Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[Automobili3XF]

A recent one, i killed a perfectly good PS2 fat hub motor after cleaning the insides of my (new to me) fat PS2.

I didn't damage the motor itself but i butchered the thin flat cables with my neanderthal hands trying to shove them in the correct places.

[TetraSky]

8 hours ago, fasauceome said:

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

YUP, made that mistake too, twice. This is why I now run all the benchmarks and diagnosis to check if the hardware is working as intended before activating... 

[SansVarnic]

-= Merged Threads =-

 

No need for multiple threads of the same sort.

[NineEyeRon]

Dropping 1k coin on a new PC to find I don’t have the time to play it.

 

I still just play games on iPad and even runescape on iPad more...

 

Children have their upsides but as toddlers and babies they are just time hoggers.

[NineEyeRon]

On 11/11/2018 at 2:56 PM, seon123 said:

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. 

I bought the M65 pro too and I 100% understand what you mean.

 

I had a RAT5 before which I never really got on with, the Razer Diamondback Magma I had before was amazing but i wore it out!

 

I eventually got used to the RAT5 but its sniper button was hard to use and it was hard to ge the weight right.

 

When I first got the M65 i was tempted to go back to the RAT5 but I couldn’t get any drivers for it (also had a joystick from same company that also had no drivers). This essentually made it a dumb mouse!

 

I stuck with the m65 and after a month (way too long IMO) to get used to it I am now in love with it. It has improved my CSGO performance vs the RAT with no drivers. I feel as a whole its a good mouse with a way too steep learning to feel it curve. If anyone does buy one stick with it, don’t give up right away as its a lovely bit of kit. You do need very good hand positioning which other mice let you get away with. I had to literally watch YouTube vids on how to hold a mouse and practice gripping it to make it work! I was literally holding an unplugged mouse on the sofa while I watched TV (an old trick i was taught to practice the golf grip for golf clubs). It worked but it took way too much time IMO.

 

Maybe I’m just too old?

[Falkentyne]

Buying a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.

Then buying a core 2 X6800 extreme edition.

 

RIP $2,000.

(the only semi decent EE I ever bought (RIP another $1,000) was the QX9650.

 

Oh let's not forget me destroying a perfectly good laptop (2012 purchase), a MSI GT60(?) whitebook, with a 2630 or 2670QM (forgot with) and GTX 570M, by keeping the AC adapter plugged in (forgetting to unplug it) when I opened it to remove a HDD, and my ankh amulet shorted the mosfets....twice....huge white spark...happened in 2016.

 

I think I beat all of you guys.

[mrplt]

Spilled coffee on my MacBook Air during finals in a library -- literally minutes after talking with my friend about how funny it would be if we spilled coffee on a computer (especially funny because of the Caffeine app on OS X)

I broke my friend's laptop screen with a mouse (it was truly an accident)

I bought an HTC HD2 instead of an iPhone or an Android phone -- it was fun to flash Android and Windows Phone 7 to it though.

I built a PC back in 2012 with a FX-8350. 

[Uttamattamakin]

Back in the days when I built my PC's for myself I tried to POST Test a CPU without any heat sync.  In the time it took to get a post beep I saw a puff of smoke from it.  (I don't recall which CPU it was but it was in the time before they put lids on them...may have been a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon era processor.   

Second biggest mistake was that I threw away/ lost my vintage Tandy Computers.  A working 1000RL or Sensation II would be worth an unreasonable amount of money for what they were able to do.  

[xKyric]

20 hours ago, fasauceome said:

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

Do you mean using a product key from a prebuilt system?

I activated Windows 10 using a Windows 7 Home Premium Refurbished PCs key without any trouble. 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

for me i think buying an asus transformer book a while ago. it's so slow it can't even handle hd youtube the majority of the time because of Windows background crap slowing it down. 

 

after that i think my MacBook Pro 15" Late 2011. i bought it 6 months ago, and i didn't know it was about to lose support (it can't run Mojave) and i didn't know about the gpu issues. when i got it the gpu still worked, and i immediately followed this guide using the macOS only steps and then removed the resistor as shown here, so it wouldn't break later. it works to this day. in fact i'm typing this post on it right now. 

however as a main machine it's gotten too annoying. i can't change the display brightness and sleep doesn't work... i partially worked around that by using hibernate instead of sleep but that has issues of it's own. it doesn't always resume correctly and it takes longer to resume. 

[Fasauceome]

1 hour ago, xKyric said:

Do you mean using a product key from a prebuilt system?

