Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[seon123]

Upgrading to Windows 10

[circeseye]

i didnt do it....but went to work on a 110 ac outlet and found out the hard way the idiots wired it for 220....damn thing literally through me across the room
btw its tech screw up cause my friend plugged his computer into it and it burned up lol

[Jurrunio]

Not mounting the cooler tight enough and surprised by NH-D15 having the same performance as Hyper 212.

 

Quote

 it turns out that it uses cassetes to play games

games also took forever to load at that time. Without reading the instruction you might not even be able to get the game loaded correctly.

[Fasauceome]

Didn't plug my front fan in on my first PC case. Luckily I had a side intake but the front fan had a red LED

[IdiotPenguin]

My short ass MOBO cable disconnected itself cuz I didn’t plug it in all the way and I spent like an entire day trying to figure out what was wrong (FYI this was my first build like 3 months ago and 3 days after I built it and i was playing BF1 at 5 in the morning) and then right before work I saw the mobo cable on the PSU side was disconnected. After I came home from work I replugged everything and it works

 

 

Spoiler

How to be a fucking idiot 101

 

[automizer]

I was cleaning the computer and I/O cabinet on a CNC lathe, took 4 days to disassemble everything and clean it all properly. When I went to turn it on I got the relay clunk and nothing else. I managed to bump the breaker switch with the vacuum hose. Hit that back on and everything worked great.
This was done because an identical machine caught fire the week before because it hasn't been cleaned. Some dust bridged two 220 volt contacts and started the fire.

[PlayStation 2]

Ever broke a laptop's charger port by using a shitty charger? Yeah, rendered an HP laptop that had an AMD A6-5200 in it utterly useless.

[PlayStation 2]

17 minutes ago, OnyxArmos said:

When I was a lot younger, I broke a laptop's charging port by trying to shove a 3.5mm headphone jack into it..

oh lord

[datboi8192]

Dropping the CPU cover on the pins, and hopelessly trying to bend them back.

 

[ZcanKal]

Dropping an AMD cpu on carpet, if the shock didn't kill it, the missing pin probably did.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, OnyxArmos said:

Is that Ram?

Let's not go there.

 

yes.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, OnyxArmos said:

Sorry I really don't know that much about building PCs, I'm currently planning for a first build

Oh, welcome!

 

I thought you were making a joke lol, my bad.

[aezakmi]

40 minutes ago, ZcanKal said:

Dropping an AMD cpu on carpet, if the shock didn't kill it, the missing pin probably did.

Dropped an old Sempron from a table and several pins broke, I counted 12 but it was probably a few more or less

 

somehow that did something that allowed me to overclock it up to 3.3GHz, before the pins broke anything over 2.4 would make the FPU tests hang the PC, it's still running to this day, I was able to run Crysis and Bad Company 2 on that thing

 

my perks are the right ones

 

 

[Z3R0 CHANC3]

My first real pc was from a computer show.  To give you some timeline ideas.... it had a 28.8 modem.  It was an AMD machine.  I promptly upgraded the modem, and decided that it needed a discreet sound card, but I never checked compatibility with anything and the audio was never in sync with the video (from what I'm sure was a lame graphics card.

 

It ran Descent pretty well.  And Myst.

[ZacoAttaco]

5 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I didn't insert my DIMM properly and spent like 5 minutes freaking out while my system bootlooped. Not the greatest 5 minutes of my life. 

I think we've all been there

[Automobili3XF]

The first version of my current computer was a disaster, i shouldn't have done it like i did at first.

You see, i underestimated how hot the R5 2600x was and installed it on a tightly packed M-ITX system, needless to say it overheated.

I tried to fix the situation with an H80i v2, it all seemed right at first, it held the temperatures decently, but the summer came around and the cracks began to show. 

I ended up changing the R5 2600x for a much colder R7 1700 and a suitable air cooler, now it should be ok.

[IrishDunner]

21 hours ago, OnyxArmos said:

I'd like to take this moment to pay respects to all our first-build friends that made this fateful error:

 

Do people actually do that or is it a joke

[aisle9]

8 minutes ago, IrishDunner said:

Do people actually do that or is it a joke

Mostly a joke, but it's only a joke because people have done it.

