Stupidest thing you have done with a computer?

1) That good old switch on the back of the PSU.
2) Floppy drive cable upside down.
3) Slipping with a screwdriver when doing CPU heatsinks. Done that twice. Both times the motherboards were knackered.
 
J.B said:
A 15year old neighbour once convinced his parents to let him build the family PC based on my testermony "oh its easy, idiot proof. And I'll be over the road if he runs into trouble"

He made the same mistake :rolleyes:
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I did that with my first pc upgrade, luckily I didn't fry the mobo!
 
Here in Stoke I used to be quite well known for building/repairing/fault finding on PC's from 1988.
One day I needed a mobo and Millennium (OCUK) was closed so I used a rival shop not far from Azagoth.
I got home and the mobo was dead.
I tried everything and EVEN got the manual out.
I took it back and the guys behind the counter knew my reputation has I said "Its dead".
One of them looked at the mobo, moved a jumper and said 'Try it now'.
I still cringe about it now.

In my defence they had just come out with a jumper that killed the mobo and there were no instructions in the box:D
 
I managed to snap the heatsink mounting bracket on an old k6 mobo at work while replacing the heatsink. Solved it by superglueing it to the cpu :D
 
writting a batch file on a computer course using a 386 PC and dos 5, set the batch file to load up on startup, then crahsing my unsupecting M8 pc so he had to reset it and when it did, the file ran and it said:

"Formatting drive C: and A:", and I think I put a delay on it as well, so a completed message came up and he **** himself thinking he wreck his PC and lost his work.

Anthony
 
Rebelius said:
when I was about 12 I flicked the switch on the family PC PSU from 230 to 110v and it went BANG!
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Did that too. Scary blue sparks! :eek:

Formatted my C: drive a few years back and forgetting I hadn't backed anything up until I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. That's a terrible moment of realisation, I can tell you. :D

The best PC failure of mine though resulted in a lot of grey smoke and a nice new motherboard burnt out in several places. I assume I was in someway responsible, but to this day I still can't work out how.
 
First time I was allowed near a Mac (many years ago) I accidentally messed up the system folder, I'd assumed it would simply refuse to let me screw it up in the same way DOS stopped me moving anything that I wasn't meant to..

Took ages to reload Mac os on floppy onto that Mac classic!
 
Back in the mid-nineties, I knocked a cup of coffee over the motherboard of works brand new state-of-the-art Sun SparcStation, two days after it arrived. Almost got sacked for that one.
 
Spending 2 weeks annoyed thinking my graphics card was gone as i couldnt get over 20fps.

Only to realise i didnt plug the power onto it when i change a HDD :(
 
it is possible to jam a dimm in backwards.

best bit is, dimm and motherboard survived nearly 3 weeks once i'd oriented them correctly before becoming horrendously unstable. the dimm under-reported a few hundred kilobytes - not bad considering the smoke that'd been
 
Numerous Netsend messages at high school.
My main PC is an electrical disaster, very dodgy...agp slot is broken so the GFX card is held up with some random bits of mental and a 10p piece :p
 
Screwed the hard drive in while it was on :eek:

Was learning my craft and just wasn't paying any attention that it would damage it :rolleyes:

Suffice to say the Lady who's PC it was lost everything :(
 
Many years ago on a very cheap case I was poking out the pci-blanking plates (the kind that have a little tab of metal holding them in still, yeah.. cheap kind).
Anyway my screwdriver wasn't to hand and so I used my EDIT FINGER instead.
I still have the scar where it literally flayed the skin off! :D
 
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