Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[B33K]

contacting a microsoft rep to renew my pirated windows 10 pro key  he wasn't very happy

[Ace McPlane]

I just beat all of the stupidity in this thread in one swoop on purpose:

 

I tried to use an AIO liquid cooler to make a certain type of resin you make by squishing a certain type of plant between parchment paper (I will not name the plant for the sake of keeping it PG in here)

 

I had an old corsair h60 I didn't care about so i did an experiment with it.

I used a heat gun on the radiator to get the block up over 110 degrees while squishing the plant I'm talking about under it using the mounting pressure to squish it. I used an old motherboard/cpu/power supply that were junk as well. Only thing is that once it got above a certain temperature, smoke starting coming out of it and then coolant leaked everywhere. It was freaking cool. It almost worked too. This would probably actually work with an air cooler, but I wouldn't risk doing this to anything with heat pipes as they could explode but maybe one of those old coolers without heat pipes like from an old Dell would work.

Either way, it was a stupid idea, but fun to experiment with

[ARikozuM]

Building a gaming rig with Bullldozer. 

 

My friend turned it into a server where it has met all of his needs. 

[OX_S]

Trying to overclock my macbook

 

[DezGalbie]

Eating that rather grey looking cheeseburger from the local 24hr bakery after a night of drinking back when I was a much younger man.

My first laptop went into early retirement after I brought all those grey chunks, bits of cheese, and cider back up onto it.

I can no longer use the orange-scented cleaning product I used to clean up my mess that night. The smell brings back memories that are best left buried.

[Jason Fisher]

I fix copy machines for a living, so I have more than a few of these.  The one that come to mind the most is the one that took me weeks to fix, replacing a lot of different parts, some were rather expensive.  It was just a lose wire.

[RejZoR]

1. Bought Samsung BadaOS powered smartphone. It was one of the best on paper spec wise back then, but Samsung killed it with absolutely dreadful software support and eventually killed BadaOS entirely.

 

2. Lenovo netbook, some S10 model iirc. Garbage WLAN, while I had it in service for that WLAN, the screen started flickering and eventually died while it was in service center! Got it back and HDD died. I've been avoiding Lenovo like plague ever since...

[corrado33]

I took off my GPU's cooler to replace the thermal paste then forgot to hook up the fans....

 

Then played skyrim for 2 hours...

 

Luckily temps only hit 76. (I have good case airflow apparently.) 

[Amazonsucks]

Buying some parts from thermaltake in like 2003. I still remember how shitty they were. 

[Eastman51]

When I bought 120mm fans for a case that only had 60mm fan slots, then proceeding to mount them anyways (fans were mounted by 1 screw, and were front/back).

 

Also, this one happened a few days ago:

I was putting together a PC out of some leftover parts, and I was putting on an Intel stock cooler. I finished the PC and proceeded to try and install an OS, but I couldn't get farther than the POST screen and the fans got ultra loud. I managed to get into BIOS where I visibly saw the CPU temp jump 10 degrees at a time. I opened the case and realized I failed to secure the stock cooler properly, didn't push down on the pegs before turning them. Guess I'm so used to aftermarket coolers that the stock cooler went completely over my head.

[_Hustler_One_]

This was happened when I just finished my 1st own build just before I was ready to start it for the very 1st time, until I relized there's something wrong with this cooler installation, and I thought the airflow direction is upward, so basically I was assuming the cooler is on pull configuration before I even know what is push/pull thing on air cooler, while it's obviously there's 2 arrows shows some direction on the fan's frame.

 

SO NOOB..

[Daniel644]

buying a pair of Titan Xp Star Wars cards because the pair of 1080ti's I had was earning like $20 a day mining cryptocurrency so I wanted to double my daily earnings and the titans where cheaper then what the 1080ti's where selling for at that time only to see earnings drop so fast that in the week or 2 it took me to get the second computer running to run the second 2 cards I was already earning less then I was before I ordered them despite having doubled my hardware hashing power.

 

I was relatively new to mining at the time, but had already made enough in trading back in November/December of last year to pay for a good chunk of the new hardware.

