Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[lions240]

I installed Linux onto my system, and after a couple of days i decided that i did not like linux and that i wanted to go back to windows. so all i did was pop in a ubuntu live disk and deleted the ubuntu partition. And when i turned my computer back on absolutlly nothing happened, and it turned out that i deleted grub so there was no boot loader.

[Blinky]

I let my mother use my comp

[Snickerzz]

I let my mother use my comp

omg XDDD

[IPCharger]

I tried to overclock my old notebock for the first time and all go wrong when I put the clock of a dual core to 6GHz

LOL a laptop CPU at 6GHz haha

[WoodenMarker]

I knocked over a Noctua NH-D14 onto my toe

[rossi94]

Primed my 3930K @ 5.0 ghz - 24h - dat_energycosts

[Marc030]

^{Fixing a computer for a family member. God i regret that lol i'm now the go to guy for everyone and everybody they know.}

[Helly]

worst i can think of is trying to replace the cooling of my radeon 9700 pro. had this annoying fin on the back for cooling which had to go.... also a lot of important parts all around it... it was pretty much glued on there and i couldn't get it off. took a screwdriver and put it under the fin but on top of 1 of the important parts... little pressure and a very soft crack later the fin was off but the part was cracked in half. Still put on the cooler and tried the card.. image was full of artifacts.. card unusable :( fell bad for a long time was my first really expensive computer part (cost me around 470 euros at the time) lucky for me i did the replacing years later when i already had a new pc :P. tried the card again little while ago.. its completely dead now..

[Snickerzz]

This happened yesterday.

I was replacing the stock cooler on my phenom ii x4 965BE with a hyper 212 evo. I had never had to apply thermal grease because the stock cooler comes with it pre applied. Anyways i was taking the stock cooler off so i could clean the cpu, i had unhinged it and pulled up gently, it wouldn't move. So i tried twisting it and it still would move so applied more force than i should have and ended up ripping the cpu from the locked socket with the cpu glued to the cooler. I had to pry it off luckily not bending any pins. The stock thermal paste was like freakin cement >_<. So i clean the cpu and cooler the put the cpu back into the mobo (after having to remove it because the mobo mounting holes for a cooling bracket didn't line up with the hole in the mobo tray) and apparently my interpretation of a pea sized dot of thermal paste is different than everyones else's xD i had put to much and it started oozing from the sides which i didn't want, so i took the cooler off and took the cpu how so it would be easier to clean, while doing that i had managed to get thermal paste on the cpu pins so i spent some 20 minutes with a Q tip cleaning the pins (it was only about 10 affected) and not knowing if the thermal grease (which came with the cooler) was conductive or not worried me to death XD so i clean the cpu and 212 for a second time now, put a SMALL pea sized dot of thermal grease on the cpu and got the fan mounted. I closed the case and got all my stuff plugged back in and it booted up. The fan is super quiet now i hardly know its there as apposed to my stock one which sounded like a vacuum cleaner XD

[Deznait]

Just a couple days ago, I was going to change the heatsink of my CPU, as it was making a lot of noise and not cooling well. When I was going to mount the backplate, I saw that it already had one. Only one problem: it was GLUED to the mobo. So, in a excelent display of human intelligence, I tried to remove it with a screwdriver wrapped in some clothes. Result: Mobo scratched, and useless, because the scratches were right in the circuit to the memory.

 

Not a smart move.

[Overl0rd]

I accidentally pressed the auto-overclock feature on my P8Z68-V and saved it.....3 months later came to realise that my i7 2600k was running at 4.65 GHz o.o Luckily I have a good air cooler, so it didn't peak above 70C and no harm was caused....

 

Ps: I was even more surprised that it had been stable all along, didn't have a single bsod.

[Calavera]

Putting Windows 7 on my new SSD via my dads PC whilst he said I couldn't touch his PC... next morning his HDD was broken with all the files on it, he was ... not amused... quite mad actually, really angry when I think about it... yes.  :unsure:

[Snickerzz]

Just a couple days ago, I was going to change the heatsink of my CPU, as it was making a lot of noise and not cooling well. When I was going to mount the backplate, I saw that it already had one. Only one problem: it was GLUED to the mobo. So, in a excelent display of human intelligence, I tried to remove it with a screwdriver wrapped in some clothes. Result: Mobo scratched, and useless, because the scratches were right in the circuit to the memory.

