Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[urkku]

Told this story here before, but i once used those electrick lighter zappers on my pc power button while the pc was on. Long story short, did not turn on for ~7 hours.

[Majestro90]

Bought a gigabyte crossfire motherboard. My biggest mistake i've ever done:(

[KirbyTech]

Either bought a Asrock board, then RMAed it and had that fail too or buying a locked i7

[Xerino]

Last year I had a HP DV7 laptop, the A6 dual core APU in it just didnt pack enough poop, but I found a AMD A10 quad core APU on eBay for $35 so I bought it, got my laptop all apart and everything, installed it, applied some thermal compund, fired it up and nothing...

 

Took it back apart and saw that I applied too much artic silver.. the excess squeezed out from under the heatsink coming in contact with the resistors on top of the CPU, instantly shorting it out and taking the motherboard with it... a costly mistake....

[Mushious]

Bought a 780 at full price about 3 weeks before the 900s came out because i didnt look into it properly, DERP!

 

Did exactly the same thing with a 780ti >.>

[dnolen95]

This one happened to me today. I updated my BIOS (hoping it would help with some CPU throttling) and afterwards, my Windows wouldnt start. Appearently updating the BIOS changes the SATA controller to IDE mode instead of ACHI, which cause Windows to not boot (but I was able to boot into Startup repair, strange.) Scared me to death but was a really simple fix!

[Tallix]

Oddly enough, my worst mistake has a happy ending.

My mom had just gotten a new laptop and had given her old one to us children to use (it was running Vista at the time). This was around the time that Windows 8 was about to be released, and I saw that you could keep your existing version of Windows and use the preview. Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the fact that this only applied if you were running Windows 7... so I installed the preview, and accidentally nuked the drive in the process. There wasn't anything important on it, but still... oops.

 

Anyway, I eventually got tired of using Windows 8's crappy UI (this was before you could replace the start menu) so I installed Ubuntu on the laptop and loved it (how naive I was, thinking Unity was so darn fast). From there I just started learning more and more about Linux and eventually switched over to Arch, thus learning even more... basically, this mistake is one of the big reasons that I'm a techie today and have an internship at my school district's technology services, am considering studying CS in college, etc.

[TheGamingLawNL]

When I was new to all the PC stuff I once misread SODIMM for DIMM without really knowing the difference for it. Also the lack of a picture wasn't helping, despite it was a repair for a desktop anyway it was still stupid Thank god it only costed me €3 back then due to a basic 2GB 1333mhz Sodimm

[Marktoneth]

relying on those bit*** who brought me    r7 260x with a6 5400k

[Kaxlene]

Kicking my computer case when i was a kid because it wouldnt run Maplestory.... never ran the same after that

[VolkA]

Buying the H440 Razer edition case. Read on internet the temp will be higher than other casing but still accepted. None of the review was done in my country Singapore which is basically hot 365 days a year. Running 2 x 290x now and has to open the side panel whenever gaming.

[CI78]

Buying a dell laptop back in the day when there were kinda crappy. Since then its only been toshibas and HPs for me.

[J.Carter]

This question makes me remember when I was in college, and I needed a new computer; before I was computer literate. I went to a “reputable” computer store- which isn’t in business anymore- and they built me the “best” computer that could be had… HAHA… Well, I just chalk that up to being young and dumb. It was a decent computer and played games on it for several years, but I know now looking back that they really overcharged me and saw and uninformed buyer. I learned a lot from that experience, and it has made me much more determined to research things before I buy them, so not all bad. 

[mkultra]

Mine would be not waiting until I have enough money that I needed for the computer i wanted.   I planned on up grading it but life sadly got in the way.  

[Ancalagon]

Well if you consider a smart phone a small computer, I bricked my phone trying to root it with a root tool designed for a different model of phone. My wife was pretty pissed. Also, when I was younger, my brother and I built our first computer together and we bought a Gigabyte Galaxy II water cooler which wouldn't fit in the case without cramming the side on and it was just a disaster. I had no idea what I was doing so it was more user error than anything but it was always kinking and the tubes weren't near long enough to route it outside of the case, so we ended up scrapping it/ This was probably back in 2007 or so.

[Andrewf]

Kicking my computer case when i was a kid because it wouldnt run Maplestory.... never ran the same after that

Haha, I used to kick the shit out of mine whenever it ran any slower than normal. Luckily is was a junky thing anyway with no GPU or any of that stuff.

[Redsun20]

Buying pre-buit computers. CRAPWARE!!!!

[ThatRandomGuy63]

Got windows 8 for a dell. I have learned since then.

[Casperian]

Not sure if this counts as a mistake yet but I've used motherboard standoffs instead of h100 standoffs on a server because it's old motherboard died and whoever sent it back left the h100 standoffs in it...

 

On the bright side, Servers had 24/7 uptime for the last 3 weeks and is running 10°C Cooler than before.

[futa125]

I plugged a 4 pin floppy connector into a CD aux connector on a sound card when I was quite young. The blue smoke that made the sound card work escaped.

I plugged a 6 pin connector into a 4 pin cpu socket. Thank god i only fried my cable and not my PSU.

[futa125]

Also deinstalled the ethernet driver on the only computer in my house (I was young).

[NightMiu]

Be honest with us.

 

I'll start. When I was 14 - years old I was finally gonna change my insane loud stock cpu cooler to something better, so I started with removing all the screws that was holding it in place, after that I started to wiggle it and applying a little force on it, for some reason I couldnt get it off. So I simply tought I needed to apply more force (great idea, I know). Well I got the cpu cooler out of the case but it wasnt the only thing I puller out with it. Attached under the cpu cooler my was my cpu... I had ripped out the cpu of its socket while it was locked in. It's easy to remember the things you should have done after it first have gone wrong. Man was i stressed if I had broken the socket or the cpu. The life of a teenager with no money to replace that hardware. Eventually I managed to remove the cpu from the cooler, I then cleaned it and put it all back together with the new cooler. Luckily for me everything worked. Still using that computer today, works like a charm B)

 

 

I treid to find the old thread, but its nowhere to be found :blink:

[nhatduy1611]

When i was 10 i think we have this old deskop computer that i use all the time. One day it got some random error and the computer shut down. Me at the time have 0 knowledge about computer at all so i though i just kick it until it work again ( brilliant i know). But somehow kicking the pc make it work again so from that point on every time i got a error on that pc i kick it. One day i was playing some game on it and it got a blue screen, i have been playing that game for quite a while i think 2-3 hours of gameplay was lost due to that blue screen so i was very pissed off. I somehow kick the pc so hard that the side pannel broke and the pc fell over to the side. I remember the cpu cooler fan was half broken and most of the mosfet on the motherboard was bent. It was very awkward to explain to my family what happend

[Manny Calavera]

bought a laptop...

 

duh

 

np will buy desktop...sometime

[DeViLzzz]

Sometimes I think buying one and getting into using one was the worst computer related mistake I made.