Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[nullbot]

None within recent years, but if you see something wrong with my current build, then that I guess that would qualify as a mistake

[steezemageeze]

Last night, I was routing some cables for a new hard drive I ordered, so that I can just plug it in and go when it gets here. It was pretty dark in my room, so I put my phone on top of my CPU cooler as a flashlight. I finished routing the cables, put my back panel back on, put my side panel back on, and walked away, leaving my phone sitting on my Hyper T4. It took me like an hour to actually find my damn phone. Luckily I didn't turn the computer on afterwards so it was fine 

[Rodniz]

My dad bought me a notebook from sony. After having it running for a year i told my dad it's running hot. He was like "i dont care, deal with it" so i went ahead, opened it, cleaned it and replaced the thermal paste
except for the gpu's one, i forgot about that one. After a few hours i completely burned the gpu out and my dad got totally angry.

 

Happy end: My dad helped me building my first self-made rig after 2 weeks.

[Allshevski]

- Spilled orange juice on my GPU

- Decided to take the backplate off to clean back of the PCB and the plate itself

- Was too lazy to get a proper screwdriver

- Opened it and found some more screws holding it in place

- Stripped the last screw head

- Tried to unscrew it anyway

- The screwdriver slipped and broke the 6 pin port

- Tried to calm down and at least change the thermal paste

- Did it wrong

- Put everything back

- Turned on the PC and everything worked

- But temps are 5 degrees hotter

- And his warranty is now void

- And has broken 6 pin slot

- And FurMark crashes so had to revert his overclock

- And I have just done all of this.

 

F#¢k.

[Bhav]

So if you've seen my video for my super bright new torch .....

 

I couldnt resist pointing it straight into one of my eyes.

 

OMFG THAT HURT AND TEMPORARY BLINDED ME 1000x WORSE THAN STARING AT THE SUN DOES.

 

.....

 

Now I want to try it in the other eye .... Ok well, I tried with reflection from a pristine collectors coin in a protective plastic case straight into my eyes.

 

Now both my eyes are seeing flashing colours everywhere ..... fuck.

 

Do not do this, I thought my eyes were strong. I could fuck up my perfect vision.

[Roughneck One]

Working late one night many years ago I was testing and fault finding broken computers, I powered up a pc without reading its fault, there was a small explosion and when i fanned the smoke away I read the fault, "Water Damage".

[Tcamp]

More of an ignorance thing, but I defragmented an ssd once. Doing that, messed up a bunch of drivers and stuff. I had to reinstall my OS, then re-download all new drivers and what not.

[DebatED Nothing]

23 hours ago, Bhav said:

So if you've seen my video for my super bright new torch .....

 

I couldnt resist pointing it straight into one of my eyes.

 

OMFG THAT HURT AND TEMPORARY BLINDED ME 1000x WORSE THAN STARING AT THE SUN DOES.

 

.....

 

Now I want to try it in the other eye .... Ok well, I tried with reflection from a pristine collectors coin in a protective plastic case straight into my eyes.

 

Now both my eyes are seeing flashing colours everywhere ..... fuck.

 

Do not do this, I thought my eyes were strong. I could fuck up my perfect vision.

Wow you're dumb  hahaha.

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

Getting a 6450 when i was a noob and than putting frozen pees on the heatsinck to cool it. Worked, but not for long due to the fact that i cooked it , and OCing a Pentium 5300 to 4.0 Ghz on air  

[dopi0815]

while switching from a case to a new benchtable, i tripped and ripped off the power and reset cables from the new benchtable...

I was too cheap to buy a new panel, and too lazy to fix the cables, so for half a year, i had a big screwdriver on my desk and just shorted the power/rest pins whenever i needed to

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

that one should be a mistake, but was totally on purpose

 

in work, busy working on our testsample of a network appliance.

