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The Weirdest/Scariest experiance with your mac

A

awulf

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 1, 2002
486
2
South Australia
My First ever computer was a Mac Plus in 1995 (With System 6.0.8) that my dad gave me for my 10th birthday, so I didn't know much about computers and even was scared the Mac Plus, due to its weird behavior. At times I was either playing a game or making something with HyperCard and then all of a sudden it would freeze, but then the weird thing started to happen: The screen would turn white with black stripes dots, etc... Similar to a fuzzy TV screen and it would make noises at the same time. The only other computer I have seen doing this was a LC at school. Once I left it doing that for a while (I was too scared to go near it) and then it just turned back to what I was doing before.

I still have my Mac Plus (running 7.5.3) and I haven't seen it happen for a long time now.

I still don't know what the course was.

What are the weirdest things that have ever happened to your Mac?
 
Last October or November sometime .. my PowerBook G4 DVI woke me up in the middle of the night making this horrid noise that sounded like a really loud fan. Trust me .. it was loud! It woke up both my girlfriend and I ..

It ended up being that my hard drive was dead and the sound I heard were the actual platters spinning loudly in their full 5400 rpm .. I think they were hitting something while they were spinning or even rubbing against the side...

But anyway .. the same thing is happening again NOW, as I type this. Another dead harddrive .. <sigh> :mad: :(

Which reminds me .. I need to call Apple
 
I was overclocking my 6100 and I accidentally ripped two of the clock chip pins off of the motherboard. When i tried to boot, all i heard was silence and then a terrible dying animal sound every minute or so. When I pushed on the chip the computer worked, but only as long as I kept my finger there. Somehow the service center gave me a new motherboard under warranty!
 
That hard drive one reminds me of once when I came back to my own Mac hard disc trashing.

I was really rather distraught, I can tell you.

Anyroads, when I finally figured that I should calm down and take a peek at it, it turned out to be the noise made by that little Rubiks Cube rotaty maccy thing in Office for X.



:D
 
well a while ago when I was working up til about 2 in the morning everynight on my Dossier (programming class project) I had borrowed my dad's mouse, and it had no problems, but about that time....I was falling asleep on the keyboard when I saw the mouse move without anysort of physical movement, then it open applications and such...man that freaked me out...I thought that it was a ghost or something...i dunno...I am gunna stop rambling now...
 
The scariest experience with my mac for me was one time when I was being dropped off at home. A whole bunch of us had gone out to a drive-in movie. I had brought my Graphite iBook along to watch some dvd's before the movie started. When I got home, I had a bunch of stuff to take out of the car. I placed my computer on the roof of the car, and then got the rest of my **** out, grabbed the computer, and walked to my door...or so I thought. I got to my door and realized, with utter fear, that my computer was still on the top of my friends car. I turned around just in time to see him driving away, with my computer still there. I freaked out. I chased after him but he was long gone. I called his cell maybe 3 times until he finally picked up. I was like, "Dude, listen to me carefully, stop your car, very, very slowly." Thank God for the iBook's rubber bottom, it hadn't moved at all. My iBook just went for the ride of it's life!
 
well, scary as in Oh **** scary, I once broke a pin off the HD in my LC II... I was sooo broke I couldn't afford a new one, and I was screwed. Luckily I managed to rig the pin into the cable, and as long as you didn't touch or vibrate the CPU, it was fine :)

scary as in eerie... any of the first times i heard the ROM sounds, like the infamous Death Chimes, or the breaking glass, etc. Very rarely have I heard any other than the Death Chimes or a solid tone similar to them...

i wonder if new Macs still have the death chimes in ROM... not much use for them anymore, but it would still be a cool legacy touch :)

pnw
 
when I was really young my first revision iMac wouldn't do something (sleep, shut down, start up???), so i pushed the power button by the monitor to hard and broke it. The bad part was is that it was only 1/3rd mine, so i had to tell my brother/mom about it :(
 
Almost cried like a little girl with a skinned knee

I was just about to start an internship in NY, and it's my first night in a new apt. everything's almost set up, and i unpack my trusty 8500/150. I'm checking all the connections, and i'm fiddling with my secondary harddrive when suddenly one of the little things on the circuit board FALLS OFF AND BOUNCES INTO A VENT!

