Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[ThyNameisWAR]

1.2 erasing a TB of data permenantly

2..killing a motherboard

[Chivpcgamer]

How about falling for ridiculously awesome Steam sale prices at every single one of their big sales?

[GoncaloMoreno]

buying a ps3

[Chivpcgamer]

Yes i spend so much money during steam sales thinking that im saving, but actually im spending loads on games i wouldnt normally buy. Steam is so clever!

[Hoppa]

I manually set my graphics card fan to a low speed to reduce noise.

Later that day i decided to play a game, forgetting to put it back on auto.

I had headphones on so i couldn't hear the beeping on my motherboard of overheating.

When my game went to a loading screen i heard the beep.

It was just shy of 110 degrees c

[Cheesebaron]

Back in the good old Socket A days I was pressuring an Athlon Mobile CPU a bit too much. It was pretty well cooled and the temps were OK, but I think I gave it a bit too much volt, and it said poof. After dismounting the Heat-sink there was a very nice little hole in the die about the size of a pin head. What was previously in the hole was now sitting on the heat sink in stuck to the thermal paste. :D

[Godlygamer23]

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. :(

I've set a rule in my house when it comes to my rig. Do not touch.

[Godlygamer23]

I manually set my graphics card fan to a low speed to reduce noise.

Later that day i decided to play a game, forgetting to put it back on auto.

I had headphones on so i couldn't hear the beeping on my motherboard of overheating.

When my game went to a loading screen i heard the beep.

It was just shy of 110 degrees c

I leave my cards at 40% for fan speeds. I was running folding@home the one time, and my second GPU hit 100 degrees C.

[wheresthemead]

I semi-bricked my phone when flashing to a custom ROM. Took an hour to fix it. This was when my SO was in basic training and happened about 3 hours before she would be given her phone and allowed to call family. It was a harrowing hour.

[laurenceeyre]

Plugging a hard drive into a undervolted molex

[pants18]

the internal mobo battery had died in an old dell laptop of mine so i had to replace it. turns out that you had to disassemble the entire laptop to get to the internal battery. so i removed the keyboard and gutted it from the inside (which was dumb since the battery turned out to be on the other side of the mobo). after gutting most of it, i could access the front of the mobo but it was still screwed in. being the lazy person i am, i decided to try and just lift the mobo pcb without unscrewing it all the way to access the dead battery in the other side. long story short, the pcb snapped in half. and since computer was so old and junk, it wasnt really worth it to replace the mobo.

[ekka]

working on a friends pc and after putting in some new memory and grachics card , carefuly plug in the power, nothing 

gripped the case to firmly pushin the power lead , it was loose :D

turned it back on

 

POP....

 

had moved the power supply voltage slider from 230 (Aus req) to 115

Every pops a power supply at least once by doing this.

Thank god they started automatically detecting what was being supplied.

[the_hardware_guy]

THis is more just a idiot move on my part I got an ssd over the summer add it to my system and then re cut it so that the ssd will be my boot device. THat process was all good then put it at my desk and plug in my two monitors and my tv then turn on my computer. Black screen on my desktop monitors. I tried numerous troubleshooting steps rma'd my graphics card evga gtx 560 1gb superclocked and was given a gtx 2gb superclocked because they ran out of 1 gigs. Still didn't work so I gave up and used my 1500 dollar computer with no graphics drivers (worked without them installed). I had spoken to nvidia, microsoft, and evga there was no luck for me. A few sad months later with no gaming school ends for christmas break and I decide to ry one last ditch effort. Reinstall the driver and have the tv on this time. It worked turned out the card was favoring the tv output which id ten feet away from me and off 90% of the time. 8 months I suffered because of the stupidest thing possible.  

[Excon]

When i ordered the parts to my computer, I didn't realize I forgot to order ram until I was ready to put it in.

[Snickerzz]

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

people dont always see the notches or dont even know about them

[Rommer2258]

i had my computer on a unstable table, and the table broke and the shock of that killed all my hardrives

[karlzhao314]

Not knowing that thermal compound was a necessity.

Although let me talk about someone else I know. I checked his computer's temps and his CPU was almost 90, so I told him the temps were too high. When I leave, he starts poking around the system and touches the heatsink, which was pretty hot, as you can imagine. Thinking that his heatsink was causing the high temps, he completely removes it and tries to boot without one. Somehow, the system got past the BIOS and got into Windows before his CPU completely fried.

[Hyp0xia]

Not knowing that thermal compound was a necessity.

Although let me talk about someone else I know. I checked his computer's temps and his CPU was almost 90, so I told him the temps were too high. When I leave, he starts poking around the system and touches the heatsink, which was pretty hot, as you can imagine. Thinking that his heatsink was causing the high temps, he completely removes it and tries to boot without one. Somehow, the system got past the BIOS and got into Windows before his CPU completely fried.

Tell that to Hewlett-Packard. I was cleaning up my mother's old Hewlett-Packard µATX system only to discover that thermal interface material had never been applied to the CPU cooler. All is well since I slathered on some Xigmatek PTI-G4512.

[Godlygamer23]

Not knowing that thermal compound was a necessity.

Although let me talk about someone else I know. I checked his computer's temps and his CPU was almost 90, so I told him the temps were too high. When I leave, he starts poking around the system and touches the heatsink, which was pretty hot, as you can imagine. Thinking that his heatsink was causing the high temps, he completely removes it and tries to boot without one. Somehow, the system got past the BIOS and got into Windows before his CPU completely fried.

Poor CPU.

[Rommer2258]

i  had my vivo-book in my truck when i took a corner to fast and hoped the curve with some wheel spin and my laptop went out the window but landed in the bed of the truck and it was destroyed. i wish it was something cool like i forgot the thermal compound on my 680 water block

[-ism]

I wouldn't say this is my biggest blunder ever, but I got my Corsair link cable stuck in between some metal contacts coming out of the back of my mobo and my case. Took literally 30 minutes to un-lodge it and the entire time I was afraid I was going to snap the cable in half.

 

I think my biggest blunder was accidentally spilling water on top of a school computer. Nobody ever knew it was me though. 

[DaFirnz]

The first computer I ever assembled, when I installed the cpu cooler apparently one of the wires was in the way of the fan. After less than a minute if would just restart. Took a few reboots but soon figured it out.

[kirashi]

 

 

kirashi, on 06 May 2013 - 7:44 PM, said:

Ironically, getting a power cable from the PSU stuck in its' own fan... The PSU committed suicide.

 

 

wut

 

 

 

 

 

What I meant is I killed the power supply with one of its' own power cables. Choked itself essentially.

[EmilD]

I was working on a client's database, and I was going to change one of the users password.

UPDATE users SET password = md5('pass@2212')

WAIT, OH SHIT

 

For the non-sql people: I changed everyones password to 'pass@2212'... 

 

Luckily for me they had a backup, that was only a couple of days old.

[KIngAbdulla]

while assembling my first pc 3 years ago the same one which I use currently I was super cautious with my new(at that time) Core i5-750 I used very light pressure while clipping on the heat sink and it didn't work the next day I took it to the store I bought it from and he just installed the heat sink again applying more pressure and it worked