Stupidest thing you have done with a computer?

I had my PC open and running, I was messing about with a HDD in my hand...I think it was when I touched the HDD to the PC case and it all went dark. Completely fried the motherboard....

GOt the technician round to inspect it and he asked why there was only two screws holding the Motherboard in place........damn, I knew I forgot something! I feigned ignorance and said something like "should there be more?"...still he replaced it anyway
 
Mine is when my dad, who was the only person at the time who knew anything about computers, was away on business. I was 'the man of the house' and was playing games on his computer. Well, I got bored and started looking through windows explorer and noticed some files that werent in any folders. I thought I would do a good thing and organize his filesystem for him. Well, come to find out those files were system files, which the computer needed to start up.

Needless to say my dad was more than a little upset when he came home and had to spend hours is DOS looking for the files to move them back. In the end he had to format and start over.

My confidence in my abilities with computer has never been so low.
 
Tried to connect a fan by randomly connecting it through a mass of wires in a crappy case whilst the computer was still running about 5 years ago, and connected it up wrong. Next thing I know the plastic is melting off the fan wires and smoke is spewing out of the machine.:o
 
Way back in the day....1991 to be exact.

I hacked into the college mainframe (not really hacked, just used her login name and guessed her pathetic password) and checked out the personal details of a girl I was interested in. Full Address/ family details and for some reason Medical details - she had entered the details (whether true or not I don't know) for an assignment. Someone else saw me do this.....

And,

Hitting the Novell server at work (1999) with a mass login program that simulated multiple usernames/passwords in a short timeframe. The server stopped for about 20 minutes (and I got a call from the admin, as my PC had been flagged up as the culprit)

I also installed a keylogger on +20 PCs at work (around year 2000 - all belonging to professors and doctors) - after a virus dat upgrade the logger was noticed, and everyone was called in to a meeting to see what info had been compromised & see if some outside company had used the program to gather info on us. I made the mistake of telling someone in the dept that it was me that did it (luckily the Dir. saw the funny side)
;)

I could go on.... but there's too many ;)
 
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With my own 1st custom build, I had the system out the case on the floor, and was just plugging in cables ect. Anywas, I managed to short out the power switch on the motherboard, cue the system turning on, and the smell of a smouldering CPU with out a heat sink lol, good old Thunderbirds. I didn't realise the PSU was plugged in :D lol.
 
Not me per se but I was at work, repairing some of the 'away' machines and doing some updates on the office machines. As such, I'm sat in front of 4 LCDs, all bustling with information, with a pile of Shuttles defragging away and a big Dell backing up to a rack of external drives, whilst doing some other miscellaneous file keeping.

Without warning our builder walks in, who was doing some repairs upstairs at the time and stumbles straight over to the mains breaker box. He looks at my screens, various computers and multitudes of flashing network and drive access lights, looks at me slightly quizically, then before I could even say anything or register his presence, flips the mains breaker, killing the whole lot.

D'OH!
 
add me to the voltage-switch-dead-psu club. Was the first pc I brought and it crashed all the time, I remember seeing the switch and thinking maybe it needs more amps so having been to electronics class I though lower voltage higher current.

Switch it on and predicably it went bang and started to smoke. As it turns out I was petrified and knew I was out of my depth, so I called the PC company and got an engineer in. I turn the swtich back before he came only took him a few minutes to diagnosis the problem. Funny thing is he said he got this all the time with the psu's just blowing :) must have been all the OcUK member :)

What was even better was the new psu fixed the pc crashing so it must have been the power supply that was causing the problem.

Actually I think thats when I really got into PC hardware. Funny that.
 
Lashout_UK said:
Not me per se but I was at work, repairing some of the 'away' machines and doing some updates on the office machines. As such, I'm sat in front of 4 LCDs, all bustling with information, with a pile of Shuttles defragging away and a big Dell backing up to a rack of external drives, whilst doing some other miscellaneous file keeping.