Totally out of reach and my machine refused to boot - big surprise....

I eventually got it out and did a patchy soldering job. It worked, but ol Betsy was never quite the same afterward. too temperamental...
 
Was using my Performa 630CD (CD-ROM--yeah!! :D ) and it got all screwy (can you say 8 Mb RAM?). Restarted it and got the chimes of death. Really freaky stuff.

By the way, if you want to hear all the old and current mac sounds, get Mactracker .
 
When my Quicksilver machine was pristine and beautiful, it gave me the fright of my life.

I was leaving college for two weeks vacation between spring and summer terms. When I came back, I was going to be in a new dorm so I had to put everything into storage. At the last minute, my ride to the airport fell through so instead of having an afternoon to pack and clean my room to check out, I had about an hour to scramble if I wanted to catch the shuttle into the city.

In the midst of the panic, I had to pack my beloved machine. I opened the box and took out the styrofoam. When I first put the computer in, it didn't fit the cavity, so I rotated it 90 degrees and got ready to put it back in. At this point, I looked down and saw the bottom side facing me. For a split second, I had no idea what I was looking at. I thought perhaps I'd banged it and knocked the plastic off of the front. I figured it out a moment later, but for that duration I'm sure my heart stopped.

Runner up: When I was in HS I did tech support work with some other student for the Network Admin. We did all sorts of insane things with surplus hardware, some of it brilliant and creative, some of it just plain stupid.

Two of my friends had dismembered a Mac Plus with the vague intent of making an aquarium out of it. There was most of a board from it, the part with the power supply and a bunch of capacitors. The little monitor was connected somehow, but an incredible number of pieces missing or broken. At some point, an idiot who was always hanging out in our area plugged this into an outlet and flipped the switch. It made an awful humming noise that I still dream about, but we got it turned off before anyone was hurt.
 
I've only had my Mac since February so haven't had anything as weird as some of the stuff here. The weirdest thing I've had so far was me putting my iBook to sleep, taking it to a friend's place, then he opened the lid and it crashed. It's never done that to me before, I reckon it just doesn't like him cause he keeps saying that Macs are dumb or gay or stupid or whatever (and of course can't tell me WHY!)
 
How many of you know the exact date and time of your scariest Mac moment? Mine was January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 am.

It was the Northridge earthquake here in Los Angeles. I awoke to find the house swaying and I heard crashing noises. Drawers were open, loose items had fallen in every room, the chimney had collapsed, and my huge bookshelf (you should see how many heavy technical books I have) had fallen over, spreading books all over the room in which my expensive Macintosh Quadra 840AV lived. I found the Mac (tower form factor) on the other side of its 6-foot table, still standing up. It had "walked" all the way across. If it had walked in the other direction, it would have gone crashing to the floor amid the other "rubble".
 
Kernal panics are the only thing that freak me out now with osx (and I've only had two in well over two years) but my first freak out with a mac was with my Mac Classic when I got my first flashing question mark. I had no idea what it meant at the time and I was starting up to try to print a paper for class. I was screwed and shortly after the computer hit the trash. I was ticked off when later I learned I could have kept it and tried for a fish tank out of it.
 
my worst mac moment ever, EVER, was last week, when human error led me to accidentally delete 28 GB worth of animal club (my sketch comedy group) files. All the AV stuff was backed up, most of the graphics were too, but i had over 400 sketches, 200 other Word files, and several databases and spreadsheets that hadn't been backed up in two weeks. ALL OF IT. GONE! i wanted to cry and throw up all at once. In the end, i used virtual lab to recover the office files, and restored the AV and graphics from my other machine. In the end, i lost one document that i had to rewrite. not bad.

The other was when my (then brand new) tibook took a 5-foot dive off a speaker cabinet. battery popped out, computer shut off. put the battery back in, and it booted fine. No problems since.
 