I activated Windows 10 using a Windows 7 Home Premium Refurbished PCs key without any trouble. 

I pulled the drive and put it in a new system, expecting everything to work

[yellowhawk]

I tried to pull off my cpu without "Unlocking it" with the little Levers that the motherboard has on the sides, i ended up having pins looking left and right afterwards, i spend around 3 hours with a toothpick trying to fix them back to normal.. I was lucky i didnt break a pin and even luckier that it was functional afterwards.

[TechyBen]

Thinking the College PCS would not boot to DOS and allow a "Format C:" command... "They have DeepFreeze installed.... right? Right?!... RiigghT...... ARGH RUN!!!!"

 

Putting Tablet in oven to get up to 70 degrees and remove the glue/screen... and forgetting. Trying to replace a screen on a modern phone and it snapping/breaking/failing every time... pulling out a double battery pack from a tablet... to find it was a single pack, and having to put it back together! (It worked  )

 

Knocking over the motherboard I was messing with, while on, and shorting the 5v rail on the USB line, smoke, fire, and bang... Motherboard was fine except no USB after that. XD

 

Formatting my OLD drive when plugging in the new one to move everything to. Took 3 days to figure out how to do a full recovery (Always do a "quick" format on rust!).

 

But the BIGGEST fail is backing up all my saves for the games I don't play anymore, and then not backing the ones up I do play. Because Steam will do it automatically... oh, it don't backup controller remaps, saves to most my games and of cause my Classic/Retro/Indy games that I also have. YEAH, so my latest PC build and I've lost some of my saves.

 

 

Oh, PS, and I have broken 1 laptop by dropping it on a USB with something plugged into it too... try not to trip over the cable when standing up. XD Done it to my latest laptop, but thankfully that only slightly snapped the outer plastic casing.

 

[Majinhoju]

Actual hardware damage:

I fried a motherboard by connecting it to the case without using those proper little mounting screws.  Took it back to the store claiming it DOA.  That was many years ago when I just getting myself into putting full systems together, haha.

 

Purchase mistake:

I bought a Geforce 5200 not understanding Nvidia's naming convention at the time so I didn't realize I was buying a low end card.  It was eventually replaced with a 6800gt.

[Guiltyxz]

At school at break me and my mates messed around with the old computers (dells). I thought that an old dell, with a pentium 4, with no heat sinks or fans in the system, would be cool to the touch. Yeah my finger hurt in class the rest of the week. I was in year 6 though so yeah.

[imreloadin]

My 14 year old brother-in-law split liquid wax into his system when he and his girlfriend were doing "something" when they were accidentally left home alone for a couple hours.

It went all over his 1060 and all over a couple of case fans which proceeded to sling it around the case, luckily the mesh on the top of the case took the brunt of it. Also luckily for him I was able to get rid of it all after a couple hours with a hair dryer.

[BlockedTheShot]

For me:

low quality psu(EVGA 500 W1, 80+ efficiency), it works fine and has worked fine for 4 years but doesn't give much headroom for other components

low quality case(Rosewill challenger U3 mid atx) ok budget case but not much room for cable management and looks kind of dated imo

having a i5 4690k instead of i5 4690 while using stock cooler

psu fan facing upwards instead of downwards.

 

Then again I was 12 when I did this, which IMO seems good for a 12 year old

[PlayStation 2]

For my OG build, mainly the choices I made concerning storage.

[Pi31415]

I was trying to plug my pc up and set it up to play some games, so when it came to turning the machine on, no display and usb ports are working. So after an hour of trying to figure it out it turns out I just had my HDMI cable in the wrong port on my GPU lol

 

What are some ways you thought your pc was broken when it was just a dumb mistake?

[Evanair]

Power strip was switched off.

[Jack The Banana Developer]

 it was needing a new on button  

[Guest savagepain]

thought i shorted my pc cause it wouldn't boot but it just needed a clear cmos 

[Cuirl]

PC wouldn't turn on, despite trying everything. I stripped it completely and reassembled it. 

Power chord wasn't plugged in the wall. Must of knocked it out when I walked past. 

[paradonym]

a too small fan on an AMD FX CPU... installed it, and alsways ran at 100% - now it's gone on an intel which it is pretty silent on... - and a monster of a cooler on the AMD.

[yellowhawk]

Not knowing that CPU cooler is a must after i had removed it and almost threw it into the garbage, repeatedly trying to get my pc to start and not having a clue why it kept shutting down.