[JonP]

I built a machine based on a Skylake Chip.  Totally lost my mind in the initial bios setup and fried the CPU almost immediately.  Good news; I was honest with the vendor and they arranged for a RMA with Intel and I got it replaced only having to pay shipping.... Pretty cool!

 

2nd best was spilling chocolate milk on a relatively new Acer Notebook.  Yes, this was really stupid but I knew what to do or so I thought.... Once I got the case open, I noticed Acer had a plastic membrane near the MOBO.  It basically helped all of the fluid saturate the board and yes, it was dead.  No luck at all this time.  I harvested the hard drives but the rest was junk.

 

I've built over a dozen machines and these two are my worst mistakes.  The moral of the story is remember what you know and slow and steady wins the race; e.g. Don't leave liquids on the same space as your PC, always ground yourself when working on a PC and take overclocking one step at a time using software to monitor.

 

With that said, I rarely overclock today.  My current build; Ryzen 2700X, 1070TI, 32 Gigs of RAM (3000 mhz) has only the XMP profile for the RAM and a slight overclock on the graphics card using Afterburner.  Games aren't as CPU intensive as they once were and I find the CPU is more than capable bursting when needed.

 

My biggest problem lately haven't been hardware; its all Windows.  Win 10 may go down as one of my least favorite OSs. (Maybe right after Vista)  I have had to tweak more setting than ever before and I just shouldn't have to do that.  "Distributed COM" errors, ESENT errors; KernaL errors; all you Microsoft......Oh and I love trying to install Candy Crush every time there is an update (Finally nuked that at the registry level)  Oh and the errors I mentioned; all started post Win 10 1703 build.  

[Ashkii]

This one was recent. I fucked up and put my processor back in wrong. It forced me to get a pre-built.

[jackco2]

On 1/16/2013 at 4:02 AM, Mitch said:

Mine would have to be my current case. I bought an Antec dark fleet DF-85 case with the special over sized cp-1000W PSU and two years later I regret it all. I looked around a bit but didn't do much research before i bought it. I am currently now looking at finally upgrading to a nice Corsair case and PSU. So what do you guys regret doing or buying?

I didn’t realize b450 existed when I was building so I got a 1600 instead of a 2600.

[AntonChigurh]

This probably doesn't sound that bad, but when I first got my new PC up and running, I completely forgot that my 1050Ti was set to Balanced power draw by default (rookie mistake, I know). So for about a month I played CSGO, TF2, and HL2 on low settings with an unstable as hell framerate, (consistently low 50s, sometimes dropping to 30s or worse when shit got heated), before I realized I have an IQ that's the same number as the amount of Call of Duty games that exist (hint: roughly 40).

[Zippy Zolton]

even for my first build there wasn't anything too bad

some regrets I have though are:

going for an old used GTX 670 (im keeping it anyway because it's an enthusiast's edition and I'm going to keep it on display when it retires as a result of me getting a new card in the following months)

 

i put the IO shield in but the flap things were covering the DisplayPort on the motherboard and I didn't want to take out the motherboard to fix that but my dad insisted and it was a good thing because we had to use that port to use the bios since we had no graphics drivers on it

 

and lastly

 

putting the liquid cooler to pull air out of the pc, there's probably a place where i can put it to where it would suck in air

[Exdominator]

On 1/16/2013 at 8:39 PM, Fordox said:

I have a few and learned from it a lot:

1. i bought corsair vengeance and i'm an overclocker... whooptiedoo

2. in my realllllly first years (on a year of 12, im now 19), i tried to format the C:/ disk in the os by rightclicking the drive and press format :')

3. tried to fix a PSU that was still plugged in... 230V hurts and the boss of the computer store was standing next at me and he allmost litterally peed his pants from laughing

4. i tried to fix a waterloop leak with superglue. didn't work. enough said

you may laugh, im over the unsuccesfull years now

What happens if u press format on the c disk by right clicking? curious

[yosarianilives]

I tried to mount an ln2 pot on the chipset of one of my boards but the spacing for the mounting was wider than my mounting allowed. So I tried to gravity mount the pot onto the chipset but the chipset was too tiny to properly balance the pot. Ended up the pot went sideways during the session and the chipset died with no heatsink.