Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[WhitetailAni]

Hmm... let's see...

I have a lot.

 

1. I accidentally took the BIOS chip out of my M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 board (the same one that has my Phenom II X4 955) and bent some legs.

Thankfully I got them all straightened and it works fine - retains settings, etc.

2. Dropped a hard drive. It worked fine for another 2 months, and then in the middle of the night I wake up to my dad's computer going BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

RIP hard drive.

You took my 4th set of HDD rails.

It was my dad's old backup drive though - 500GB, because then you could have 2 copies of your hard drive (this was when he had a Phenom X3 with the M4A88TD board, and before that he had a build with a 250GB HDD, I think an Athlon 64 (he didn't like Intel then because they were bad, and he doesn't like them now because of their weird CPU and chipset rules), and then a 500GB backup drive.
That drive died, because I dropped it while he was putting it in my current case.

So no data loss.

3. Killed my Power Mac G4 400 MHz PCI graphics board (it was half-dead, I just finished it off) by accidentally dropping a screw on it while it was running.

Yes, I was messing around with screws in a running machine.

It was my first time and it will be my last time.

4. This was on purpose, but still fun.
I had an optical drive from the Power Mac G4 that made anything it was connected to not boot (I tried 4 machines), so I grabbed my Raspberry Pi jumper cables and hooked up a floppy power connector to the CD_Audio port, inspired by Linus.

 

I set off the smoke alarm.

Twice.

 

I connected the power to the IDE pins too.

 

5. Again, intentional, but still fun.

The Seagate HDD inside my iMac G5 committed suicide (booted up and I hear "vrrrrrRRRRR-SCREEEEEEEEEEECH", spinning circle freezes, then the iMac shuts down) so I took out the HDD, put in an SSD (those boot speeds amazing) and opened up the HDD to torture.

Between its 2 platters it now has a random tiny screw, some fancy metal tape, a bit from another hard drive, and mangled HDD head bits.

If it is powered on I am greeted with SCREEEEEEEECH. Instant sibling deterrent.

Once I get it working with the plate on I'm putting it inside a WD My Book shell and making it turn on with the flip of a light switch.

I would tell you more but pizza is here.

[LloydLynx]

Buying an Acer Aspire to run Linux. Within a few months the VGA port broke off the board, the display and palm rest were scratched to hell, and the body was cracked in multiple places. Also the fan was loud and constant on/off. Linux had suspend issues and WiFi issues, and the touchpad would have issues after a while too. That laptop was a $300 mistake.

[tire]

buying a 1650

huge mistake

[JamesTheFolf]

I was using Windows XP, and I was working on a text document, and I accidentally sent nearly a thousand pages to my parents printer. And because I was still really young I couldn't figure out how to stop it.

[Natanael K]

-copied a game shortcut to usb sticks and run it on my laptop

-installing a 64bit softwares on 32bit OS

-change a normal mouse switch to Mechanical switch but the board was too high while soldering so the components nearby just blew up(2nd try is success on other mouse lol)

[papajo]

When I was a teenager  I switched that red switch behind the PSU (on a brand new build with at the time high tech stuff ( from 240 to 120 ) just to see what happens...

 

The PSU capacitors started to explode in series with loud bangs like a huge firecracker  hopefully there was no fire and nothing else got damaged other than the PSU which I replaced with a new one free of charge just by switching the trigger back to 240 and pretending I didnt know what happened to the retailer and that it just didnt work hahahahaha 

 

before that when being a child I wanted to tidy up the mess on my computer (or so I thought) and I decided to do that by creating files on the desktop labeled with a letter (A, B, C etc) and I put all the files starting with A to the A folder the files starting with B to the B folder etc. 

 

The OS was windows 95 which gladly allowed me to transfer system critical files wherever I wanted... suddenly the PC hang at some point and I couldnt boot it and at that time I never installed an OS before and didnt even have a disk and if I had I wouldnt know how to install it  but that's how I learned how to do it I brought it to a technician (actually to my teacher in a private computer school I was going) and saw what he was doing in terms of the command prompt and tried to memorize it which at later points helped me out to understand how to install OSes and how to work the command prompt a little bit...

 

and I still remember that elusive "sir" command that I couldnt figure out how it worked and what packets it need to be recognized as a command, altavista didnt return any useful results.... it took me years to realize that this "sir" command (which I saw my teacher using) was just a typo for "dir" hahahahahahahahahaha

[Sixel]

It's not a particularly bad mistake, but I plugged in the front audio connector on only half of the pins on the motherboard .  It was an easy enough fix.

[Letgomyleghoe]

On 1/11/2021 at 8:30 AM, AlexaKitty said:

Buying a B550 Aorus Pro. Board died on me after setting one DRAM timing wrong. Corrupted its own BIOS just because I shut it down from the power button and not the PSU. Couldn't get it to boot. Had to return and get my money back

how wrong did you set the dram timing? bios shouldn't brick itself from powering off with the button, must have been a faulty board. I've had zero issues with mine.

[Gum Joe]

Not buying a GPU, and not waiting for Ryzen (I got a i5 7500K)

 

I built my first computer in 2017 - in February. Ryzen launched in April. I wish I waited.

 

Now both these would have been fine, since I was just using the PC for school work and to browse the web.

Then 6 months in (bearing in mind I wanted the PC to last 5 years would me outstripping its use case, as what happened with my first 2 computers) I started seriously video editing and doing 3D work in Cinema 4D. A Ryzen 1600X and a dedicated GPU would have reallllyyyyy helped with that - but at that point it was too late.

