worst computer blunder

my friend knocked a cup ot tea over a xfx 790 with 8 gig of 1800mhz ram, a quad core cpu, and 2 bfg gtx 280's. he didnt have any money to spend for a while whalst me payed me back (unfortunatly not my build, we doing it for a friend)
 
Damn, should have tried that, the expression on his face when his parents said no income and no christmas and bday prezzies until it was payed back was great though
 
Buying a super cheap power supply (£10 jobby) for my second PC, around 4 years ago. I was lying next to the computer under the desk fitting a 6600GT. Turn the computer on and after a few seconds the PSU exploded and a blue arc of crazy electricity narrowly missed my head, flashing right in-front of my eyes. My wife was watching all this and we had a good nervous laugh about it afterwards ;)
 
Paid around 150 quid for an 80gb HDD a couple of years ago, got it home and dropped it... as you can guess it was buggered, took it back to the shop though, they swapped for new. ;)
 
Had a near miss a couple of days ago.

I'd bought a s775 mainboard from someone who'd was splitting a system. I then bought a nice E5200 to go with it but decided to power it up with a E2160 I had lying around to update the BIOS as I figured it may not support the new chip otherwise.

Cleared the CMOS with a jumper, and fired it up to flash noted the CPU fan seemed to be working quite hard while idling (pwm driven)..... noted the BIOS temps were high then found the voltage was still set to 1.55V. Rather glad I didn't stick the E5200 in the first!

Turns out the jumper I used to clear the CMOS didn't have a metal bit in.....



Another time I'd driven around 100miles with a hard disk amongst other things wrapped up in a coat in the boot. Go there, it was cold, grabbed the coat and the HDD hit the tarmac with a terrible thud. A very modern 630MB unit at the time.... Still worked fine though and lasted until it given away a couple of years later.

AD
 
spending 20mins looking for the floppy cable :S it was hidden under the optical and hard drive IDE's

and not putting the ram in all the way

im building a new rig soon so hopefully there wont be any blunders :S

very newbie mistakes
 
ConTRo13R said:
That too! lol my first ever building mistake, huge bang proper made me jump!
Click to expand...

I have to admit that was also mine, I was 8/9 at the time seem the red switch at the back and flicked it while it was on... Needless to say I never did it again :D(Mainly because it took me a few years to get another pc :D!)
 
When I started watercooling a long time ago I made a massive blunder. I had next to my PC a 15 litre reservoir with an Eheim 1250 in it submerged.
From this there was some tubing going into my PC (the side case was removed) and it was attached to my waterblock.

One day after a rebuild I had put everything back into place, and neglected to fully check the jubilee clips. So I threw the switch on my surge protector to power up my pump only, the machine was powered down.

To my absolute horror I heard an extremely bad gushing sound and saw water pouring out of my case. It turned out I had not only forgot to check the jubilee clips, I had entirely forgotten to attach the output tubing of the pump to the waterblock!

I dived for the switch on the surge protector which had been soaked, and for about 2 seconds I breathed a sigh of relief, until the surge protector shorted out and the damn pump powered up again! This time I ended up going for the main plug and finally it was off!

I was so down :( I thought I had destroyed my entire PC so I left it for a day in the airing cupboard, thankfully after some careful hair drier action and a warm environment everything worked! To say I was relieved was an understatement.
 
Not my blunder but the brother. Dead pc won't post, gfx card had error LEDs. He tested gfx and memory in mates pc and all good. tried my working cpu, NEW mobo and a spare psu and it still wouldn't work.

Took bits home to my pc the next weekend and his memory didn't work on my PC. MUPPET. Useful though as my mobo died a few weeks afterwards so kept the spare one from my trouble.

Other bad one was sitting there formatting discs and formatted the wrong one as I mixed up the cables and forgot that I had switched them around for some reason. Que about 2 weeks going through about 12 billion recovered files looking for important uni work.
 
i had 3 socket A athlons back in the day that needed testing, i knew 2 were faulty but didn't know which ones.

tested the first 2 and they were both faulty but thought i'd test the 3rd one anyway just to make sure, unfortunately i turned the machine on forgetting the put the heatsink back on, lots of smoke and 3 dead cpu's :(
 
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