What did you do to your computer that gave you a heart attack?

[Morris_lee_9116]

when i was a kid i always panic when game go full screen, because i have no way to close it(no top bar)

[CrowTheRobot]

Went to change my Ryzen 5 3600X from a stock cooler to a Corsair AIO, and didn't think to wiggle the cooler to break the seal made by the thermal compound.  Pulled the CPU right out of the socket along with the cooler, and bent some pins.  Then went to fix it with a credit card like I've seen a lot of tech Youtubers do, and at least 2-3 pins straight up fell off.  Naturally, this was in 2021 when there was a CPU shortage, so at the time it cost more on Newegg to buy a 3600X than to get a 3700X, and even then the 3700X at MSRP was around $300.  Thankfully my wife was of the mentality that having an entirely non-functional PC sitting around was a waste, so she had no issue with me doing what I needed to do to get it up and running again.

[Karthanon]

13 hours ago, Erioch said:

But lunch is in my top 3 meals of the day.

My employer likes it when I don't take lunch breaks. Who would've guessed?

[DadT3ch]

In college I was reformatting my desktop.  I had 2 HDDs in place, one for just general data dumping and the other was the OS and games.  I was so sure I knew which one was which.  I did not.

I don't know why but I let myself get all the way to the drive partition portion of the windows install.  I THINK what happened was I blew away the partition and then saw how it allocated the free space.  Knowing how windows displays separate drives and partitions, I instantly knew something was wrong and my heart sank.  Sure enough, I deleted the wrong drive's data partition.

Thankfully I was able to use EASUS recovery and get back all of the data.  I unplugged the drive during my next attempt.

[Issac Zachary]

The other day I got some software I had ordered on Amazon. However, after trying to open the installer I got the dreaded "Randsomware" notification. I even got emails from Microsoft. I tried quarantining it but it kept coming right back.

 

So I deleted everything on the computer and on my OneDrive (in case the infection was uploaded to the cloud) and reinstalled Windows. Then I popped out my backup hard drive and put all the files back. I am missing a couple changes on some files since I was working on those after I backed up my computer. But other than that things are back to normal.

[Milesqqw2]

1 hour ago, Issac Zachary said:

The other day I got some software I had ordered on Amazon. However, after trying to open the installer I got the dreaded "Randsomware" notification. I even got emails from Microsoft. I tried quarantining it but it kept coming right back.

 

So I deleted everything on the computer and on my OneDrive (in case the infection was uploaded to the cloud) and reinstalled Windows. Then I popped out my backup hard drive and put all the files back. I am missing a couple changes on some files since I was working on those after I backed up my computer. But other than that things are back to normal.

Ransomware is the word of anything that can infect your computer. BY FAR! Unless you are prepared, then it is just “ope I guess I that I need to wipe and reinstall all of my files, no big deal.”

[bluessorrow]

5 hours ago, DadT3ch said:

In college I was reformatting my desktop.  I had 2 HDDs in place, one for just general data dumping and the other was the OS and games.  I was so sure I knew which one was which.  I did not.

I don't know why but I let myself get all the way to the drive partition portion of the windows install.  I THINK what happened was I blew away the partition and then saw how it allocated the free space.  Knowing how windows displays separate drives and partitions, I instantly knew something was wrong and my heart sank.  Sure enough, I deleted the wrong drive's data partition.

Thankfully I was able to use EASUS recovery and get back all of the data.  I unplugged the drive during my next attempt.

Ditto, I accidentally wiped the drive that has ALL our family photos when using GHOST to restore the windows when I was young, and I was not able to recover any of them because I didn't know any better.

 

It happened around 15 years ago, but I till remember that feeling of heart sink as it just happened, as that was probably the closest I had from suicidal thought..  Right now I either unplugged extra drive, or will be checking at least 3 times to ensure that I got the correct drive.

[TheDutchGinger]

When trying to open my school laptop i accidentaly broke off all the plastic pieces that click it into place never told anyone because i did it in secret and if school knew they would stop the warranty.

 

I wanted to replace the ssd in the laptop as 250gb isn't close to enough for the type of programs that were needed on it and when trying to replace it i forgot to disconnect the battery and when i accidentaly touched the board with a screwdriver and it created sparks.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Several years ago I was using my parents' Dell D830 laptop.  Was leaning with my elbow on it below the keyboard next to the trackpad.
Heard this nasty screeching sound, and the computer froze up.  (I don't remember if I had to force power it off from that, or if it blue screened.)

 

Apparently I was leaning so heavily on it that I'm thinking I somehow managed to slow or stop the spindle motor on the hard drive (it didn't have an SSD at the time).

Luckily I didn't cause a head crash, as it rebooted fine and the data was all fine.


Also in the early 2000s or so, my name on Planet Fortress forums was [<0FPS]FriedVideoCard ....
We had an ATI All-In-Wonder card that my brother had originally bought in 1997.  I'd been doing a bit of experimenting with video capture from VHS and similar tapes.  One time, I was hooking it up, and there was a pop and some smoke, and we no longer had a graphics card.  Had to pop in an older low-end card, like a Trident 9685 or some other Super VGA card from the mid 1990s, so we'd have video out, but that ended my gaming for a while.

Even with that ATI card, I don't think I ever got out of single-digit fps at 320x240, lowest settings, software mode in Half-Life 1 / Team Fortress Classic, even with my face embedded in a textureless wall on an empty server.  That, combiend with the fact that we only had dial-up internet at the time, meant I pretty much exclusively played as an engineer building sentry guns.
Then when I've seen "Can it run Crysis?" ... I imagine that when Crysis came out, its performance on the top-end GPU configs of the day (like 3-way SLI GeForce 8800 Ultra or 4-way Crossfire Radeon HD 2900 XT) would, at best, have maybe matched what my ATI AIW got in HL/TFC. 

