What's The Most Bizarre PC Issue You Have Had?

I just got done fixing an issue with my pc that was so mind boggling I have to get out into words.

First - The Plan: My GF has been wanting a gaming pc. Original plan was for me to buy a 3070 and give her my 2070 super to start building with. We werent able to get a 3070 but we did find a decent price on a prebuilt computer with a 3070 from newegg. Seeing as how expensive graphics cards prices have become with scalpers, we considered the extra cost to have a prebuilt PC worth it considering the build quality should be professional as well (which it was).

Next - The Execution: It seemed like it would be a relativity simple task to swap out two graphics cards and physically, it was. After the 3070 was swapped, I connected everything and started it up and thats where the issues started...

Next Next - The Mess: I couldn't get my computer to boot into windows at all. It would just boot loop into the bios constantly. I tried serveral things (updated bios, messed around with boot drives, reset my cmos, etc). Nothing. Nothing could make windows boot back up and I no idea why. Defeated and embarrassed, I resulted to just swaping back for the 2070 Super. Get that all connected, everything hooked up, start up my PC: same exact shit. Wont boot into windows. Constant looping into bios. It is at this point that I am at my lowest. Did i just brick my computer? Did I send an electrical shock through the mobo somehow? UGGGGGGGGGH.

Finally - The Fix: This goes on for an hour or two until I realized I could boot into a windows 10 usb installer. This wouldn't have been my first choice but with no other options, I decided to format my entire nvme drive and do a fresh install of windows 10...about 10 to 15 min later...my pc boots back into windows 10.

God.

I have no idea what caused this to happened or why I was never able to get it back into windows without reinstalling. Extremely frustrating. What's the craziest experience you ever had with your PC?

Recent issue involving the Microsoft Store.

I couldn't re-download the games I bought from it after re-installing Windows because, after hours of troubleshooting, the store for some reason wasn't getting the necessary permissions to write to the designated drive. I did try configuring security settings that were mentioned in this thread back in September, which did work when I had a similar issue with the Microsoft Store a few months ago when I clean installed Windows because RPG Maker wasn't working for reasons that I couldn't figure out. But my solution this time around was to transfer my essential files to other drives before wiping the drives that the Microsoft Store couldn't write to. Good thing that my ISP doesn't have any obvious data caps because downloading almost 8TBs worth of games kinda takes a while.

All of this for Gears and Forza.

My current one about my new hard drive(which is 150% confirmed NOT DOA which is what everyone suggests and it's getting frustrating), can't be formatted or accessed or even show up in bios only when plugged in with my ssd.

A really recent one I've had is Watch_Dogs Legion's DLSS being broken on my 1440p monitor, but working totally fine on my TV. This resulted in me getting like 70 fps at 4k and 50-55 fps at 1440p with a 3080.

My monitor goes blank randomly for like a second when I’m playing a game. No rhyme or reason, it just does that. I’ve tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers like a dozen times, spent hours troubleshooting, no dice. Short of a complete format, I’m not sure what else to do

Just sometimes at random when I turn off my PC it turns on again, I'm 300% sure that I don't restart it, it can go weeks without it happening and BAM, it turns on after. My guess is that this computer is haunted.

I used to have this issue. Turns out I had a faulty DisplayPort cable. Didn't figure that out until I ripped apart and rebuilt my PC and swapped in and out every other thing I had laying around.

Recently my computer would take over a minute to start up on an ssd, and quick boot kept getting an error. Thought it was one of my drives failing (it is but it wasn't the cause) it was just the nvidia audio drivers having a conflict with my motherboard audio drivers.

My pc had no problems at one point. It was... terrifying.

@the_nubster: Ah, that could definitely be it! I actually have a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter right now (because the HDMI ports of my video card don’t work and the monitor only has HDMI), so it could very well be that.

@navster15: I sincerely hope it is that simple of a fix. Fingers crossed for you.

I'll ignore all the Xbox app/Game Pass stuff because everyone seems to experience that bizarreness.

