Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[razaldo]

I have two stories, one mine and one by my wife and her co-workers:
Mine: Did not pin the 12V power connector to mobo (thought it was optional). Spent a good hour trying to troubleshoot, was close to RMAing the mobo and/or CPU

 

My wife and her co-workers:

For some reason they wanted to try and see how a CD ROM reads a floppy drive.

They forcefully inserted the floppy in and the CD tray got jammed after making a loud noise.

[Automobili3XF]

Ran an R9 280 with a A10 6790k for about 2 years because i couldn't anything better at the time.

Better yet, i sold this system for around US$1300.

[Lathlaer]

Spending double the amount of money needed on fittings because I changed the plan mid-build in my first hardline watercooling project.

 

Painful, although I consider it my personal idiot tax.

[AdamJo91]

"Nah, I don't need thermal paste."

$415 poorer, I walked out of the store with a new processor and a tube of Arctic Silver.

[ImNotDeViLzzz]

The worst mistake for me was me allowing myself to be born into a world like this.

Oh wait looking at the topic you meant tech mistakes. Well I would say getting into tech at all may have been the worst mistake I have ever made.

[MitchG_]

1. Buy a 1050ti

2. bought an overpriced powersupply, turns out it was the graphics card which was dead so wasted like $150.

3. buy a non-Ryzen AM4 cpu. (save up if you have am4!)

[Phrench]

Buying an LED Fan from China...

[AntonChigurh]

Accidentally uninstalled Steam (and all my games) when trying to fix a glitch in SFM involving transparent models

[Drak3]

Buying a Nintendo Switch. Only worthwhile games are multiplat and definitely not fun experiences played on the go.

[alicskysareblue]

we have all had one of thos brain fart moments where we did something really stupid and didnt understand why the computer wouldnt turn on.

 

for me it was the time when I was transfering my parts into a new case and somehow managed to jam my 8pin pci connecter into the 8 pin auxillery port, it luckly didnt damage the motherboard but it was a really stupid moment 

[kelvinhall05]

I blew up a power supply. It wasn't spectacular, just a loud "bang" and a bad smell, but still. To this day I never trust Corsair PSUs for this very reason, but I was told by Corsair that I just had a faulty unit.

[Alexokratis]

That one time I stuck my finger in my BRAND NEW Asus Rog Strix Gtx 1070ti.

 

Unneccessary to say that of course I cranked my fans to 100% (about 3500rpm) before that.

Even more unneccessary to say that one of the Fanblades broke of and the Card (and my whole Computer) began to vibrate like crazy.

 

(I bought a new Fan which was about 21$ on Amazon and repaired it, but anyway...)

[Alexokratis]

Or when I broke the USB 3.0 Connector on my new Motherboard by bending a Pin trying to get that damn cable in there...

[jiyeon]

When I finished my build, I had it all plugged in, tried to switch it on, didn't work, so I moved about my front panel connectors because I assumed those were it, did a bunch of troubleshooting, and guess what the problem was?

... I forgot to switch on the power supply.

[Grifterguru]

Lets see....

Very first build way back in 02' I set the mobo jumper to "Clear CMOS" prior to first boot. Walked away from it for a couple of days and went back. tried switching on and nothing. went through the whole thing, tore it all down, re-installed every component. Still nothing. looked over the board and... DOH, that jumper was still set to "Clear CMOS".

Can't honestly say I have not forgotten/not done something since as it taught me the principle of "check everything" before first boot.

Now I have said that, we will see what my current (re)build has in store for me....

[PlayStation 2]

Not really when building a computer, but once I turned off the ability to use an external GPU on my motherboard (an ASRock AB350M that, despite not having any external video outputs, can do that) and realized that I had to figure out how to clear the CMOS with the jumper.

[N1tro199]

Plugging 240v in a 120v PSU(Forgetting to move the switch in the back). Not a nice moment...

[The_Tron]

Pairing a 1050ti with an i7 7700

[Void Master]

Plugging the floppy power connector 1 pin ahead.(And reversed too !)

After that I had a small fireplace inside my pc .

bad times fixing an old Pentium 4 pc

 

[DataEmo]

Inserting the first gear instead of the third for overtaking at 115 km/h. Poor under powered company car. First time stick shift in 12 years. My personal cars are all some kinds of overpowered automatics.

[Jtalk4456]

1 minute ago, DataEmo said:

Inserting the first gear instead of the third for overtaking at 115 km/h. Poor under powered company car. First time stick shift in 12 years. My personal cars are all some kinds of overpowered automatics.

Worst Tech mistake

I'm not sure that's what was meant...

[DataEmo]

Is your car organic?

 

Then probably the accidentally swapped neutral and live in my polyphase distribution board. 400 volts on the wall sockets produces a lot of magic smoke. Conclusion: 2 power supplies,a light bulb and one monitor killed.

[dcgreen2k]

One time when I was first getting into computers I told somebody on a forum that he could flip a small switch on the back of his power supply in order to turn on a testing mode, because someone else had told me that. Unfortunately, I later learned that the switch is there to set the PSU to 120/240 volts. I never heard from this guy again, so I don't know if he realized I was dumb or if he blew up his PC...

[DrMacintosh]

Selling my Nintendo 3DS which was an Ambassador model. 

[DataEmo]

17 minutes ago, thegreengamers said:

...I later learned that the switch is there to set the PSU to 120/240 volts...

The worst that can happen in the US is a PC that doesn't start till the switch is flipped again. Here in Europe it is more "fun" like my 400 volts fault.