 

 

  

On 12/7/2023 at 1:38 PM, bluessorrow said:

Ditto, I accidentally wiped the drive that has ALL our family photos when using GHOST to restore the windows when I was young, and I was not able to recover any of them because I didn't know any better.

 

It happened around 15 years ago, but I till remember that feeling of heart sink as it just happened, as that was probably the closest I had from suicidal thought..  Right now I either unplugged extra drive, or will be checking at least 3 times to ensure that I got the correct drive.

 

That reminds me, several years ago I was wanting to back up my dad's laptop HDD (500GB) to one of my desktop HDDs (2TB).  I didn't actually have a working desktop at the time, so had to use an external enclosure hooked up to the laptop.

Anyway, I first shrunk the partition that was already on there to make room for cloning from the 500GB drive, as I was only using maybe about 1 to 1.2 TB of space. 

Then, I don't remember if I actually go so far as to copy the partition (I think I used GParted in Linux), but at some point, the drive ended up coming up RAW with the data inaccessible. 

I had to shelve the drive for a few years, as I didn't have a second or third drive to clone and atttempt recovery for a while.   I knew enough to not use it at all, to increase my chances of possible recovery when I did have extra drives and a way to hook them up simultaneously, to attempt data recovery.  (Also I held out hope that I could recover it because -- there was part of the process that I forget exactly what I told it to do, except that it was supposed to affect the entire hard drive, and it only took a few seconds to do, whereas writing the entire drive would take at least a few hours or so.  Before, the data was fine, after, it was inaccessible.)

And I'm still not sure, even 10+ years later, if I managed to get everything, some of it did come back, but some of it didn't remember any folder structure or filenames when doing the recovery.  I was using TestDisk and PhotoRec, I think.

[Average Nerd]

On my previous laptop, I ended the "Explorer" task in task manager out of curiosity and the taskbar, start menu and desktop shortcuts as well as all opened programs immediately disappeared, and I couldn't do anything anymore except move the cursor around.

After a forced reboot everything was fine, but I got quite the scare because I thought I just bricked a 1100€ laptop.

[Spindel]

To many things over the years to remember. But here are some that stand out. 

 

An old IDE HDD, the molex connector was so tightly stuck so I had to put some effort in getting it out of the HDD. When it finally gave in I smashed the HDD full force into a cast iron radiator. Chipped the paint both on the radiator and the HDD but the HDD did work after this so non of my 100 MB of data (it was a 125 MB drive, and no it's not a typo it was MB) was lost fortunately. 

 

This one I've mentioned in other threads. I dropped the heat sink on my Athlon Thunderbird, for those who don't know these CPUs where bare die, I chipped the corner of the die and the CPU was dead. 

 

Pressuring CPUs with FSB overclocking way to far, luckily never killed anything doing this. Unlike today there were no safeties in CPUs. Frying them with to aggressive jumper/dip switch settings was a real possibility.

 

 

[cooky560]

About 20 years ago, I was new to this whole PC building malarky, and I didn't understand what spaces were for, I bolted the motherboard directly to the case. Nothing turned on, and I had a bit of a panic attack, thankfully by some miracle adding the spacers the system then POSTed.

[Rarity]

pc got virus/trojan infected after downloading a program online .. luckily managed to remove the damn thing before it caused any of the system files to be screwed up,after that always started scanning downloads no matter where thier from . 

[atarione]

in about 99? I killed my P3 1Ghz CPU... still not exactly sure how, but it was dead.. got the store to exchange it... by playing dumb and being nice?   which was nice as it was a $400~ cpu 25~almost years ago.     This is still (touchwood) the only cpu I have ever personally killed.     With many dozens of builds still the only CPU damaged..

 

my machine was a beast p3 1Ghz (rip 1st one.. well and 2nd one now) \ Asus CUSL2-C  \ 256GB \ origionally a TNT video card and later GF3 Ti 200 and a 20GB harddrive, well and CD-RW drive and floppy and some antec power supply in a glorious enlight beige case (that i honestly sort of still like and wish I had one still? ..but airflow would SUCK with modern hardware.)  Similar to below, this style of enlight case was the "best" looking of the 90s beige mid towers ...you heard me.

 

[Milesqqw2]

On 12/12/2023 at 11:41 AM, Rarity said:

pc got virus/trojan infected after downloading a program online .. luckily managed to remove the damn thing before it caused any of the system files to be screwed up,after that always started scanning downloads no matter where thier from . 

Same think happens to me. Mabel I shouldn’t have downloaded the thing labeled “made by hackers, for hackers” and given it system access, is that normal for a pycharm theme? Might not even been that, just assuming because it was the last thing I downloaded before my antivirus detected it.

[AudiTTFan]

My grandma brought me her circa-2010 HP ProBook to fix up in mid-2021, since it had started getting awfully slow, and would turn back on as soon as it finished shutting off (for some reason the BIOS wasn't set to UEFI, so the Fast Startup feature on W10 was causing that.)

Set the BIOS to UEFI by disabling the CSM, threw in a Samsung 860 EVO SSD, and... immediately dropped the laptop on a 20ft staircase, watching in horror as it rolled to the bottom.
Thankfully the old HP ProBooks were built like tanks and the stairs were carpeted, so the computer came out unharmed. The wall at the bottom of the staircase, however, didn't fare nearly as well. It ended up with such a huge dent that we had to install a whole new sheet of drywall.