Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[aselwyn1]

no buying lots of bitcoins 4 years ago

[zombiepixel]

so i bought a shitty computer on black Friday and it had a harddrive in there that had windows 8 on it. but surpricely enough the laptop didn't come with a product key. so i put the hardrive into my custom computer because who has the money for buying windows ;P. a couple of months went by and i upgraded my windows 8 to 8.1 preview thinking it was the real 8.1. turns out it wasnt... so i tried making my windows to the real 8.1 aaaaaaand it didnt let me. i called up microsoft and they said they could not do anything about it. (fuk microsoft...) so now im stuck in between windows 8 and 8.1. some games that i buy don't even work so its always a gamble for it to work or not.   

[The Great Lord Mccodi]

Installing McAfee because I rushed the adobe flash update.

[TetraSky]

While changing changing my CPU cooler, I wanted to remove ALL the thermal paste that was left on my intel CPU, so I took it out of the socket, cleaned it nicely... But then, when I went to put it back in, I went in too fast, at an angle, and ended up screwing the CPU into the socket pins. So there went my $250 motherboard. I just don't know what was going on in my head when I was doing that, I just know that I felt like crying afterward. I hate these "new" sockets from Intel... way too easy to break. At least the AMD CPUs, if a pin break, you can just put it in the socket and it may still work... (Like what Linus showed/did before)

 

CPU was still working fine, still using it today in a much cheaper motherboard($75), zero difference in performances.. I will not make the mistake of buying an expensive motherboard again when the cheaper ones do the exact same thing, minus a few extra thing I don't even need anyway. (like extra 16 PCI-e slots)

[terrytek]

Running a Core i7-3770K without the heatsink, causing a $330 mistake. GODDAMNIT. WHAT. THE. FUDGE.

 

WTF was I thinking? Could it be just human error? Geez, I destroyed the CPU and the motherboard (rammed the CPU into the socket, bending all the pins). Remind me to always check to see if everything essential is  assembled. #@#$@ please.

[terrytek]

I tried to overclock my old notebock for the first time and all go wrong when I put the clock of a dual core to 6GHz

 

WTF?? 6GHZ?????!!!!!!!! R U INSANE??? ESPECIALLY ON AN OLD NOTEBOOK?? GEEZ MAN!

[Arshdeep]

Tea and computers don't mix. :angry:

I love tea...don;t even go their man (just had 2 cups)

Friends with full glasses of lemonade and a 5 year old, all near a laptop don;t mix either. That computer still runs, it being over a decade old.

[Luke]

Cleaning my beloved computer (Pentium 4).

 

A.k.a cleaning/inspecting my computer and discovering some mysterious white goop that was on my processor that i immediately cleaned off. Good thing i did that or else my processor would overheat and die one week later. Oh wait it did and i'm an idiot for wiping off thermal paste thinking it was some sort of corrosion.

[bcredeur97]

not backing up anything... hard drives are so expensive though:(

[kizoku_95]

Tried playing Crysis on high settings @ 1360X768 on core2duo G41 chipset  iGPU in my early nOOb days! 

[ANUPLUCIFERGAMER]

trying to open up a game which never existed in my system 

[clementk]

Mine has to be tinkering about with my bios and accidentally saving over my overclock profile!! What a doosher!

 

oh yeah and playing at 1080p and not realising that the screen I was using was 720p lol. bye bye graphics card!

 

I was showing off too, I was like "yeah look, duke nukems running at like 5'000'000'000 frames a second"..............................power off!

how is it posible to play at 1080P if screen is 720P ? its just cant it would just downscale in worst case and how can this damage your GPU?

[clementk]

Deleting system 32 on windows and not being able to fix it.

its not posible system32 is a Systems folder and you need to use CMD to to remove it .not even Administrator can remove it.

[clementk]

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

again not sure that a virus can do that >>.

[clementk]

how did the vacuum cleaner kill it

static maybe.

[clementk]

tried reading though this "Fixing Peoples post" then seeing the Page number lol

[SrN95]

Mine was getting thermal paste in a mobo socket.....then not realizing it was in there and bending a pin on my 8350, though i did manage to fix it

[Corvus]

Letting my younger cousin borrow my PC. Took a while to clean up the mess.

[Guest Kefuren]

Either removing system files semi-accidentally from an ancient Windows 3.11 laptop, which I didn't have an installation disk for, or cleaning a video card with a cleaning duster (please just don't ask me why I did that...)

[Guest]

I make no mistakes, I am made for operating computers...

[Advent]

I make no mistakes, I am made for operating computers...

Then you are doing it wrong. You learn by making mistakes.

As far as my worst mistakes over 20 years of computing I would probably say getting caught war dialing back when dial-up had just started. Since I was a minor at the time it was expunged from my record. In more recent years I would have to say the time I replaced some caps on a board and had them reversed. Snap, crackle, pop and the magic smoke later and I had a dead board.

Also managed to rewire a PSU wrong and blow the caps in it. Didn't damage any of my connected components though.

[Frix]

Forgetting about mobo spacers (only mistake )

[Advent]

Forgetting about mobo spacers (only mistake )

how long have you been using a computer for? I hardly think you have made only 1 mistake your whole life regarding a computer lol.

[tobben]

i bricked my computer by downloading and running something with a trojan virus when i was younger, the pc guy told us the system was shorted out  so he kept the pc.. he probably sold the parts after taking it .. so first mistake, getting virus, second mistake being scammed, i think i also managed to fully reset and delete everything on a computer when i was a small child, back when i was afraid to open the web browser because it was so expensive ..  though im not even sure if that's what i actually did or if they were just messing with me to make me feel bad, which i did .. oh so much, i still kinda do

[Frix]

how long have you been using a computer for? I hardly think you have made only 1 mistake your whole life regarding a computer lol.

Well I cant think of anything else. Feel free to correct me if you think you know more about me than I do.