 

Thankfully, my PC just abouts managed - I can edit 4K video together on a 1080p timeline with good performance, but the minute I add Lumetri and audio effects the timeline become uneditable.

[AlexaKitty]

On 1/29/2021 at 9:04 PM, Letgomyleghoe said:

how wrong did you set the dram timing? bios shouldn't brick itself from powering off with the button, must have been a faulty board. I've had zero issues with mine.

How wrong? I just set my XMP timings manually. Then there was no POST and I had to shut off the PC, which led to a constant CPU debug light. Nothing worked to get it fixed.

 

On this Strix board, I've set countless timings wrong and a simple CMOS reset fixed it.

[oyzmo]

Built one of my first computers wearing wool socks while standing on a polyester carpet.... (it never started)

[divach]

It wasn't MY mistake, but still awful. Uncle comes to me with his laptop, which he decided to open up while eating cake. the hard drive was covered in chocolate icing and filling. Eugh.

[starry]

when i was new to computers i tried to force proprietary psu connector pinouts into standard components... There was smoke

[Tom09]

Getting a gaming laptop instead of a pc

[Rex Hite]

Buying a DEC Alpha Personal Workstation.with 64 bit RISC Windows NT4 in 1998. Had I known in '98 what I knew in '99 I wouldn't have bothered.

[Edmond Dantes]

building a PC during the middle of covid, that cost me around 3 racks, now the same parts on pc parts picker is 2.4 racks.

[GeorgeMKane]

• One time when I went to re-paste my cpu (from a few builds ago), and somehow thermal paste got underneath the cpu. Thankfully, I got pretty much all of it off from the bottom no problem, but it still freaked me out a bit at first. Lesson learned was to keep a few extra paper towels on hand, when re-pasting the cpu.
• Lost PC Building Simulator save with over 40 hours played at the time. (Pro tip: It's in the game's actual directory where the game's files are located, in the "Saves" folder. Not Steam -> userdata, where literally almost every other save file is located.)

[Xavier_Eternal]

I would have to say the worst thing I did was set the voltage too high on my CPU when I was overclocking it.  I found out very quick that I just made a huge and expensive mistake.

[Gum Joe]

Brought my first DIY PC 2 months before 1st Gen Ryzen. Could have really done with the extra cores/threads (would have got the 1600X over my i5-7500)

[TukangUsapEmenq]

Recently happened for few days ago, I wanna test a friend's dead laptop LCD (a ROG Strix, his brother stupidly turned on the laptop while it's wet after it did hit the rain), as if the LCD's still good, welp, good few bucks commission. Thinking of actually tearing down my personal, daily driver laptop to check whether it has the same connector; it is, 30-pin one.

 

Welp, switched the LCD cables, turned it on, didn't come up at all. Re-switching back to my laptop's LCD, doesn't turned on either. Some kind of safety switch that the laptop won't turn on when it's on bare-PCB, I think, so I replaced back the back cover. It did boot fine. Still curious, removed the cover, and turned on the laptop again (still with it's original LCD), it actually booted up. Dafuq man.

 

Proving if it's booting up fine while it's cover removed, tried it again with my friend's LCD. While trying to plug in the connector.....

 

IT SPARKS A LITTLE BIT ON THE CONNECTOR'S CORNER. And yes, it scared the shit outta of me, I got SSD as my boot (and storage, as HDD on laptop simply just not reliable at all, died every 3 years on my use-case, storage SSD didn't connected tho) drive, and I'm afraid it'd kill it.

 

Welp, stupid mistake to not remove the battery connector. Removed it ofc after the mini-firework. Now tried it with the charger plugged in. Still no luck. Tried it again with my original LCD, "It's fine, fortunately", I thought, until.......

 

My laptop froze all of the sudden while booting, the "circle-loading-thingy" went stop, and, fun fact, it actually never been like this before to froze in the middle of booting. 4 mins waiting of it, have to hard turn off ofc. Turned it on again, it boots, yet stucked on black screen for a while, even I had freaking negative thinking as "Did I just killed my freaking SSD over a stupid test?" and......

 

This little shit updated itself (and yes, I disabled the whole auto-update thingy already, still won't overcome the "important" updates tho) while I'm handling the laptop, with it's PCB totally exposed, and I'm so hardly tried to not even touching the conductive parts on it, while balancing the fan to not drop down as it barely have anything to hold it (fan actually using the same screw socket as it's back cover screw places, so I'm screwed for 5 mins waiting it to update).

 

Welp, after all of the drama, and one "F the LCD, no more of this", screwed everything back, and here I am few days later, typing with the exact same laptop as above. Fortunately, nothing's damaged, and no data loss.

[UltraTech]

Trying to unbrick an HD 7770 using the method of connecting 2 pins of the BIOS chip, I connected the wrong ones and that motherboard has no sound output anymore (I replaced it like 4 months later).

[thekingofmonks]

Not really a tech mistake but I hesitated purchasing an R9 290 for $35 and bought a 280 for the same price when it was too late… there’s a huge performance gap between the two, btw. One performs like a 1060 while the other is like a 960.

[Wonjay]

Mine was probably buying a phat Xbox 360, for the sake of collection. Needless to say that not only it RRoDed on me, the psu actually went smoking soon after. 

[EphraimK]

I tried to fix a power port on my laptop, and I accidentally broke it badly. Wouldn't boot at all. Now that I think of it, I wonder if I messed up the CPU, and then things wouldn't process. 

[da na]

Buying a dual socket workstation where the 2nd CPU goes on a riser instead of the board itself.