Originally posted by LimeLite
The scariest experience with my mac for me was one time when I was being dropped off at home. A whole bunch of us had gone out to a drive-in movie. I had brought my Graphite iBook along to watch some dvd's before the movie started. When I got home, I had a bunch of stuff to take out of the car. I placed my computer on the roof of the car, and then got the rest of my **** out, grabbed the computer, and walked to my door...or so I thought. I got to my door and realized, with utter fear, that my computer was still on the top of my friends car. I turned around just in time to see him driving away, with my computer still there. I freaked out. I chased after him but he was long gone. I called his cell maybe 3 times until he finally picked up. I was like, "Dude, listen to me carefully, stop your car, very, very slowly." Thank God for the iBook's rubber bottom, it hadn't moved at all. My iBook just went for the ride of it's life!
Click to expand...

Haha that's great! I would've been scared out of my skin if I saw that happen, even if it wasn't mine. :p
 
The scariest experience I ever had was with my PowerMac 7100/80. It was in a dark time of my life. A few of us have been in that sort of place in our lives so you know what I mean. Well anyway I was spending a lot of time up way late at night by myself. I had many almost out of body experiences and sort of hallucinations on these late night binges that I was on for those few months. Well I was playing with the program Morph just morphing this or that. Well it was very late at night and I started a new morphing transition. I can't remember the images I was morphing from to but that really doesn't matter. Well about halfway through the transition it just stops and in the twisted distorted mess that is in the middle of a transition was the obvious image of Satan. I nearly **** myself. I quit the program and restarted it and ran the same morph again. It stopped again at the same point with the same obvious image. I did this several times even reinstalling my system and trying it again it always did the same thing. So I saved the final image and finally went to bed. I woke the next day and started up the computer and opened the image to just be sure I wasn't seeing thing but hell no it was exactly what I thought it was the night before. I ended up reformating and deleting morph and haven't touched another morphing program until just a week ago.

The whole experience would have been freaky on it's own but tie it together with a bad period in your life and you get a horrifying experience that you will never forget.
 
well i havent had many problems yet.
when i got back from ottawa ontario in early may, i had my ibook off and closed and in a safe spot for a week and when i got back, i opened up the ibook, there was this green static appearing on the computer in certain spots, i dont know what happend but it still does that and i need to get it fixed as soon as i go to the computer store next

either than that, once i was on OS9 and the system crashed and i had to restart and the os9 system needed reinstalling although the default os is OSX, and once when i went in os9 once again, i was having problems selecting OSX in the system disc and then the finder crashed, tried restarting 3 times, on the 3rd time the kernel panic showed up, i was so freaked out but after that time osx worked fine :D...well for a few weeks, and that was only a week after i got my ibook back in dec
 
It was pretty scary the first time i went into a totally dark room to discover that the powerlight pulsates when the mac is in sleep mode. :)
 
My scariest moment

The moment that I realized that I am posting on a Mac rumor site, and I have never owned a Mac. That will change once the G5 XServes and an updated 12" PowerBook comes out.

Hickman
 
Not really Mac specific but last week we had a goodbye party for a bunch of staff made redundent and a bunch of the staff made an iMovie of the event to show everyone. I put it on my firewire drive to use my PB to show it and in hooking it up it dropped off the table and died with over 50 Gb worth of data on it. Only time I ever even bumped the damn thing. Couldnt get it recognised again argh. If we had a decent ethernet connection (base 10) and decent size space on the servers I would have a backup...
 
My scariest (stupidist?) moment with my old Performa 5200CD was courtesy of my mom. If you remember, the 5200CD was an all-in-one machine, like the imac.

Well, my mom had always yelled at me about drinking soda near my machine, so one evening, I was drinking a diet soda and went to place it next to my keyboard. After a moment of remembering my mom's constant warnings, however, I placed it up on a bookshelf next to me, away from the computer.

Not even a minute later, the bookend holding back all of the books failed and all of the books fell along the shelf, flinging my can off the shelf and onto the top of my mac. I scrambled to pull the plug as fast as I could, but it had spilled all the way down my monitor right onto my logic board.

The board was $800 to replace.

If I had ignored my mom and placed the soda by the keyboard and it spilled, all I would have ruined was my keyboard. Oh well... thanks mom! :rolleyes:

:)

Alia
 
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