Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[WillOfTheLand]

Using compressed air to clean out the fans and heatsinks on my media PC that files I had no other copies of on it including very dear pictures that can never be had again among a plethora of other things, without anchoring the fans in place so they wouldn't spin while the air passed through them.

 

Turns out if the fans spin without being actually powered they can build up a slight charge, enough to cause issues. Upon booting the PC after I was greeted by no display output and after leaving it for half a hour with still no display and hitting the power button to initiate shutdown it still hadn't shut down another hour and a half later, at which point I made the call to hold down the power button and do a hard power off, to which I was greeted by the sound of the HDD screeching as is grinded to a halt.

 

That said (and this was a complete idiot move) I wanted to see just how bad it was figuring I'd wrote off the drive, I powered it on again and surprisingly it booted up just fine.....It just somehow was lacking ethernet drivers, and upon trying to restart again it just failed to boot, not the drive in total, but windows itself would get part way and fail, even safe mode you would see loading up modules only to see it crash about 2/3 the way. And the drive didn't sound the greatest when this happened.

 

So it's been powered off and the media PC has just been sitting aside ever since, the drive at least isn't completely total'd and probably mostly recoverable as it's probably just a bad sector that was made even worse by what happened (the fact it booted once at all would indicate the heads are fine at least, and most of the platter), even enough that if was recovered and you ran startup repair on the clone it'd probably fix whatever is missing and boot, but data recovery is expensive, even from the cheapest companies, so it's just going to sit there as a reminder to stupidity. 

 

Always hold the fans still if you're cleaning with compressed air.

[HeyItsSam]

I decided to exist

[Gibs960]

5 years into PC building and I made the stupidest mistake I've ever made. 

 

Changing my case on Christmas Day, went to turn it on and there was nothing... so I thought it was my PSU cable because it had come loose, so I changed and still nothing... so I concluded it was the motherboard but then when I got the new motherboard it still wasn't working. I was so confused, it wasn't even turning on when I was shorting the pins on the mobo. 

 

It turns out I'd got the serial port and front panel port mixed up - both motherboards are fine, both cables are fine...

 

Time to flip that old motherboard on eBay (my new one has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in and is a better motherboard)...

 

So, what's the dumbest PC mistake you've made?

[WhitetailAni]

There's a thread for this already.
Don't know where though.

[trag1c]

I was drunk when I was putting a better motherboard in my AMD FX build when I plugged EPS connector for the CPU in backwards. There was apparently no over current protection in my psu because that thing kept shorting until I unplugged it. The connector and the receptacle were completely fused together in a charred heap. lol

[CommanderAlex]

It was my first computer, a Compaq SR Presario and it had the voltage switch on the back of the PSU for 115V/230V. Since I live in the US on 120V, I flipped the switch when it was off to 230V and tried turning on the computer. I heard a bang and the computer never turned on again. Had to get a replacement power supply. I was probably 8-9 years old when I did this. 

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, trag1c said:

I was drunk when I was putting a better motherboard in my AMD FX build when I plugged EPS connector for the CPU in backwards. There was apparently no over current protection in my psu because that thing kept shorting until I unplugged it. The connector and the receptacle were completely fused together in a charred heap. lol

Did your FX survive?

[SPARTAN VI]

This thread: 

(Edit) Threads merged

[trag1c]

1 minute ago, ragnarok0273 said:

Did your FX survive?

Surprisingly yes. That chip is still running in a cheap computer that I built for my buddy. Only the mobo/psu kicked it for obvious reasons lol

[Murasaki]

Putting the PSU in first. Learned the hard way.

[Yoinkerman]

I had a tiny case once and snapped caps off of the motherboard pushing a cd rom drive into the front 

[Quackers101]

trying to press down a bit too hard on the motherboard power cable, since it didn't quite look like it was in there.

It didn't fit quite right, so I put enough pressure to hear the motherboard snap.

It still works just fine, but something is a little broken...

[Gibs960]

Just now, Quackers101 said:

trying to press down a bit too hard on the motherboard power cable, since it didn't look quite in there.

It didn't fit quite right, so I put enough pressure to hear the motherboard snap.

It still works just fine, but something is a little broken...

I had that same problem with my new cable, at least it didn't break!

[Quackers101]

also I bet something stupid might happen with the BIOS when getting ryzen, just hope not to brick anything...

[AlexaKitty]

Buying a B550 Aorus Pro. Board died on me after setting one DRAM timing wrong. Corrupted its own BIOS just because I shut it down from the power button and not the PSU. Couldn't get it to boot. Had to return and get my money back. Bought a ROG Strix B550-F instead, this board has treated me way better. Went through 30 CMOS resets all related to tuning RAM timings with it and it's still alive and kickin'. As a sane board should be...

 

One other mistake would be not tightening my NH-D15 down completely, stopped when I heard the springs creak. The result? 93C in AIDA. Remounted the cooler, tightened it completely. The cooler sag was gone and the temps were 80C max in AIDA. Tighten your Noctuas please.

 

Another extremely stupid mistake I've done was buying a HP prebuilt back in 2018 when I didn't know anything about PCs... oh well, the i7-8700 and GTX 1060 from that PC is now sitting in a nice gaming rig I've built for my brother. Got an all new Ryzen 9 rig built in a Pure Base 500DX for myself.