Boss comes over and drops ancient PC on my desk. It's from "idontknoweveryf*kingnameinourcompany", can you see what's wrong with it and fix it, so we don't have to set up a new one? (a company with friggin 1500 employees and they are to cheap to replace a jurassic type PC... they actually tried and succeded (more or less) to install win7 on old PCs with 500mb-1Gig of ram just so they don't have to replace it)

 

i open up the case and remove a small desert from the hardware.

i decide it's not even worth my time, grab a pair of cables, trace a few lines from ram,GPU and CPU to the 24Pin power connector, shorten everything with the wires and start the PC.

After a spectacular death, i open the windows to let out the smoke of life, that escaped the PC like an ancient soul that can finally find peace, and tell my boss it is dead, probably due to all the dust.

 

[Dionyz]

I have basically the worst luck when it comes to testing stuff out.

1) Reverting back from windows 10 to windows 7 a few months ago. I got BSOD, and my 5TB hard drive would not read the system image that I put on that day (Windows 7). Do an fresh install of windows 7 because I was screwed, and find out that windows AUTO partitioned my external hard drive. Losing all of my brothers windows 7 CD keys (He got it for free from his school). 

2) Testing my GTX 295 today... Sounds simple right? Well I insert the card get an system thread exception not handled  ... Whatever I put in my other card back in (The one that's been there for 2 years) then I get the same  system thread exception not handled ... FML

I forgot to mention that I did not make any mistakes during these two issues.

 

Post your bad luck with Tech.

[MoonlightSylv]

My Galaxy S6 randomly started glitching the UI and making static all over the screen. I got a replacement from Verizon though.

[Eelviny]

Well... I think the biggest mobile phone kill streak I've racked up is 3...

Carrying a few friends phones in my bag, which also held a water bottle. Doesn't need a genius to figure out what happened.

[LokiFire]

I punched my set of drawers the other side of the room and smashed the top drawer inwards, went back to my PC... it froze, could not boot again and showed code FF on mobo...

[Beauds28]

mine was deciding to install a Windows 10 preview build on my windows tablet over crappy university wifi. Something happened along the install and I pretty much bricked it. Dock luckily works but I cannot do anything. Happened almost a year ago and I still have a $300 paperweight.

[Jalmio]

So. I was building a PC around a mobo with bent pins I thought I had fixed. I inserted my 3770K in it. System didn't post and the bright, red MemOK led appeared. I powered it down, checked if anything wasn't in place, reseated everything. Same happened. I thought the CPU could be bad (I had just bought it and this was the first try) and borrowed some I5-3570K from another PC. Again, no post, same red led. Put the CPU back on the other PC. This time, the other PC didn't post either. Neither the I5 or the I7 worked on it. It boots with a known working CPU.

 

(I did all the MemOK checks, etc. on all setups)

 

Conclusion: 

3570K - 150€

3770K - 200€

Mobo - 150€

16GB of RAM - 90€ or something

 

I hope my Graphics card still works.

 

That makes about 600€ or somewhat less than $700. (I live in Finland. Some of the parts are real pain to find. From abroad there's shipping, import costs, etc.)

 

The worst part is probably that I did this because of my own stupidity.

Also, the I5 wasn't even mine.

 

Now I know how it feels to drill a 980ti.

[DebatED Nothing]

4 hours ago, Jalmio said:

So. I was building a PC around a mobo with bent pins I thought I had fixed. I inserted my 3770K in it. System didn't post and the bright, red MemOK led appeared. I powered it down, checked if anything wasn't in place, reseated everything. Same happened. I thought the CPU could be bad (I had just bought it and this was the first try) and borrowed some I5-3570K from another PC. Again, no post, same red led. Put the CPU back on the other PC. This time, the other PC didn't post either. Neither the I5 or the I7 worked on it. It boots with a known working CPU.

 

(I did all the MemOK checks, etc. on all setups)

 

Conclusion: 

3570K - 150€

3770K - 200€

Mobo - 150€

16GB of RAM - 90€ or something

 

I hope my Graphics card still works.

 

That makes about 600€ or somewhat less than $700. (I live in Finland. Some of the parts are real pain to find. From abroad there's shipping, import costs, etc.)

 

The worst part is probably that I did this because of my own stupidity.

Also, the I5 wasn't even mine.

