Dumbest mistake when building a computer.

AdamNesvick

2[H]4U
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Jun 18, 2006
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I thought about this all day.

Mine:

First rig, Got an Abit BH6, and a P2 350, everything went together fine, but it would not post, no beeps, nothin. My brother looked at it, and I had not pushed the processor in all the way (slot 1, if your remember) I didnt wanna break nothing.

DOOOOOHHHH!
 
You know those little metal risers under the motherboard? Yeah, well on my first build, I had 2 extra risers there and it was shorting out the motherboard. The thing would power on and post then all of a sudden it would just shut off. That had me going for a while. :eek: :D
 
When I worked in a repair shop as a notebook tech one of the desktop techs built a machine without screwing in the board or anything. Got it all finished up and when he went to move it the board fell over. I got a good laugh out of this.

I haven't really screwed up big yet(which is good since I've been doing it like 8 years) other then like turning on a system without the cpufan hooked in(mounted just not pluged in) which I've caught right away and stupid shit like not hook a hd back in or something and slaping the case side on. On notebooks I killed a powerbook logic board by tearing up a trace. That revision of the powerbook had issues with bad soldering that I found out about after I killed one. Went to remove a connector and it came right off. We ended up replacing the board although I was able to repair the other one. It was just a bitch.
 
mine was plugging my monitor into the second slot of my 6600gt and no video would come up after building my rig i was kinda freaking out. Then i realized it was in the wrong slot and it worked fine thank god.
 
Hmmm 1995 I didn't match the inner pair of blacks on an AT powersupply/motherboard.

Apparently I broke it :rolleyes: haha

The first PC I put together, a 486/dx2/66 into an old 386ESP I ripped the MB out of and used it's case. It would post but couldn't see the hard drive.

Oh so Pin 1 is the red stripe on an IDE cable and it goes next to the power line. Gotcha! (unless you also reverse it plugging into the MB too, yeah yeah. Back then you could because there was no "groved" slots to prevent that!)
 
Mistakes? Some of us don't make any. :rolleyes:

:D

Anyways, once I was trying to shove some RAM in to the point it was almost bending the motherboard and I had it turned the wrong way. :)

Built a pc from the ground up, hit the power button and Nothing, checked over everything, all was fine, but still nothing. Had a friend come over to take a look at it and he said the CMOS/jumpers were disabled. I guess some manufacturers do that to save battery life although I have never had another one since. Maybe it was used or a refurb. :(
 
Building a socket A rig for my mother, and when putting on the CPU fan. Had to push down w/ a screwdriver to lock it down to the mobo. Slipped and put a huge scratch in the CPU and mobo, killing them both.

Man, socket A was a pain.
 
I concur with above.

I went through 4 ABIT KT7-A's back in the day when I first started building. Using a flathead screwdriver to push down the last hatch of the HSF, I'd always slice off a HSF tab, rendering the board useless, or I'd stab the board and break something. Wised up and got an MSI and went with a bolton PAL8045 HSF.
 
Installing a heatsink on a socket a processor. Used a flat head screwdriver to push the clip down, the clip broke off and I stabbed my motherboard. I then had to put a thick piece of rubber in the heatsink so that it was on tight, since pushing on the clipping mechanism bent it so badly after breaking it. Computer still works to this day though.
 
I installed a heatsink backwards and booted up to 70c temps on an XP 2200+. Noticed it real quick, shut down and figured out the stupid mistake.
 
Putting the ram in backwards and not noticing.

Frying $200 worth of RAM was not fun :(

My most common one was back when I used to work at a noname computer assembly shop (In the Pentium 150-200 non-MMX days). I used to always forget the stupid CD audio cable, and have customers come back in complainign that they couldn't play music.

I printed a big sign and put it over my station that said CD AUDIO CABLE but that didn't seem to help!
 
skittzle said:
You know that little metal risers under the motherboard? Yeah, well on my first build, I had 2 extra risers there and it was shorting out the motherboard. The thing would power on and post then all of a sudden it would just shut off. That had me going for a while. :eek: :D
bwhahaha.. that one has to get everyone at least one time or another. I did the same thing on my first build, except there was only one standoff touching the back of the mobo. I mean, I thought everything was put together so awesome and perfect. Then, I went to hit the power button and nothing happened. lol.. I swapped out PSU's, unplugged everything and plugged it back in, tried different power outlets, etc. I finally got pissed off and went to send the mobo back to the manufacturer and realized there was an extra standoff in the case. I took it out, then it booted just fine. hahahaha. I felt pretty dumb, but it was one of those computer cases that comes with the standoffs pre-installed, and I just thought they were all set up properly already. heh. :p
 
oh, and another one just happened recently, even though I'm pretty experienced in building computers. My friend's computer was messed and he had a dead memory module. (e-machine with old celeron) Well, I was going to take out one ram chip and move the good one to the first slot.