The truly most bizarre thing I've run into on Windows is sometimes on boot one of my monitors either wouldn't turn on or would display a corrupted image and be completely useless. Reinstalling drivers, swapping out cables, etc. did nothing and it wasn't consistently reproducible in any way that I could find. It just seemingly randomly happened every few restarts and it would sometimes fix on restart but other times it would take several restarts to resolve the issue.

It turned out the cause of this issue was the Spotify desktop app. I'm not kidding. It was corrupting something somewhere and causing this issue. Uninstalling the app made the issue go away. I ran into someone else who had the same issue and they had the same experience.

In a similar way, I was running a MacOS beta last year on my Mac. I've run MacOS betas for years and never had major issues. Anyhow, out of nowhere my Mac started behaving weirdly and appeared to have major problems. On restart the screen wouldn't turn on, the trackpad didn't work, and it was completely unresponsive. The only way to know the machine was on was that I could hear the fans spinning up when I hit the power button. I did the usual troubleshooting and figured out something was causing the System Management Controller (SMC) to get corrupted. Unlike my Windows issue, this one was consistent so I could figure out the issue. The SMC would get corrupted every time I booted so I would reset the SMC, boot, and then let it get corrupted so I could figure out the cause.

Again, the Spotify desktop app was the cause. Again, I'm not kidding. Uninstalling the app caused the entire problem to go away and on re-install of the app the issue never came back.

I genuinely think Spotify's app is put together with duct tape and toothpicks. The app's performance has always been terrible and it seems to be doing things that it perhaps shouldn't be.

Once had Fable crash so hard the entire hard drive disappeared from my system. Had to re-add the drive in bios again and everything, but even then that was after me having to physically disconnect and reconnect the drive to the sata cable. Never seen anything like it since then.

Buying the HD before Blu-ray version of Terminator 2 and not being able to play it because it was a copy protected WMV file that required a server check to play and the server was taken down like a year after it came out.

The fans on my current PC all go into jet engine mode when Windows starts. I tried fiddling with all of the Windows power plan settings, which made no difference; tried adjusting the fan settings in the BIOS, which made things worse. The only thing that stops it is to put the computer to sleep/hibernate, after which it will be nice and quiet upon waking.

Sending the computer to sleep after turning it on, then immediately waking it up again is now just part of the process of starting up my PC.

I've had plenty of issues using PC's for the last 25 or so years, but if we're talking bizarre a few years ago i had a regular stutter, every 5 or so seconds whatever game i was playing would pause for a split second, it was extremely reliable and very annoying.
I swapped graphics cards, format and reinstalled Windows, bought entirely new ram, nothing helped, while trying every device one by one and with different combinations i finally found the problem, it was my 2nd monitor. If it was turned off it was fine but even on standby not displaying an image it was causing a pause on the primary monitor every 5 seconds, maybe some kind of regular power spike? Not a clue, it wasn't happening when watching videos or doing anything else so i assumed the monitors were fine, so dumb.

My most pointless fight was Me vs Realtek in December 2019.

For 4 months this new PC was fine, then suddenly everyone complains that they can barely hear me.

I start investigating, and my Headset has been replaced with a "default microphone" with 0 settings. Can't control gain, can't toggle noise suppression etcet. all greyed out.

This lead to a weekend of rolling back audio drivers, including one rollback that completely bricked my windows install. Every time, the second I connect the the internet, the windows update installed the new driver. I spent hours trying to prevent this update process. Windows just lies and does it anyway. It was somehow flagged as a critical security update to the best of my knowledge.

I could only have a microphone not on 1% gain if I restarted in safe mode without the internet, used third party software to completely remove audio drivers, manually install the audio drivers, restart into windows and only then connect to the internet, and never turn the machine off or reboot. I did this for two weeks.

In the end I gave up and bought a USB headset instead of a 3.5mm one, because it had its own drivers.

Then covid came and too many headphones were messing up my ears, so now I have an midlevel dynamic mic with its own drivers from the Amp, so I can talk without it picking up my speakers (though it does pick up my keyboard)

The blame is probably shared between Realtek, MSI (the mobo) and Win10, but it is an amazing example of how "It just works" explodes on you when you try to protect users from too many settings and mistakes, and then leave them with no avenue to fix something that you broke.

I had a Realtek update a week ago, suddenly I have a settings screen. I plugged in my first headset and it works again. So that's..... 11 months. Great.