 

Not a smart move.

was that backplate already glued on by the factory? O.o

[Snickerzz]

Putting Windows 7 on my new SSD via my dads PC whilst he said I couldn't touch his PC... next morning his HDD was broken with all the files on it, he was ... not amused... quite mad actually, really angry when I think about it... yes.  :unsure:

what did you do? format your dads hdd by accident? 

[rossi94]

I accidentally pressed the auto-overclock feature on my P8Z68-V and saved it.....3 months later came to realise that my i7 2600k was running at 4.65 GHz o.o Luckily I have a good air cooler, so it didn't peak above 70C and no harm was caused....

 

Ps: I was even more surprised that it had been stable all along, didn't have a single bsod.

 

Better watch out with autooverclocking the ASUS vcores sometimes are pretty beasty.

[.Im#NuMBeR1]

Erm...a few years ago I was so distracted with things around me when re-building this current PC from cleaning the whole system out, I forgot to connect my CPU radiator fan connector to the CPU_FAN connector on my motherboard and started booting the system up... :P Luckily, I noticed my error and immediately shutdown the system to connect it. Also luckily the CPU temperature didn't even increase very much to a hazardous point. It only increased about 3-4 degrees from 25'C. So, I'd say 29-30'C max temperature before turning the system off to connect the fans. :lol:

[Overl0rd]

Better watch out with autooverclocking the ASUS vcores sometimes are pretty beasty.

Was not bad actually, 1.3Vcore @ 4.65GHz (could have been lower ofcourse).

[rossi94]

That's alright .. mate had a 3820 running @ 1,37 vcore and 4,6 ghz that was too much in my opp, My 3930K made 4,8 @ 1,35 vcore.

[Sklomp]

Overclocking the GPU of my laptop, which wasn't supported by any program, so I wrote a little hack for that. It did improve the performance quite a lot, but now it is very unstable. It now needs to run about 50mhz below stock and have a really agressive fancurve. temps above 50C ar enough to get a nice green and flikkering screen. I think I just destroyed the chip because it never hitted thermal limit.

 

Also my dad did something wrong. He connected his laptop using HDMI to our TV, but somehow he managed to set the hz of the HDMI output so high that he fried his laptop, had a thermal lockup and now has a destroyed unreplacable bios battery, unstable ram, unstable gpu and a quickly overheating laptop.

 

 

Both laptops are Acer, i guess that is the problem because I know other people with Acer laptops who hit the thermal limit while browsing... Guess they use crap thermal paste that needs to be replaced after 2 years.

[Deznait]

was that backplate already glued on by the factory? O.o

Yep, it was. It's a 6 year old Dell, so no surprises really. But had to spend 60€ more to buy a new 775 ddr2 mobo so I can use the computer while I upgrade.

[Nertballs]

reinstalling windows, forgetting that my save files were on the C, and not D drive...

[AMICLG]

I tried using a 32-bit WIN 7 cd to repair my PC when I have a 64-bit version installed..... It deleted the boot loader file causing me to lose all of my data and forcing me to reinstall win 7

You could have put in the windows recovery disc and done bootrec /fixboot lol

[LDX]

not really Computing, but hardware

 

I was so excited cause i Got a Pentium 3 PC, like 12 years ago

with an old CRT monitor, I tested the PC in the store

 

but then at home the screen was black, I thought it was a scam

 

I tried to fix for a couple hoursand I was almost ready to return the PC 

and i realized it was the "Contrast" knob Wheel

 

Felt like the dummest person on earth

[joelthezombie15]

I have no idea, was dead after i finished cleaning :P

static maybe. vacuums have alot of static build up sometimes

[Guest]

My first build nothing would work, it would boot but nothing would come on screen.

 

 

I sent motherboard back, got my CMOS replaced after much bitching etc.

 

Turns out in the end I found out I forgot to put in the CPU power.