Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[NineEyeRon]

Tbh if the power button stopped working on my case it would take me a long time to diagnose it too. It’s just one of those things you assume just works.

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, TheTechWizardThatNeedsHelp said:

Yep. God damn it I hate myself.

Merged to megathread.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

I have to deal with making windows boot from a DVD to repair the SSD that doesn't know how to boot with a uefi. Go windows

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Man, I've never been so happy to see the Intel core i5 inside logo ever.

[Nena Trinity]

Buying a Nokia Android phone... (I prefer any brand over it that I have tested, Apple(iOS), Blackberry(BB10), Huawei, Microsoft(Windows Mobile), my|phone, REALME or TECNO the last 3 even more than the test!

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, NZgamer said:

What don't you like about it? I have a Nokia and love it!

Oh god where do I start, ok at first it was slow, even a equally specced phone with a trojan on it was actually slightly faster but with original launch OS it was usable, then it got a Android version update... Then it got extremely buggy and needed a factory reset EVERY MONTH! And then another Android version upgrade and they broke the SD card support so no storage for apps = unusable and I gave up on it.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Just now, NZgamer said:

Just looking at that I yelled STATIC ELECTRICITY?!

I have a peice of cardboard under the board.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

33 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

Phew, it must be perfectly sized for that board

No it's smaller

[StrawberryShortCakes]

Buying 3 different itx cases for 1 build and ending up using the first one I got. 

[Marbo]

Amd A6 on A68 motherboard 

 

*drops mic and leaves thread

[Snowarch]

left the computer on the floor.  dogs made me lose an entire usb port that day. half of it was stuck in my mouse's connector. only a toothpick saved the mouse, the port wasn't so lucky.

[zeusthemoose]

I made two very big and bad ones.

1. i bought an IMac... (pls don’t judge, it was my first computer and all my family had one)
2. I bought a prebuilt (beginning of my tech days and I thought it would be cheaper to buy a prebuilt than build my own. It was but I have a shady psu and dram-less ssd)

my only other was swimming with my iPhone X. Twice... first time it survived but the second time it didn’t 

[danomicar]

Spilled a full glass of water on my new keyboard. Immediately bricked it.

 

13 minutes ago, zeusthemoose said:

my only other was swimming with my iPhone X. Twice... first time it survived but the second time it didn’t 

I feel like I've had dreams nightsmares of this happening to me! Luckily it's never really happened. 

[appr3ntic3]

I had a i3 Dell Laptop with 2GB DDR3 RAM which i purchased about 7 years back. It used to run very slow so i purchased a new RAM and paired it with the old one but the performance did not change. I am using sata HDD currently. So, i regret at just upgrading my RAM, i should have also gotten a new SSD for it.

[LauRoman]

On 1/16/2013 at 7:16 PM, Whaler_99 said:

My other issue sometimes, being in a hurry during a build.... not making sure the CPU heatsink was properly placed, tighten it down and nothing... shutdown due to thermal overload... Doh... Oh ya, the block has to be ON the cpu... no just hovering above.

Imagine fixing laptops for friends once in a while and sometimes forgetting to plug the cpu fan back in. What kind of idiot does that? /looks sideways

 

I plugged in a hd audio cable in an ac 97 socket or the other way around (can't remember) and it had the cables separated. I either reversed the polarity of something or plugged in some cables i should not and fried the audio card.

 

Bent quite a few pins on the best new P45 mobo i bought with my own money by trying to clean excess thermal paste without the cpu installed. And i loved that Asrock board a lot as it had 0 Linux issues that i was aware of.

 

Upgrading the firmware of an old Moto Razr v3 or thereabouts using the Motorola phone manager thingy back in the day without reading what it said. I tried with because i previously had success transforming a Nokia N73 TIM edition to an EU adition that also had my language by changing a code in the firmware and updating the firmware with the Nokia desktop manager software.

[hopdog]

bend my motherboard and damaged the copper on the cooler.

[dcgreen2k]

Back when I had an old prebuilt PC, the thermal paste had completely dried up after 10 years of not being replaced and I didn't have much money. So, I did what any 13 year old would do and watched a video about thermal paste alternatives that I could find lying around the house, and that's how I ended up using a mixture of toothpaste and vaseline as thermal paste. It worked great and I haven't replaced it since.

