The “personal” in “personal computer” means we get to use our laptops for whatever our little heart desires. But what happens when you need to get your’s fixed and allow somebody to peak into your personal life? Here’s some of the weirdest things this AskReddit community has found on other people’s computers.
Comments have been edited for clarity. The source can be found the end of the article.
Bedbugs in an overheating HP DV6k about 8 years ago. We left it memtesting overnight and in the morning the little buggers were coming out of the vents everywhere.
kentuckyfriedwee***
Used to work at a repairs and refurbish center. We worked on consoles and laptops. For laptops, inapropriate child videos. Happened maybe 3 times while I was there. Police are immediately called.
tocilog
For consoles, cockroaches. None alive thankfully but man, just systems full of hundreds of cockroaches, some of them fried on the board. The smell is even worse. We don’t work on those, even when it’s working. For health and safety reasons, we bag those and throw it out.
tocilog
Some other common strange errors: pet hair caught in cooling fan resulting in overheating, consoles full of sand (do you guys bring your console to the beach?), Sticking stuff in the disk drive (found a dollar once, as well as WindWaker in an X360).
tocilog
I worked for my university’s IT department in the “Laptop Depot” so we basically would do any repairs on students/faculty/staff’s laptops (we had this really solid warranty with Dell where they were 100% covered for 4 years, even including intentional misuse) We saw all sorts of laptops full of dust, smoke, beer/wine/liquor (they would always say they spilled “juice” on their laptop). I got to the point where I could replace a motherboard on a Latitude D630 in under 5 minutes. The only time I ever saw a laptop that we refused to repair was one dude who barfed all over his. My boss just put on rubber gloves, put it in a plastic bag, and mailed it to Dell to be replaced.
applepwnz
Buddy on my floor freshman year worked at the college help desk. A guy (who I actually knew through another friend) brought his computer in to get fixed. He was adamant about saving what was on the hard drive. My buddy saw some “interesting” file names, and decided to look further. It was inappropriate child videos. Dude went to jail, my buddy had to testify at trial.
bilfdoffle
Someone once brought in a cooler to the repair shop. I was completely confused. Asked awkwardly if I could help the guy.
Guy opens the cooler and hands me a freezing laptop thats keyboard is literally bowed out because of the ice that formed in the motherboard. Apparently the guy spilled water all over his computer and his friend told him to put it in the freezer so it would turn into a solid….
Dumbest thing I have ever experienced.
tb8592
A 20 year-old friend’s mother was going through her husband’s laptop to fix some virus issues and found videos of their daughter (my friend) getting changed, taking showers, etc… on the laptop. Apparently the husband/dad had hidden cameras in their daughter’s room taking inappropriate videos of her for years. He’s in jail now, but I can’t imagine how that felt finding out that her own father that she loved and trusted was betraying her in the sickest way for most of her life.
Average_Jane_XIII
My coworker asked me to fix his computer and I agreed since he was a nice guy. It turns out it was actually his 13 year-old son’s computer…
As soon as I got it I knew it was a bad idea. It was disgusting, covered in food particles and a white crusty residue I’m hoping wasn’t preteen… you know. It wouldn’t even boot up when I turned it on, but I managed to get inside with Windows Startup Repair. As soon as I logged in, I saw dozens of torrented video games and hundreds of GBs of adult videos.
Oh boy. I ran a virus scan and it removed so many files that it corrupted the hard drive and prevented the laptop from booting. I spent over 20hrs trying to recover the hard drive but it was royally messed up. I gave the laptop back to him after I was able to get it booted and agreed to stop fixing PCs on the side.
Willbo
I fixed my dad’s computer and found a 1.8gb folder of high heels and other shoes. Mostly just the shoes. Not anyone wearing them. The folder was labeled “dream big.”
ThoseArePenguins
The last company I worked for, I got a laptop back from one of the sales guys who was complaining that his computer was slow and kept crashing. He was the sort of guy who, rather than raise a ticket, sends an email with the entire exec team copied in about how he couldn’t do his job because IT were incompetent, etc, etc.
Well, I got his laptop from him and noticed the hard drive was completely full. Most of the sales stuff is web based, so there was no reason for the local drive to have anything on it.
So, I had a look. ‘Expertly’ hidden on his hard drive in a folder called ‘work stuff’ was over 300gb of naked pictures and videos of himself.
Literally thousands of pictures of him naked. Videos of him dancing naked. Videos of him shoving things in his rear end.
One extremely awkward meeting with the guy’s manager later, he was quietly let go.
Paulius2444
I hooked up with a girl from work and she asked me to fix her laptop. I found her wedding photos on there. Always check the ring finger guys.
parttimeadult
A guy I know that fixed computers for a living (years ago) had a customer bring in a computer stating that the floppy drive had stopped working. When he opened it up he found cockroaches mashed against the read/write heads in the drive. He said he just closed it up and left it on the front step for the guy to come and retrieve.
guitbit
At my old job some kid (prob 17 or 18 at the time) brought in his ASUS gaming laptop for us to clean up. The thing was riddled with malware. Some of the files we had to manually delete, and when we went looking we found something interesting. He had hours of intercorse tapes with him and his girlfriend. Also keep in mind that this is when Windows 8.1 was new and he Photo tile on the Start menu cycled through saved content.
