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

[Allanv]

mmmm let see

had a 300 watt psu go down on me so i opened the case removed all the power leads (still unsure psu is gone)

couldnt be bothered to unscrew the old psu so i balanced a new one on top the old on while the case was resting on its side on the CARPET :>

burned out the MSI MB, 1x 20.4 hdd,1x 46.1 hdd, 1x 50x cd rom, 1x 8 speed cdrw, 1x amd athlon 1ghz, modem, soundcard.

the only things left were the ls120, 256meg pc133, and the voodoo card. DOH DOH dont try this at home folks !!!

lucky i build them and i could send them all back on warrenty, now the case lives on the side taking up to much room but hey what the hell.

 

[DARRIN]

Tried to update the bios in my mothers computer and guess what. NO BOOT! DOA! :frown:

 

[metallibloke]

Oh yeah, nearly forgot. I blew up my cpu once. My mouse cable fell out while playing C&C. Being lazy, i didnt want to reboot, so i plugged it back in straight away (not realising that i'd have to reboot anyway for it to work again). As soon as i plugged it in, the machine died. Turned out one of the pins bent, so two pins went in the same hole.

 

[jcovercash]

I have never did anything bad like some of these guys, I always try to be real carful. Nothing somes to my mind right now, but I will reply later when I think of something, Till then

BUMP

 

[CrackRabbit]

Hmm worst thing i have ever done accidentaly was drop a laptop hdd before putting it back in my machine... all it did after that was.. whiiiirrrrr CLUNK, whiiiirrrrr CLUNK, luckily i was able to take it back and say it was DOA. My friends and I have always had fun killing old comps (Usualy 386s and 486s) umm some of the things include... Putting a penny in each of the ISA slots of a 486 and then powering it up, Showers of sparks, lots of acrid smoke and 1 dead 486SX,
burned a 386 alive, using Trioxane (a solid compressed fule used by the military) we set a bar of it on a 386, powered it up and lit the trioxane.... ran for about 15 secs after lighting it...
Also we created "The Keyboard", this old AT keyboard would fry any machine it was put in.
One of my friends bosses pulled the "CPU Hot-Swap" trick with a brand new Gateway P-Pro 200 back in '95-96, shocked the sh!t outta him and toasted the CPU, good thing gateways have warranties.


Thats it for now i think.

CrackRabbit

 

[Andy22]

About 7 or 8 years ago, a friend of mine and I were trying to clear off some space on the hard drive using one of those ever so popular DOS based file managers. We were scanning through the directories and we came to this dir that had about 20 megs or so in it...DOS...what's this DOS directory...let's delete it! "the game is more important than this!"

Doh! Luckily, another more experienced friend (at least at this time he was) came over and used the file managers "undelete" function to get the deleted "Dos" folder back

 

[Mookow]

A guy I worked with managed to jam a DIMM in the slot backwards (he was really, really dumb). He must have been standing on it to get it in there, but somehow he managed to get electrical contact. He called me over complaining that all the machine was doing was "beeping at him." I figure out its the RAM beep-code, take the case apart, and shutdown. I go to grab the RAM chip to pull it out and reseat it (at this point I didnt know that he had put it in backwards), and the stick burned my hand. Needless to say, that stick never worked again.

 

[Musicman6425]

This is some good stuff....

[bump]

 

[bozo1]

Working in the server room on a Sunday morning and had not been informed that they were doing a firealarm test. Saw the strobe going off which normally means you have like 30 seconds before the Halon gas starts a falling. I ran over and hit the bypass plunger since there was no fire only to find that the big red plunger was the power cutoff. 4 AS/400's, couple hundred file servers, 30+ big Sun boxes all lost power. Got awful quiet in there too.

 

[MichaelD]

Luckily no fried components yet (knocks on wood).

But while Dremeling out fan grills in my present case, the grinding wheel got bound up in the metal and exploded. :Q:Q:Q

Tens (hundreds?) of little shards fanning out at 30,000 rpms make a heckuva noise as they whistle past your ears. The little shards made about two dozen little cuts (almost like shaving nicks) all over my arms and face.

Luckily, I'm a big believer in protective gear, and had shop goggles on. The kind like glasses that cover the sides of your eyes too. I never cut or grind anything w/o them on.

Moral of the story: Don't rush the darn Dremel. When it's done cutting the metal, you'll know. Leaning on it makes it spit at you!

 

[moid]

I was installing a SIMM, and bent one of the pins over, shorting it out. It dumped all the BIOS info when I powered up. Luckily, after straightening the pin and reloading all the BIOS info, it ran fine...the memory slot even worked (with a differant stick, of course...)

 

[freeway]

I dropped a 4.3 gig Maxtor HDD about 3 1/2 feet onto a hardwood floor two years ago. I put it in, it fired up and is still working - I love Maxtors.
I bent a pin on a western digital HDD tring to plug it in. The pin was so smashed it took me an hour with a little pliers and knife to straighten it.
I pulled a vid card out of my old BH6 without pulling the power plug and grounded out the mobo. I spent days trying to fix this one. Finally I got it started by powering it up on a piece of cardboard.
Just yesterday I was spraying canned air on my TNT2 and instead of air coming out, It sprayed some kind of liquid all over my card. It hissed and bubbled and turned white (froze I guess), but no damage.
I've done a lot of dumb things, but every time I lucked out.

