The Weirdest/Scariest experiance with your mac

[thegreatluke]

My first ever Mac was an aging 400 MHz Sawtooth that I intended to upgrade.

Bad idea.

I'm sure the seller didn't realize it, but the power supply was dying. One day, I shook the mouse to get it to wake up, and the display wouldn't work. Nothing would make it work. I switched it with one of the others in the house, and then another, and the displays each worked for a while then stopped working. I actually went through two other displays that I got from Craig's List.

Luckily, I was able to save up $1800 to buy an MBP. (I'm a student; $2k doesn't come easily to me.)

...And then a thing appears on the desktop with .dmg on it, out of nowhere! I had absolutely *NO* idea what this was, had read no guides to the Mac OS, and as .dmg sounded like "damage" in my sudden state of panic...

Whenever I see a .dmg, I still say "damage" in my head even though I know it's "disk image."

 

[paleck]

Last year about a month after I had switched to Mac. I had just downloaded an installed some updates for Tiger and had to leave for work, so when software updater asked to shutdown or restart I told it to shutdown. When I came home and turned it on, the display didn't turn on. Then all of a sudden the fans came on full blast and I thought that my new PowerMac was getting ready for take-off. I shut it off and then turned it back on and everything went back to normal.

Nothing serious I know, but having only had my Mac for a month I thought that I had made a very expensive paperweight by running updates.

 

[ham_man]

HOLY THREAD REVIVAL BATMAN!!!

My scariest experience? When I screwed up the head of one of the screws on the RAM slot on the bottom of my PowerBook. Luckily, the guy at CompUSA was able to get the thing open and put in my RAM...

 

[ricksbrain]

During Hurricane Katrina, I knocked my tibook off a coffee table while looking for a flashlight in the dark. Not a single thing happened to the case, but I lost my period key. Oddly, the hurricane seemed much less important until I knew my 'book was ok.

I keep the key off as a battle scar.

I'm sentimental like that.

 

[trainguy77]

I went to use my brothers imac when i was about 10. I turned it on and some error came up while it was booting OS 9. I was scared because i did not ask to use his computer. I thought it would be ok. But then when he went to use it , it did not turn on. Its turned out ok.

 

[iShane]

I was letting my sister use my TiBook one day and she cracked the hinges by moving the screen back too far. I was pretty mad but I forgave her for it.

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

I was falling a sleep and I fell asleep with my iBook on my lap and next my bed is a wall and it fell and when I woke up it was still awake with the screen open.. scared me to death.

When I had my iBook in a case and i unizipped it to get something out of it i then walked outside to do something and it was on the seat and when i got back in i grabbed the case <unzipped> and my iBook flew out on to the CEMENT. scared me to death ... and it was fine..

oh, and my step mom smashed my 4 day old ibook's screen.. so now the one i have is new..

 

[Erasmus]

I have had two problems with my G4 Cube. The first was my power brick stopped working. No big deal, just got it replaced on Warranty.

The second was more bizzarre.
My computer kept doing the "Folder question mark flash" on startup. It only seemed to happen when I'd been using it for a while, hen just shut it down and tried to start it up again. Luckily my dad's laptop HD had recently died (he had warning and backed it up) so HD failure was on our minds.
So I tried to back stuff up, but it never worked. I left it for a couple of days, until it FINALLY started working, left it a while, it went to sleep, and didn't wake. I think there is another thread here about what happens when a HD is removed while the computer is on.

So a few days later, I finally got a chance to back up some stuff on thumbdrives. My dad got it replaced with a cool 250Gb HD.
Pity my computer can only read 128GB of it.

Ditto with the .dmg's. It so says "Damage".

Oh, and the time a few years ago I pulled out our old IIe and set it up to play some corny "Black and Green" games. Smoke started coming out of the monitor. My dad said it was most likely just dust burning, but didn't it give me a shock! (even if the computer itself wasn't worth anything)

 

[dazzer21]

The second worst thing that EVER happened to me with my Macs was about four or so years ago when my 300MHz Powerbook G3 just died on me. Luckily, I'd backed uop the entire drive a couple of weeks before, but I'd lazily just carried on and not backed up since then, hence 2 weeks-worth of work (including 2 weeks-worth of job timesheets! GONE!).

The First worst thing EVER was being told what was wrong with it and how much it would cost to repair. From that very moment, I lost a good friend.

Still the most recent freakout came when my DoubleDoor G4 decided to reward me with an evening of complete frustration when out of nowhere, with a courier waiting to collect a disk, the machine locked up completely, requiring a restart which would not recognise the boot disk and had to be restarted from the System CD. When the installer had loaded up (took 5 minutes which seemed like hours), I quit and changed the startup disk back to 9.2. I found out to my utter horror that the crash had completely trashed whatever files and applications were open at the time. OS9.2, Quark XPress, Toast and the numerous files (including the files that were being put onto the CD for the motorcycle courier) would not respond at all.

Luckily the file was on an external disk with a recent backup, so I had to go back and do the last lot of revisions (about an hour's worth). Then was a complete re-install of the system and applications. Have since had to wipe the disk and do a complete re-instatement of everything on there. So what should have been a buzz-off at 7 and what the telly, turned into a 36-hour stint that I could have doone without. The annoying thing is, I haven't the foggiest idea why it happened...

 

[Macmaniac]

Not with my mac, but with a mac I worked on.

I turned it on and a shower of sparks and smoke came pouring out of the monitor(it was an iMac G3)

Lets just say it really needed a new tube, and PAV board by the time that was done