Adventures in Stupidity

[BobsBigBoy]

Well, I decided to give the old PC a little tune-up, so I dis-assembled everything, cleaned out an amazing quantity of accumulated dust with a can of compressed air (or whatever it is that's in those cans), cleaned the contacts, etc. Putting it back together was a piece of cake; I made quite certain all the cables and power hook ups were in nice and snugly and the old girl booted up perfectly first try. "Ah," thinks I, "I finally put one together with no mistakes on the first try." So I thought.

Well, the machine seemed to work flawlessly. Web surfing was fine, Word ran great, no problems. Until I fired up Deus Ex, that is. Two minutes into the game - boom, crash to desktop. Hmm, that's odd. Deus Ex was very stable until now, no crashes in 20+ hours of gameplay. Well, it's probably just a software bug. Reboot; start up DE again - boom, another crash to desktop. Hmm, well I did turn on active desktop recently, maybe there's some conflict there. Turn off active desktop; reboot; restart DE - KABOOM, spontaneous reboot. Not good. This is a hardware problem. Did I short my memory when I cleaned it? Unlikely, I was pretty careful. Wait a minute there's something funny going on in the back of the case. Air is blowing out of the case fan, instead of into it.

Yes, friends, I put the case fan in backwards. It took a resource eating monster like Deus Ex to generate enough heat to expose the problem. Amazing what a difference a cheap little fan can make. Just another adventure in stupidity.

-- BBB

 

[Dan]

Don't feel too bad. I guarantee we've all done dumb things of equal or greater magnitude.

Once, at a customer's location, I changed out a workstation's power supply, hit the "on" switch and promptly blew out half the lights in his warehouse. It's hard to maintain your credibility after that!

 

[Rifter]

at least you didnt pull a ISA card out while the system was ON. Lucky me it still worked after.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

lol rifter

 

[jmcoreymv]

At least you didnt pull out the ram while it was on like me.

 

[Rogue]

Yeah, how 'bout me frying a perfectly good T-bird Athlon 1GHz today! Don't know what happened, but I took off the heatsink to check it out, popped it back on and when the system was turned on, *POOF!*, 1GHz T-bird up in smoke. Guess I didn't get the heatsink on good enough or something and burned it up. Oh well, it's under warranty and I can order the part for it!!! No loss out of my pocket!!!

 

[Rigoletto]

You know something, I unplugged my Athlon a few weeks ago to change the heatsink when the computer was ONLY TURNED OFF AT THE CASE'S FRONT SOFT SWITCH. I can't believe I did that. Could I have died if my fingers wandered?

 

[Rigoletto]

wow, like someone would care anyway huh?
HA!