 

[soupwizard]

I bought a Mac IIsi motherboard used for $200 in '91 and was installing it in a full tower PC case. Had to figure out how to turn the MB on - the mac used a power on signal from the keyboard, kinda like today's power on ATX. I had to hack the PC's AT power supply to work like the Apple one (that I didn't have, nor would it have fit in the PC case)

I dug through apple's tech docs and finally found a pinout of the power connector, which listed the wire to momentarily ground to start up the mac. So I clipped on a couple of wires and "jumpstarted" the mac by touching the two wires together. Whoo-hoo! It Worked! The mac made the startup "bong" noise, and I jumped up and started dancing around.

Unfortunately, when I jumped up, I also dropped the live wire that had +5v on it, which fell onto the power supply, which made a loud "pop" sound, then the circuit breaker on the power strip tripped. Motherboard dead, $200 down the drain - just when I had it working after a week of research. Sniff.

 

[LordFortius]

Nothing too serious- yet.
One time, in my early days, I was installing a stick of 128mb ram next to the 128 I already had and put it in backwards. I still dont know how I did it... Anyway, I closed the case up and tried to boot the computer, and of course it didnt boot. Instead I heard a pop, sizzle, and smelled something like burning grease. I immediatley take out the power and open the computer up, and I see the stick of ram blown out of the dimm socket. I pick up the stick and examine it, realizing what I did and what an ass I am, and see that one contact pin at the end of the stick is all browned out- so, I cleaned it, and then put the RAM in correctly- I must have been lucky or something, because the computer booted just fine, and right there on the BIOS diagnostics screen, it said 256mb ram!

 

[pdqcarrera]

Attempting to get my attention away from another long night of Quake2 WoD my wife got real frisky with me. When I responded appropriately (sorry my fellow fragaholics but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do) I picked her up and placed her on the desk a little too boldly and she knocked my $750 monitor to the floor. The monitor exploded! :frown: The cord luckily was just long enough to pull the case over only a few inches, but not pull it down to the floor with it.
We cried, we laughed, we came...

 

[gkwok]

Was reordering my PCI cards, and was too anxious to get the system back on after they were in, so I just left them in and unscrewed, and left some of the brackets off, thinking that I could screw everything back in while Windows was booting. I got all the PCI cards screwed in, and was working v-e-r-y carefully with the last bracket, as it was between two cards. Unfortunately I slipped with the screwdriver, and the metal bracket fell onto a live Netgear FA310TX NIC--shorting two of the solder points and throwing out an audible spark. The computer immediately shut off. The surge must've propagated through the system cuz I lost my partition table on my main drive...reformatted and everything's fine, even the NIC!

 

[Drekce]

spilled a can of coke on my keyboard!

 

[Skoalboy]

HEH....Was buidling a K6 233 and on any box I build I always have a can of compressed air handy, got cpu set and HS ,mem, video card and HDD wasnt paying attention when I went to grab the can of air I didnt relize my wife set down the pledge right beside the can of air, well all and all you can guess what happened, there was a nice aroma and
pzzztt!!! lost mobo and cpu but hey they were at pledge clean

 

[d33pt]

<< Working in the server room on a Sunday morning and had not been informed that they were doing a firealarm test. Saw the strobe going off which normally means you have like 30 seconds before the Halon gas starts a falling. I ran over and hit the bypass plunger since there was no fire only to find that the big red plunger was the power cutoff. 4 AS/400's, couple hundred file servers, 30+ big Sun boxes all lost power. Got awful quiet in there too. >>



HAHHAHAHAH! i could just see this happening.. what company was this at and you didn't get fired?!?!?! HAHHA

 

[McMadman]

So far I've been lucky, and haven't done any permenant damage.

I've removed a 30 pin simm from the computer whlie it was running, locked up the computer, but it was fine after I put the memory back in.

Put the AT power connector on in such a way that it didn't fry the board, but it failed to power on, was very lucky too!

my biggest &quot;mistake&quot; would probably be actually buying a cyrix pr200/pcchips mobo combo, that thing was garbage!

 

[robpasell]

We have mirrored drives (hot swap) on our Proliant server at work. One of the drives made a horrible grinding noise, and died. I forgot that even though they are hot swap, you can't pull any drives out if any of the other drives are rebuilding. So, I yanked it out to get the part number. Fortunatelt for me, no activity was going on, otherwise I'd be looking for new work.

 

[MichaelD]

SkoalBoy,

LOL! Good story. &quot;Pledge Clean&quot; Ha!

 

[Ender78]

Well,

If we get into the Linux mood:

rm -rf / (pressed enter a bit to quickly)

 

[lilnnjaboy]

let's see...I found this ASUS p3v4x board...one of the only ones available...needed to test it to make sure it was working...cuz the board looked used. So I test this board out of the box, not knowing that I have the board backwards. I plug in the video card backwards...thinking it was straight. I wanted to see if I could get a post...and all I got was a spark from the AGP slot. Thought it was the video card, so I grabbed another one. Same thing. Ok...I look and smacked myself on the head realizing the board was backwards. So I had one bad motherboard, and 2 bad video cards. Luckily I was able to return everything

 

[Renob]

When I built my 2nd system I was waiting for my new case to show up it showed up but we had to go out that night. We got home a 2am I was tired but wanted build my system. I put it all together but forgot about the motherboard stands I turned it on and fried a mobo,vidcard,harddrive and a sound card... that sucked bigtime you can bet that will never happen again........