 

Now I know how it feels to drill a 980ti.

RIP. Never test dubious hardware using something you can't afford to break.

[SQZY98]

When I sold my 970 the dude asked me whether I only did gaming on it or rendering too. I said "Not really, rendering is more CPU dependent anyways.". This is so embarassing. I don´t even know why I said that. That dude didn´t comment on it tho. ,__,

[Pickelhaube]

When I was installing my new AMD processor, back in 2012, and I lost grip of it and it hit the case then hit the floor, bent like 20 pins... Also tripping on a wire and having my pc drop to the floor, but at least i half-caught it...

[Mark77]

In 1987, when floppy drives were $600 a piece, I "took apart" a malfunctioning 5.25" floppy drive to "fix" it.  Never did get it back together and working properly.  Sent it to the factory for warranty service, they purported to 'fix' it, but even the factory couldn't seem to service it properly. 

 

~1997 or so, had to move some servers in the office that we really, really didn't want to shut down during the move (I know, terrible idea).  So, hooked to UPS's, we unplugged the UPS' from the wall and let them continue running, and put everything on a cart.  Unfortunately I grabbed the AC power cord for the UPS, and the cord was back-energized by the UPS itself.  My whole hand felt like it was on fire.

 

Was in the lab one day, and watched as a technician hooked a board that needed a 5V power supply up to a 24V supply.  (they looked identical, except for a small label).  20 seconds later he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, but noted that the chip seemed excessively hot.  A $2000 FPGA board fried. 

 

[Achtas]

When I was still very young, I had a leftover Robotron (PC 1715). And I totally managed to fry it since the PSU had a voltage switch. And as a kid, naturally I set it to the wrong one before switching it on. In before a spark and some magnificent burning soul scent.

 

And another fun thought. Not mine but managed to be a witness to it. Imagine someone feeding 220v back to a USB port on a laptop. And that face when they just noticed that the cables were connected in the wrong manner. The legendary 'Oh s***' expression.

[Kalebtheking12]

Pressing the Download button on one of the ads thinking it was the real download. It gave me a virus.

[mrEway]

I have made a lot of stupid mistakes:

-buying a cheap no name psu (I remember my dad coming to my room asking: is there something on fire?)

-Overclocking an Athlon 760k on a cheap motherboard (pushing for 4.8 Ghz caused me to see little flames through my window)

-Not waiting an extra week so I could afford a 1TB hdd, a proper psu and 8 GB of ram.

-Buying a FX-8350 when I could get a 3570k for €30 less

-Buying a r7 250 

-Knowingly using a GPU without working fans

-Attemting to install a desktop gpu in a laptop (FYI, I was 10)

-Cooling my laptop with ice...

 

[Jalmio]

On 9. huhtikuuta 2016 at 3:09 PM, Jalmio said:

So. I was building a PC around a mobo with bent pins I thought I had fixed. I inserted my 3770K in it. System didn't post and the bright, red MemOK led appeared. I powered it down, checked if anything wasn't in place, reseated everything. Same happened. I thought the CPU could be bad (I had just bought it and this was the first try) and borrowed some I5-3570K from another PC. Again, no post, same red led. Put the CPU back on the other PC. This time, the other PC didn't post either. Neither the I5 or the I7 worked on it. It boots with a known working CPU.

 

(I did all the MemOK checks, etc. on all setups)

 

Conclusion: 

3570K - 150€

3770K - 200€

Mobo - 150€

16GB of RAM - 90€ or something

 

I hope my Graphics card still works.

 

That makes about 600€ or somewhat less than $700. (I live in Finland. Some of the parts are real pain to find. From abroad there's shipping, import costs, etc.)

 

The worst part is probably that I did this because of my own stupidity.

Also, the I5 wasn't even mine.

 

Now I know how it feels to drill a 980ti.

Now that I won't have a PC for a while I took my old Wii from the shelf. I forgot how fun Wii gaming is.

[Clanscorpia]

Updating an old Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10. Crashed in an hour and bricked the whole thing. And it was my brothers laptop