Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[TrainFan475]

First time I ever installed a cpu was when I tried to replace the core2 duo in my dell machine. I was like "What's this gross pasty stuff on the bottom of the fan? Meh, whatever." I put the new cpu in and installed the heatsink. Without thermal paste.

 

Ended up returning the Q9650 because it was "defective". Ah, the good old days...

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I built my 1st PC back in the AT days, when the power cables were 2 separate pieces that, while directional, could be plugged in incorrectly all the same.

Plugged them in, incorrectly, power it up and watched the power blow a hole right through the motherboard.

 

...oops.

I built my first PC back in the 286 days too. I learned a few lessons:

- Turn power OFF, and UNPLUG always before futzing with the insides

- Don't hotplug expansion cards, hard drives, (I did this before even knowing what hotplug was and only managed to blow a hole in one ISA card slot)

- Don't fix the PSU rattling by jamming the fan.

 

From 486 era:

- Don't fix the PSU fan noise by replacing the fan without first making sure the PSU isn't a problem (this PSU was replaced because after the fan was fixed, the "air compressor" that was used on it to clean the PSU managed to damage the PSU.) Which leads me to

- Hold the fan down when cleaning it, if it sounds like a kazoo, you've destroyed it.

 

From the Pentium era (before USB):

- CRT monitors can still zap you when unplugged (lan-party)

- The correct way to wire ethernet, before standardized 100mbit and Cat5 cables.

 

From the late Pentium II/III era (Post USB 1.1)

- Multisession CD's suck, don't make them

- HP's directjet sucks.

 

The worst mistake still stands as setting up the laser printer shares on directjet and then having it bring down multiple desktops with it, rendering them inoperable. How does that happen? I will never know, but suffice it to say, I really really hate networked printers to this day.

 

Overall these are just things that were either time or money-losing events that had consequences.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

tried delidding i5 i2500  with clamp forcefully ,its so tough that i  failed with broken tools.

then find out cpu is soldered ...

[TheNewDarkSide]

I dropped my PS4. Didn’t  break but the fans are loud

[Beef Boss]

16 minutes ago, TheNewDarkSide said:

I dropped my PS4. Didn’t  break but the fans are loud

They're all like that. But yeah my sister dropped my ps4 pro when we were walking out of Walmart when I bought it. 

[The King of the Undead]

monitor was off.

[TrainFan475]

Buying an i7 6700k in 2019 and a GTX 1050 in late 2018.

[AndreiArgeanu]

Well to be honest I haven't done much. But I had back then like 4-5 years ago maybe? Not sure exactly but I had a sony xperia S back when sony was Sony Ericsson and what happened is the charging port and cable started having flaws after like 1 year of use. I was also using the phone while charging and what I needed to do to get it to charge is to somehow bend maybe the port as in putting stress on the connector and the port to make it charge and did that for quite a while, and after a while, not only did the screen crack near the port from so much stress but also the phone didn't charge anymore, didn't have the money to repair the port and basically ditched it but has been recently repaired and I hold it somewhere as a memory of my first smartphone. Thank god now we have more reliable ports like USB C or else I might have broken a couple more phones/tablets untill now

[mach]

Bought an obscure intel nuc with e3815.

That shit is too slow for anything useful.

[AimShootFire]

Buying a 144hz monitor and then running on 60hz for about the next year. Couldent even tell the difference but once i switched it over it looked like a brand new game. Thanks Nvidia.

[PlayStation 2]

Fried my old laptop's charger port by using a shitty charger. Bad thing make good thing go boom.

[Damascus]

23 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Me?

 

When building my current rig, I put a 2600 in an Ass Rock AB350. Now I call it that for a reason. First off, I didn't know that I had to get a boot kit to update the BIOS and when the board didn't POST, ended up RMA'ing basically everything. Got an AMD A6 9600 boot kit, updated the BIOS.

 

CPU also wouldn't hold 4.25 GHz at 1.44 volts because the board had some stupid 95 watt power delivery limit and was heavily throttling. Which led me to make my own custom VRM cooling solution which ended up killing my GTX 1060 when the heatsink fell on it.

That seems more like ritual suicide 

[20_below]

When I built my very first PC in college, I was doing an all-nighter to get the build done and was extremely sleep deprived. I ended up screwing the motherboard directly into the case and couldn't for the life of me figure out why the PC wasn't turning on when I put everything together. I looked down and noticed four screws laying around, and quickly realized that I didn't install the standoff screws for the motherboard. To this day that was the dumbest mistake I've ever made.

[lawliot]

Don't use the long screws to screw in the PSU. Learned it the hard way.

