Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

The Northbridge heatsink mount on my socket 478 board (You remember the Pentium 4 HT chip? Yea those got hot) completely failed and the entire heat sink basically fell out without me noticing. Well I eventually did when the Northbridge burnt out.

[vXhanz]

Worst computer problem? The human interface. Trying to help someone troubleshoot over the phone when they are panicking and you can hear them clicking away on the mouse.

[WkdPaul]

lack of money ... worst thing EVAR!

[TheRandomness]

Not plugging in the PCIE power for my GPU when first building sig system. Scared myself so badly

 

Not really a problem but I guess it was when there was no display output 3 years ago

[plsno]

Had a motherboard and stick of ram die on me. I'm pretty sure it was because i was overclocking on a cheap AM3+ board.

[Commander Llama]

My oooold PC (2002-2007ish) kept getting BSODs. They were quite random. It might go a week without one. Then it would BSOD five times in an hour. It loved to BSOD while loading Battlefield 2, my favourite game at the time. Oh, the fury.

 

I swapped out the RAM, the two hard drives, the CPU, the PSU. I eventually called it my PC Poltergeist. I couldn't get rid of it. The BSOD error was so generic, reading about it online was useless. It could be your hardware, or your software. I deleted all unused programs, cleaned up my files. I didn't reformat because I'd never done it. BSOD BSOD BSOD.

 

In retrospect, maybe it was the MOBO, or just really shit luck, or I don't even know to this day. Thing is, I didn't have a job at this time and was still a teen, I didn't have the money to throw at these problems I did today, and much less technical/diagnosis know-how.

 

I had a laptop for a dark, terrible period of my life (relative to PC gaming lol, actual life was fine), and stuck more to consoles, until I could afford to build Kronos (sig) in 2009. I never cured my PC Poltergeist, I just fled to a different machine entirely.

[Benji_w]

Had a motherboard and stick of ram die on me. I'm pretty sure it was because i was overclocking on a cheap AM3+ board.

 

Definitely! Cheap AMD boards are scary and I always recommend the Gigabyte UD5 or UD7, Asus ROG or Sabretooth boards because there is no point having anything stock on AMD and lower tier boards like to pop and kill things.

[KE2012]

If some of you remember back I did 'Thermal paste' experiments on one of my old laptops that kept shutting down on me, I would say that was the biggest problem to overcome as it was just fiddly slow and tedious work cracking the lapshit open and fixing (read replace TP with all sorts of house hold chemicals) it, not really had though. 

[sissj]

When corsair don't tell you which damn way to put in the USB 3 connector and you put it in the wrong way and bend the pins

 

It took me 6 damn hours to unbend the pins ;.;

[Gikero]

Cockroaches in my Xbox, which is kind of a computer. That was not a fun time.

It has a Celeron CPU and a IDE hard drive, enough of a standard PC in my eyes.

[Guest trucker2]

Upgraditis, 6 months after you spend a ton of cash and you read a review of the next gen whatever and you PC, formally your pride and joy, just seems too slow.

 

A cockroach crawled into my cpu fan and died jamming the cpu fan, froze due to overheating during a defrag, format and reinstall EVERYTHING. The write operations were corrupted.

 

Stored vintage PC collection in garage, mice destroyed all but 2.

[GoldSrc]

I once spent like a week trying to get a game running, had it not been thanks to nvidia inspector and random comment on some weird site I would have never figured it out lol, which reminds me that I think I lost the steps I had to make, and what value to modify in order to make the game work again.

That's the only thing that I remember having a hard time trying to fix.

[KemoKa]

Worst problem I had was when I was a wee idiot AMD fanboy lad and got landed with a really nasty browser hijacker virus. It basically crippled every browser I had on there. Opera, Firefox, Chrome, IE (Even fucking IE...), it just rendered my internet browsers useless.

The solution? Well, I tried to think of something that wouldn't be affected by the virus, and then it hit me.

Netscape. Yeah. I installed Netscape. Netscape is so old that the virus didn't even notice it, and that's what I used until I was able to gouge out the virus by the roots with Ccleaner.

 

I don't care what anybody says, Netscape freaking rocks. Someone needs to bring Netscape back.

[Quinten Verhelst]

Dead MOBO

[ThinkWithPortals]

Worst problem I have ever had? Technically not affecting me too badly, but when my dad's old HP all in one's HDD failed and we lost nearly 5 years worth of family photographs.

[MSTRBKR]

Thermal paste on CPU pins is the worst issue I've had. That's not a terrible issue, but it's the worst I've had in 10 years of building my own PCs (4 builds).

[Geralt]

The Hard Drive wasn't plugged in.

 

And I was wondering why it wasn't working. >.>

[PC POWER]

When I've had trouble connecting to the damn internet even though the router/etc is working fine.

[Skydiver]

I spent 2 days trying to recover a windows installation after changing the motherboard and forgetting that I should have backed up the data. I naturally failed but what was even worse is, when I finally decided to just completely reinstall windows, I got error messages telling me my 1TB HDD could not be used to install windows because of space issues. The HDD was partitonned in a weird way and I therefore had to remove those partitions by plugging the hdd in an other PC.

Days of work and failures and I later fried a crappy GPU, best days ever ....

[FoxxyRin]

CyberPower themselves.

 

My laptop was bought from them because I got a damn good deal. RAM was faulty out of the box and despite me paying an extra $100 for an extended warranty, they refused to RMA it. Luckily for me, it was only one of the two sticks, so I managed to find which was faulty and live with 4GB, but it really sucked.

 

That's not the worst part, though. My boyfriend bought his PC from CP back in the day, and they fucked him over. They managed to somehow install the graphic's card crooked as hell, and even forcefully screwed it in to the point that the PCI bracket was bent. My boyfriend wasn't the brightest when it came to computers (he was like 16 when he got it), so he never even noticed this issue until I moved in with him and offered to clean out his PC and do some cable management. I pointed it out, and he said he never had any issues, so I mess with it and plug it in correctly. Suddenly, he was able to mess with his Crossfire settings, and was getting a decent boost in games. It was all well and good until a few weeks later that card started overheating really bad, and when I took it out, that's when I noticed that his motherboard's PCIe slot was bending off of the board. It's amazing that it hasn't shorted out or died, but that slot's 100% unusable now, and he only has two slots compatible with modern GPUs. Things will work in that slot, but will overheat (tested with a spare network card like a dumbass). It's been going strong like this for a few years, but luckily we'll be getting his upgrades in the next few weeks. New CPU, mobo, case, etc. We're even getting him an SSD and a brand new copy of Windows so we can rid him of his horrible copy that refuses to ever go back to working as good as new, even if we reformat.

[Senzelian]

How about a little bit of small talk.  :rolleyes: 

I bought three Cougar CFD120 blue LED fans once, because a few people recommended them.
So when I got them I tried them out and oh god are they loud. They move a decent amount of air, but they sounded like Gigabyte made them. 

Have you ever been disappointed by a product?
Was it so utterly garbage that you could've thrown it against the wall?

Let me know. 

[zzenigmaxzz]

nvm you said pc component

[ZetZet]

I watch/read reviews so nothing really.

[Coombzy]

I'd have to say the entirety of my original system. Oh and this H80i I don't really like it any more and its getting replaced for sure.

[Guest]

An R9 290x. Thing was fucking deafening and reached 80-90 degrees in a short moment.