When the kid came to pick up the laptop the Photos app showed a preview pic with his girlfriend’s butt and his man parts clearly doing the deed. We quickly flipped the laptop around claiming that we forgot to re-enable something and turned off the Live Tile feature so that the pics would show up. None of us that worked on the laptop said a thing to the kid or his dad when they came to pick it up.
NeoKrieg111
Guy accidentally overwrote a partition on his hard-drive, I performed a drive recovery and was confused to find a bunch of images with random file names. I thought that the recovery had failed, so I checked the files to see what they were. Police were called, I had a bad day, though not quite as bad as the computer’s owner I suspect.
ViperThreat
I found a dead rat inside a PC one time. Customer couldn’t fathom why it shorted out. Thing was like a mummy too.
SplattercatOfficial
Old 90 year old dude comes in with a computer. Pop it on the tester / hook it up to a monitor and his background is the most hardcore homosexual intercorse ever. There are like 10 customers waiting in the shop so I quickly just turned the monitor off, swapped the desktop background out in the back and did the work.
SplattercatOfficial
Was at an old couple’s house backing up all their pictures, and those two old folks had some nasty self filmed amateur adult videos on there. So many grey hairs…
SplattercatOfficial
Had a customer come in and be like “I don’t know why my computer isn’t working”. Load up the desktop and there’s tons of malware, I ask what kinda sites he goes to so I can coach him on how not to get infected again and like clockwork a bunch of malware popups start flashing and playing the “A** n’ Ti*****” song. took everything in me to just hold it together.
SplattercatOfficial
I was fixing my sisters laptop because she said there was a virus/running slow despite being new (at the time). You know what I found? Almost 2 gigs of Mario/Peach rule 34. My sister was 7 at the time. Im still confused by it.
Strikercharge
My friends Dad used to fix up old computers and laptops, and one day he told us about this time this elderly man came into his shop to get his old desktop fixed. So he drops It off, and immediately my friends Dad notices It smells off and I mean very off. So he goes to fix It and when he pops open the side, I kid you not 20 cockroaches climb out of this thing and scatter away.
On the inside is this rotten piece of Meatloaf leftover which has turned moldy black and gross. My friends dad said he almost threw up in the moment and they had to call an exterminator to kill the roaches.
He called the elderly man back to tell him about his computer troubles, apparently the old man had dementia or something and thought the computer was a fridge, and he had stored his leftover meatloaf in there. Needless to say, they did not fix his computer.
MyStoryIsReal
Used to work at a small computer repair shop. Every now and then you’d find adult videos or something like that, nothing to unusual. The worst part was usually the physical state of the machines.
As a courtesy, the shop I worked for would always blow the dust out of systems that came in. Smokers computers were the worst. Years of tar and dust buildup just would not come loose.
There was one system that as soon as we opened it, we saw dozens of roaches inside. We quickly closed up the case, taped up all openings stuck it in a bag and fumigated it.
There was this other time that a customer brought their system in for weird performance issues. Turns out that their cat puked through the side vent all over the motherboard. Customer wanted to pay for us to clean it rather than replace it….
trell2202
Doctors for some reason have the weirdest computers. Maybe because they’re desensitized to normal humor or human interaction. A friend that was working on one in particular said that every icon on the desktop was of Emmanuel Lewis, you know, Webster. His background too. His picture folder was filled with pictures of Webster too. Super creepy, but technically not illegal.
C_deltahouse79
The inside of a heavy smokers computer is beyond disgusting. It creates a fine orange-ish film that coats every single internal component, smells wretched, and will become a noxious cloud if you try and blow it off.
Just go outside to smoke. Seriously.
Lt_Col_Anguss
Was doing IT at a law firm. Saw a folder called literally c:dirtyPics
Immediately opened folder (I mean, come on), saw pics of almost every secretary in the firm naked.
yodawasevil
Not me but a guy I used to work with. He found pictures of the owner dressed up as a baby and getting coke cans shoved into his rear end.
taomark
A crusty old man walked into the shop with a look in his eyes like a child who just stole from the cookie jar. The year is 2017 but he asks me if I can burn a CD for him. I am confused, but I indulge the customer’s request. I ask him what he wants burned to the CD, he simply points to a folder titled “new folder” by instinct I double click, and in that moment what little innocence I had left died. Inside that indescribable folder, hundreds of pictures of what I’m assuming is wife in what can only be described as explicit positions.
I’m sure she is a fine lady, but age has not been kind to her, the lack of hygiene and poor diet didn’t help either. Frozen in place, I slowly turn my head to the old man’s gaze, only to be met with a simply indescribable grin and a slow nod. Never before in my life has I been that afraid, disgusted, and stunned, but I had a job to do. I grabbed a dusty old 700mb CD and burned those images to its form. It was done, the transaction was made, but I was robbed, of my innocence, and of my sanity.
VG_RaptorJesus
My brother works on laptops and one time a guy came in to get windows 8 put on his computer.(this man was a old family friend) and while he was backing up files he found a video of the man’s daughter. I won’t go into details of what it is, for the sake of keeping my blood pressure down. But my brother immediately alerted the authorities and the man is now serving a 12 year prison term. He’s just lucky my brother was at his place of business, or I believe he would have killed him instead of calling the law.
Scubaroooo
I opened a laptop once and the background picture was a buff naked dude in the shower. I just looked at the guy and said “could you change your desktop, it’s making me feel inadequate.”
Marz-_-