What's the dumbest thing you've ever done to your computer?

WickedAngel said:
I'm still waiting for an "I installed Windows SP2" :p
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Funny since I haven't had any problems with it.... yet (we are talking about MS here). :D
 
this is the dumbest one i've had to run tech support on:

Girl on my rez floor had a brand-new PC (from some small local shop) which she had moved to a new spot on her desk, and then it wasn't working. Trying to start the thing got me nothing ..... no POST, no beeping, no screen flickering, no numlock LED, nothing, but the fans all kicked in.

So I go in and do the CMOS clear/battery pop n' push based solely on intuition and reading those itsy-bitsy labels because the damn ECS motherboard didn't have a decent manual. One memorization of morse-code beeping later, I do a google and find out her computer is saying "one of my chips is fried!"

She got really pissed, and I was almost sympathetic .... until I found out that to move the computer she ripped out the power cord while it was on, removing both the power supply and the ground. Cheap PS + cheap mobo + dumb user = fried mobo
 
Funny since I haven't had any problems with it.... yet (we are talking about MS here).
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The only problem I've had with it so far is that it limited the number of outgoing connections to 10 instead of the previous 50 (This makes P2P useless). It's an easy fix though.
 
hmmm, there was this onetime where i was taking my watercooling system apart and accidentally left the pump on... what more can i say. Water all over my motherboard. I took everything out, dried it carefully and put it back in and it all worked!
 
I had just put a window in my hard drive and was testing it out.. I didnt bother to screw it in so I just held it flat in the case. Well my hand slipped and I dropped it and it fell on the other hard drive and they both were destoryed. :D The Window Hard drive looked good though..
 
infin|ty said:
I had just put a window in my hard drive and was testing it out.. I didnt bother to screw it in so I just held it flat in the case. Well my hand slipped and I dropped it and it fell on the other hard drive and they both were destoryed. :D The Window Hard drive looked good though..
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You cut open a hard drive for a window?!?
 
lopoetve said:
You cut open a hard drive for a window?!?
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yea... i've heard of peopel doing that.. i don't think it's that weird.. just.. i've always heard that harddrive window mods don't last very long.. the harddrive usually ends up breaking really fast after teh mod..
 
Not to mine, but I was installing a new motherboard (Biostar M7NCD) In my friend's PC.

I had to change the backplate.

Took me a while to get it in,. But I got it in. That's when I noticed that the entire backplate was covered in blood
 
When I was in grade 5 my family got our first computer (IBM Aptiva... 486 @50MHz with 8megs of ram and a 350meg hard drive). I remember you could have only one or two games on the computer at a time, and I just bought doom shareware from toys-r-us. There wasn't enough space for it, so I went to dos and just started to delete things that I thought weren't important. I remember seeing the folder 'SB16', and thought "what the hell is that? delete." My family was totally computer illiterate. Needless to say, we didn't have sound for about 7 months. Another time I installed an AMD processor and I didn't remove the plastic tape over the thermal paste on the heatsink. The result? Smoke and confusion and loss of money. Good times.

What are you doing man? Buy a new cd rom, there's probably enough change in your couch for one.
 
slowbiz said:
Oh yeah, I installed service pack 2.
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Maybe it's just me but I haven't had an problems (that I know of) with SP2. I know a few that pretain to video/audio HTPC software but what other problems are people having?
 
CrimandEvil said:
Maybe it's just me but I haven't had an problems (that I know of) with SP2. I know a few that pretain to video/audio HTPC software but what other problems are people having?
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I wonder if it's the cause for my computer restarting after playing Rainbow Six 3. It only does it to that game.
 
SarverSystems said:
Magnetized screw drivers won't harm ANYTHING inside your computer.

Every single computer manufacturer, inlcuding the hardware manufactuers, and 99% ofthe smaller computer shops use magnetized screw drivers.

I have 3 of them, and I've never hurt any components. I'd be willing to bet it was ESD, not magntetism that screwed your drive.
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The drive was a samsung 1gig 1.18gb capacity with no errors or bad sectors. A few months ago I decided to try the drive again to find that scandisk had found 650mb in bad sectors :eek: .

BTW this screw driver was a little too magnetic.... as it has killed many ram chips by sitting it next to them.
 