Without warning our builder walks in, who was doing some repairs upstairs at the time and stumbles straight over to the mains breaker box. He looks at my screens, various computers and multitudes of flashing network and drive access lights, looks at me slightly quizically, then before I could even say anything or register his presence, flips the mains breaker, killing the whole lot.

D'OH!
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i hope you ripped him a new one?!
 
I've had surprising few screw ups but I do remember blood .... lots of blood .... know the IO blanking plate you have with your motherboard which the ports fit through ... know how they normally have a metal tab sticking out from it which sits over the ps2 ports ... well if you manage to stick that into the end of your thumb then you get a rather large amount of blood coming out ... (fortunately over the table and floor not the machine :) )

Do remember one at work from ages ago where we had spent ages getting a production cluster up over night following an issue. My boss had spent the last 2hrs getting back up and I thought that I'd use command recall to see what he had done ... and accidentally ran the cluster shutdown command ... I contemplated not answering the phone that immediately started rings but luckily he was ok about it and everything came back cleanly and quickly :)
 
decided to change the fan on my cpu.... the old (stock) and heat sink wouldn't come off.... so i pulled it.... still didn't come off... so i pulled it harder.... and the CPU came out with the heat sink..... riped out of the board.....board and cpu looked fine.... put it back in the board attached the new assembly (gigabyte rocket) and conected everything up... turned it on..

nothing......



turned it 'off'

cursed swore.... went to bed

turned it on the next morning and it worked.... but abit uguru (and cpuZ) had gone CRAZY..... it was reporting that the voltage was fluctuating between 1volt and 1.4volts and the multiplier was going from 5.1X to 11x.... on an amd 3500+ 939 chip..... the clockspeed was all over the place.... but surpisingly none of this seemed to affect the actual speed of the thing... or the heat.... and after about 6ish months it stopped doing it.... never worked the same since tho..... even tho the clockspeed voltage and multiplier are all now stable
 
[FnG]magnolia;11229505 said:
I remember trying to 'short' one of the backsockets of a C-64 when I was about 9 or 10 but I can't remember why exactly. I think I read something in a magazine about making it better or quicker or some such rubbish. Used my sister's hairclip and my dad went mental, lol.

Wish I could remember what the hell I was trying to achieve :) Anyone?
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Yay! The old reset trick so you could enter poke's for extra lives and stuff? ;)

The preferred method was to use the ground lead from the tape deck on the 3rd(?) pin of the cartridge slot iirc.

I got bored one day and decided to see if any other pins did anything interesting and kewl... five minutes later I found out they did! :p

...they deaded your C64 - do not pass go, do not collect £200... :( Probably my worst mistake, but at least I manged to get a loan machine while it was away.
 
When I was a bit younger (15 maybe) I put a cold glass of water on top of my PC tower, which sat on the desk to the left of my CRT monitor, to warm it up a bit. Top of said case was slightly curved, and the glass slipped and threw water straight into my monitor. I unplugged it immediately, wiped it down, got my Mum's hair-drier and dried it out. Turned it on the next day and it was fine, fortunately.
 
pressure testing my phase cooling system with propane and finding one of the brazed joints bursting @ about 2 bar :(

MW
 
A recent blunder of mine was having the side panel off my case removed as I had been investigating with cooling.

Anyhoo, had been off a few days, under my desk -no problems.

One night I went to get a drink and I put the glass on my desk but somehow dropped it and it landed under the desk and some squash managed to fly out of the glass and hit the bottom of the motherboard, whilst it was still all powered on !!!

Needless to say it wasn't best pleased and threw a fit instantly locking up. Fix was a new mobo. Most expensive drink I've ever dropped!
 
Killed my 8800GT because my side panel was off and while moving some cables around touched the top of the graphics card with a mini USB cable, it instantly died. :(

A more recent one was trying to flash my bios from inside Windows and bricking the board.
 
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