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What is the biggest newb mistake you have made since you got interested in computers?

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Upgraded a friend's EDO based Pentium 166 motherboard to SDRAM (it had both slots) without changing the jumper settings for voltage. Ended up frying something on the board.
 
Showing the dumbasses at school how to program a BASIC application on the Apple IIe's that filled the screen with bad words and captured break-outs, so it required a restart. I wasn't allowed in the lab for the rest of the year.
 
Buying not 1 (386 SX - "Premier Innovation" - out of business within 2 months after I bought it...

not 2 (468 DX-66 - Trigem - eeewwwuuu)

but 3 computers (P3 - 450 -Cybermax - out of business).

Best cure is building your own. The Cybermax became my "son of frankenstein", my grandson of frankenstein" and a few other related projects.
 
Messing around the inside of my Parents old PI 200mhz system. I pulled out the BIOS for fun to take a closer look at it. after doing this plugged it back in and booted up...

System didn't boot but saw a burn mark on the BIOS chip. Turns out a plugged it in backwards. In the end it only cost my like $20 for a new BIOS chip, but I learned always make sure to check which way something is supposed to be plugged in haha.
 
Not my mistake, but a friend of mines:
Buying a saphire 9600pro atlantis 256MB, and wondering why his barton 3000 machine was running it worse than a p4 2.0 with a 8500DV...
Buying a Gigabyte GA-k7, whatever (the crappiest one...) and wondering why he can't OC or anything (hit ctrl+ F1, you idiot!)

My brother's main mistakes: Buying the aforementioned gigabyte board in combonation with a mobile 2600 and BH-5 *still makes me cry that the bh-5 tops out at 208*
Buying a silent boost heatsink

My Mistakes: Wondering why my most recent build wouldn't post. Come to see that the PSU is shorted out on the case (cut wires) luckily nothing was fried, and the PSU still works.
Getting a KV8-MAX3 and thinking that it can can actually OVERCLOCK!!!! danm you no agp lock...
 
I placed my ram on the wrong slot. Couldn't figure out the problem, drove an hour to the shop that sold me the Mobo, then paid $50 for a technician to move the ram two slots down.



 
I honestly haven't made many large mistakes with my computers yet. Closest would be the 160 gig drive that just got major file system corruption on me the other day. I didn't have most of it backed up, but they weren't files I really cared much about anyways. Odd thing was that that drive failed WD diagnostics numerous times across numerous cables and ports, but when put in an external HD enclosure and used with OSX, it works fine....
 
Upgrading my Northgate 386 from 1 meg to 4 megs of RAM (for $400) without understanding what I needed to do to access the memory. It just sat there for many many months before I figured it out.
 
Originally posted by: JackDanielsDrinker
OK, I just did it again.

I have my 3.5 inch drive cage unscrewed and sitting on the 5.25 inch cage. The bottom hard drive was exposed to the metal 5.25 cage.

Can you say MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION?

Good Lord I need a Jack.
Click to expand...

That reminds me.. a long time ago, I had an ancient 120MB (yes, MB) Maxtor IDE HD. (It was from my 386 days). I had it in a system as a spare HD for testing, and I had it running, unmounted, on top of the case with the PCB facing up. Well, wouldn't you know it, I slipped and dropped my (heavy!) metal-bottom keyboard, right onto the PCB of the spinning HD.

Ka-thunk! Head crash! Funfunfun.

I think I've since gotten rid of the HD, but for a period of time immediately after that incident, attempting to use the HD would result an an occasionally KA-THUNK as the head smacked the platters once again. You could actually visibly watch the bad-sector defects grow, if you ran sucessive SCANDISK surface-scans.

The above, is a definately example of what NOT to do with a HD. (In fact, I don't even recommend spinning-up a HD without securely mounting it in some sort of chassis.)
 
mine would have to be the best. wanted to use one ide cable for my optical and harddrive to improve airflow. didnt know about master/slave settings. damn thing wouldnt boot lol. put them both back on their own channel. later realized both were set as master. lol
 
Swapped out motherboards on my old Athlon 1GHz machine. I reinstalled the heatsink and got everything back together. Powered on and screen went black, a puff of smoke and a nasty burning smell.

Turns out I didn't bother to check the heatsink before reinstalling and a piece of my old MS mouse (whole other story) got stuck to the thermal paste and was wedged between the heatsink and CPU. I burned it alive....

Lessons learned: Always check the mounting surfaces and be kind to your mice...
 
Bought a generic 400W PSU for my new amd300 system, didn't know about the 4-pin power connector, went back to the store and told them it wouldn't boot, guy sold me a 550W Enermax and said it would work. Wired everything up, still wouldn't boot, my mother comes over who knows nothing about computers and says "What's this one for?" as she points to the 4-pin.
 
Definitely taking a friend's advice, and building a P4 2.8 Northbridge, with FX 5200, Soundblaster Live; all this just last year.

I hadn't a clue.

He didn't know much more.

But then again, it is said that it's only a mistake if you continue to repeat that trend (which I am definitely not!), and therefore is a lesson, if you learnt something from it 😛
 
Cracked the core on an XP 2000+ Palomino. My Dad took it pretty well and bought an XP 2200+ Tbred B to replace it.
 
The biggest mistake, and most shocking, was this one time when i was trying to help a friend get some data off his hard drive...

So i unplugged the power cable running to my floppy to get some extra lenght out of the cable so i could plug in the hard drive that was sitting outside the case.

Well that went all fine... but when i went to plug my floppy back in I kinda-sorta-didnt-quite get the power cable on the floppy quite right... I had somehow managed to only get 3 of the 4 pins on... ( which i didnt find out till afterwards )

Well when i booted the system there literally a ball of fire in my computer, with a loud ZAP noise, and then that awefull electrical smell. My friend and i looked at each other and where like "oh my..."

Well needless to say i was scared poopless that i had fried all the components... but luckily I had only fried the floppy drive and the power supply...

but man, i was so scared that i had fried everything...

my friend and i get a good laugh of it still...

I still bug him about the time he applied Artic Silver to THE WHOLE PROCESSOR!
When ever he would mess something up I would be like " Lets just put some artic silver on it..." and then laugh... while he would look at me like he wanted to kill me... LOL
 
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