Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[Error 52]

In general - lotta smashed phone screens. Including when I had to replace the screen on my Pixel 4a not too long after buying it, only to immediately fuck up the new screen as well (though the second time was internal damage, interestingly.) I have made a point to get a screen protector on my Pixel 6.

 

Spilled lemonade on my PSP and killed it. Did manage to get that one repaired, at least. Though I remember it needed a second pass through at the repair shop, for some reason. (If I remember right, the UMD drive didn't open?) Oh, yeah, and I had a PSP Go that my dog chewed up and destroyed. That also sucked.

 

Bought a new laptop (Acer Swift 3) to replace my ancient, knackered Macbook Air, then flung it in my (extremely filled with crap) bag. End result was that the screen was destroyed in less than a week. My brother did fix the screen, but the repair was never quite right and it was always a bit off center and eventually got this annoying white blotchy bit. Real shame, as it was a pretty nice little laptop otherwise. Definitely have been very careful not to repeat that mistake with my Legion 5.

[Guest]

The worst mistakes was selling off old hardware. Some cpus, boards and video cards should had been kept. That's a draw back of barter and trades though.

 

Wouldn't mind having my old Sapphire 4850x2 to play around with. The old crossfire days where it really improved some game titles frame rates and playability.

[Guest]

A few months ago I accidentally put 2 of my fingers on a Intel stock cooler which was running at full blast. It cut me so bad that if my bones weren't there I would have lost 2 fingers.

[Charles_2007]

Built a computer bases on a Thermaltake Lanbox case ans with an Intel 8400.  I hated that case.  I hated that CPU and the motherboard only bas two Ram slot and did not accept more than 2x4 gb

[rikitikitavi]

Sold Nokia N-Gage QD and Sony PSP-1000 long time ago... not worst, but still...

[AssociatedMushroom]

I returned a $2000 PC to because I was setting it up/plugging it in while drunk later that day and plugged the HDMI into the motherboard instead of the GPU. I woke up the next day and didn't check my work and just assumed it was a nonfunctional product so I returned it to the store.

[IPD]

2 hours ago, AssociatedMushroom said:

I returned a $2000 PC to because I was setting it up/plugging it in while drunk later that day and plugged the HDMI into the motherboard instead of the GPU. I woke up the next day and didn't check my work and just assumed it was a nonfunctional product so I returned it to the store.

I made that same plug-in mistake the last time I hooked up my PC.  lol!

[Vilacom]

Let a friend who claimed to know a lot about computers design and select parts for my “Ultimate PC” The machine is totally fine, but ended up spending a bunch of money i didnt have too cause he went with SLI 1080 TI graphics cards and a 16 core processor(Extremely expensive at the time) plus an expensive AIO that did nothing for my gaming performance or really give me any significant benefit at all, just added a few thousand to the price tag and have a computer that probably underperforms for my use case

[AzzaNezz]

When i was a kid and got my first pc this was in time where 4gb ddr2 was standards in pc's.I was often cleaning it and removing the fan and blowing it with air.But in those 3 years i never repasted it,and have used it without thermal paste

[jewkesman]

Leaving the Window above my pc open before going to sleep just before a giant rainstorm. then while inspecting the pc for what got wet. I found out i never fully locked the CPU into the socket and in a weird twisting motion while removing the cooler i pulled the whole thing loose bending half the chips on a two month old AMD FX 6300.  I meant pins not chips lol.

 

[SirShanova]

On 4/16/2022 at 7:15 AM, Theminecraftaddict555 said:

Bought an HP Pavilion 15-n219eo laptop and thought that it would be a good "gaming laptop". 

Saddest thing in this thread

[SimplyChunk]

Dunno if i mentioned this in this thread before but my biggest mistake was joining this fo-----Running MS Scandisk from a bootable floppy on a Novell printer server.  The boss asked me what happened.  I said "I ran Scandisk" and he sighed and asked with a quiver in his voice "Did it find errors?" So i replied "Yeah..why?"  He didn't answer he just dropped his head turned away from me and inserted the Novell boot disk in the PC and mashed the restart button

[Theminecraftaddict555]

On 4/24/2022 at 11:09 PM, SirShanova said:

Saddest thing in this thread

I mean the plus side is that it was "Ok" for the games I was playing fallout nv, minecraft, roblox at the time. 

