Stupidest SH** you have ever done

[G.T]

Shit happens, it's how you deal with it when it does that matters. =]

I just said "fuckit" bought some new RAM and a new MOBO and life goes on.

Other than that, it's good to laugh at your own mistakes.

 

[infrared]

lol, yup! =]

 

[CjStaal]

I tried putting a IDE HDD in my puter the other day and it started smoking wtf????
Also, I tried hotswapping ram, first try I fried a slot, second was 1337

 

[Thermopylae_480]

I was working on my computer while it was plugged in. I unscrewed a PCI card and the screw fell on my motherboard... oddly enough the screw shorted something and my computer turned on. No permanent damage though.

 

[trog100]

quickly remove my own cpu to test out wether or not a friend had a cpu or mobo fault.. carelessly bung it back in my machine.. fit the socket A heatsink the wrong way round.. take at least six overheat shutdone warnings at bootup to convince me something needed looking at.. fry my own cpu.. he he

curse at friend and say u are a f-cking nuisance.. he he.. not a mistake this last one.. cos he was.. and still is.. never aquire the reputation of being a computer expert..

trog

 

[CjStaal]

I was working on my computer while it was plugged in. I unscrewed a PCI card and the screw fell on my motherboard... oddly enough the screw shorted something and my computer turned on. No permanent damage though.

Dude, most of the time it doesn't show up right away.

 

[Shadow_Fox]

Stupid Me

I got a new lapto from dell that my parents bought me. Well one Night I was fooling around with my computer and was in the C:\ Drive. Well I'm talking to my girlfriend and I was doing around of delete. I didnt realize til the next time I turned on my computer that I deleted system 32 . Can you say Bye Bye to battlefield and Fable and Warcraft. *SOB*

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

Installed Linux onto a Windows system, (the install of the windows was OEM) and did not like linux. Long story short, I deleted Windows and had linux on the comp, did not like linux, installed windows again, deleting linux, and then windows did not work, hence the OEM version. Put linux on again, kept it, and that is what made me a linux user.

 

[wtf8269]

A little over a year ago I had gotten some new parts that had required me to rewire my case. Well I had unhooked my PSU and I didn't drain the power from it. When I hooked the 20pin back into the mobo, everything turned on for a split second. As a result I fried my s754 3200+ ClawHammer. I had friends coming over for a LAN party that night too... We had fun playing catch with it though.

So since then I have ALWAYS drained my PSU no matter what I'm doing.

 

[Polaris573]

building this computer (specs on left) not putting the mobo risers on and being greated by a lovely hum upon power on.

hehe I remember that. That is what brought you to us right solaris?

I bought a heatsink to replace the crappy one that came with my dell. When I tried to replace it I realized the retension mechanism wasn't the standard one that goes on a socket 478 motherboard. It was "dell specific"! So I had to replace the old dell heatsink. I had forgotten to buy some type of thermal compound so I went down to the local computer store, but all he had was some stuff that was obviously cheap and half useless. I bought some anyway to use on my processor until I could get some AS5. A month or so later when I got the AS5 I tried to take the Heatsink off and the processor came with it! It was practically glued to the heatsink I'm lucky I didn't damage any of the pins. I tried using a hair dryer, but the thermal compound wouldn't soften enough to seperate the processor and heatsink. I ended up prying the processor off with a screwdriver and scraping the cheap thermal compound off with a razorblade!

The moral of the story is: Don't buy cheap thermal compounds from shady merchants!

And of course there is the gigabytes worth of files I've lost because I don't backup often enough.

 

[KennyT772]

wow... dell horror stories. um lets see... those little itx computers dell makes are a hazard. theres about 400 of them at my school and they are not just slow. i touched the back and got burned by the exaust! nothings better then first degree burns at school. i felt so stupid i never did anything about it though. i could have had a million dollar lawsuit!

 

[Solaris17]

hehe I remember that. That is what brought you to us right solaris?

haha more or less i think i joined about a week b4 though because i had upgraded my ram and instead of 512 it showed up as 504 it was because of a mem buffer option in bios.....good times so long ago....i think i remember your response Polaris it whent some thing like this i think


or was it


but yes now im here im learning im teaching and i have many freinds now yay me

 

[W2hCYK]

3, 2, 1, here we go...

I thought I could remove the IHS from a 2.4C that OC'd to 3.8GHz to lower my temps a tad, popped the IHS off, core came with it :'(

Never fried anything with this, but, I bought a thermaltake Crystal orb to put on my old tnt2 so I could overclock it, tnt2 didnt have mounting holes, and I didnt want to put it on permanently, so I took metal wire, threaded it from the orb, around the top of the card, along all the traces on the back, under the AGP slot, through one of the notches, back to the orb, and tied a knot, worked perfectly...