Monkey34 said:
Mmm....could be the time I touched the inside of my wifes (girlfriend then) comp just to "look around", and fried the video with some good old' static charge.

Or the motherboard swap (Win ME) that freaked windows out (loosing everything, and killing the hdd).

Or the first home build that cost me an extra $40 at the local computer shop because I didn't notice the ram wasnt seated fully ( even rma'd the board before this for the same reason). :D

Oh well.......trial and error.....I'll never do the same mistakes twice!
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So, that's why it blew!

(tried PSU in custom system)(
 
CrimandEvil said:
Maybe it's just me but I haven't had an problems (that I know of) with SP2. I know a few that pretain to video/audio HTPC software but what other problems are people having?
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This deserves it's own thread... but sp2 made my computer freeze permenantly. I lost everything.
 
slowbiz said:
This deserves it's own thread... but sp2 made my computer freeze permenantly. I lost everything.
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it has its own thread.. many of them in fact.. go to the OS subforum

Took me a while to get it in,. But I got it in. That's when I noticed that the entire backplate was covered in blood
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ive done that shit before.. man those little things are razor sharp sometimes...
 
I didn't do anything to my computer, but I am short one inverter now.

I thought I can use a certain wire straight from the wall. I was so dumb to forget: Wall = 120v, inverter threshold = 12v.

So there was a loud pop, and some of the plastic inside the inverter has a bit of a black spot in it (circuit board looks like nothing happend to it).

Ah well, live and learn.
 
qb4ever said:
BTW this screw driver was a little too magnetic.... as it has killed many ram chips by sitting it next to them.
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Probably the ESD from leaving the ram just sitting around killed the chips. Your screwdriver had nothing to do with it.
 
lithium726 said:
I've done that shit before.. man those little things are razor sharp sometimes...
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Hey, it matched the mobo.

Even worse, the friend was a girl. She freaked out when she saw the backplate (not to mention I got it all over the mobo tray as well).
 
So, what video card do you have, CodeGen?

Last couple things I did:
Screwed up a couple NF7-S boards trying to install my SP-97.
First one, installed the sink and fan, booted once and that was it. Tried everything I could think of.
Second one, somehow I cracked one of the traces by the socket.
Also fucked up a 92mm H1A panaflo. Tried to moved one of the fan clips while the computer was on, jabbed a finger into the fan, busted blade.
 
The dumbest thing I did was to reformat my family's computer because he downloaded some pr0n and it installed loads of viruses, trojans and spyware. I got out the viruses and spyware, but the trojans were too tough, so I just reformatted. When XP asked for the activation key, I was screwed because I forgot to write it down. To make things worst, XP was upgraded from win98, and I didn't have the 98 CDs. It ended up costing me $100 to get an OEM version of XP home in a few days (I still owe my Mom for that).
 
adri1456 said:
The dumbest thing I did was to reformat my family's computer because he downloaded some pr0n and it installed loads of viruses, trojans and spyware. I got out the viruses and spyware, but the trojans were too tough, so I just reformatted. When XP asked for the activation key, I was screwed because I forgot to write it down. To make things worst, XP was upgraded from win98, and I didn't have the 98 CDs. It ended up costing me $100 to get an OEM version of XP home in a few days (I still owe my Mom for that).
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hehe, its called a k*ygenerat*r (edited, hopefully, to keep me safe)

As long as you have the licence, you should be safe from MS. wait a sec, if you had a XP CD, where was the CoA?

heh anyways. The stupidest thing I've done is to (almost) format my backup drive accidentally rather my main HDD when reinstalling XP. I foolishly failed to disconnect my 250GB hdd (it defautled to my IDE drive rather my SATA) and went partly throught the windows setup format process the thought it might be formatting the wrong drive. It did format it enough for windows not to reconize it, but after $50 worth of recovery software, I was up and running with all my important stuff
 
Kain said:
So, what video card do you have, CodeGen?
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Normally I'm on an Asus V7100 that is based on the nVidia MX200 and has 32MB of VRAM

Right now I'm on a Radeon 7000 because I need the TV out.

Neither of the two need help to produce poor quality graphics.
 
While installing a VGA Silencer on my MSI rx9800pro, i was removing the thermal interface from the stock heatsink and a big blob of it fell off the q-tip i was using and came in contact with the little leads arround the core. At the time i didn't think much of it and try to clean it up best i could. Installed the vga sliencer with as cermeque and booted up my sistem. No post.

