Dumbest mistake when building a computer.

forgetting to plug in the 4pin mobo power heh, was getting soo freaken pissed too that it wasn't powering on lol.
 
Installed my first X2 CPU without pulling off the little plastic film and then wondered why it was running so hot. *oops*
 
PigCorpse said:
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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yea i think my mobo (asrock dual939 sata) does have the metal rings, but i put the washers on top anyway.

Thanks, on my previous PC i bent the ehternet port tabs outwards also hehe. No problems though. Oh well i know for next time :p
 
kinda a build boo boo./
back in 96 or 97 i had a P1 133 running on a board in my test bench . for some damm reason I decided to pull the CPU from the socket, which I did. only after doing so I noticed the power
was still on and win3.11 was still running. so I popped it back in moved the mouse around and all was well. I have never tried to repeat that little boo boo. :D
 
i didn't push a stick of ddr into the slot all the way and powered the system up and toasted the ram and made a nice puff of smelly smoke ;)

lets see other than that i spent like 30 mins trouble shooting my first build then realized that i forgot to plug the big atx powersupply connector into the mother board. haha i am a little retarded sometimes
 
flynlr said:
kinda a build boo boo./
back in 96 or 97 i had a P1 133 running on a board in my test bench . for some damm reason I decided to pull the CPU from the socket, which I did. only after doing so I noticed the power
was still on and win3.11 was still running. so I popped it back in moved the mouse around and all was well. I have never tried to repeat that little boo boo. :D
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I always wondered what would happen if you removed the CPU while the computer was on. I would have guessed that the computer would just reset and not go past POST or freeze. You say that windows 3.11 was still running? Wow, I would have opened a program to see what would have happened!:)

I have not built my first computer yet but I will soon. Hopefully I won't run into too many problems.
 
My dumbest mistake in building a computer had to be when I was taking out the blanks from the cd bay, and somehow caught the wire from the power button in the metal and cut it. RMA's the mobo before I realized why it wouldn't power on. to this day my reset button is the power one. Upside is I'm the only one who can get my finger in there so I don't have to worry about other people messing wit my computer.
The dumbest thing I have done while using the computer was when I was 7 and deleted win.dll from my mother's computer. wn 3.1 on a pentium s that overheated all the time.
Or on my old computer, cat hair got under the cpu socket and caught on fire. cpu melted through the mobo.
After reading all these posts, my first thought was W00T! I'm not alone!
 
Buying parts from fry's for my first computer. Had nothing but problems till I replaced every part purchased ast frys. Fry's Sucks!
 
Forgetting to remove the floppy disk when rebooting after installing 9xx or W2K and getting the dreaded 'The Ntldr is either missing or corrupt" ....the bad part is not remembering right off the bat what is causing the problem.....have done it more times than I will admit. :D
 
PigCorpse said:
Buying a Gigabyte motherboard, 'nuff said.
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Same Mobo no probs with in fact I like it. Except it wont overclock a pinch.

Worst mistake made not removing the huge heatsink from my 550 before moving it to school. Shifted and killed the mobo ( a really nice Abit AA8) man I was mad. Had to revert to a 1.0 duron and a geforce 2. But other wise the usual forgot the 4 pin connector psu off. Once put a stick of ram in backwards and freaked out when the comp would post. Lucky turned it around and it worked fine. To this day I dont know how I got it in backwards.
 
Was bench testing a T-Bird 1000mhz back in the day...

The heatsink wasn't bolted on, just resting on top of the cpu-temps were fine, but when I shut the system off, I waited about 5 seconds before pulling the heatsink off..

Let's just say...the tbird went up in flames :(

I still have it sitting next to me. Even though the core actually caught on fire, none of it charred. It still looks like a good CPU.

R.I.P.
 
3 years ago I built my first system, an Athlon XP 2500+ system geared for OCing. First, the bios on the mobo was dead so that was a delay.

But when everything was togethor and ready to go I turned it on and suddent electrical sound, the system shutdown, and smoke and a sulfer smell coming from the case. Don't think it could get worse than that :)

Luckily it wasn't that bad. Don't ask me how, but some how the power cable to the floppy drive had missed one of the pins. Yes, some how I put it on and missed a pin, you wouldn't think you could do that if you tried. Half of one of the pins was burned away. Only consequence was the floppy drive was finished but nothing else was damaged.
 
I sold a machine to ny brother friend, but when they got it home it wouldn't work
got them to bring it back and knew that their monitor just didn't support the resolution i had it set to.
Plugged in the KB Mouse, VGA and then the power cord....massive bang
One of the idiots had switched the PSU to 110v (i'm in ireland)
So when testing the components to see what was and wasn't working i stuck in the Athlon cpu (1.8ghz) and turned the machine on...
You know that infamous "ohnosecond"...well after hitting the power button i instantly noticed the heatsink sitting on the ground...*poof* cpu went to that magic place that all burnt out cpu's go to
 
i forgot to put the power switch to on on the psu...and it was my first build ever...so i was shitting myself...i thought i had shorted the mb or something so i took it all apart, put it back together again and then i realised lol :p
 
Forgot to plug in the fan on a 7900GTX after applying AS5, naturally the temps hit 66C before I figured out what was wrong...

And I fried the top USB ports and/or headers on my mobo by plugging something in upside down. And the ports will register a USB Device Not Recognized, but it literally kills anything you plug into it (USB memory stick, printer...etc. I actually have dead hardware from this aside from the ports themselves and possibly the mobo headers)
 
Well, the stupidest thing I've personally done is chip the corner off of a palamino back in the day. Wasn't happy about that.