I took out the memory just fine, then I went to put the good stick in the first slot. Well, his computer ram slot must have been dry-rotted or heat damaged because when I went to push in his ram, half of the entire slot that holds the memory snapped off so the pins were exposed. :eek: It made a huge noise, then you could hear plastic falling and hitting the case. hahaha. His mom looked over and said, "omg what was that?". I was just thinking to myself @&)#(@*&!, but I said "oh, nothing, I just popped out a power connector and it fell." LOL. Then I put the still good memory module in the 2nd slot, and luckily the machine booted up. It was only a 128mb module, and he had 2 slots, and I just broke 1 of them. :p

Well, his computer actually ended up seeming slower, especially with just using 128mb on windows xp. So, I felt bad and purchased him a 512mb memory module. I went to install it after I got it shipped to me, then realized the computer mobo sucked and didn't accept double sided memory in the second slot.. haha. I said screw it and I haven't really talked to him a whole lot since. :cool: Moral of story: Emachines blow and ruin friendships.
 
skittzle said:
You know that little metal risers under the motherboard? Yeah, well on my first build, I had 2 extra risers there and it was shorting out the motherboard. The thing would power on and post then all of a sudden it would just shut off. That had me going for a while. :eek: :D

I've done that :eek:
 
First Build 1993 put the Chip in 90 degrees out ... this was before they marked the sockets .... lots of smoke and melted socket.

Latest ... ASUS Sli motherboard ..power switch is one pin over from the next switch. kept putting the power switch connector on the wrong pins. took an hour to figure out I was an idiot.

Done the standoff thing several times ...DUH ... now that is the first thing I look at before putting the motherboard in the case.
 
Built machine, turned it on, and it set off a siren inside that sounded like it came from WW2.

Yep. Forgot to connect the video card power connector.

-Larry
 
I was building my first rig and I got the ram to go in backwards (don't ask me how). Nothing would happen and I couldn't figure out how to get it to work. I was about to RMA stuff because I thought it was DOA, but I got frustrated and tore it apart and started again from scratch just in case. That's when I figured it out. Luckily I hadn't broken anything. :rolleyes:

 
Puterguru said:
Built a pc from the ground up, hit the power button and Nothing, checked over everything, all was fine, but still nothing.

Same thing happened to me...I couldnt figure it out for about an hour. After plugging all the components back in again, I realized I forgot to flip the PSU power switch to the 'on' position.
:p
 
skittzle said:
You know those little metal risers under the motherboard? Yeah, well on my first build, I had 2 extra risers there and it was shorting out the motherboard. The thing would power on and post then all of a sudden it would just shut off. That had me going for a while. :eek: :D

Same type of thing happened to me. I built my last PC to replace the one I had previously with a fried motherboard. I just about killed something when I thought I had yet another dead mobo.
 
Never made a mistake actually building a rig... However, the dumbest thing I ever did was buy a cheap Asus mobo for a rig I was building for somebody and never checked to see if there was an AGP slot on the board. I ended up with a board that had only onboard graphics and a seperate graphics card that needed to fit into an AGP slot and had to buy another mobo...

The board cost me £45 at the time and I never bothered sending it back, which in some ways is fortunate as about 4 or 5 months ago I had somebody who needed a mobo urgently and didn't need a dedicated GPU slot as his card fitted into a generic PCI slot (the card he used hooked up four monitors that he used for web design) and sold it to him for £70.

That was lucky, otherwise I would still have the board now.....



Also, one of my mates got me to go round to his flat once to see if I could figure out why a new rig he had built/upgraded wouldn't work. Got there and it wouldn't post, opened up his case and he hadn't pushed his RAM into the slot properly :p
 
my dumbest thing. I was 12, convinced i could take on the electronics world head on.

So my dad buys me my first comp, Pentium 133, with 16 megs of ram, 3gig hdd. etc. Top of the line 4mb video card. and a steel case.

first thing i do to assemble it? lift the STEEL case, without the psu in it, by putting my index finger into psu hole.

3 stitches and 2 weeks of healing later, convinced dad to take it back to the vendor and pay them 20 bucks to assemble it for us. lol. good thing it didnt cut thru the arteory or tendant.
 
that little tab that is on the ethernet hole on the I/O backplates, I never could figure out what that was for, now just after building a new machine it hit me! I wasn't supposed to bend it out away from the case and leave it hanging there, it was to support the mobo and keep it pressed down.

BTW with the metal standoffs, are you supposed to put the little rubber rings UNDER the mobo on the standoffs, or ON the mobo between teh screw (which I do)
 
roz1281 said:
that little tab that is on the ethernet hole on the I/O backplates, I never could figure out what that was for, now just after building a new machine it hit me! I wasn't supposed to bend it out away from the case and leave it hanging there, it was to support the mobo and keep it pressed down.