I missed some of the silver based, and thus conductive, thermal material on the leads and it shorted out the card, my nf7-s and my truepower 480. A very costly mistake.

:(
 
hmm i've done a lot of stupid things. i think the dumbest was accidently sticking my finger in my 6500RPM heatsink fan. it chopped a pretty big portion of my index finger off.. and broke a fin off the fan.. and broke it. blood, skin, and fan parts were all of the inside of my comp.. it was horrible..
 
What is it with people and sticking their fingers into high-speed fans?

Besides, shouldn't your computer be off when you work?
 
^It's like cursing at a computer. Almost everybody's done it at one time or another.
I'm glad my Panaflo was just 2800 RPM instead of 6500.
 
Dumbest thing i have done..was 4am before i had to wake up for a LAN party at 8am.. i was fratically ensembling a last min. server. I threw the board into this dumpy case.. hooked everything to it.. and turned it on.. and poof.. turned off.. i fried the damn board.. come to find out.. hahhahha.., i forgot the case brackets for the motherboard.. so.. the back of the board was touching the case.. and shorted itself.. oh man.. that sucked... but i had another board to throw in there.. and it was ok.. just never went to bed til 6am.. slept 2 hrs and stayed awake for 18 hrs straight.. and then fell asleep at my computer.. in mid game.. thats [h]ardcore
 
i thought my mainboard was broken. I am living in norway, bought it in germany, so i wnet back to germany, to talk to my dealer. He dusted my keaboard off, tried it and it worked. 1300km for nothing.. thats what i call dumb
 
Tonight, I forgot to plug in my heatsink fan into power, and a few minutes into a conversation online, my computer froze. When I checked, the processor temp was at 74c!!

Luckily, I solved that, and it looks like nothing is damaged.
 
adri1456 said:
Tonight, I forgot to plug in my heatsink fan into power, and a few minutes into a conversation online, my computer froze. When I checked, the processor temp was at 74c!!

Luckily, I solved that, and it looks like nothing is damaged.
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LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
c:\
c:\del *.*
Y/N?
Y


Oops. That was way back when we got our first 386 and it taught me to always make sure I know where I am before running a command! Man my dad was pissed :D Thankfully back in the DOS days it wasn't hard to fix a messed up PC.

I've done other stupid things but that one is a classic blunder.

Oh, and can't forget la year or two ago when my IT-savvy (Unix admin) buddy was helping me rebuild some PCs - hey make sure not to Fdisk that D: OK? It only has MP3s. I look over and he is saying "Y" to fdisking that very drive. I watch his finger descend in slow motion... ARG! 45gb of Mp3s gone :(
 
Dumbest thing i can recall is working on rebuilding a customers PC and for hours i couldnt get it to detect the HD, turns out i forgot to plug the power connector into the damned thing.

Found out that fixed it right away.
 
Oh, and I can;t forget this one:

I was replacing the mainboiard in my box. (My previous one was an Asus P4B w/ SDRAM). I had a spare mobo and DDR RAM (my Chaintech 9VIF1 and Kingston PC2100 ValueRAM). I install it all. Hit the power switch: Sweet nothingness. So here I am thinking "I didn't fry my mobo again. (I forgot to use spacers at one point, lost my fan headers, so I was using a 9" desk fan for cooling) I pushed on the power button. LIFE!

Another time: I was putting together a system. Hit the switch: Again, sweet nothingness. For some reason, I hit the reset switch, and it sprang to life. Pressing the power button resulted in the resetting of the systerm.
 
one time I was over my aunts house and I was using the pc. i put my big gulp on top of the computer cus her desk was full of crap need I say more :D
 
Codegen said:
Another time: I was putting together a system. Hit the switch: Again, sweet nothingness. For some reason, I hit the reset switch, and it sprang to life. Pressing the power button resulted in the resetting of the systerm.
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uh.. "for some reason"makes me think you still dont know what the cause was... your headers are plugged in backwards, check em
 
the dumbest thing ive ever done was probably this:

when i was building a pc, i accidentally got a screw stuck in the power supply (have no clue how it got in there) and when i turned it on, a bigass spark flew out of the back, and all of the electricity in my upper level just shut off. i had to go buy a new power supply, and a dissection of the old one revealed what had happened.
 
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