What is the stupidest thing you have ever done with a computer?

shilala

Lifer
Oct 5, 2004
11,437
1
76
I threw my computer, desk, monitor and everything hooked to it out in the yard.
I can't remember why, but it seemed like the right thing to do and it felt really good.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
53,654
6,532
126
mine was when i was building my 2nd PC ever, and when I was hooking it up and turned it on the first time, i fried the CPU fan pins on the motherboard.

and the worst part was that this motherboard had the protection that would shut the computer off if the fan on the CPU fan port was not working correctly. so basically, my motherboard was useless to me ...

until after hours and hours of searching through the manual and internet, i found out how to boot the mobo up w/this disabled, and went into the bios and disabled the setting for good.

there were 2 CPU fan controllers next to eachother, but if the CPU1 fan controller does not have a fan powered on it, it would not power on the computer.

btw, this was a soyo dragon+ board.
 

YOyoYOhowsDAjello

Moderator<br>A/V & Home Theater<br>Elite member
Aug 6, 2001
31,205
45
91
My computer fell out the back of a parked van when I opened the tailgate due to it shifting during the ride and leaning up against the door.

The only thing that was damaged was the front panel of my Chieftech case. I got a new one and now it's a matrix case :)
 

brunswickite

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2002
6,386
1
0
Originally posted by: Amol
"Let's clean the WINDOWS folder!"

guilty of this as well.

also, formatted a PC and forgot the admin pw i set during the install. i had to reformat again.
 

Rogue

Banned
Jan 28, 2000
5,774
0
0
I use Remote Desktop and the Narrator to talk to people when they're at my house. It freaks the kid and the wife out all the time.
 

Zanix

Diamond Member
Feb 11, 2003
5,568
12
81
Installed a mobo with out the little riser knobs.

Sparkle, smoke... lesson learned.
 

neonerd

Diamond Member
Apr 24, 2003
8,746
1
0
Decided to try out something at school....

logged onto one of the computers with admin pass, and cleaned out the registry + windows folder as clean as we could get it :D

anything that could possibly be deleted was removed
 

dullard

Elite Member
May 21, 2001
26,066
4,712
126
Originally posted by: FeuerFrei
Stuck my finger in the CPU fan. It broke.
Fan or finger?

For me, I'm not sure what was stupider. So I'll list my two lowest periods.
1) I was in 5th grade and my family got its first computer (~1987). It was 3 1/2" floppy only. We had terrible trouble with it. It would never work at home, and always work in the shop. Spent months trying to get it to work. It would work great and then randomly fail. Eventually we found the problem. One disk had its protective metal covering that would get stuck in the drive. After inserting 3 or 4 disks, the protective covering would come out (which is what happened every time we took it in to the shop). I never noticed that one disk had no covering and another would have two.

2) About 8 years later and another computer later another incident happened. My computer was getting old. However, it ran well. Slowly a problem developed and just got worse and worse. It would often take 20-30 times pressing the power button for it to boot. After booting the power supply would sometimes make a loud whirring noise. Fan ran just fine (or so I thought). I dealt with this for ~6 months until I finally bothered to get it repaired. I had somehow got a screw to fall into the fan and it got stuck there. So the fan was rotating this extra mass all around (the noise). The fan was slower and thus the power supply would think it was overheated and refuse to turn on.
 

Eli

Super Moderator | Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
50,419
8
81
Tried to measure the van header voltage with a DMM(Older board that didn't have hardware monitoring) and crossed the leads.

*pop*

no more fan headers. Oops.
 

flexy

Diamond Member
Sep 28, 2001
8,464
155
106
for i = 0 to 255: print chr$(i): next
REM my FIRST program ever [on a C64] :)