 

Oh... and the last cherry on top of the cake... buying a Zotac Mini GPU. It was a RTX 2070 I bought back in December 2019 which lasted exactly one year. Why did I buy a mini version of an RTX card? Wanted an upgrade and the drive bay in my small HP prebuilt case wouldn't allow any other GPU. Well, the GPU died on me unexpectedly and one of the fans began to scream in December 2020. I guess that's what you get for buying Zotac. Had to sit through Christmas and new years without a functioning PC while I waited for my MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio I found at slightly above MSRP, which by the way, is a HUGE improvement both in temps and acoustics. Never saw this thing surpass 65C and 45% fan speed not even in FurMark while my Zotac GPU would reach 80C in GTA 5 at 70% fan speed...

[Quackers101]

9 minutes ago, AlexaKitty said:

 

Spoiler

Buying a B550 Aorus Pro. Board died on me after setting one DRAM timing wrong. Corrupted its own BIOS just because I shut it down from the power button and not the PSU. Couldn't get it to boot. Had to return and get my money back. Bought a ROG Strix B550-F instead, this board has treated me way better. Went through 30 CMOS resets all related to tuning RAM timings with it and it's still alive and kickin'. As a sane board should be...

 

One other mistake would be not tightening my NH-D15 down completely, stopped when I heard the springs creak. The result? 93C in AIDA. Remounted the cooler, tightened it completely. The cooler sag was gone and the temps were 80C max in AIDA. Tighten your Noctuas please.

 

Another extremely stupid mistake I've done was buying a HP prebuilt back in 2018 when I didn't know anything about PCs... oh well, the i7-8700 and GTX 1060 from that PC is now sitting in a nice gaming rig I've built for my brother.

 

Oh... and the last cherry on top of the cake... buying a Zotac Mini GPU. It was a RTX 2070 I bought back in December 2019 which lasted exactly one year. GPU died on me unexpectedly and one of the fans began to scream in December 2020. I guess that's what you get for buying Zotac. Had to sit through Christmas and new years without a functioning PC while I waited for my MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio I found at slightly above MSRP, which by the way, is a HUGE improvement both in temps and acoustics. Never saw this thing surpass 65C not even in FurMark while my Zotac GPU would reach 80C in GTA 5...

 

did you have any warranty that you used? kinda heard negative things about zotac cards, so I guess this becomes another reason to not buy them even on cheap.

pre-builts are becoming a bit better, more that are like custom builds. Some coolers just are horrible for mounting pressure

[AlexaKitty]

5 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

did you have any warranty that you used? kinda heard negative things about zotac cards, so I guess this becomes another reason to not buy them even on cheap.

pre-builts are becoming a bit better, more that are like custom builds. Some coolers just are horrible for mounting pressure

Nah, no warranty on it. Found it at $300, didn't expect one lol. Even still, I wanted an upgrade to Ampere and, a high end RTX 3070 partner model in stock close to MSRP? Heck yeah I'm picking that up. Got a 1440p165 monitor for myself too. ASUS TUF VG27AQ. Anyway, this was definitely my last Zotac card.

 

The prebuilt I had was a crappy HP Pavilion 580-199ng. The case was a baking oven. I took the CPU and GPU out of there and made my little brother a nice gaming rig with a CX 650 PSU in a Pure Base 500 case.

 

Noctua coolers are great for mounting pressure and spreading paste from what I've seen, applied a single dot of NT-H2 in the middle of my Ryzen when everybody recommends an X or 5 dots, and it still spread across the entire CPU. Just tighten Noctua coolers down until you can't turn the screw anymore and you're good. Noctua designed the screws to stop - you can't overtighten.

[WkdPaul]

* threads merged *

[SpikeSpiegel]

Trying to upgrade my Dell Dimension 3000 with different PCI Video Cards trying to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  I tried a GeForce FX5200, 6200 OC, and finally a GeForce 8400GS then I finally got a AM3 system.

[berhd]

My first build I didn't screw my CPU cooler on fully so that ended well...

[The_Other_Cody]

Getting into PC building in general. Just like car guys, everything is cool and expensive. Who can be bothered to eat when you spend all your money on a 3080!

[Rocketdog2112]

On 1/17/2013 at 11:52 AM, 7heArchitect said:

i bought an OEM machine.

$700.

2006.

You got out cheap considering Dell was just coming out with the XPS 700 series desktops that started out just under $4000...

[FakeNSA]

I was replacing a power supply at work, and I switched out an automatically switching unit for one that had a 120/240v switch.

Unfortunately, this was an unlabeled 240v line that still ended in a standard female connector, and we experienced some fun blue smoke.

Thankfully the circuit blew, and we only cooked the power supply (and I didn't get fired, which is also a win).

[RTX 3090]

On 10/12/2020 at 12:18 PM, SpiderMan said:

no spacebar whenever I hit the spacebar...lets just say, it was a $130 mistake and broke a diode that I can't repair. 

You can solder a new switch in. Soldering iron is approx $5 from local hardware store and a switch is aprox $1 from eBay

[CommanderAlex]

Just now, RTX 3090 said:

You can solder a new switch in. Soldering iron is approx $5 from local hardware store and a switch is aprox $1 from eBay

I no longer have that computer haha. That was like 2009. The second power supply lasted for another 3 years and something went in the computer. After that, we replaced the whole computer with an HP prebuilt.