[irishbeast]

On 1/16/2013 at 10:17 AM, Rwa said:

Drinking in front of my computer. Drinking way too much. I had my computer on the floor back then, right next to the table. I accidentally knocked a full 1 liter (33~34 ounces) glass of vodka mixed with cola off the table, and pretty much all of it ended up in the fans on top of the computer, blastering everything around it with vodka and cola for a few seconds before the computer died.

Everything in my old computer died except for my two hard drives. Too bad, that HD5850 was only a couple weeks old =/

I've done that  a fair few times.

 

Before I knew anything about PSUs I spent my student loan on a £300 to0 of the line graphics card. Kept cutting out so figured the computer was buggered and bought a new when I I needed was a better PSU., In my defence the computer store didn't point it out either but they were pretty useless

 

 

[wseaton]

I'm fortunate enough to have not made infrastructure mistakes i can't quickly fix.

 

However, I've gone along with some bad decisions because its not worth my time screaming. By far the worst is letting some idiot consultant talk upper mgnt into using Citrix or RDS on prem to replace local desktop environments. Anybody who's supported this cluster-f knows what I'm talking about. It them takes years to get off that platform and back to properly managed desktops.

[Marylin]

I drink a large glass of wine in front of my computer. I literally saw my computer die((

[linkboy]

A few years ago, I bought a HP Elitebook 8770W and needed upgrade the hard drive in it. I didn't want to do a fresh install of Windows, so I decided to clone the old drive to the new one.

 

Instead, I cloned the new, blank drive to the old drive with my Windows install.

 

Which meant I lost everything and had to do a fresh install of Windows anyways.

[Abraxaz]

When I was upgrading dieing hardive in my pc to a larger harddrive, I copied all my raw photos and jpegs of my daughter over to the drive I use as a scratch disk...

 

Cue putting in the new disc and which some how killed the mother board and the m.2 drive. Litterally fried the boards power module. 

Ok not great but I still have the original copy, plug that into a old 2600k based pc which was my media pc to back up to my htpc harddrive and it made the dreaded click of death..

 

Soo sent it off to a harddrive repair place and they wanted a grand to recover the data...

 

And that's how I lost all my raw photos of my daught from ages 0-2...

 

Luckily my Google drive automatically backed  up the jpegs I sent to the family on WhatsApp/Facebook...

 

To say I've learnt my lesson, I now have a harddrive copy in my pc, a Synology Nas and a Google drive with automatic back up and my missus has only just forgiven me..

[Zodiark1593]

That time right after I built my desktop, and in the process of copying my external drive to the desktop to actually have a second copy, I accidentally yeeted the partition data, rendering everything inaccessible (leave it to it happening when I actually tried to back it up). Running TestDisk to reconstruct the file structure took several days. Thankfully, it was a success.

[abit-sean]

I once crashed a network of about 300+ users by shutting down the SAN. I configured the SANs in pairs split across 2 buildings with replication and auto failover, the only problem was I forgot to add the server connections to secondary SANs. So technically the data volumes were online but the servers couldn't connect to them, after 10 minutes or so of panic I noticed my mistake and added the servers then after a quick refresh everything started to come back to life. Unfortunately all of the VMs had shutdown and had to be switched back on which took another 30 minutes, so in total the network was down for almost an hour. Bad day at the office. 

[AndreiArgeanu]

I once had a DHT11 sensor which I plugged into my raspberry pi not knowing about the reliability issues of the DHT11 and it's 1 wire circuit. Because it wasn't reading at all I thought I didn't wire the power properly so I reversed the VCC and GND connections like a dumbass without even checking a diagram and fried the sensor and also almost burnt up my finger when I touched the sensor.