Second in the running would be trying to unplug the power to a HDD while the computer was one. Big spark, but hey, it still worked. :D
 
Wow, after reading all of these I count myself as INSANELY lucky. I've never used an anti-static wristband, routinely work on carpet, rarely unplug the rig.. In fact sometimes I leave it on while pulling stuff out.

I lose screws inside the case, I can still hear em rattle when I shake it.

Of course, this is all on my secondary computer. My primary (sig) is treated with the utmost respect. No anti-static wristband though.

I've also learned that helping friends is never worth it. If they want a new computer, show them what's good and leave them be.
 
Worst thing I've ever done was when I was removing a heatsink (was a machine for a family member - so think back to the P4E stock cooling headaches) from an older antec case (with a lot of sharp metal edges), I was snapping the last bracket off and cut the hell out of myself on one of the edges of the case. I proceeded to drop the heatsink denting the hell out of (and rendering useless) the CPU and breaking off a couple of capacitors on the motherboard. Lots of inventive phrases ensued, not to mention some nice blood stains on the case. Antec has come a long way since their early cases haha.
 
I forgot to put the mounts to screw the mobo onto the case. Ended up frying my motherboard. Luckily it was only a $40 dolar motherboard. Diagnosing the problem costed me $50. Haha
 
Snapped a SATA connector off the back of a brand new hard drive...twice. I have big hands and a lack of patience.
 
Broke off that little clip on the stock A64 heatsink that you're supposed to use a flathead screwdriver on to lock the heatsink in place.

Yeah I broke it off and stabbed my motherboard but it still works excellent to this day. I have no idea how the hell i'm going to take it off though. >_>
 
Broke off that little clip on the stock A64 heatsink that you're supposed to use a flathead screwdriver on to lock the heatsink in place.
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Heh my brother did the same thing to his athlon 64. just get some tin snipps and cut the retainers off. or just remove the plastic braket from the mother board.


Dumbest thing i ever did was forgot to turn on the power supply :rolleyes:
 
ThatsAgood1jay said:
Dumbest thing i ever did was forgot to turn on the power supply :rolleyes:
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And then get so pissed off because the darn thing was broken!!! :D
 
I once put a stick of ram in backwards. Sad thing was I keep jamming it in there until the retention clips locked into place. Power On. Lots of beeping and the smell of fired electrics. Some swearing on, cussing on my part. RMA to mwave and never a mistake again.
 
put some pc66 ram in backwards... got hot and smokey. lol...
I returned it after I realizsed what I did... I told them it was defective... lol... I was like 14 then... lol :rolleyes:
 
the stupidest thing i done i guess woild be i tried to wire a few blue leds to a fan header like i had a old fan plug so i twisted the wires together after making sure they were alright plugged it in works fine so i take it out go to souder everything together after that i replugged everything in there was a big spark, the mobo shut off, the leds fried, and i fried the header along with that, i didnt recheck before i soudered so the header and everything got shorted out....
 
wow. So many guys who had problems with socket A. I guess I'm just lucky or skilled. Installed over 20 hsfs on socket A, and mine at least an additional 10 times. Never had a problem.

My biggest whoops was running a 15" CRT at too high of resolution & refresh rate when I had no idea that it could damage the monitor. Fried the thing.

Also screwed up an xbox motherboard with solder doing a modchip.
 
My favorite mistakes are:

Forgetting to put the heatsink fan power plug in (thank god for overheating protection on the 775 boards)

Forgetting to plug the power in the computer.

Don't laugh at the last one, everyone has done it. It's really stupid but, you plug keyboard, mouse, sound and monitor in, ready to build Windows, and it doesn't fire up. Check all internal power and switch connections, no luck. I've even once flipped the switch on the back of the power supply to on, not realising that I don't even have juice from the mains flowing into it. Thats what lack of time does...
 
Put in a P4 Socket 478 CPU, and locked that ZIF-lever down. Proceeded to find out why my heatsink would not go on. Found out that about 1/4 of the pins were not fully in the socket, and were now slightly bent.

Hey, all it took was just shoving those bent pins into their respective holes, and volia!
 
This really isn't about building a computer, it's about a printer, but here goes...

I bought a new Brother laser printer off of the egg to replace my old Brother laser printer. I got it in, but it wouldn't turn on at all. I just kept pounding on the blue switch up top and no lights would come on at all. I packed it back up and sent it back for RMA.

So I get the new printer awhile later and the same thing happens...no power when I hit the blue switch. I tried other outlets and even another power cable. Still nothing. Until I notice a little black switch on the side...the on/off switch.

I wasted all my time and shipping cost all because I couldn't find the on/off switch. My old brother laser didn't have an on/off switch, so honestly I didn't know to look.

That is probably the dumbest thing I've done in relationship to computers.
 
Meh, I was building a computer for a guy and he bought in all the parts. I didn't check to make sure the HSF would fit w/ out killing the board and as I installed it, I knocked off one of the smallest resistors known to man (didn't even see the damned thing until the next day) and it had some major stability issues (may not have posted even, I don't remember). Never trust someone else's part choice without first checking the manufacturer's website. It's not as much of an issue anymore..
 
I was putting together a PC for a buddy at work. Well, we put it all together with no problems, but when we went to install Windows, it wouldn't work. Bad HD.

The case was a little cramped and I just grabbed that sucker and pulled. Snapped three capacitors right off of the mobo.
That's what you get for being lazy...
 
A few hardware revisions back I was doing some cable sleeving, which required removing the 4-pin molex connectors. Reinstalled most of them correctly, but I got in a rhythm and stopped paying much attention. Ended up switching the red and yellow cables on a couple of the connectors. Fired the rig up and got the familiar smell of hot electronics. Ended up trashing pretty much my entire system except the mobo, CPU, one stick of memory and the video card. Expensive lesson learned there.:(
 
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