Post your first FAIL

[Horrux]

Originally Posted by mjkmike

My first big fail was-

Selling my TRS-80 when I was 15. Bought it with my own money @ 13 and my dad almost killed me for buying the thing. Stayed away from computers for 25 years. Glad too be back!!!

Oh I remember that one. I had one. It wasn't even good for its time, but hey, it was a computer! Had tons of fun with it...

[Yo_Wattup]

Originally Posted by qubit

Well, this certainly won't be my first fail (I can't even remember what it was) but never one to be slow to take the chance of humiliating myself in public, here's one I just made right on this very forum:



Yeah, click on the link, go back a few posts and you'll see that I mistook a PCI-E slot for an AGP one!

Originally Posted by xBruce88x

the usa is screwed up in that regard... a house can have ungrounded 10A lines, or it can have over engineered 40A grounded lines with GFI plugs lol. edit: a good 40A line will let you safely pull 3680w at 115v. (it can do more... but my electrician friend said its not good to load more than 80% of the actual capacity)

All I know is that in Australia, the maximum is about 3000-4000W. the other week I was running my DJ sound system (four 15 inch speakers + two 18s, 2000W+1000W power amps) at max volume PLUS the air conditioner through a single socket... all of the sudden everything shut down.. wiggled the plug a little... ZAP! I got shocked from the wall socket! 240V; I thought It'd be alot more painful to be honest...

Socket no longer works... the cord to the power board was getting quite warm also...

[BrettRuthnam]

My biggest FAIL was when i wanted to remove ram heatsinks on my gtx260 (i wanted to put the stock cooler back on). Anyway i checked the "internet" and decided to freeze the card and "pop" off the heatsinks that were held on with thermal adhesive. Oh well that day i was very sad, the heatsink "popped" out with the ram chip , luckily that gpu was going to be my physx card and not my main one

[Towly]

I had alot of epic fails. Always forget to insert the 4pin power at the cpu or power to the hdd. One was way back when i installed a zalman gfx hsf on a asus nvidia 6200. the card slipped out of my hand. Put it in, boot up. nothing. RMA time. Got a new card. Now working extra carefull when working with parts. Forgot plugging in the cpu fan header. Lucky.

[Joe Public]

Hmm... Not sure. I think it must have been when I replaced the fan in a PSU a long time ago and I mounted it fan facing the wrong way. I didn't notice, put the PSU back in, turned the computer on and played some games. Suddenly the CPU temperature alarm went off (a loud squeal from the internal speaker) and when I touched the computer case, it was really hot. Realized my error, took the PSU out and turned the fan the right way and situation was normal again.

[mauriek]

my first fail, bought a very expensive Quantum Hard drive for my 386 iirc only to destroyed it during installation when i decided using longer screws, tightened it in the casing, turn the PC on and cant detect the new hard-drive and finally found out that screws was to long that it cut through the hard-drive bottom PCB.

my latest, when i accidentally squeeze Power Glue tube to hard in front of my Sharp LCD monitor, the glue dried within first minutes on the screen.

[Yo_Wattup]

This thread makes me feel smart.

[Lochban1088]

My first major bollox was back when i was still using my 486 dx4 100 i had opend the case to replace a hard disk and managed to cross the mother board wires arse about tit insted of black to black i put red to black... the moral of this dont mess with pc,s at 5 in the morning when dog tired and not thinking strait... and yes it poped most of the caps on the mobo took me the better part of a week to replace em all before it would power back on... sigh we live and learn

[specks]

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=76

Here are the pics:

[Norton]

Originally Posted by specks

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=76

Here are the pics:

http://img.techpowerup.org/120223/SDC10111.jpg
http://img.techpowerup.org/120223/SDC10113.jpg

Ouch!

What happened?

[specks]

Originally Posted by Norton

Ouch!

What happened?

Damn generic PSU crapped and took the 4pin with it. I should have known better. Good thing it was the only thing damaged.

The PSU and mobo 4 pin fused from the heat that i had to use pliers and a stripping knife to get it off.

[Norton]

Originally Posted by specks

Damn generic PSU crapped and took the 4pin with it. I should have known better. Good thing it was the only thing damaged.

Lesson learned:
Once you get a bitten by a crap PSU all future ones will tend to be much better quality models

[specks]

My current one is still crap but a lot better than generic ones.

[hat]

I was overclocking a Phenom x4 9500 on the same board I'm using now (Biostar TF720 A2+). I forget exactly what settings I was trying to run, but I do remember doing some math and figuring the CPU power draw to be right around 125w. The board can only handle 95w according to spec. Ran OCCT Linpack and blew up the board, along with my 9800GT. RMA'd the board and just threw the processor away, didn't bother testing it.

