Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[stianm3]

i want a cat 3:

you can get one of mine xD got 4 xD

[ekka]

I'm a fairly green (5 years) systems admin for a school and I've had some giant ones.

Half way through a semester I locked up the sharepoint based reporting system when it's database smashed into the 4GB limit on the version of MSSQL I was running.

Took me 2 weeks and a Microsoft certified professional to fix it.

All the while I've got 50 teachers burning down my office with every other tiny job they could find.

I don't smoke, but sometimes I can see the appeal.

[Eric1024]

ESD + $15,000 ( AUD ) custom PCI-E server card... Yeah, beat that.

Care to elaborate? :P

[Thrash911]

"Helping" my father with his DOS PC when I was much younger. I don't remember what the problem was, but it went something like this:

 

Me: "I can help you do that, dad."

Dad: "Are you sure? Nothing can happen to my files!"

Me: "Um, yes dad. I sit at my own computer every day. I know what I'm doing."

Dad: "Okay, then."

 

..aaaaaand, I ended up formatting the wrong partition.. :unsure: My dad ran an important business back then. He had A LOT of important and irreplaceable documents, and it was all gone in an instant! I have no idea if it had been possible to unformat or somehow recover it, but I did not know anything about that back then..

 

That was some dark times.. My dad was not my biggest fan for several months, and I really understand why..

[Torg73]

Buying a Dell laptop from the Dell website, worked for 3 weeks and then it was 13 weeks of hell dealing with 2 engineers and getting set to get `fixed`, end up getting my money back and just spent the money on my desktop computer (new gpu, 2 montiors, sound card, mouse).

 

Will never buy Dell again!

[TyagoDani]

I try to don't remember this but I had to share it.

 

6 months ago, my uncle asked me to format his laptop (Core i5, 8GB of RAM, GT 540M). I had his laptop backing up the importante stuff to my PC and at the same time I was preparing the USB flash drive to install Windows. My 8 year cousin knocks the door and enters with a glass of juice (you may now guess where this is going). I had the laptop in front of my desktop in the floor. My cousin went to play with me but I asked him to wait 5 minutes because I had to finish doing some stuff. Because he wasn't tall enought to put the glass on top of the desk, he opened the DVD drive and used it has a stand for the glass (I was so concentrated on the thing that I was doing that I didn't noticed that he did that). He left the room to do something and after about 30 seconds I heard glass breaking and the entire house runs out of power. I look down and I see the laptop covered in juice. I just had time to say two words: OH FUCK!!! I turn the power on again and come back to my room and the laptop was smoking. My uncle enters the room, sees the laptop smoking and covered in juice and says: Oh no, just please tell me that it was already backed up. It wasn't and he lost everything. And also, because of that, my DVD drive died. :(

[Poocannon]

That's back from my days on the amd athlon xp 2600+. Tried to connect my Ati Radeon 9800Pro to my CRT-TV. If I remember correctly, it actually worked for a few seconds and that just shut off. Fried the Graphics Card in the process :D

[samyG]

Accidently clicking the TPU option (auto overlock) on my asus z68 mobo when my cpu was already manually overlocked...

[Valinor]

I once decided, a few minutes into changing the file system on my external hard drive, that it would go much quicker if I cancelled it and removed some of the files from it first... Yeah, apparently not a good plan.

 

I also ruined a school PC once by going into the BIOS and setting all the RAM timings to their lowest allowed values. For some reason it didn't boot after that  :huh:. I think they eventually fixed it...

[Snickerzz]

Not knowing That the CPU cooler gets stuck on the CPU was my biggest mistake, I just ripped out The Cooler With The CPU Without opening the CPU Socket Lever... so yeah bey bey Athlon you served my well :P

i did the same thing with my phenom ik x4 >_< luckily it still worked :D

[shady-elite]

Was making a bootable usb installer, accidentally selected a partition on my hdd instead of the usb drive.

Lost ALL my music, movies and pirated software and what not.

Never been suicidal, but i know the feeling. -_-

[IVIeLt]

I built a system and tried to boot it up for the first time and it wouldn't detect my ssd, so I spent hours trying to find out why. Turns out I never even bothered putting the sata cable in

[Snickerzz]

Was making a bootable usb installer, accidentally selected a partition on my hdd instead of the usb drive.

