Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[popolongo]

I paid 300 dollars for a 1gb hdd a while ago

[Minjon]

I mounted my motherboard with the wrong screws... I replaced some screws with the good screws but i ended 50 % psu screws and 50% motherboard screws.

I did the same thing but i barely managed to put the right ones because the two top one wouldn't screw in properly ugh...

[Tom_Donaldson]

Built up a APU system :(

[DJ46]

I tried to cool my overheating laptop by puting ice into a bag and placing that on top of my laptop. I haven't noticed that the bag a had a hole in it and the ice got melted. I immediately grabbed a tissue and removed the water from bellow my keyswitches. Laptop still works :P

I agreed after a long day in school to a pre-built computer in a HP case with a changed PSU and GPU. Now I have to sit besides it and I'm using up all my moneys to slowly change components so I have what I could get back then. :( :( :(

A bit embarassing one, I tried to watch a video on my smartphone while pissing and it slided into the toilet. The power button sometimes stops working, but otherwise it's fine. And I have a new phone, so I don't really care.

That's probably all, I may remember some more later.

[chingyg]

- buying a cheapo raidmax 530W PSU semi modular

- buying a reference evga gtx 560 ti

- not planning my color schemes when I first bought all the parts

[Glaith]

Cant remember what series of Nvida card used to die after inserting a S-video but man was that lame, put svideo into my new card and bam lines all through screen so googled problem only to find out its a Nvidia fault. Never used s-video again.

It was the GT 240

[Glaith]

Spilled my drink into the keyboard..

Oh cmon we've all done that..., but as soon as u do this best thing do do is bang it face down on the desk as quick as poosible, i have saved many keyboards with this method.

[Glaith]

I have not made a noticeable mistake yet( I have only been in to computers ofr about 4-5 moths now). Its kind of scary to go that long with no mistakes...I know a big mistake must be coming....

Lucky for you, you have a massive forum telling you the mistakes we have done and now you know to avoid them. We learnt the hard way without forums :P

[Glaith]

My worst mistake was during my first computer build. forgot to ground myself and touched the gold pins on the cpu. felt the pain of the static first, then after 20 seconds i realized what i had just done (this was a $230 Cpu at the time).

damn dude, that would have sucked

[Glaith]

Didn't happen to me but i had a mate who didn't know to much about gaming rigs but like to spend the cash any ways, so we're talking one of those towers with all the temp gages and knobs and heaps of fancy crap, He also like to spend unecessary amounts of money on his PC just to beat me and a friend. Any ways, what he has running at the time was a AMD 6000+ with 4 gig ram and a 8800, comes to a LAN puts the tower on the side of a desk, another friend came over drunk as hell and pushed it off the side, needless to say it hit concrete and the things Beeped and squeeled all manner of noises from the gadgets, was not a happy chappy.

[Agons]

ah yes, back just a little while ago i built my first gaming rig, spent 600 buck on the top of the line, brand new gpu Ati 6970! it was the best GPU in the world! XD well at the time my only place to put my desktop in a CM 920 mid tower case, was in a wodden cabinate that was by my desk, i always kept the door open, due to the massive amount of heat it created. but on day i had forgotten. play SC2 for about 5 hours straight running on ultra setting ofcourse. Went to bed and woke up to a strange WWWWHHHIIIRRRRRRRR 'ing sound from the other room. needless to say the top of my desk was hot enough to cook an egg on. sigh, i'd only had the gpu for 2 weeks. Still works but the heat damaged causes slight artifcating that i have lived with. still waiting for the 8970's to be anouced, but since amd isnt looking to go there anytime soon i might be switching to nvidia's 700's when they come out.

[TechTheWorld]

biggest mistake buying a HP

I agree I have had 3-4 hps and they are junk.

[TechTheWorld]

Was using a laptop HP dv9000 was a good laptop but one day I was in a bad mood and I think a driver stopped working while I was using it so it closed everything I was doing and I got mad and punched the screen that 17" screen was done went without a computer for a while laptop is still broken

I have that same laptop! Except my problem was the fan does not speed up when needed so It fried who knows what....

[Simmytu]

Buying a Packard Bell :,-( The pc cost me around €700 (back around 2007) and braked up after a year (videocard+mobo failure). Cost me €300 more for repairs and upgrades. Terrible experience with that company.

[DoubleNegativeInfinity]

I fell into my computer while it was running. Killed my HDDs, cracked and bent my side panel, and killed my DVD burner (I was watching a movie). Twas' a terrible time.

[Olila]

I bought an hp desktop before I started building my own and hated it.

Same... the only parts I have left is the hard drive, blue ray drive and my 1090t

[Venum]

Spilled my drink into the keyboard..

As of now mate that is the worst i have done, I don't want smashing or downloading worms and trojans in my system just for the purpose of doing the worst ..

[Paperchase]

Just last summer i spilled a bowl of popcorn on my PC. It might not seem that bad, but I LOVE salt! (It will probably be the end of me). As you can imagine this bowl of popcorn was crammed with salt, the bowl fell over, and salt fell inside my PC through venting holes, being sucked into fans and thrown everywhere into every little corner of my case.

Thankfully I managed to clean it all away, at least most of it. After that I din't think more of it. After about 2 weeks, there were some salt remains still inside my PC, it seems the salt had been eroding on my motherboard at the feet of the PCIe slot, causing it to simply die. Therefore i had to RMA the motherboard, and got a new one a couple of days later.

[3570tech]

i was going to try the windows 8 release beta thing(i had win 7), i didnt know you couldent get win 7 back....(i got a ISO file so i got it back but, so much time spendt)

[Emkryan]

Accidentally buying DDR3 ram to upgrade a shitty DDR2 Dell, luckily I was planning on building my own pc anyway so I just held it till I could build the actual pc

[Tardbarn]

When I was around 15 years old, my friend and I put my only gaming capable rig in a frostless freezer as an overclocking experiment. Although nothing broke, it was such a stupid risk, because if anything had actually broke, I wouldn't have been able to afford to replace anything and would have had to go without a gaming rig for a long time.

[xentric]

My first BIOS update I put the file on a raid drive and used this motherboard easy update and started it. So you can guess when it deleted the bios it broke the raid drive set up the whole motherboard died.

I had a friend that built his first PC and it died within the first months of having it due prolong overheating. So when I pulled the CPU heat sink off, he had left the plastic sticker over the thermal paste that said "Please remove before installation".

[tp95112]

Plug molex 2 other molex that are coming out of the PSU causing my computer to shut down

[Mo5]

I bought a big tower cooler for my CPU... it was too tall for my side panel to close. It was a mATX case though :P

[Dodge]

Building a 5V fan adapter, which was even more ghetto than Linus ghetto adapter: http://youtu.be/SyrvdDkS_SA

I startet with a similar 4-pin to 3-pin adapter, but I didn't have any tools to remove and change the pins of the 4-pin molex conector. And since I wanted 5V and not 7V, I simply cut off some of the plastic, so that the connector would fit the other way araound. It worked perfectly.

The problem was that I forgot it and connected a slimline DVD drive to this modified adpater. The DVD drive got 12V instead of 5V -> smoke.