My current minor gripe is that somewhere in the chain (IDK if this is Win10, Nvidia or AOC) my monitor will screw up its *sync settings in Dramatic Ways. Like dropping half of the frames bad. It only triggers when I launch a fullscreen application, then I have about a 1 in 20 chance of being in N64 land. Restarting the monitor fixed it.

I have a 2015 Razer Blade laptop which is absolute trash on the best of days. I've had so many problems with this thing over the years and I just need it to hold out until I finish the next year and a half of college so if I ever go back on campus, I have a laptop. I use it right now as an overpriced webcam and Teams machine. It gets plugged into my second monitor so I can have Teams up on a bigger screen.

Within the first week of this semester starting, it decided it's now going to have weird screen problems. Sometimes on boot, the display will sort of tile itself and flip half the screen and invert the colours. It still works, but it's impossible to really see anything on it. I can plug it into a second monitor I have, which I do anyway for class and it works fine.

It doesn't do this every time it boots or even half the time. After it decides it's going to freak out, it'll do it consistently through reboots for a while. It started during a Windows update but I rolled that back and it kept doing it. At some point I thought if it was left plugged in overnight it was doing it, but that's not entirely true (this thing has had so many battery/charging problems over the years).

Honestly the weirdest part was after I set it to second monitor only when it was freaking out one time, if it does freak out, it'll set itself to second monitor only, even though the rest of the time I extend the displays. The last time it happened it didn't go back to extend, even though it did the 5 or so times before that.

It's weird, it's essentially made the laptop useless as a laptop because there's a good chance the display won't work on boot, but at least I'm stuck at home and don't have to take it anywhere right now. Depending on how this virus goes I might actually still be at home next (school) year so I guess I'll worry about it then.

I got the "a device has been connected" and "a device has been disconnected" USB sound without connecting or disconnecting anything. And it would periodically do this for ever and never stop. I even pulled out every USB device I had connected and it still happened.

My fix - Went to the sound settings and turned the sound for USB notifications off...

So I guess its still happening in the background to this this day.

At work, normal pc windows XP. Connected to a laser marker Sometimes the mark file manager cant read from the server where the marking files are. The solution you ask?

Go in to the C disc, highlight; only highlight the laser system folder and all is good.

I have an almost certainly unfixable situation with my graphics/internet that is something you would imagine could be possible scientifically, but not in reality.

It's actually simple to explain though. My graphics card under load outputs so much EM interference, it causes my wireless connection to fail. I actually proved that's what it was by slipping a crumpled up sheet of aluminium foil, in a plastic bag, inbetween the graphics and network card to act as a partial faraday cage. Which did indeed help.

Though obviously, I kinda don't want to have a big sheet of metal and plastic wedged inside my PC, so that's not a solution. The actual answer is that I have to use the 5GHz band on the wireless which avoids the interference. Unfortunately, my 5GHz connection is for some reason way slower than the 2.4GHz. So when I want to download a game off Steam, I have to just switch back and forth.

I remember having issues with the taskbar in the first year of Windows 10. After a few reboots, eventually the bar would no longer be clickable at all and it was back to reinstalling the whole thing.

I also had a weird email issue that is probably part of my own doing. I can't recall the specifics anymore but i do think that the existance of microsoft accounts also played a part in the following issue.

As a kid i had a hotmail account with password A.(1) Then eventually @outlook rolled around and i guess i used the same username at the @outlook domain, but with password B.(2) No issues until i decided to use the windows mail client in windows 10. And had to use a Microsoft account to be able to use the Microsoft store.

For a few weeks it worked fine and i had access to both accounts. After a while, one of the accounts stopped syncing and i straight up couldn't get access to account 1 anymore. Eventually i decided to try password B instead of password A and both accounts suddenly merged, but all information from 1 was straight up gone. I couldn't get access to this account any longer neither, both username password combo's would direct me to the outlook account as if username@hotmail and username@outlook were the exact same thing. At this point i did a password reset and for some reason now i had the same problem but the other way around. Access to account 1, no access to account 2. I felt like such a grandpa at this point, i might have even emailed Microsoft. I don't think this brought me any closer to a solution and sadly i can't find any mail traffic with them.