Hard drive exploded when I was playing fear... lost 160gb of stuff :'(

had an old R9100, stuck the crystal orb on it next, as a new upgrade, thought I'd never need a new video card... yea right... I epoxied it on... got a new video card, tried to take orb off with screw driver, POW core came up with it, ripped right off the pcb... oh well...

x800pro, tried to add a VR to the coreV, big soldering iron + molex wire + an attempt at precision soldering = disaster.... ripped the trace off the pcb for 2 resistors, card is announced as dead... :-( scored me like... 7370 in 3dmark05...

back in 1996, parents spent $1800 on an old P3 400MHz gateway system, 15gb hard drive, i found the windows folder, erased it to save space for zoo tycoon, next reboot after installing the game, it wouldnt reboot... $75 to reinstall windows from gateway...

there was a jerky boys AOL service prank phone call, they gave a DOS prompt command to "check this ladys computer for porn" and I typed it in... didnt know it would erase all windows files again another $75 to repair by gateway...

hrm... i know I have more stories... lol...

old system, tried to use a peltier on the processor, 2.4C, 2nd one after ripping the core off of the other... so yea, case was sideways this whole time, put the peltier on, 14c, air cooled, sweet.... after doing a terrible job with the paste, i decided to re-do it... went under the heatsink, looked @ cpu/mobo, so much condensation, dried it up, 8 hours or so, put it back together, all good right? there was condensation inside the cpu, when I tilted it sideways, it leaked out from under the IHS... landed on mobo... RMA the mobo.. cpu was dead too...

i think i got one more... lol... you've gotta be thinking i'm a computer killer....

scared me with this, but didnt break anything... 9800 pro.. stock cooler, just put in AS5, put the stock cooler back on, 1 pin didnt go back through the pcb right... half on the core, half off... powered up, smoke... smelled like burnt crap... thought I burnt out the chip, but it just burnt the AS5... scared the life out of me...

then...

put on ramsinks with arctic silver adhesive, it oozed over, was drying... 1 1/2 hours, had a grip to it, decided to run it in the comp... didnt realise it oozed over onto the pcb... :-| ran it, it was fine, got to the multi scale vegitation test in AM3, artifacts like crazy... black screen... died... :-(

I still mourn for all of the losses in my nerd family... :''(

 

[KennyT772]

whoa dude ur cursed... STEP AWAY FROM THE INTEL BASED PC! move to mac's ya cant scrwe up up as easy

 

[AMDCam]

Well Kenny, you're definitely right that YOU can't screw up an Apple as easy, but that's just because it'll do it for you. The Mac OS is the most annoying, keep-the-user-as-ignorant-as-possible, decide's when it'll work, comes up with random FAKE errors with every single application you try to run, one-button mouse should work great through generations, and is ever-so-smartly designed to have all the hardware....SOFTWARE CONTROLLED, not only software controlled, but unreliable APPLE software controlled!, type of Operating system on the market. So I DO support your statement Kenny, don't get me wrong...lol.

But anyway, sorry to hear that W2HCYK, but thanks for sharing those stories. Cool to hear you jury rig too though lol, always cool to see creative overclocking things.

Also Shadow Fox and everyone else that is saying they're deleting system files, HOW??? I thought if the system was using that file you couldn't delete it, and even if it wasn't Windows would give you a restriction saying "system file, not deletable" or "not enough access priveleges" or something. Plus why would you go into the Windows folder to free up space? The only way I could think of you deleting that is if Windows was on a secondary hard drive or you were using DOS. I'm not 100% sure so I DO believe you guys, but I just though it wasn't possible to do.

 

[wazzledoozle]

I had a mac a few years ago, I think running on OS 8. I dragged the hard drive into the trash can to see what would happen, it crashed and when I turned it on it wouldnt boot and had a lot of errors. Gave that POS to some charity.

 

[infrared]

W2hCYK... That is some crazy bad luck...

The the cores of processors seriously come off that easy?

hehe, they're some painful stories i'm sure!

LOL wazzledoozle!

 

[MDK22]

AMDCam um yeah its possible very possible espeacially with the older versions of windows. My dad has done it with 95. I did it with 98, wanted to see if it would let me, Me been there done that nt and 2000 too. The only one that gives u a warning is xp and that is you have to go show these files the first time ur in there. Otherwise you can still delete it lol.

The only time you get the error insufficent privligies is when someone smart ie not microsoft set it up that way and u are not an administrator.

I just find it funny loggin in as system on windows ohh my can u mess so many things up so easy lol. Havent been there but seen it done by 2 ppl both of um crashed there computers very badly one had to reformat lol and i told him he shouldnt do that. I am going to try it eventualy this year lol.

I only have 2 real horror stories that are ones of my own. The first one was when i helped my computer teacher by swapping his vid card to a higher one. I put the higher one in it didnt work it was incompatible. So i put the old one in and i must have fried it with static electricity lol didnt work after that.

the second one occured last night i was runnin my 350W Aspire PSU i smelt this burnt popcorn smell thought my brother burnt popcorn in the kitchen cause my door is in the kitchen, i live in the basement. Approx 3 mins later my computer restarts. I am like ok maybe my vid card finally overheated even though it never gets above 75C at my current OC. So i shut it off and ask some of my more unfortunate computer freinds. The ones that have stuff fry all the time they told me it was my PSU. so i smelt around agreed trashed it took a new Antec 400W PSU i had lyin around and threw it in there its fine now. I had forgotten we had one when i built my comp or else it would have already been in there. But it really scared me i thought everything was gone b4 i got the new one in there.