[Sir B. Fannybottom]

Originally Posted by xBruce88x

about the CD-rom issue... reminds me of my old copy of roller coaster tycoon... it has a crack too... i figured maybe i'd copy it and then not use it anymore... well the drive dicided to spin up to max speed during the cd copy process... and BOOM! i had to take the cover off and pick all the parts of cd out... drive worked fine ever since. so i just went to TPB to get an .iso haha. I later ended up buying another copy tho along with RCT2

Exact same thing, with exact same game happened with me!

My most recent fail was when i was applying some new TP to everything in my rig, and I forgot to plug the 6pin into my 5770. It started up and the fan on my 5770 was on 100% and I'm like wtf? I check and luckly ATI had me covered by using the fan as a sort of alarm No harm was done!

I would have to say my biggest fail was trying to flash an OEM mobo with an hacked one so I could overclock my CPU. The flash failed and that mobo died, and the 2 after it died. I realized a standoff in my case was shorting them out, put some black tape over the standoffs and it ran fine

[BenHoliday]

I remember back in the WinNT days when this canuck took pity on me and decided to teach me how to repair pc's. He decided to teach me how to swap out psu's.

Step 1 unhook the power cables from inside the pc. I grabbed the first cable yanked and watched about a foot long arc of electricity go from the cable to the box. We looked at eachother for a moment and he said. Step 1 unplug the pc.

[eidairaman1]

Originally Posted by BenHoliday

I remember back in the WinNT days when this canuck took pity on me and decided to teach me how to repair pc's. He decided to teach me how to swap out psu's.

Step 1 unhook the power cables from inside the pc. I grabbed the first cable yanked and watched about a foot long arc of electricity go from the cable to the box. We looked at eachother for a moment and he said. Step 1 unplug the pc.

LMFAO.

I had a system powerup because I plugged in an AGP card while the machine was still plugged into the wall, it scared the crap out of me, lucky the components were not damaged

[jgunning]

My worst problem was probably with a cheap 650W psu, sitting there playing some games and i hear some zapping sounds...quite alarmed i turn my pc off, and there is a smell of smoke.quickly unplug my pc and open it up, there is smoke coming out of the psu...one of the resisters fried itself and nearly caught fire..FAIL

#Note to self..spend the extra bit of money and buy a reliable psu

=\

[Akrian]

Couple of Fails:
one of earlier builds with Athlon X2 - mobo caught on fire due to overtighting a screw.
1090t build - MSI NF980-G65 board caught on fire during Linpack run 0_o, replacement didnt.

[Cold Storm]

My first fail didn't come from myself but from a member on TPU... See.. I was the guinea pig for the 3870 mod... So.. I let RM mod mine first.. blew it up.. then, when he resodered the whole thing, popped it in the computer, and boom, windows was saying my new os was bad.. so what he do? installs it on the wrong drive losing all the anime I converted from DVD... Yeah... I say he's my best friend too...

[xenocide]

I actually just remember a big fail I had not to long ago. I had a really old 200GB External HDD, and bought a 1TB External with USB3.0 and everything, went to format it in Windows and figured the list was in order of drive letter, it wasn't. Ended up formatting over my 200GB Seagate that was literally filled with ripped music, movies, and some other precious documents. I just sat there awestrucken for like an hour.

[Millennium]

I have popped a monitor with too high a refresh rate. This was in the early 90s when a monitor wasn't too cheap either.

It was a daewoo though (best I can recall) and they did free collect and replace next day in home service. I couldn't believe it! I just said it stopped working

[micropage7]

umm....

first fail when the first time i bought vga card, its radeon x500
its brand new, but after i switched on
theres something not right, the screen is blank. check and recheck, everything is normal so i guess the err from the card then RMA it
later i realize that if you plug the card first then setting the bios you gonna have blank display
so its not the card fault

2nd. when i cleaned processor hsf and forgot to plug in the fan. thanks God it didnt burn

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by eidairaman1

LMFAO.

I had a system powerup because I plugged in an AGP card while the machine was still plugged into the wall, it scared the crap out of me, lucky the components were not damaged

I've done this too when I worked at MSI.
I've also had amusing flames results plugging the wrong version of AGP into a mobo (they had different voltages, and the keyed versions with lower volts still fit a lot of the wrong mobos).

[t77snapshot]

One of my first n00b experiences was when I attempted to remove a dvd/cd optical drive while the pc was still running and can you guess what happened??

Yup, I shorted that bad boy instantly!!

Lesson learned.

Originally Posted by Norton

I was running a Socket A system with a 1Ghz Athlon at the time. In the middle of playing a game, Unreal I think it was, I heard a snap inside my PC followed by a rattling noise and a crash.

I was just at the wtf moment when the PC shut down and wouldn't restart??? Pulled the side panel off and realized that the CPU cooler had snapped off the socket and fell off into the bottom of the case.... burned the CPU out in like 10 seconds

Lesson learned:
I always ensure my CPU runs as cool as possible and the cooler is mounted securely

OMG! That is crazy!!! Good thing you didn't destroy a video card too. That is a harsh lesson learned Norton.