Question: what is the wrost thing you ever did while working on your computer?

[mcveigh]

so far nothing really bad, I've been really luck sometimes.
buuuuut, on my first computer I wanted to upgrade the bios ( I had never done it before) any way I tried to to from windows. that lead to a week of crazy problems, it would never boot up correctly. Luckily i was able to eventually figure out my problem and use a friends computer to make a boot floppy and fix it

 

[flood]

formatted the wrong drive

 

[bjc112]

<< Learned that the 'f' in fdisk can stand for something other than &quot;format.&quot; And my dad came home early that day >>



LOL, i know the feeling..

the worst i ever done, was when i fisrt started out, and i thought i &quot;knew&quot; what i was talking about.. so my dad had windows 98.. and it was for a &quot;new computer only&quot; so figure i can just delete 95 in Windows Explorer.. well that didn't go over well, it messed the whole comp up, and cost my dad like 50 bucs.. i have gotten lots better since then (about 2 years ago)!!

 

[astros67]

was moving fans around the case while my computer was on, and i was unplugging and replugging fans, so an open molex connector touched the secondary end of the ata cable. the computer turned off and my 20gig maxtor never worked again

 

[Syborg1211]

Wow, I really havent done anything too bad to my computer. But I stupidly screwed up my mp3 player a little while ago. There was something stuck in the screen so I popped it open to get it out and when putting it back together I totally stripped one of the screwed and had to use plier to get the thing back in and in the process putting some huge gashes into it. I am stupid
And I didn't even get the crap out of the screen either...

 

[tomtomberry]

I walked into my computer room with a cup full of lemonade and a pitcher of lemonade. As I bent over to set the pitcher down...the cup, which was right full, tipped as well and spilled all over my brand new intellimouse optical. After frantic cleaning,loud swearing, and violent punches at the air, I got the mouse to work except for the scroller. Other than that...nothing too bad.

 

[birddog]

snapped a resistor off a Tyan motherboard with a screwdriver while trying to remove a s370 he/fan. Board=Dead

 

[odog]

changed jumpers while the computer was on.

swapped cpu's (same speed) while a computer was in sleep mode(no problem at all surprisingly)

booted my celery 566(oc'd 366) without the fan plugged in, why do i keep crashing????

touched a delta with my pinky.

knocked a HD of the counter(a buddys drive) complete toast, no back ups... that sucked..



many others, but thats all i can remember right now.

 

[Musicman6425]

Laughing Hysterically!!!

[bump]

 

[panhead49]

blew up...exploded.. shorted..very loud exlposion my kk266 mb...with my brand new gf3 inside.....(didnt hurt the card)....

 

[V]

I broke my ATI Expert 98 by touching it while I was not grounded. Oh well, it was a sucky graphics card anyway.

 

[V]

I broke my ATI Expert 98 by touching it while I was not grounded. Oh well, it was a sucky graphics card anyway.

 

[Techno]

Worse thing i ever did was get wrapped up in the hype of witch Pentium 3 450's overclock the better. Wile on the internet, (on anandtech) i read the serial number and got so excited i went to my case and took out my processor (wile the computer was running) to check then got happy, then put the processor back in the machine and wondered why the thing crashed. Took a few seconds to sink in. Then I turned it off for the rest of the day.


Processor still works!

 

[Musicman6425]

Told you all...people hot swapping their CPUs!!!

[bump]

 

[chiwawa626]

I ate a screw...hehe i was 4, wasnt realy a comp screw...but from some electronics...never bothered me though

 

[chiwawa626]

i had a hardrive sitting on top of an open comp running, pc board side up, i put down one off the brackets on the pc board and saw sparks, reboot but nothing happend

 

[Kindjal]

Let's see...

I reflashed a bios with an older version than the one that was there causing a bios rom checksum error.

I fried a whole computer system while under the guidance of Micron Tech Support.

I actually installed the first retail version of Win95.

I think that's it!

 

[RanDum72]

HHmmm... I got lazy once and and didn't put all the little plastic supports under my 486 Mobo, then tried installing those SOB VLbus cards. The video card ( a Diamond Stealth 64 with 2mb double-ported VRAM, yiihaaa!!)went in OK but the Promise VLB card (you know, the one with 16550 UARTS, bi-directional printer port and can run harddrives in 32-bit disk access mode )was a pain so I exerted more pressure than necessary and cracked the mobo ( it was also an expensive AMI board ).

Probably the dumbest was when I didn't wash my hands after eating some Hershey's and tried installing some early SDRAM on my favorite Iwill board (intel VX chipset, built in ultra SCSI, really nice board). I didn't know some stray choco was on the two memory modules (each 32mb, a fortune back then). I fried the memory AND the mobo. I actually cried that day.

 

[virtuamike]

Installed AOL

 

[RayH]

Ran out of drive bays in the case so had 2 hard drives resting at the bottom propped up slightly by edge of the case. Shifted the drives slightly with the pc on and shorted out the controller board on one of the drives. Luckily I was able to swap the controller board from a duplicate drive to pull the data.

 

[FordLorider]

Ah, them old good days of case modding.

I was Dremeling out some holes on the case (wearing my safety goggles). I was workin all day, everything turned out great.

I then tried to sleep, my fricken eye burned like no other, it was 2am and it hurt to close my eye. Obviously this didn't bother me during the day because usually people have their eyes open, unless in class. So I finally rollerblade over to the Olin Medical Center on MSU Campus at about 4am just to find out that the hospital is closed after 6pm or something. What kind of hospital closes at 6? So I finally get to a real hospital and I find out there was a little piece of metal (no not like the cartoons where it's 2x4 size piece sticking out half your head, it took her like 15 minutes to find where it was) stuck in my eye and the only time it hurts is when my eyelid is over it. So she swabs it out with a cue tip while my eye is numb *yeah that's one the coolest feelings in the world, you can touch your eye and not feel it, your reflexes make you blink but you still can't feel a thing*. The next day was the most fun part. I had what was called a &quot;rust ring&quot; around where the metal was so they had to actually use a drill (they could have just used the Dremel that caused it ) and back to numbness while the doctor proceeded to dril out a part of my eye, yeah, I was scared out of my pants.

The end result, metal can go through googles, somehow?!?!?!

 

[Mookow]

The metal filings flung by a drill dont always travel in a straight path. did the glasses cover the sides of your eyes?

 

[snowdogg187]

Installing AOL is freakin crazy

 

[vohwink1]

Besides the porn and my mom thing, I was going to take the side panel off my case while the computer was still running... well, must have been some huge static buildup because when I was pulling the side away a big blue static electric spark jumped from the corner of the panel and struck my video card.

I was like NOOOOOOOOOOOO.. cuz the puter froze when that happened... so I rebooted, and thankfully nothing was wrong, but it made my heart stop for a second.

Oh yeah, and when removing the stock HSF from my GF2 the other day to put a diff one on... I plugged it back into my machine and pressed the power button... my worst fear... black screen and &quot;beeeeeeep beep beep&quot; ARGH! My heart had stopped again. Then after trying it again, it worked fine... heh, lucky me.

 

[Syborg1211]

I had this old sound card from an old comp and I accidentally poured gasoline all over it and set it on fire. It melted and I picked it up when I thought it was all cooled down and threw it in the trash. Burnt my hand to hell and lit the trash can on fire hehe