Lost ALL my music, movies and pirated software and what not.

Never been suicidal, but i know the feeling. -_-

Remember the CoC

Admitting to being involved in the distribution of copyrighted software/media, cracks and product keys.

[AW3i]

*snip*

[shady-elite]

Reaching into my computer case to feel the temperature only to get my middle finger nail split in half by a top exhaust fan and having fan blades break of and shatter into the cpu heatsink fan... And then my unstable top fan shook my computer to death.... boy... that was stupid.... well i actually still stick my hand inside my new desktop to feel the airflow.... i broke the back exhaust fan. And i also nearly killed my fingers with corsair sp fan.............. lolol.

I once put my hand in my old server to feel the air flow, touched the ram with the tip of my finger, and BSOD.

On a humid winter morning with woolin socks on, yeahp, ram died. -_-

[ccaian]

Overclocking a i7960 to 3.8ghz on a stock cooler. Yes I know bla bla the tdp is 130 bla bla I use a stock cooler and I can't overclock. Predictably my whole computer when POOF.

[AirFie]

mine is dropping HDD when I just move all file into it.

and wrong deleting partition, that I was ready make empty partition.

[ProGearUk]

I guess mine would be beiing barefoot on a carpet and touching a motherboard when the power supply cable had been unplugged. This only broke an oem foxconn motherboard from a prebuilt hp i got in 2010 but still. This was in about april 2012 and i didnt have the confidence to replace the motherboard myself so I bought one and then got pc world to replace it and while they were at it i got them to put 16 gb of ram in that system that originally had 6. The new motherboard that I had to get along with its cpu and original 6gb of ram are now in my server running game servers for me and friends and also the server runs folding@home with a 7970 and a phenom II 1035T on beta work units for the gpu. 

[dep2ks]

mine was when the althons slot A CPU's came out and the didnt secure my power pack right if fell ripping the CPU off the motherboard kill the motherboard and CPU :(

[Hyp0xia]

My worst mistakes were when I built my first PC from scratch for my mother. I had that typical n00b notion that more is always better, so I stuck a Corsair AX1200 into her system that doesn't use more than 400 watts. Let's not forget that in the same build I threw in 24GB RAM or that, despite Sandy Bridge and LGA 1155 being out at the time, I went with Bloomfield and LGA 1366. In addition, I gave her two 1TB Seagate HDDs in RAID 0 rather than just getting a 2TB HDD (preferably Western Digital).

 

I was too much a n00b to have any right building such an expensive machine, but I'm proud to say I've come a long way since.

[MsTrMind]

wasn't me, I "work" as a "technician" for older people and go teach/fix some small problems.

I got called by a guy who told me he was an electrician and he cant figure out why his pc isn't booting.

I get there, he tells me what his pc got (pretty decent shizzle), reason his pc wasn't working properly is cus he cleaned his pc out and really PUSHED in the cpu, in the wrong way.

Bye Bye 500$ mobo+cpu lol

[FireFox]

wasn't me, I "work" as a "technician" for older people and go teach/fix some small problems.

I got called by a guy who told me he was an electrician and he cant figure out why his pc isn't booting.

I get there, he tells me what his pc got (pretty decent shizzle), reason his pc wasn't working properly is cus he cleaned his pc out and really PUSHED in the cpu, in the wrong way.

Bye Bye 500$ mobo+cpu lol

 

Even after putting notches on CPU's to aviod things like that, people still do it lol

[Mr. Chairman]

My worst mistakes were when I built my first PC from scratch for my mother. I had that typical n00b notion that more is always better, so I stuck a Corsair AX1200 into her system that doesn't use more than 400 watts. Let's not forget that in the same build I threw in 24GB RAM or that, despite Sandy Bridge and LGA 1155 being out at the time, I went with Bloomfield and LGA 1366. In addition, I gave her two 1TB Seagate HDDs in RAID 0 rather than just getting a 2TB HDD (preferably Western Digital).

 

I was too much a n00b to have any right building such an expensive machine, but I'm proud to say I've come a long way since.

And two Titans in SLI for HTPC! #overkillFTW

[Yoinkerman]

I broke some caps off a mobo in an matx case by pushing the cd rom drive in too far. Didn't work at all lol

[RDilux]

on my old monitor bumping up the Hz causing to break the seal!