[Lord Vile]

Personally mine is nearly returning a motherboard because the PCIE slot looked to be dead. Turned out the connecter into the PSU wasn't plugged in correctly but the power from the slot itself was enough for the lights on the GPU making me thing the power to it was fine. Either that or wondering why Gsync wasn't showing up as an option in control panel when I was connected through HDMI.

[Kanna]

Ohh I have one, I got a prebuilt on Christmas counting a few years back and we replaced it with a new one like one day later due to mobo temp saying 124°C but the new one had the same problem so I concluded the mobo just doesn't have a sensor

[CommanderAlex]

It was getting towards the end of the night and finishing up a game of Battlefield 5 and I was getting tilted...I slammed my fist into the spacebar of my Corsair Strafe RGB Silent switch keyboard...I woke up the next day and noticed there was no spacebar whenever I hit the spacebar...lets just say, it was a $130 mistake and broke a diode that I can't repair. 

[Bitter]

On about 25+ years ago didn't understand what thermal grease really was but we had a tub of axle grease! So I slapped the heat sink on a Pentium 66 or AMD K5 or Cyrix CPU with a daub of axle and brake grease. Pretty sure it didn't even need a heat sink but by golly it was getting one because processors in magazines had them and they were faster so clearly it was just a heat sink that made things faster. Perfectly sound logic!

 

Edit, might have been a 486 not Pentium class hardware lol. Def a socket with lever arm tho, so pretty sure not a 386.

[Zonal]

I haven't done much but one time i bent the sata cable and the pins and had to bend them back into place.

 

[OvErclOCKeR]

On 1/16/2013 at 1:33 AM, LinusTech said:

I plugged a 4 pin floppy connector into a CD aux connector on a sound card when I was quite young. The blue smoke that made the sound card work escaped.

Hi linus. ouch.

[DeuteriumTSM]

Hoooo BOY. I have a mistake I made just today. I've done things like mixing and matching RAM and stuff, and done shit like accidentally run my 3200mhz DDR4 RAM in single channel, then find out a few weeks later I've also unwittingly been been underclocking it massively by not using the included XMP profile (and not only that but putting it in the WRONG dual-channel slots so it couldn't even reach the advertised speeds), but every bluinder I've made in the past PALES in comparison to what happened today.
 

I have two gaming PCs, my main gaming rig and a low-end rig made from the chassis and parts from my old gaming rig (respectively nicknamed Spawn of Beastie (just "Spawn" for short) and The Elderbeast, get those laughs out of the way now). Until today, Elderbeast had been running off a 320gb 2.5" hard drive cannibalised from an old laptop, and I intended to change that by buying it a nice mSATA SSD (all the SATA slots on its mobo are taken up and it's old enough to have an mSATA slot). So I bought one (secondhand 'cause who still makes new mSATA drives? Also I'm a cheapskate) and slotted it in, PC saw it all fine, and so I initiated my plan.
 

My idea was to do the same thing I had done when upgrading Spawn's SATA SSD to an m.2, namely use CloneZilla to copy the data from the old HDD to the new mSATA. This, however, copies the data and partitions exactly, meaning that it leaves a big wad of unallocated data on the end of the drive if the destination drive is bigger. And I could simply extend the C drive into that, were it not for the fact that Windows creates a 100mb partition on the end of the drive which it needs to boot properly. So what I did was use GPartEd to move the partition that Windows creates onto the actual end of the new drive, then extend the C drive into the unallocated space. I'd done the same thing to Spawn, and it's still working fine.
 

So I did that... then the trouble started.
 

For context, aside from the SSD I have 2 HDDs attached to Elderbeast, namely the aforementioned old laptop HDD and a 3.5" 160gb HDD, cannibalised from my first ever PC from 2005. This is what happened whenever I booted:

• With all 3 drives connected, I got stuck in a loop of booting into the recovery environment, and Startup Repair can't fix anything.
• If my 160gb HDD is unplugged but my 320gb HDD is plugged in, the result was the same.
• If my 320gb HDD was unplugged but the 160gb one plugged, Windows failed to start altogether and told me "The boot configuration data file doesn't contain valid information for an operating system".
• If both of them were unplugged, it failed to start and told me "a required file is missing".

No big issue, just restore from the old drive, right? Nope. Dumbass me decided he'd be keen and nuke the old drive right away so I could keep using it as storage.
 

And that, dear friends, is why I now have to clean-install Windows 10 on my low-end gaming rig.

[WhitetailAni]

Ooh, that's a tricky one...

Pick a number between 0 and 5, and whichever number gets posted first is the one I will share.

The others will never be told.