worst computer blunder

Either installing a motherboard without jumpers, and killing it. Or formating the wrong harddrive, deleting all my stuff :(
 
Bought a new fan + heatsink for my old FX5700, got it and found it was for the Ultra version. So I "modded" the fan/card - chip burnt out :)
 
My best would have to be on my first home build. I built it up fine first time (although it took a while :p) but was constantly messing with it, overclocking etc. So anyway I found a guide about how to make your fans 7v by switching the cables around. All went well and the fan was running much quieter, until I plugged another fan into it...
Much smoke and fire later I decided to stop messing for a while.
 
During my "n00b" years I was building my first homemade of and wanted to get on with the building but I had not purchased a heaksink and fan for the CPU, I didn't think it would get that hot so ran it without any cooling and quickly cooked the CPU to its death.

Oops :o
 
Letting a mate loose on my PC, he managed to do a "del c:\*.*" on it without me there, then did a runner while I was asking why it wasn't booting...

He denies it to this day! :D
 
Shrapnel said:
Was building a PC for a mate. He paid me beer. I was using a WD hard drive. I had it set to "Master - solo" , but I should have had it set to "Master with Slave present" because I had a CDROM on the same cable.
Click to expand...

Putting CDROM and HD on the same cable is a blunder in itself lol
 
Had an nvidia 6800gt and the zalman reserator, when installing the waterblock i couldn't quite figure out how to screw it in so resorted to just sticking the block onto the gpu directly using that arctic ceramic mix that sets as hard as concrete.

Later told by someone that it might eventually peel off or something so I thought I'd attempt to take it off and actually figure iout how to screw it on..

The waterblock was stuck solid to the core and after applying a lot of force instead of the block separating from the gpu I ripped the gpu in half :o the shiny crystalline insides looked nice :p
 
I was upgrading a motherboard, and cpu. and excitingly taking the other ones out the case, i'd got the other new ones ready and put to one side, I got the mb out placed the case on the desk sat down and heard CRUNCH !!!!! it was about 15 yrs ago
my gawd I still remember the cold sweat running down my back.
I sat up slowly and found it was just the outer packaging of the box,
To this day I move everything out the way.
 
I can remember mounting a usb and audio card directly onto the metal covers behind the drive bays

all was fine until i plugged in a usb cable the solder on the back of it must have touched the case which

caused the pc to go off it still worked fine except for all of the usb ports which were dead.
 
You know that bright red switch on the back of your PSU? The one with 240v or something along those lines written on it? Don't switch it to see what will happen no matter how big, red and pretty it is, it isn't worth succumbing to the temptation.
 
Blowing up my first celeron 300A cos I put the power block the wrong way into the mobo socket .. well it fitted, sort of!

Forgetting to put the heatsink on my Athlon XP chip - the computer kept switching off almost instantly after switching on and I was getting well peed off ... then I noticed what I had not done .... that sinking feeling followed but I was glad I had the temp probe on the NF7 mobo!

Blowing up a perfectly good PSU probably cos I fitted the water cooling after having a few beers and was not careful enough ... that was loud and a bit err ... dodgey!
 
One of the cpu fan cables detached leaving the fan motionless, the PC would boot up for a bit then restart, took me a while to work out what was going on. The smell of burning helped!

Not really a blunder though..
 
Mine was back in the old days of AT PSUs, connected the 2 main power connecters the wrong way round. After 3 hours and 2 PSUs later a mate came round and said "did you know, your connectors are the wrong way round?" I felt VERY stupid
 
One day when I switched on my PC I found that the SATA hard drive wasn't being detected. So I tried an old drive to see if that worked, also wasn't detected. Luckily the second drive was using a SATA to PATA converter, so I could load up with that in the PATA socket. I installed windows on that drive and ordered a cheapo SATA controller card so that I could use my main drive once again. However, when that arrived, whilst it worked, the drive ran really slowly on it, making it near impossible to use it. Even worse when I tried to use my old drive as a storage drive. Then I had an epiphany. I updated the motherboard BIOS and the SATA sockets on the mobo worked again.:rolleyes: :o
 
Mine was also the 110/220 Voltage switch :o

This was in 1982 when I was in my teens, a loan PC from the OU where my Mum worked, an Apple IIE with the full monty, twin floppies, colour monitor, state of the art for it's time and a lot of dosh to repair..........

Cough, cough, Mum, I've got something to tell you..........:o


More recently, my first watercooled Shuttle had a lucky escape 18 months ago when I spilt water all over the OCZ RAM whilst topping it up :o Managed to rescue everything apart from the RAM and the Shuttle is still going strong :)
 
Before I add to this thread in my defence I have been in IT for 25 years and have built Hundreds if not thousands of machines ......

I have done most of the basics of killing Ram and processors not correctly inserted including a 32 meg ram stick that actually blew (as in phisically exploded) every single chip on both sides about £300 worth at the time.

Powering up machines in the middle of working on them is an old favourite too thats always good for a laugh as is hot swapping components yep I have done that too.

However I once misplaced a decimal point in some financial software I used to deal with and although I am not going to give any further info I can assure you the chances that anybody else here has made a more expensive mistake is fairly low.
 
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