Eventually i ended up with 2 microsoft accounts and 2 email accounts that both share a password... i think. (actually.. now i look into it, it seems like Microsoft gave one of the accounts a new password afterwards that i had no knowledge of, nor did i generate this one... but i didn't lose sync access to this account. Probably a good thing i took notice of this unknown password now!)

The main solution however seems to be that i am no longer logged into a microsoft account at all. I guess having 3 different microsoft accounts interconnect with eachother was just too much.

when we made the switch to high speed internet our old PC just refused to recognize wireless cards. Hard wired expansion cards were fine, but Wi-Fi cards just never worked.

Took me 5 hours to figure out I hadn't put the RAM back in properly after changing out the CPU cooler. To my credit, I was completely new to desktop PCs coming from a macbook pro.

@prolurker: oh yeah i had RAM issues as well on my first build. Even sent back the motherboard thinking it was broken. Turned out i actually had to push down on the ramsticks with 2 hands to finally get a decent 'click'. I was just way too afraid to break something i guess.

Watch Dogs Legion DLSS on my 3090 makes the water in the Thames River look like ass. It has this weird artifact (seemingly) on the top layer of the water. DLSS on improves the framerate and everything else looks perfect.

This isn't my "most bizarre" issue but just wanted to share after I saw DLSS in WDL mentioned.

Question for you all.

Computer is 4 years old, with a 1070 and higher parts from that time. For the past few months, maybe even longer but more frequent now, the computer will hard lock during gaming. And not like red dead 2 or more recent stuff, like during both lords of shadow games i played recently.

Currently replaying bioshock series and it happens maybe once an hour of game time, ending with hard locking 3 times during the final 20 minutes of infinite, really took the enjoyment out of the ending.

By hard locking i mean freeze screen, annoying sounds out of speakers, cant alt tab, have to hard reset the computer.

Any ideas to what might be going in the computer? Dont mind replacing a part or 2 if needed to make it last longer but troubleshooting a PC has been a life long anxiety for me.

My current issue isn't exactly day ruining or anything but since doing a fresh install of windows(After getting a new mobo after the previous broke but that's another story) every now and then I'll go to click a link and it would open up a new instance of the browser, or I'd type anything and it would be treated like I was doing shortcuts.

Turns out that something is causing my PC to think I'm holding down the CTRL key and the only way to get rid of it is to hold CTRL+ALT+DEL and then escape out of it.

It happens sporadically enough that when it does happen it catches me off guard a little.

With my first PC build, I had two issues.

First, it wouldn’t turn on at all. I had to talk to a friend at work and bring in my giant desktop (my 30 pounds with the box and everything). About 10 minutes before he showed up I randomly thought “I wonder if I should plug in all of the CPU fans into the motherboard”. And, yep. It didn’t boot because it didn’t want to kill itself from overheating. I think I probably plugged in some fans into something else, rather than not plugging them in at all.

Second, two HDDs were being a pain. I had two SSDs and four HDDs, all designed to serve a specific purpose, like gaming, general documents / files, backup for important stuff in case a drive randomly died, etc. So two of the HDDs I couldn’t see at all when they were plugged in. Then later on when they did show up, I couldn’t use them. If you were to use them, they would go to 100% utilization and just not open up that directory. So kept rebooting, reformatting, over and and over again and the same thing happened.

After a certain point, it just worked. I have no idea what I did or what the problem was. I looked through some old emails recently—because I’m thinking of building a new system with a 3080–and saw the replacement email I placed with Amazon. Pretty sure I requested a replacement, then the drives magically worked, and I had to go back and cancel that request.

The only thing I can think of is maybe I went back into the case, unplugged drives and plugged them back in and that fixed it. Although I could see the drives after a certain point and could format them. It’s just that my PC didn’t seem to know what to do with them. The drives more or less work good ever since. Some random things have popped up before, which usually is fixed with a reboot. Not sure if it is something on the motherboard’s end or what.

If I leave the RGB enabled on my keyboard, it defaults to an annoying rainbow wave effect once the PC is shut down. And it won't stop unless I unplug the USB. If I press the button to turn the lighting off, it just stops the wave animation.