[Mnky313]

I bought 9 Apple Xserves because I underestimated the cost of shipping for 450lbs of servers... Ended up being $150 for the servers and $270 in shipping... and you couldn't even install windows on them...
(luckily some friends bought a few and I sold some so I only ended up losing ~$100 and still have 2 1/2 (one is in parts with no RAM or fans)

[UnwantedLinks]

broke my cpu while delidding

[shaz2sxy]

Spent £250 on my first proper graphics card,

had a aftermarket cooler and thermal epoxy glue on the heatsinks for the memory.

after 6 months the card started artifacting so had to put to stock to RMA it.

 

Managed to get all the heatsinks off

 

last one was a little harder...put a little more pressure on and POP!!! ripped the memory chip off the gfx card !!!. 

 

Eventually got the heatsink off the chip and glued the chip back on the board lol.

 

surprisingly the gfx card still worked but with artifacting.

 

Sent to RMA and they didn't say a thing.

 

 

[atxcyclist]

One of these three:

 

-Trading my first computer, an IBM XT, for a 286. I started to miss the XT because it was pieced together from parts in my grandfather's workroom in the early 90's, the first computer I ever built. It also had a legit Hercules card in it, and they're worth a little coin to the right person these days.

-Trusting WD hard drives were still good after they dropped their lifetime warranty, lost thousands of photos and some school projects. (Backups are important too) I only buy Seagate platter drives now and I've never had one fail.

-Buying a 7600k instead of a R5 1600 when building a computer a few years ago, now I've already relegated the 7600k to a secondary computer.

 

 

Bonus, or maybe not: Buying a K6-2 550mhz to replace a 350, then discovering my board only supported up to a 400. It's still sitting in the tray I purchased it in all these years later.

[SenKa]

Just now. Knocked my Logitech G903 on to the ground, and one of the modular buttons fell off. Cannot find it 

[The Torrent]

just a memory of when i was really small, about like 7 or 8, was taking apart this old compaq computer cuz it didnt work, thought i could fix it by replacing the hard drive, had no clue what i was doing. I remember my uncle coming along for some reason and he just came and said he'll help and yanked half of the cables out - i could not for the life of me figure out how to put them back in. I ended up taking the cpu out while trying to put a wire in? im not sure i only remember glimpses. I always think of it time to time whenever i build a pc.

[Maticks]

My worst tech mistakes over the last decade are.

 

1.) When i first did watercooling youtube didn't exist, i added the inhibitor formula to regular tap water and here in Australia that means floride and other stuff in the water.

2.) Buying a Zalman Power Supply, i will never complain about coil whine of a product ever again, even though my GTX1080 has a soft coil whine this this PSU was like a trumpet.

3.) I bought a Radeon Graphics Card in the early 2000's because it was better performance, it did outpace Nvidia at the time but the Drivers was horrid, endless flickering in games and game crashes.

4.) Decided it was 10 years on and surely Radeon had lifted it's game i bought a Fury X Graphics Card, Maybe it was called that by how angry it made the user?

First one was DOA not a good start, Second One would crash if the temp went over 45C for any reason, so in summer even with the water cooling system it would die.

Conveniently GTX1080's were coming out soon and pccasegear allowed me a credit from these issues to buy an Nvidia.

Good news the Drivers were great and no software glitches in games apart from the hardware failures.

 

[Joluch]

It was the first Flatscreen LCD TV I bought, maybe 6 months old. I had to store it while my floor was getting fixed, so I put it panel-side down on the top of my kitchen cupboards. A month later when I took it back down, the whole screen was cracked.

 

Warranty didn't cover it. 

[FezBoy]

Installing arch.  HOW DEEP DO THESE RABBIT HOLES GO?!!?!?

[The_Prycer]

We all do it. We do things we shouldn't in the name of convenience or laziness that we really shouldn't. Confess your bad tech behavior so we may learn from each other's mistakes

 

I'll start.

 

I've been using the same password for free online games since the year 2000. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Adventure Quest, Mech Quest, Neopets, and any other website I didn't need a credit card for and had connected to my "free online games email address" has used the same password for nearly 20 years. IDGAF, password security is for stuff I care about or have to pay for, but for flash titles that are just time wasters, I'm really not all that concerned with security or remembering multiple passwords. If my account gets hacked I'll just make a new one and have the fun of playing all over again.

 

I refuse to upgrade to Windows 10. I'm holding out on Windows 7 forever and just downloading things to a thumb drive off my Linux laptop if I really need to go online after EOL. All my stuff is old and I don't want to wonder if 10 will bork it or not. If I buy a new machine it will be a Mac or I'm running Manjaro for that sweet Linux gaming because I hate the direction Windows has been going in.

 

Rather than investing in additional and proper cooling solutions, I just put a box fan on high next to my open case and it seems to work just fine.

 

Due to sheer laziness, I refuse to install anything other than Steam as a launcher. My games and apps either load on their own or they don't get put on my system

 

I can't be the only one here who does bad tech things.

 

 

[akio123008]

1 minute ago, The_Prycer said:

I hate the direction Windows has been going in.

 

Could you be a bit more specific?