Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[elfensky]

Spending about half an hour looking for the 'any' key when I was reinstalling windows late at night.

[79wjd]

I upgraded from a 3.9 GHz i7-920 paired with an R9 270 to an i7-4770k and an R9 290.

 

Worst decision ever. I didn't need to upgrade and the new system was a complete waste. The old system can still play AAA titles. I just re-assembled it with a few spare parts and gave it to my roommate and he's playing Fallout 4 at 60 fps on near-max settings with only a few tweaks (tesselation set at 4x, etc). I'm such a dumbass. That 8 year old CPU still has ample life left in it and is not a bottleneck, and I don't do enough to warrant the R9 290.

That probably describes like 90% of the forum.

[xgn]

Deleting school spyware i got thrown out of the domain and lost a month of drawing lessons because of slow IT consultant.

[Guest taha78]

Put a 110v PSU on a 230v line

[Principis]

Put a 110v PSU on a 230v line

Shouldn't PSU's be rated for 100-240v or something?

[Guest taha78]

Shouldn't PSU's be rated for 100-240v or something?

It was about 10 years ago when you still had an 110 - 230v switch

[Principis]

It was about 10 years ago when you still had an 110 - 230v switch

Ow ok

[HelplmChoking]

I was given my first ever PC, which had a Pentium 4 and some chunky looking ATI GPU that never worked, and would get stuck "shutting down" forever. One day, tried getting the card to work by flipping a red switch on the PSU, which turned the voltage way up, resulting in a loud bang, some nasty smoke and my parents throwing the GPU away as they thought it was the card..

 

The PC still works ten years later, and the explosion actually fixed the shutdown issue. A week after the "incident" I discovered something called a BIOS, and the option to enable PCIe slots...

[brandishwar]

Back in 1998 I had an old 486 DX-2 that I decided to upgrade with a new baby-AT mainboard and processor. Unfortunately I didn't pay attention to what I was doing with the power supply pins on the mainboard and ended up connecting the PSU wrong and fried the mainboard and power supply. I think my dad still has it to remind me of it. It actually worked out better in the end as the mainboard I replaced it with supported a much wider range or processors, including the AMD K6-2 that I had for several years.

[daniellearmouth]

Going with an FX-6100 instead of an i5 2500K.

[T_H_O_M_06]

I bought a non-gaming laptop instead of a gaming desktop

[Gumi Rokkaku]

I decided to build a media PC without my buddy's help. I had him help me with my first two builds, so I was feeling pretty confident I could do it on my own (With some help from Linus vids obviously).
I ran out and bought myself a nice Z97 mobo and a G3258. The motherboard wouldn't fit over the standoffs correctly. Not thinking, I just nudged the mobo over the standoffs with my hand while I screwed it in place. Came to find out that it didn't line up because I didn't put the IO shield in correctly. I must have scratched the heck out of the bottom of the mobo on the standoffs. I can clearly see that I bent some of the pins on the bottom of the board
Needless to say, the system didn't post. I ended up just putting my old Phenom II system in that case, and in that case it stayed.

[Griffscavern]

Not knowing that the case fans had to be intake and exhaust, I put all of my fans as intake. Ran the computer for years like that, and never opened it up after building it. When I did it was the biggest dust bunny mess I has ever seen in my life. I am truly surprised that the pc ran for as many years as it did with no problems.

First time ever building a pc way back in 2002.

[Giddyguy]

Rushing whenever I'm making a new build (the excitement!). That includes buying parts and installing stuff.

I have ended up spending way too much on thermal paste, a gamepad, a crappy psu, and messed up several windows install because driver and other software issues.

[jcastro_805]

At this point it really feels like building a PC. I used all of the money that I had to buy parts for my PC and then I was having problems, so I RMAed my graphics card but then it wasn't the graphics card so I bought a new PSU and that didn't fix it and then I tried new RAM and that didn't fix it and I tried the CPU in a different mobo and it worked there so I sent my mobo back to Newegg but since it was an LGA 1155 socket (ASRock Z75 Pro3) they didn't have any more and so they just refunded my $85 and now I can't find any good 1155 motherboards for a good price and so right now I have a bunch of parts lying around my house and no money, no PC, no time, and no hope anymore and my old prebuilt PC won't sell on ebay so I don't know if I will be able to find the money to get a new CPU and motherboard anytime soon. Hopefully my PC will sell and I will be able to get the new parts that I need so this won't be the worst tech mistake I've ever made

[AveragePinq]

Getting an Apple Macbook

[Maximoose]

Organizing my grandma's pictures on her computer, accidentally permanently delete all of her 2010 photos

[Haswell_rasperry_pi]

Wanted to do a bios update through MSI Live update. I made sure all applications were closed before I updated it but Steam popped up at the last minute. Got a bsod and motherboard died.

Literally my first mobo. Msi z87. I decided to to do a bios update with live update then it freezes and bsod. Now I have a motherboard with a 20% flashed bios. Thanks msi.

[deWaardt]

Deleting school spyware i got thrown out of the domain and lost a month of drawing lessons because of slow IT consultant.

School spyware?

Is there something I'm unaware about?

[Belgarathian]

• Buying a 900D Case. While it's baller, it's like owning the worlds largest yacht. The whole thing is impractically large, and is difficult to take anywhere. 

Possibly not tech related, but when I was young I didn't understand anything about sound, speakers, RMS, wattage, etc. Anyway, I was playing around with a Technics amp - It was old at the time and pretty cheap, but we had the thought that we could make speakers louder by plugging them into something bigger. Long story short, you can for about 10-15 seconds. 

[JuztBe]

Friend gave me his rig so I could figure out where is the problem in my rig.
When I was trying to take off a cooler it was like glued to the CPU. Some stupid thermal compound was used.
I've used a lot of force until cooler came off... with a God damn CPU stuck underneath it. Few pins got bent. I've straighten few of them, but one of them stayed bent or even break off(can't recall).
I've put everything right back. And it worked! Changed thermal paste and never told him about this accident. 

[Nuluvius]

Friend gave me his rig so I could figure out where is the problem in my rig.

When I was trying to take off a cooler it was like glued to the CPU. Some stupid thermal compound was used.

I've used a lot of force until cooler came off... with a God damn CPU stuck underneath it. Few pins got bent. I've straighten few of them, but one of them stayed bent or even break off(can't recall).

I've put everything right back. And it worked! Changed thermal paste and never told him about this accident. 

 

This is just one of a great many many examples as to why I hate other humans...

[JuztBe]

This is just one of a great many many examples as to why I hate other humans...

Heyy, not saying that I'm proud of it It's one of the ways to learning in tech.

That rig was discontinued anyway, he had a new one. 

[deWaardt]

This is just one of a great many many examples as to why I hate other humans...

You sound like the kind of person that doesn't allow any kind of mistakes and wants everybody to be perfect.

Well, I'm sorry to bring to you like this....

We don't live in a perfect world.

[Principis]

Friend gave me his rig so I could figure out where is the problem in my rig.

When I was trying to take off a cooler it was like glued to the CPU. Some stupid thermal compound was used.

I've used a lot of force until cooler came off... with a God damn CPU stuck underneath it. Few pins got bent. I've straighten few of them, but one of them stayed bent or even break off(can't recall).

I've put everything right back. And it worked! Changed thermal paste and never told him about this accident.

If you have to use force to remove the cooler there is something wrong don't use force on a motherboard... You will definitely break something.