Searched all over and can't see a fix for it. And it doesn't even happen all the time. So I usually panic and try and hit the lighting off button while the PC is shutting down if it's still on.

Guessing the motherboard is still pumping power thru the USB to allow things to charge, and it's seeing the keyboard as a device that continually wants to draw power from USB.. no idea how to fix that tho.

I had an AST 386 (with a Turbo button) that I did a card swap in (I don't recall if it was a video or sound card). Booted it up with the case cover off to make sure all was well and it was. Screwed on cover. No power. Took off cover. Perfect. Cover on. No.

Went over the whole case with a multimeter to try to find if it was a shorting issue. Found nothing.

Finally after much annoying twiddling I found that the top right screw on the back of the case if installed was the culprit. No binding. No electrical weirdness that I could find.

So. Left the screw out and that "fixed" it.

Basically everytime I try to use a computer. They're awful compared to consoles, that just work

had to be that person huh?

Oh I have a good one and if anyone can explain what happened then you deserve a cookie.

Last month, I went ahead and put together a brand new PC. All parts were replaced except for my network adapter and monitor at the time. On my older PC, I was getting a consistent 10MB/s download speed wirelessly. When I completed my new PC, everything seemed to be working splendidly, that is until I tried to download a new game. I noticed that my download speeds became slower and more erratic, bouncing from various speed levels. The pc is in the same spot as my old one, so I didn't understand the change, figured it may be the network card so I went ahead and bought a new one. Installed it, still same issue. Tried almost every PCEI slot, still the issue persisted.

I was totally stumped, however I kinda moved on and started to think about getting a new monitor, the one I had was a few years old and only 1080p and I wanted one of them fancy G-Sync monitors. So I purchased one and would take a few days to get to my house. Still battling this download issue, I started to notice a strange pattern, whenever my old monitor would shut off, and I would wake it up, the download speeds would be back to a consistent 10MB/s. but right after I woke the monitor up, the speeds dropped. I noticed this about 2 or 3 times, thought to myself "Is my monitor the problem here? No, that's crazy, how is that even possible!".

New monitor showed up, unhooked my old one and set the new one up. Tried to download a new game and bam, my consistent internet speeds returned even better than they were before. I have absolutely zero ideas as to why my computer monitor was somehow affecting my internet speeds, but it was, I can reproduce the results with it too without any explanation as to why. I have accepted that I will probably never know the answer to this question, however if anyone can give me some ideas as to why this was going on, that would be super cool!

Back in college my desktop would just randomly turn itself on from being fully powered down, always in the middle of the night and maybe two or three times a month. I imagine it had something to do with being plugged into the school's ethernet network since it never happened at home, but it was really bizarre and vaguely creepy and I was never able to track down exactly why it was happening.

@jamesyfx: does that still happen if you're plugged into the back USB ports on your motherboard? I've seen some front side USB issues with fancier keyboards

@sanderjk: I have an MSI board and those lousy Realtek drivers. Back audio jack has stopped working, still no sign of life, and installing the official Realtek drivers for the board hilariously breaks my sound completely so I'm using generic audio drivers instead.

My computer currently refuses to go to sleep or shut down without immediately spinning back up.

The most frustrating part of it is all the Google search results, which all claim to have new and different solutions, just regurgitate the same 3-4 things that totally don't work.

In the early days of Macs switching to Intel there was a rush and excitement to get OS X onto PC hardware. Others online had accomplished it and it looked like the hardware I had at the time would be compatible with the hacks going around. Welp, silly ole me finds what claimed to be a cracked copy of Leopard. The image looks legit when I view it threw Windows, so I think "heck, why not?"

So I boot from the CD, excited for this new Mac future. What I got had me rolling around with laughter. Not a virus, or malware, or broken software. What booted up instead was a CRT full of goatze. The greatest software prank I'll never be able to scrub from my memory.

About 15+ years ago, the very second I killed the last boss in Dungeon Siege 1, my pc crashed. Tried everything to troubleshoot. When I started taking parts out, noticed one of my sticks of RAM had burnt marks. Somehow I had a stick of RAM fail on me. Luckily had some other RAM to get by until Crucial could send me replacement RAM.

