When was the worst possible time that you experienced hardware failure?

@megamatt (14292)
United States
May 3, 2010 2:37pm CST
Computers are a great thing, that have helped make our lives a little bit easier. With that being said, they can in fact fail at the absolute worst possible times imaginable. Certain parts of the hard ware especially. The monitor goes dead, the printer won't work, speakers stop giving sound, whatever you want. Of course, the worst possible thing is the hard drive crashing. So have any horror stories of having experienced hardware failure at the worst possible times? I think my hard drive crashing the week that an important paper was due for a class was one of them. Thankfully, I had most, about ninety five percent of the paper backed up and I could complete it and print it off at another computer, but still, five percent of the work was lost. I am sure that many people have lost everything, due to foolishly not backing up their work. Anyway, what is the worst possible time that you experienced hardware failure of any kind? Looking forward to reading your response.
2 responses
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
3 May 10
I have had a few hardware issues in the past, but none of them have really been a catastrophe. If hardware fails it simply needs replacing, which I do not consider a problem but just inconvenient. My hard drive has never failed, although it would still not be a major issue. All the data and programs are backed up and my system has 3 hard drives, so I could simply use a different hard drive and soon reset everything.
@megamatt (14292)
• United States
3 May 10
Yes, its always a good idea to have them backed up in several different places. Because, you never know what might happened. Also, having extra hard drives will help solve the problem. I think the only hardware thing that failed on my part that was a huge problem was the monitor. Kind of hard to do anything if I cannot see and it might be a bit before I am able to replace it. Speakers are fine, just annoying and printer is seldom used. Still thank you for your response, it was much appreciated and contributed to the topic well. Have a nice day.
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
4 May 10
Your point about the monitor is one that I had not considered. If the monitor suddenly expired then it would be a catastrophe because it is not the type of hardware that anyone keeps a spare of.
• Mexico
4 May 10
There was a time when we needed to finish a project at school. It was a 8-bit microproccessor implemented on a FPGA. I had a laptop (a sony vaio nvr23) in wich I was programming the proccessor and when we were going to finish the project I take the laptop by it's screen and this came off! Hopefully it doesn't totally broke but for that night we couldn't continue the work on my laptop and loose many hours of work until we could get another computer to work with.