worst computer blunder

Wondering why my pc would not boot after half hour of stripping down and fault finding relised I had the wrong boot order in the BIOS.

Changed some memory in my media PC and wondered why only 3gig was being seen instead of 4 gig, opened back up, I had not fully inserted on the memory modules.

What else ... Front USB ports on my case did not work, ended plugging the firewire cable in, instead of the USB cable into the motherboard.

Used on the wrong screw on my Swiftech dual rad and ended up piercing the rad :eek::o
 
Don't think I've ever had any build nightmares other than formatting over my entire scuba diving logbook history of about 4 years...

I was so sure I had saved all the important stuff too, stupid software had it hidden in some obscure folder... :(

Oh, just remembered a recent one.
My PC audio runs purely through a home cinema 5.1 system and when the sound packed up I thought it was first the PC, the drivers, the audio card, the leads, the connections, then the setup / output channel in the amplifier...
All looked correct so assumed the PC was fud...
All it was in the end was the amp was switched to bitstream instead of dolby audio. Took me a week of pulling the PC and amp cabling to bits to find it!!
Note to self... Don't let your mother dust your amplifier
 
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My worst blunder was leaving porn on my desktop! Followed by dragging the comp along the floor while it's still on, it swiftly stopped working.
 
When i installed my new 6800GT, I tried pushing it into my old amd xp2800 system, and after a few pushes I started the comp. Failed to boot. Hmph i thought. Opened the PC took another look. Realised the card was a bit skew, so i took it out and tried putting it back in. At this point i kinda tripped n fell in the pc, to hear a loud "click" sound. Bugger I thought, £200 worth of kit gone. Then switched on the computer and it worked :P.

2nd blunder was when I installed some geil ram, which blew up my comp, literally. Gfx card had burn marks, as did the mobo!

3rd blunder, was doing cable management in my new pc, and while undoing the old cable ties, managed to cut half of the fan setting lead off. Still works to this day *touch wood* :p.
 
Nothing major - spilled water on a USB card reader and it blew the mobo. It was the wife's PC though so I just told her she must have broke it somehow :p

That's about it. Not bad for 11 years of building/upgrading PC's.
 
had a pc on the floor, with the case open, put my foot in the case, and not knowing what it was i touched the cpu and case fan with my toe, it was smashed to pieces but everything worked after, just needed to change both fans, which i had spare!

either that or..

put the USB cable from the case the wrong way round, while placing a usb drive into the usb on the case it zapped my finger with a bit of electricity, made my hand squeeze the sharp edge of the usb pen drive :( and wiped the revised essay!
 
I was asked by a friend to upgrade the RAM in his laptop a few months ago. He brought the laptop and ram over and I was about to open the lid to make sure it was off but was immediately told not to worry as he'd shut it all down properly.

Fair enough, I thought, he's my mate, I trust him, he isn't stupid.

Little did I know.

I then proceeded to remove the old ram, install the new ram, flip the laptop back over, open the screen and hit the on button to be greeted with the prettiest (and most bricking moment) scrambled screen I'd ever seen. It was one big artifact.

I forced a shut down and turned it back on to be greeted with the good old NTLDR is missing error.

I turned to my mate and said "It was in sleep mode wasn't it you dunse".

We both hung our heads in shame, him for assuming that quickly hitting the power button shuts down a laptop completely and not just send it to sleep, and I for not checking that it had in fact been turned off completely.

And so off I went to get my windows xp disk and all was well after a quick repair thank god. Surprisingly, no hardware was damaged in the making of this blunder.
 
Latest one:
Plugged in a fan adapter to convert 3-pin to molex passthrough. Plugged in the 3-pin RPM monitor that came with the passthrough too . . . . It shorted out the cable, instantly melted all the plastic and made a fizzzt sound. Motherboard was fine, no ill effects. No idea why it did it.

I have also just converted a computer PSU into a 12v Power supply for a tent, so I can power red/white striplights and various other things. Built the first one on my bench, desoldered all the wires, resoldered things like the 3.3v sense wire etc. Went to test it . . lovely smell of burning silicon. There was just a few screws underneath the board . . . swore, cursed and then decided to get the multimeter out. Thought it may of been the fuse, so instead of pulling out the fuse just set the multimeter to read 240v and then probed the 3-pin kettle socket.
BANG, FLASH, FZZT, darkness . . . Blew all the fuses in the house. I still have no idea how the hell it happened. Multimeter is fine, except it has half burned its way through one of the probes. Cannot explain it.
 
slinky, that'll teach you to pull the battery from any laptop before you go poking about inside.

My last blunder occurred when I was fitting a brand new LTO-3 drive into a clients server. The tapes loaded okay but kept getting stuck when I tried to eject them. I eventually realised (while on the phone waiting to speak to someone from Quantum about an RMA) that I'd used screws that were very slightly too long that were jamming the mechanism.

Luckily the drive worked okay after I replaced the screws with shorter vserions; It would have been difficult to expain to the client that I'd just destroyed their £1000+Vat tape drive!
 
I think I win :eek:

It was my first build back when the first A64's came out. I was bought a full A64/9800Pro/MSI K8N Neo machine. Little did I know, I screwed the mainboard straight into the case with no standoffs and continued to build the machine. Anyway, 2 Days of head scratching I finally realised what them brass screws in the bottom of the box were for. :p

I was quite scared at the time I had ****** the lot up & wasted my parents money. ( I was about 14 at the time ).

The machine still lives to this day - Legendary. Its been through quite a lot!
 
I've just realised that my worst computer blunder was developing the software I'm currently working on and spending my entire Friday afternoon, evening and night trying to find a bug!

I am at least getting close to a solution.
 
First time applying thermal compound = applied too much = killed my AMD Duron (days of no IHS). But what was the blunder was spending a whole day going PC shop to shop trying to ask them if they can test the CPU for me just to rule it out with no luck :o
 
Mine was back in the early 90's - can't remember exactly, but for christmas, I got an ISA soundcard (pro audio spectrum.) I plugged it into an 8-bit ISA slot instead of a 16-bit slot. Fried the motherboard and CPU - 3 days after our computer's warrenty expired!

I think the thing about 8 bit and 16 bit is correct...it was a long time ago!
 
Spending a day reconfiguring jumpers, adding and removing PCi / ISa cards and hard drives etc. Even trying different combinations of CPU's and co processors (remeber the 486 DX / SX / 487s - lol) just to get my new mobo to post. Eventually I thought it must be the CMOS battery that had drained down in the warehouse, so made a last minute 15 mile trip into town to get a new battery. Got home to fit it and found a nice little sliver of plastic on the underside of the battery. Doh....
 
Used my dad's magnetic screwdriver on my first build. Really handy for picking up screws you've dropped, scraping it all over my motherboard, dropped the screwdriver on it a few times, and for some strange reason, the motherboard never worked.
 
It was my first build and I ordered everything, it was all going great I assembled everything and started it up ... Installing windows ... nothing ... after a lot of googling (On Dads PC) I realised that I needed to install drivers for the SATA HDD on start up, so done that and I was away ...

I can`t remember what I done next but I altered something in the BIOS and the thing wouldn`t POST so I decided to reset the BIOS as it said in the manual in times like this. Not reading the full instructions I set the jumper to reset BIOS and then started the comp, that didnt work ... RMA - got a new board ...

Only recently I learnt that after setting the jumper to reset whilst the PC is OFF you must then put the jumper back in origional position BEFORE starting the system up again! ;)
 
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