embarrassing moments from your early techie days

[JAW96]

Come on we all have them. Those mistakes from the pre-enlightenment days, before we had a grasp of basic concept

 

for me it was the complete lack of understanding what motherboard chipsets were (I actually use to think that they were like integrated graphics) the first mobo I ordered had a 960, which now I know had no hope of running my 8350, but what actually made me return it was the fact it was the wrong size (it was micro ATX I wanted ATX) and I happen to see a ATX one that fit into my price budget and now that is the mobo I happen to use

[Wiflare]

Most of my build.
Listed in my profile.

[Enderman]

I bought black vengeance LP ram, and then i discovered there was a white edition which would have fit my colour scheme way better

I will regret this until I buy some dominator platinums, in which case I will paint the aluminum bar white.

[Enderman]

Most of my build.

Listed in my profile.

Aww poor guy...

I feel sorry for your PC :C

[Anthony10]

Most of my build.

Listed in my profile.

I think your keyboard costs more than your GPU and CPU combined

[JAW96]

Most of my build.

Listed in my profile.

that is a very... odd mismatch of parts

[TheNinjaNextDor]

I bought an Antec 1200 V3.

[JAW96]

Most of my build.

Listed in my profile.

I just wanted to bring attention to this

[rambi36]

I was a mac and apple fanboy and i worshiped steve jobs

[Wiflare]

I just wanted to bring attention to this

On the bright side, it only cost <$450, not including the keyboard or monitor.

[JAW96]

On the bright side, it only cost <$450, not including the keyboard or monitor.

I guess that is a bonus and I just notice that you live in Michigan I now that you mention it there are a oddly large number of people from Michigan and Canada here 

[JAW96]

Me thinking my iMac was fast. It ran Minecraft at a blistering 60FPS. Then I turned up the render distance and installed shaders. 'Nuff said.

I had a friend install shaders in minecraft, I don't get the point of doing that with that game

[helping]

Most of my build.

Listed in my profile.

 

holy balls why

[JAW96]

 

holy balls why

I like how he has 8gb of RAM, like it would ever be able to handle anything that required 8gb of RAM

[Jimbo Slice]

About a week ago, I was connecting new fans to my Kraken x60. I was working on the floor with poor lighting. Cable management in this condition gets frustrating easily, not realizing I connected the 3 pin fan into a 4 pin motherboard fan header...BUT I missed the grounding pin... As I go to flick on the PSU, a loud pop and puff of smoke come from the CPU area. There goes my MOBO and AIO water cooler. 3 hours of cable management goes down the drain as I tear it all apart.

[BenestoTech]

Probably when I upgraded a 2002 HP Pavilion a562n by giving it 2GB ram instead of 512MB. I wanted to have a 'Gaming PC' because Portal 2 said it needed a 3GHz CPU and at least 2 GB RAM. I knew nothing about graphics cards. Waste of money. That would be my best mistake. I was like 10 don't judge me

[SkilledRebuilds]

30 Years ago..... I knew nothing!!!!!

 

Was Given a 486 DX4-100Mhz, the Ultimate beast! (Not that I knew it, I had seen DX2-66Mhz before, but not 100Mhz DX4's)

Two days later, went to my uncles and he was playing Sega rally on his P166Mhz (his higher speed 166Mhz allowed use of Hi-Res 640x480 over the 320x240 default I had to use)

Few weeks went by, and using BBS's to talk to likeminded fellows, I had learned a thing or two about dip switches

 

Few days later

 

486 DX4-120Mhz!!!!!

The FPU on this CPU was a beast, and was IMO faster than Intel's at the time, because my little 20Mhz overclock had me surpassing my brothers Pentium 133Mhz in performance across a few noticeable titles.

So I took it to my uncles, while he could get what looked like 60fps @ 640x480 I could also now use 640x480 and maintain playability (although occasional stutters)

 

Before when my CPU was @ 100Mhz, 640x480 stuttered a lot more in SegaRally, Mod files (audio) loaded a little slower, not a lot was improved, but what I did use, was faster.

The embarrassing moment is where you ask?

 

I set a Bios PW, keep in mind I didn't know how to reset the bios.

Yep, I also forgot the PW.. rendering the machine useless for about three days while trying to find a fix (internet 30 years ago, you wish, BBS were the shit)

 

 

This is what started my Tech-enthusiasm, thanks my my trusty 486 DX120Mhz and my competitive uncle.

I'd actually like to go back and "OC 2 Death" another 486DX, maybe closer to 150-180Mhz or hope to with some new age aftermarket cooling... I could Build another Carmageddon box

[Guest]

Let's see...

 

What about me allowing my dad to populate 3 DIMM slots on the 915G motherboard with a 256MB, 256MB and a 512MB module and thinking it would make the computer faster? Hmmm?

 

Thinking the XPS 8500 I was stuck with for 2 years afterwards was a fantastic deal at the time.

 

Buying a Z77 Extreme3 because it looked cool, I thought its 8-phase VRM was god until when I discovered this http://www.sinhardware.com/images/vrmlist.png and realized that they were D-Pak

 

Buying the SSD 530 at such a high price even after pricematching because I didn't know any better, or any other SSDs.

[bmxtricky5]

I added 8gb of ram to my macbook to get more fps in Minecraft.

[elecxonica]

I thought HP was good... Yeah no.

[lani100]

I bought a Alienware it was cheap for the specs but damh that thing sucked.

I also bought a high end AMD cpu from 2011 in 2013 -____-

[Imaginaerum]

I put my first computer together on carpet.

 

It still works fine today! Except I've made changes which were all on wood. Besides that I almost didn't put on thermal paste or use motherboard stand-offs until after I had the motherboard screwed into the case. I figured it out before turning it on.

[Hyp0xia]

I put a 1200-watt power supply unit in my mother's Facebook machine.

[Stadiz]

using different ram sizes after that everything went fine

[nothingspecial]

Hotplugged a molex into a hard drive. PRETTY SPARKS! Dead drive