BTW with the metal standoffs, are you supposed to put the little rubber rings UNDER the mobo on the standoffs, or ON the mobo between teh screw (which I do)

The tabs on the backplate are for reducing electromagnetic interference. They need to touch the metal.
 
i use black tape under the mobo :rolleyes:

anyway it was buying a new mobo with CPU but no video card back in 03 and i was thinking hey my old card can fit in here! AGP does not fit in PCI-E :eek:
 
When building my first 939 machine, I had the DFI Lanparty Ultra-D board. I was adding orange uv sleeving to my powersupply cables so i had to take the molex connectors off. Well, many of you know the Ultra-D needs the floppy cable plug in...so when I was putting the molex connectors back on, I put the floppy wires in backwards and switched the +3.3v and te +5v. Needless to say, fried the mobo and cause lots of frustration. :(
 
Bought a bunch of mATX stuff to fit inside a Sony case. Sawed the PSU hole to fit the new SFX Forton I bought. Dremeled several other spots in the case in preparation for placing fans there. Powered up system...nothing. PSU incompatible with motherboard.
 
Squishead said:
Same thing happened to me...I couldnt figure it out for about an hour. After plugging all the components back in again, I realized I forgot to flip the PSU power switch to the 'on' position.
:p

Yeah.. i did the same thing on my first build, i took the hole thing apart about 3 times till i relized the damn psu switch was set to off, :rolleyes:
 
Ah, yes. The "Hadley-Watson" model :)

It will be interesting to see how many get that...

-Larry

dextr3k said:
my dumbest thing. I was 12, convinced i could take on the electronics world head on.

So my dad buys me my first comp, Pentium 133, with 16 megs of ram, 3gig hdd. etc. Top of the line 4mb video card. and a steel case.

first thing i do to assemble it? lift the STEEL case, without the psu in it, by putting my index finger into psu hole.

3 stitches and 2 weeks of healing later, convinced dad to take it back to the vendor and pay them 20 bucks to assemble it for us. lol. good thing it didnt cut thru the arteory or tendant.
 
Putting a video card in a system that the case was tight near the expansion slot and scraping a circuit off a perfectly good motherboard.

I needed an upgrade anyway.
 
I couldn't find my antistatic wristband, but i had heard you could just leave the computer plugged in and touch a metal part of the case at all times. I unscrewed the video card, but accidentally dropped the screw on the motherboard. There was a spark and the computer spontaneously turned itself on. I had missed the part where the PSU switch needs to be off. The motherboard was fried after that. :eek:
 
Build the rig and it wouldn't power on, I later found out that i needed to connect the 4 pin connector to the MOBO apart from the traditional one. Never had seen one of those, that was about an hour of headscratching.
 
When I built my PC, I went to my friend for help since he was a "Computer Pro", and he was going to make sure I didn't make any mistakes in buying parts.

Told me to get an SLI motherboard with an X800Pro thinking Crossfire would work with the SLI mobo

Told me to get the 3000+ which I really didn't like and ended up getting the 3500+.

Told me to get the Antec Truecontrol 550 watt (And I later read on some mags that the psup really sucked, and had reports of actually exploding).
 
Couldnt figure out why my Socket A Tbird wasnt booting up..... I figured it was a dead mobo and tossed it..

come to find out that you NEED to have the power button connected to the motherboard... flipping the power switch on the PSU wont always do it

im almost certain that I threw away a perfectly good socket A motherboard
 
Alien said:
Build the rig and it wouldn't power on, I later found out that i needed to connect the 4 pin connector to the MOBO apart from the traditional one. Never had seen one of those, that was about an hour of headscratching.

When I use to work in a computer shop we had people with that issue at least a few times a month. It would be kinda funny as everyonce in a while some jackass would go off how he pluged it all in and would bring the system in and watch me connect that connector and have the system post. Good times.
 
PigCorpse said:
The tabs on the backplate are for reducing electromagnetic interference. They need to touch the metal.

OMG! Didn't know that thanks! Is it worth disassembling everything to bend the tab back into place? (On the ethernet port's block)
 
hooked everything together hit power button, nothing, we assume psu is doa so we rma it, get a new one back same thing, so we screw around and finally we realize power button isnt plugged into mobo
 
roz1281 said:
OMG! Didn't know that thanks! Is it worth disassembling everything to bend the tab back into place? (On the ethernet port's block)

About that, probably not. My friend bent them all facing the outside (so he gets cut every time he plugs something in) and he hasn't had any problems. But if you get noticable interference, you can try doing that.

Edit: I'm not actually sure if it's electromagnetic interference, but they're for grounding (in general).

Double edit: Most motherboards now have metal rings around the holes where the screws go. If there are metal rings, the felt washers (should be red, if I understood what you were referring to) aren't necessary.
 
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