Last year, when I started using the Xbox One controller with my PC, the controller would disconnect a lot depending on where I had controller. Holding it closer to my PC would fix issue and not disconnect. Thought I had bluetooth or bad motherboard. Dug through my motherboard box and connected the antenna for Wifi and it fixed my issue. I had a friend that ended up having same issue as me and I told him connect his antenna and fixed his issue.

In my mind, I was thinking the antenna was only for Wireless networking and not bluetooth connection.

Mentioning Xbox controller now reminds me of the weekend I lost to what appeared to be a failing motherboard. This was around 2015.

I open my file explorer, and my secondary HDD is gone. Weird

I reboot. It stalls on boot.

I reboot into safe mode. Everythings fine.

I reboot again. My primary HDD is gone.

I reboot again. Launch windows just fine.

What the hell is going on.

I spent a lot of time on this, up to making a spreadsheet to weigh replacing just the mobo or which of the 3y old parts, until finally I noticed the light on Xbox360 controller blinking.

The USB had slipped, and was just barely making a connection, but not properly handshaking (I guess)
Whatever was happening was wrecking all my other component detection.

Clicked in the USB fully, rebooted, never a problem again until I retired it 4y later (parts out of date, bearings on the gpu cooler became very noisy)

Oh man. Not a PC issue but an internet/tech issue (although I "fondly" remember my BF2 days when an old AMD driver accidentally gave gamers a wallhack by removing textures but leaving geometry in place).

A couple years ago my wife and I realized there was a third person using our Netflix. The login history showed it was from South America. They were watching a lot of telenovas. We found out because once it said we had "too many devices streaming" and then the "hacker" was bold enough to make their own profile...

I slowly went mad over the course of a week. Boot all devices off. Make a new password. Nope. Boot all devices off. Make a new email JUST for Netflix. Make a new password. Boot devices off again. Make a 24 digit password. Nope. Over and over.

I called to cancel - I told them that if they couldn't or wouldn't do two-factor to help me out I didn't want to let somebody else in on my account. The guy was extremely unhelpful, suggesting that I...boot all devices off and change my password. He cancelled our service, though.

About 7-10 days later a guy from "corporate resolutions" or something calls. I am not a corporate customer? Anyway, he said the following and I am NOT kidding: If you had an old Netflix DVD account with multiple queues, they all had their own logins. If one of those had ever been compromised, it could still be used to log in to Netflix. Back in the nascent days of passwords and security and *well* before two-factor, my email/password were the same on like 50 different sites and my info had been one of the many hacks out there.

That meant that due what the support guy said was a known issue, people were using my Netflix whenever they wanted. What the actual f***? The guy said they were basically addressing it as they found it. There is even an old Ars Technica article where a woman had the exact same problem.

I found it pretty amazing. A known issue from what seems like the weakest possible security compounded by my - at that point more than 10 years old poor internet habits - was just sitting there waiting to be exploited.

I rented a copy of Half Life from the video store and when I ejected the CD rom the tray came out but disc stayed in the machine...

@navster15: In my experience, replacing the HDMI cable fixed this.

@whitegreyblack: I've seen this happen on a machine that has a Windows Update waiting (even if it's an optional update)... the bigger updates sometimes sit there for weeks before they auto apply.

Not one I had, but I heard it from one of the techs at Spectrum Holobyte back in the Falcon 3 days when I was a sysop on the Game Deveplopers forum on CIS... (Hi Center, wheverer you are!)

Center: How can I help you?

Customer: I can't get the game to install.

Center: Are you getting an error message?

Customer: Not really... I put the first disk in and typed install and it made some noise for a while and then it asked for disk 2, so I put that in and hit Enter and it made some noise for a while and I thought it wanted disk 3 but I can't fit it into the drive...

<Center bangs head on table>

@ithas2besaidkvo: @ithas2besaidkvo: Every so often, the disc drive on my laptop will pop open randomly. I don’t nudge the physical drive button on the side, I don’t click on the disc drive executable on my main pc folder, yet without fail, I’ll eventually hear the ‘pop!’, and there goes the disc drive.