is computer illiterate and I’ve many stories about him. The time when I said to click the Start button and after 10 minutes of troubleshooting it turned out he was looking on the keyboard for a key called ‘Start’, the time when he asked which type of mouse mat he should use; the time when he couldn’t connect to the internet — and hadn’t even subscribed for an account; his compulsion to open spam that said ‘Urgent’ just in case it was; whether he (him personally, not the computer) could get a computer virus; If ‘the Word program’ (MS Word) gave the words for his crossword puzzle. Don’t get me started on social media sites … this is all true even though I’ve heard some of them from other users and thought they were jokes.
Karthik
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 12:25 PMThere was a time when a few of us enjoyed using keygens to unlock softwares. Especially ones that would help us speed up / secure the PC including Kaspersky :P. Oh yeah, and the Music converters, games …the lot. So there was this friend of mine who got lucky.. He hit a road block called “HijackTHis” (recollecting the name.. on the lines of Hijack).
I enjoy troubleshooting and offered to help as we could no longer play Counter Strike 1.6 together. We did some research, downloaded the tool / analyzer on his machine, copied it onto a thumbdrive for backup (note this one down) to make sure that we have something handy it things get worse.
One of the trickiest procedures to contain / remove the virus I had seen at that time. Ran the tool to grab the logs, registry keys and started fixing it one by one. After going through all the Registry keys and everything he was back up. I said “Cool, that was a nice experience.” I also said, ok let me borrow your thumbdrive so that I can have a copy of this tool.
This is where it gets interesting, a beer on me if you can what happens next.
I take the drive and plug it into my machine, copied the files onto my machine and Voila!! Magic!! I have the bloody virus now.. Why?? Yeah, I too asked the same question and realized what I had done. ROFL.
Took a backup on the drive, alright, fixed his PC, great!! Now, how about fixing the virus that was transferred to the drive before I use it on another machine?? Yeah, that would be awesome!! Better late than never. Back to square 1. Yeah, and I fixed the drive after I fixed my PC!!! Thanks for asking!!
Andrew
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 12:50 PMNot the worst tech disaster but a funny one. GF’s uncle kept running into the issue of a contact on skype always going offline as soon as he logged on. GF’s family have told him that the person is going offline when he see’s the uncle come online (avoiding him). He doesn’t believe that’s the case and wants the IT guy to *fix* it.
Another recent one was a friend’s pc was continuously overheating. After opening it up I noticed that the cpu fan/heatsink’s clips to hook/screw it into the motherboard were missing and he was using large screws to try to keep it down, the original holes in the motherboard weren’t too damaged so another fan fixed that.
Regularly see dust packed cases and sometimes pc/laptops making crunching noises coming from the HDD
Stevo
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 1:48 PMHelped my friend’s dad out with his virus owned old computer. She told me they just wanted it formatted. He told me he had some tech knowledge and only needed me there to consult him. Wrong. He had previously called up microsoft and harvey norman and started to partition his harddrives and do all this other useless crap like buying new ram!? A simple format was what i was expecting to do but instead i had to swap out his incompatible ram, unpartition his tiny hdd, and fix the most pointless things that he thought would fix his computer… than i had to format it. Mad favour. Should of thought with my brain not my…
Fistbeard McTavish
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 2:03 PMWorking at a school, when one teacher brings in her Macbook.
“Fistbeard, it doesn’t turn on! I was in the library just using it, and then the screen went funny, so I shut it down and restarted it, but nothing!”
Weird… So I decided to have a look, doing the usual tests. Seeing if it was charged, making sure the brightness wasn’t set to “off”, you know… the usual issues I come across working with teachers.
Finally, after 10 minutes of me trying to figure out what was wrong, Teacher said this:
“Oh! I might have had it sitting on the big magnet in the library, could that have caused it?”
Story 29 of 10,472