Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[PeachGr]

I wanted to erase any data from an HDD. I downloaded a disk-eraser named program. It appeared to be a program that erased the disk it self, not the data that it contained. No need to say that it became unusable by any means, neither that it was the main OS room of my old laptop

[Pickles von Brine]

Let's see here. I have been working professionally in computer repair since 2012... So, here it goes:

Lost customer data
Blew up a $500 board
Dropped a computer (I slipped on someone's salad dressing...)

 

Those are my top 3. 
 

[vinit6694skr]

On 6/1/2020 at 11:12 PM, TheBritishVillain said:

I was just watching Tom Scott's latest vid "The Worst Typo I Ever Made" and he describes how he messed up an entire website by pressing the wrong key.

 

It got me thinking about my mistakes and I know I have made quite a few. 

 

What is your worst mistake that you can think of? (Can be hardware or software based.)

 

A few of mine:

-Recently at work, there was folder in the email client we used with about 10,000 emails in there that were 'relevant'. Anyway, I tried to 'move' the folder but somehow it got deleted. 3 different I.T peeps tried to restore it but no success until some new grad manage to do it (thank God.)

-In high-school my friend deleted another friend's entire coursework as a prank (knowing it would go to the Recycle Bin and you can restore it.) When he went to the Recycle Bin to restore it, I clicked empty (thinking I could ctrl + z afterwards) to increase the prank, however it obviously didn't end well and the work was lost.

-Hardware mistake: When I built my first PC, I screwed the back screws of my motherboard way too hard and caused 5 out of 9 to break...luckily 4 was enough to keep it attached to the case.

I once removed the heatsink from my CPU for cleaning and put it back without removing the old thermal paste and reapplying new and always and surprisingly the system function well for more than one year then I upgraded the PC all together but I bet the CPU is still fine. 

It was a Haswell Core i3 4130 CPU.

[vinit6694skr]

37 minutes ago, Benji said:

@vinit6694skr Well, that's pretty much a common misconception that a system will overheat quickly without/with old thermal paste. If the thermal paste was high quality and it was still in its usual consistency, the thermal transfer will probably only be ever so slightly worse (a small single-digit difference in degrees Celsius) compared to re-applying it.

Stock Intel thermal paste. It was only a 2 core 4 thread Haswell but I did some CPU intensive music production work on it. The motherboard died in December 2019 so I upgraded to Ryzen instead of investing in the old Intel platform. Now I would still like to revive the PC again by purchasing a new Haswell era motherboard if I could find any.

[vinit6694skr]

1 minute ago, Benji said:

Yeah, finding (especially new) motherboards from that era can be quite challenging.

I have my friends prebuilt Lenovo AMD Sempron 145 based PC lying in my house with probably a dead motherboard too. 

[josephabbott07]

Changing my computer's file system. Lost everything!!!

[PeachGr]

On 6/3/2020 at 8:07 AM, Pickles - Lord of the Jar said:

Let's see here. I have been working professionally in computer repair since 2012... So, here it goes:

Lost customer data
Blew up a $500 board
Dropped a computer (I slipped on someone's salad dressing...)

 

Those are my top 3. 
 

In Greece they used to do format disks as the first solution for any problem, they did to after replacing a GPU back at 2000's. So lost data of a customer was not even s mistake

[Radium_Angel]

Back in the AT days of PCs, the power supply  cable that connected into the motherboard came as two different cables, colour coded to be sure, but you could plug them in wrong way 'round. Did that on my 1st pc, and blew every circuit in the house, as well as a dime sized hole in the mobo.

 

Ooops.

 

Oddly enough, after getting a new power supply, and plugging it in the right way, the mobo still worked. To this day this is why I love Asus hardware.

[DougIL56]

disconecting the power suply from the mother borad while power was on lol

[18358414]

When I was 12 I ran out of hard drive space on Windows XP which triggered Norton Antivirus to completely lock down the computer preventing any data recovery or anything (no even safe-mode).  That was before I learned about Linux. 

 

Bye-bye all my files! (though it was a family computer, so the family's files went bye-bye too)

[Godlygamer23]

On 6/2/2020 at 10:32 PM, butre said:

once was diagnosing system instability, pulled a ram stick while it was powered on.  that made it real unstable.

Was it still usable after putting the module back in, or was it effectively destroyed? 

[Qaasim Syed]

When I was younger I ran my pc without thermal paste and I didn’t realize until my computer started shutting down randomly. My pc got so hot my cpu wouldn’t work. I was able to return it since the person understood my mistake. Lesson learned ALWAYS apply thermal paste.

[butre]

On 6/5/2020 at 4:03 PM, Godlygamer23 said:

Was it still usable after putting the module back in, or was it effectively destroyed? 

needed a reboot but it mostly survived.  that one stick was fried, no longer detected by any computer, but using another module worked.

 

could've been a lot worse and a lot more expensive for me than it was.  

[TehDwonz]

On 8/24/2019 at 10:16 AM, shaz2sxy said:

Spent £250 on my first proper graphics card,

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

Similar, but I did this to an old Athlon (32bit) with exposed die. Forgot about it, and when I went to strip it all down years later to store the parts - RIP CPU. Ripped that sucker right in half. Never used epoxy again though!  

[Tan3l6]

Codegen 300W

[TrainFan475]

Not PC related, but when I was young and dumb (like 9 years old) I got a new controller for my small model railroad as a birthday gift, the one I had always wanted. I was so excited and impatient to set it up that I rammed the 3.5mm track plug into the io ethernet port when the track power was on. There was a zapping sound and smoke poured out of the controller. Needless to say the bachmann ez command never worked again.

[LOST TALE]

I waited (then 6 years) to upgrade my gtx 670 2g, even though I saved on not getting the 4gb model back then with the idea that I would upgrade before that would be obsolete. But the 670 was good enough to max my 75hz 1080p monitor forever (until games using more than 2gb of vram came out in 2017). There was Bf1 which I couldn't tell cuz my cpu was being killed.

 

I didn't buy gtx 1000s, rx 480 or 580 when they came out. Prices inflated from cryptos. and my gtx 670 DIED 5 months after the crypto bubble and retail gpu prices hadn't come down yet. Got new gpu at more than the launch price 2 years ago.

 

I didn't even buy new gpus when I knew I could profitably mine cryptos with them.

[Tan3l6]

Worst investement?

Used Gigabyte Vega64 - https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-RXVEGA64GAMING-OC-8GD#kf

Died in 6 months. Though it cost only 180€

[Statik]

I bought a FX-8320.

[Orika]

Idek what happened, what happened was i switched my power cable with another computer which is similar to mine and the PSU went *boom*

[steelo]

I didn't know better at the time, but bought a computer circa 2005 with a Pentium D...What a POS

[IStealYourDuck]

I bought a thermaltake view 27 case and installed my GPU vertically. Downside is, the GPU hugged the side of the window.. So I had to cut a hole into he acrylic and get a fine mesh in front of it so the GPU can safely draw some fresh air.

All.i wanted was a nice looking PC with a vertical GPU. Now all you can see is the top part of my GPU haha

[daveholland86]

Watching Linus Tech Tips, now I am water looping a laptop...

[TehDwonz]

3 minutes ago, daveholland86 said:

Watching Linus Tech Tips, now I am water looping a laptop...

RIP sanity!

[daveholland86]

12 hours ago, TehDwonz said:

RIP sanity!

Right!  I held off for about a month but I am just so curious what kind of results I can get and if I can get it to work.  I stress tested it and got my numbers last night.  Now I am just waiting for my Amazon package to show Thursday to begin.