Travis has nightmares of ugly computer gremlins chasing him across a field while waving large sharp cd-roms and occasionally throwing them at me. The computer gremlins are small ugly green goblin like things made out of binary code. finally they catch up to me and start doing the matrix thing on me and turning me into 1s and 0s. I finally wake up when I feel like I am a number.

another bad computer nightmare I had was. I was working at my computer writing a paper for school late at night (when else do you write important papers?) and these two eyes appeared on my screen and told me that he was the demon of the internet. then this mouth with sharp fangs appeared along with two claws. the claws came out of the screen and grabbed my hands and started pulling me into the screen.

Another computer nightmare I had occured when I was ignorant and was still mucking around in system files. Somewhere in my mucking I messed something up I shouldn't have. I had to reformat and reinstall windows.

#2 by Sir Travis the Kong

I didn't even think of REAL nightmares when I saw the title of this thread.

http://www.netlingo.com/lookup.cfm?term=pixel%20dust definition of pixel dust

then promptly put the computer on a power strip, and use that to turn it on and off. havn't seen problems with more modern computers 'cause everyone i know just keeps them on all the time.. but in older computers when that power switch wears out, its a pretty penny to get it switched out. 'course in the old days the switch was right on the power supply. kinda like a tractor verus our modern cars.

i'm headed towards a computer nightmare.. i'm really hoping its not though. lately i've heard a fan giving me scary bad sector harddrive sounds.. and i'm sure its a fan.. at least i'm pretty sure..i dont have a loss in system performance when i hear the sound.

when i opened the thing up and laid it down on its side to run it open for a little bit, the sound stopped. i vacumed the case to be safe, and also checked that my wires werent hitting a fan (i've got 7). my bios hardware monitor would show my processor fan speed drop when i heard the sound, and promptly go back up again. still wondering if there is a wire smacking it. anyway i've been keeping my eye on the fan to make sure it doesnt go out on me 'cause an athlon will over heat in 3 seconds. its run nearly 24/7 for a year and a half.. but it should be rated for about 3 years.

papidon....clearing the CMOS as dune suggests may lead to other 'issues' if you are unaware of your BIOS settings, etc and are a novice in that regard.

MBs will have a jumper usually adjacent to the BIOS chip for clearing its memory without battery removal and waiting for capacitors,etc to discharge.

Horror stories about computers are generally compounded by the 'quality' of advice offered for their solution.

I'm sure there really are people out there that have emptied their recycle bin by typing 'format c:\' at a command prompt through following 'assistance'....

and these two eyes appeared on my screen and told me that he was the demon of the internet. then this mouth with sharp fangs appeared along with two claws. the claws came out of the screen and grabbed my hands and started pulling me into the screen.

Travis: You mean like this?: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=8&SkinID=749

My work here is done!

I'm still hiding.

I had a power supply blow up. And when I say blow up I mean a loud bang followed with flames coming out the back like a hot rod. The tower was real close to the bed and it happened when I turned the pc on. Had I not been there my room would of caught on fire. Weird thing is there was no other hardware damage. Took a few days to get the smell out. I still have it, you really gotta see the aftermath inside.

Papidon, can you elaborate some with the XP installation? Any error messages? BIOS beep codes? Noises from within your case?

Like this one is !

My first computer nightmare was loosing the 5-6 hours of work coding an animated version of hangman on a ZX81 - when I bent over to connect the tape recorder to save the program, I wobbled the RAM pack on the back on it reset. That was also my first experience of computer rage as I punched the poor little thing...and to insult me further, it kept working without a hickup!

My first computer nightmare of the sleep influenced kind was induced by many hours playing the game Repton 3 on a BBC - dreams of screens of puzzling diamonds, rocks and soil filled one night and was also the first time I'd dreamed in pixels!

The only other dream state computer nightmare I've had was caused by modeling the house I was sharing at the time in Doom, and then playing it...there's something deeply disturbing about finding a flame throwing monster in your living room which tends to stay with you for a while...

BTW - to DesignCaddy: with all the symptoms you have pointing to a CPU fan issue I'd recommend just getting a replacement anyhow. The MTBF for the fan might be 3 years, but that doesn't mean any particular one won't fail sooner.

Oh, and like The DJ - I've had a PSU blow up on me, but that was in the workshop putting together a batch of machines for a customer. The supplier of the basic unit had run out of stock in the UK and shiped us some from Canada (I recall), and I didn't check the voltage selector on the back before starting to install. I left a room full of machines installing NT over lunch, and came back to find the place smoke filled and with 5 fried power supplies...luckly, the mains trip switch had saved us from a more serious fire!