Yesterday as I was booting up I almost had a heart attack when I saw that. Especially since my friend's HDD went out earlier that day and I had just recommended my HDD as a replacement. Fortunately after making sure the cables were seated right and everything, it worked fine. I was really scared because I had spent the last hour organizing the cables in my case.

Please resize that image before editing it back into your post. -DSetthar

So anyway, post your most frightening PC experiences.

I hate it when that happens.

I once turned my computer on to be greeted with a loud BANG.

Turns out the PSU didn't like the heat we had that summer, thankfully none of the PC compentents were damaged and it worked fine once we replaced the PSU.

Oh, and I've had a wasp caught in one of the case fans before i had to clean out what was left of it

Don't let babies crawl into the computer. Unless, you know, you're into that sort of thing.

Once in a while in the past, my computer would spontaniously shut off and a smell of burnt wires comes out of the system. Always freaks me out when it does that. To combat that now, I just leave the case open with a small room fan to keep it cool and I set my bios to only shut down when it hits 150 degrees, not 120 degrees like before. I really do need to get a better cooling system. You know it's really bad when it overheats when you DON'T have anything overclocked.

You probably just knocked a cable loose while you were fidling around

Or you could be like me, trying to run an Athlon64 with a cheap PSU and fan (cheap my @__! The fan was a whole US$25!). The average running temperature for the processor is 155 degrees Fahrenheit (That's the temperature you cook beef at); the rest of the computer ranged from 120 (motherboard) to 110 (graphics card and HDD) to 95 (removable disk drives). During hotter summer days, the metal surface of the case can actually burn anyone who touches it. Fortunately, all of the components work well in such extreme temperatures.

Well, at one point (due to an undiagnosed heatsink mismount) my computer would spontaneously shut off. That scared me, because that was after I had a trial overclock.

Everything was stock, I just wanted to test how to do it.

We've been having a Santa Ana (heat wave) here in San Diego. Even along the coast it was 90 degrees. I was in dad's room fiddling with the network cables when I notice that his case was frightfully HOT! I swear the PSU was going to explode. Fortunately it didn't and the machine still works.

At those temperatures, your CPU is going to last about 2 months. There is no way that those readings are right. Any heatsink/fan can keep a CPU from that hot. If you bought a separate heatsink/fan, practically 99% of thsoe are better than the AMD retail heatsinks, and those are designed never to let the CPU get that high. Your computer is going to die in less than a year. Otherwsie, itll be a miracle.

You could be mistaking Fahrenheit for Celsius (subtract 32 from my temperatures, then divide by 1.8), or I'd say that it'd be a miracle (or the sensors are exagerating), because it's been over 3 months, and everything is working exactly as well as it had before... I've run repeated tests for all of the components, and there's been no change. Remember, this is one of the newer processors (and not a Athlon XP), so it was designed to withstand high temperatures. If I recall correctly, its maximum safe operating temperature was something like 180 Fahrenheit (82 Celsius). I've not been too worried about the processor; when I tried over-clocking it, it seemed to enter "precaution" shut-down at about that temperature. It rebooted when cooled and had no problems.