[TheSLSAMG]

Buying a 7700K a couple of months before the 8700K was announced and buying a Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX while expecting good airflow. Not extremely major screw-ups, but also not quite minor.

[TheSLSAMG]

3 minutes ago, campy said:

My dumb ass didn't bother to pay attention to the slot layout on this board so now if I use the turtle beach Santa Cruz I wanted to, I'm blocking the single fan intake to the 8800GT bliss in my xp machine

 

im seriously thinking about a pci riser and running the card in the back of the case

Is that an LGA1366 board? That's pretty neat and severely limiting at the same time.

[Cereal5]

Buying a Corsair 450D instead of 760T or Air 540. The cable management space is a joke. One of those “push as hard as you can when putting the back panel on” type of cases. I bought a $350 PC last week that has a better case - with tempered glass side panels.

 

Also - buying two 970s instead of a 980 Ti (which was about $50 cheaper than the 970s at the time). I don’t know why my dumbass did that. I don’t regret going with the 5820K over the 6700K though.

[tatte]

Something always goes wrong with the IO-shield. Can't explain how that's still possible, but somehow, every. single. time.

 

Buying a Mugen MAX for 40 euros was probably one the worst calls I have ever done. It's bulky, doesn't perform well and I wouldn't have been able to install it without the screwdriver Noctua's coolers come with.

 

Going through three headphones from Sony before switching brand probably counts?

 

Edit/ Someone once offered to bundle a large tube of paste with something I purchased. I ended up actually using it for a good while after I ran out of better stuff, so it's now in various places including my server. It's terrible paste, but my boredom despite of it's enormous quantity is very picky.

[Pixel5]

back in 2006 i bought my first PC and got it pre assembled by a PC shop, i spend about 800€ just for the GPU because i wanted the fastest available at the time which was a 7950GX2 it was more than twice as expensive as two 7900GT cards but still slower.

 

also just as today dual GPU sucks donkey balls and i had to deal with micro stutter all the time in the end i left one card disabled most of the time because i was fed up with fiddling around.

[Amazonsucks]

I bought a thermaltake PSU and CPU cooler back in 2002. I dropped a metal bracket into a running PC about the same time, shorting the motherboard. It worked afterward, but it seemed to BSOD a lot and was probably never right after that. It also had a Netburst P4 in it, so its entire existence was a mistake.

 

 

[LukeSavenije]

Buying a a8-6410 laptop. That thing runns 60 degrees on idle (celcius)

[Worstcaster]

Combining a overactive 11 year old with a swivel office chair and a wired controller.  Accidentally yanked the new gaming computer off shelf into desk (~1 ft fall).  Fortunately only the wifi antenna was destroyed.  New antenna should be arriving this week.

[seon123]

Getting a 120GB SSD. I had a gift card, and the 250GB version was out of stock. 

Buying the Corsair M65 Pro RGB. Absolutely terrible. Really heavy, extremely uncomfortable, the sniper button placement is aweful, one of the weights is broken, and one of the RGB LEDs is also broken. 

[SidM]

The title says it all, what are the biggest mistakes you made while building your pc or what are those DIY ideas that you tried to implement that went wrong? My mistakes included the time when i forgot to plug off the extra openings on the GPU waterblock resulting in water spilling everywhere and also the time when i trued to fill the vrm cover on the Maximus ix formula(without a loop) and forgot too close the other opening which again resulted in water spilling. Thankfully the motherboard wasn't damaged

[Fasauceome]

Biggest mistake was trying to use OEM windows on new PC build and whoops haha

[_Hustler_One_]

That upper right corner arrow lead you to my biggest noob mistake when I was building my 1st PC.

Edited December 26, 2018 by SansVarnic

[Teddy07]

I tried to assemble a PC in the year ~2004. I had very little to no knowledge on how to do it:

Youtube and other video tutorial sites didn´t exist. I killed the motherboard because I turned the power on without the spacers in place. I got a new one because I claimed it was DOA. I trusted a guy on a forum to pick the right RAM for me but he picked the wrong one. I had to buy new one.