I have others that are freinds stories if u want i will share them.

The absolute worst thing was on my Me computer i had installed spyware. Now this was way before anyone even called it spyware. It infected my browser and i had to track it down by hand and remove it manually took me the better part of a month before i got my internet back. All that cause i had downloaded a patch off a website cause update was takin to long. Worst part of it was it was the family computer and and it had porn all over the website that it would keep setting as the homepage. That thing was the worst thing i ever had to fix and i have manually tracked down viruses for fun lol.

 

[Steevo]

When my old compy was new a year and some back, I took it apart to clean it and re-assembled it, started it up and started playing HL2.

There was a strange smell about 30 seconds before the thermal pretection kicked in.

2.8Ghz Prescott @ 3.4Ghz. Thermaltake 7+

I forgot to plug in the case and CPU fans. Fortunately I run systems with the thermal pretection on, if there is a optionin the BIOS. 165degrees, and I was smelling the AC5 paste cooking with the oils and finish cooking off my Thermaltake HS. I was burned by touching it while pluggin everyting back in. After 2 minutes it wouldn't boot as the processor was still too hot so I ended up using the cool setting on the hair dryer to cool it down.

I reseated the HS/F to be safe and it still works fine to this day, it is now a server in our other location.


For a experement I used dry ice to cool a AMD K6 350. I got it up to 600Mhz and managed to get a little bit of frostbite by grabbing at the block as it fell over. I like dry ice. I have used it to cool the intake on my wifes celica to win a race. Idiots didn't think it would do anytig for me.

 

[mydumpstinks]

Long long time ago spent a whole day trying to get a mates 3dfx card to work, no go, into windows fine 3d game black screen this went on and on couldnt figure it out, duh try not plugging the voodoo 2 into itself. Another friends windows had packed up took my hard drive to his, tried to install windows to his hard drive slave to master formatted my drive not his, have also formatted other ppls by mistake. the biggest was losing my rag and getting frustrated with my own pc, constant lockups and none stop hassle, like i said lost my rag and swung my left foot very hard at the front of my case, that really really hurt and killed my mobo gfx and memory, at least it cured the lockups

 

[KennyT772]

that is quote, "fixing it the russian way". today in math class watching the announcments, the tv started acting up so my teacher smacked it in the side. it worked like normal for another 5 mins and then it did it again. this time he hit it to hard and killed it smoke and all. twas hilarious.

 

[Dynamic]

First Story:
Back in the good old days of the AMD k6 series i had bought an aftermarket HS for a k6-2 that i had, i think it was the chrome ORB and it had an adjuster on it that i didn't use when i tried to install it and it cracked the socket on the motherboard, HAHAHHAHA! I had a friend give me some crazy glow and patched that MOFO right up and it worked.

Second Story:
Recently i bought myself my first AMD 939 based motherboard, the ASKRock 939Dual-SATA2 and i finally wanted to add more voltages for my Venice to overclock it some more. Well, after reading all the articles and mods that had been done i head out to the nearest RadioShack and bought myself the conductive pen that was required to do the mod. Anyhow i got the points on the motherboard connected finally after 20 attempts (I'm hustle man, what do you expect...) but when it came to booting it back up it would just boot with no post, OH OH. So i send the board back and got the replacement and it works just fine. I think somehow i shorted the board, but not sure how i managed to do that. SO NO MORE MODS FOR ME DUDES.....

 

[AMDCam]

hey mydump, I've had trouble too like that, especially with this piece I'm building now.

1. Athlon XP slowly dies due to bad thermal paste coverage on the core
2. Tried to RMA but answered a question wrong and AMD thinks my processor still works...great.
3. Tried to explain I was confused on that question, EVERY TIME I send the e-mail "failed to get to recipient", gave up on that
4. Buy $300 worth of a new processor and mobo...1 website tried to take my money for the mobo
5. that took almost 2 months because the parts were so rare (Opteron and MSI K8N Neo2)
6. MSI mobo's AGP slot was dead
7. Took apart my PSU because it was pulsing my lights
8. Forgot what fan connector was positive and negative, the PSU is still sitting here
9. Bought a new 520w PSU
10. My stepdad wanted me to get a whole new system (PCIe mobo and graphics card), I wanted SLI so the PSU wouldn't work
11. Ended up deciding to get the MSI board RMA'd instead
12. Being repaired now
13. Altogether it's been almost 6 months (since the Athlon XP) and my desktop STILL isn't running

 

[CjStaal]

I had my socket 775 waterblock on the wrong way, I was wondering whymy temps would be in the 70c when I ran firefox

 

[infrared]

LOL, a water system that heats instead of cools!