What's always breaking?

[Paqman]

What would you say is the most unreliable class of components in your computer?

Mine would have to be optical drives. I seem to go through about one a year in my desktop. I used to have trouble with hard drives too, until I stopped using Maxtor ones.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Windows, seriously :D

I have many computers die mainly because of windows.

[LaRoza]

Mouse and keyboard. Although they don't "always break", they are up next for replacement. It is the original keyboard I got, so it isn't like I ever had to replace it yet.

[Paqman]

Windows, seriously :D

I have many computers die mainly because of windows.

That's not really broken though is it? There's a simple fix here (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download)

;)

[Mazza558]

Hard drives for me.

[SuperSonic4]

PSU, I've had to replace one. Probably because I like turning it off at the mains.

[pape]

Hard drives.

:KS BACK UP PEOPLE!! :KS

[Siph0n]

Optical drives for me too...

[SunnyRabbiera]

PSU, I've had to replace one. Probably because I like turning it off at the mains.

so far only two PSU's died on me, but these days I keep them maintained

[snova]

I've never lost a hard drive, or any other piece of hardware.

How long will it be until my luck runs out, do you think?

[klange]

In every custom build I've been in some way involved in has had the floppy drive fail. What's with that?

[steeleyuk]

PSU fan. Can't remember the last time I saw mine turning but its a good few year ago. I'm still waiting for the PSU to overheat and die...

[Sam]

4 hard disks (one suddenly died, the three others started by getting unreadable sectors before weird noises, so backing up was possible)

1 CPU which literally exploded in the case. Of course the mobo didn't supported it (peace to your soul, my good ol' 486SX).

1 keyboard (do NOT put a coke glass between the keyboard and the mouse !)

[hellion0]

Usually, if anything dies on me, it's either the hard drives or the monitors.

[billgoldberg]

I've had some bad luck with optical drives.

The motherboard in my laptop has been fried once too.

Besides that I don't have any real breakage to report, sir.

[will1911a1]

Optical drives, hands down.

[glotz]

- All those default el-cheapo fans die like flies... Horribly loud and hot. Have replaced like 20+ of those and you can say I passionately hate them.

- I had my (t)rusty Pentium 3 450 MHz CPU die on me back in the day, I guess part of the blame could be me overclocking it, nothing too radical though but I did run it 100% (110%) for a couple of years straight.

- One hard disk I think, no backups, ofc. Long time ago.

- One mobo, it was one with the infamous crappy capacitors.

- I have a faulty RAM stick in my drawer waiting for the badram kernel patch to be applied, not sure if it was like that when purchased or if it actually went south sometime later in use.

- One dead PSU, the holy smoke came out, boy did it smell good! Ewwww!

- One dead GPU, it was a venerable TNT2, also somewhat overclocked, the colors went wonky, for good...

- One keyboard didn't like orange juice.

No other casualities I can remember and this streak is like 21 years. Not bad.

(I though this tread was about new Ubuntu versions and software breaking up. Hardware is the classic question I guess.)

[Vince4Amy]

DVD Rom Drives. Though I've changed quite a few PSUs this year.

[Don S]

That gotta be my monitor... I've had one of them broken so far. I've also lost one GPU and a USB-port. I tend to be a good care-taker of my computers. :)

[aeiah]

ram a couple of times for me. im currently running on one 1gb stick of DDR, which doesnt work so well when there should be a pair.

to be honest, the thing that fails for me more than anything is usb thumb drives. i think ive owned 6 or so, and they only last a couple of months. maybe my usb ports supply more than 5v or something. ive given up with them now. i have a 1gb one that i dont trust. all the others have been thrown away after breaking :(

[mfarquhar]

Hard Drives for me. at least 3 in the last 2 years.

[Stu09]

I just had a hard drive die on me this morning. I'm running off an Xubuntu live CD to write this

[Polygon]

two cd drives in the past 7 years, both within two weeks of each other. i think its my motherboard at fault tho

[Daggo]

I blew my stock PSU overclocking. *doh*

[bigbrovar]

I have had 4 laptops in the last 2 years and all but the latest one ( which i just got) had optical problems.

[Frak]

1. PSU (I replace them like rolls of toilet paper... on a very bad day...)
2. Motherboard (I shall never buy a Hewlet-Packard ever again... capacitor exploding piece of crap.)
3. Hard Drives (tick... tick... tick... screeeeeeeech... tick......)
4. RAM (My macintosh ate one once, shorted and snapped off 4 pins off of an SDRAM chip)

[notwen]

In my 14 years I've had several things go bad, but I think PSUs topped the list. =]

6 PSUs
3 HDDs
3 Modems <-- Haw
2 MEM Sticks
2 Gfx Cards

[Paqman]

So it looks like hard drives, power supplies and optical drives are the main culprits.

Hopefully the switch to SSDs should improve the hard drive situation a lot. Can't see the other two improving (I don't think flash storage will completely replace optical disks for quite a few years, myself)

Looks like it might be an idea to always buy the best PSU you can afford, though. In the past i've only ever swapped out generic ones for noise reasons. Looks like reliability should probably be a consideration as well.

[rick08]

I encounter most problems with hard drives or fans. The fans don't really break, but they get worn out over time and all of a sudden your overclocked cpu breaks in half and scares the ... out of you. My hard drive problems are mostly because of winblows.

[Paqman]

My hard drive problems are mostly because of winblows.

How so? Generally speaking, software doesn't kill hardware.

[schmidtbag]

Optical drives for me seem to be the most troublesome - the PATA interface doesn't help make problems less frequent for me. Motherboards are the 2nd most breakable to me. I fix a lot of computers and nearly everything PC with something permanently damaged is the motherboard, and guess what, its always Dells.

I personally never dealt with many PSU problems but I do know for a fact that they, and video cards, are the parts most likely to be DOA.

[Dragonbite]

I've had 2 things crap-out on me; one is listed (optical drive) the other is not (wireless card).

I'm lucky that I have an external USB CD burner I can use in the meantime, but the wireless I am going to have to wait for the money for a new one.

At least, while testing out my work computer, I found it's wireless card was detected by the Ubuntu LiveCD without having to download anything. So I'm going to try and get that one for my home laptop.

[HellNoire]

Drives in general.

As of right now, my 120 Gig HDD is dead, my Flash drives are missing, and my CD drive is tempermental.

However, I don't have the time to replace them, so I'm just ignoring it for now.

[Trail]

4 Hard drives,
2.5 Monitors,
2 Optical drives,
1.5 Motherboards,
1 PSU

[Dragonbite]

4 Hard drives,
2.5 Monitors,
2 Optical drives,
1.5 Motherboards,
1 PSU

Wha? Do you use a baseball bat or something for typing?! :lolflag: