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What is the worst thing that you have done to a computer that was running?

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NFS 4, that's a cool story. I think that's cool cause i did something like that before. Not Internal device though, it's an external USR modem. 😉
 
I remember one more thing. Once when I got Celeron 366@550, the cpu fan connector, well mainly the mobo (It was Iwill BD100 Plus) had problem working with Win2k. So the CPU fan will stop running once the Win2k startup screen shows up (weird huh?). I didn't know this till I run the cpu for about 5 days and notice that it's really hot (I monitored it using MBM 416) and I didn't hear the CPU fan.

The overclocked CPU ran for 5 days with no fan on Win2k without any problem. None! I was amazed!

One more thing, I installed Win98SE once and had the SMART drive disabled using a command line parameters. It took me more than an hour to finish the d@mn installation. 😉 Stupid me!
 
i didnt know that the thermal compound i was using didnt harden. well i had my voodoo 3 2000@166 and when i came back about 5 hrs later the big socket seven heatsink fell off my card. it hit my sound card and was there. i think i ran it for at least 3 hrs without a heatsink on my v3. luckily there was a slotcooler under it. it probably saved my card.
 
LOL ..... I tried to measure the output on one of my fan headers with a voltmeter once .. accidently crossed the leads.... Oops? 🙂


Don't you all just love the smell of burning electronics in the evening? 😉
 
I think i am this years "Dumbest Geek" award winner!!

I still think my X-girlfriends stupidity lead in!!! 😛

 
I had a computer illeterate friend oogling over my STEP-Thermo Athlon setup. He wanted to closer inspect my fan setup...so he pulled the Athlon out while it was on much to my horror. It killed my Gigabyte 7IX. Chip still works.
 
pluged a hdd in and took one out
no they are not hot swapple
🙂
same thing for cdroms
i know i shouldnt but i was new to the scene
 
Two more things I remember, happened to two friends of mine.

I was watching my friend put together an old 486 and somehow he forgot to put on those little rings for the screw on the case, and then when he fired it up the power button on front of the case blew of, flew about a meter away from the computer. Still everything worked after that, only a little harder to turn the computer on.

Another friend of mine was trying to remove the backplate of his 700mzh Athlon when he slipped his screwdriver and removed to resistors from the PCB, that one didnt make it, so he had to buy a new one.
 
I replaced the fan in my power supply because the old one kept on stopping. But before i did i had a brain wave to make the fan blow in instead of out, cooler of course(NOT). To make a log story short one week later i am using the net, there is a loud pop and the puter shutsdown. I panic as it wont start straight away, wait 3 min still wont start. I later found out that the original fan was .2Amps the new one i put in was 2.2Amps and it overloaded the ps. My new one (ps) is under warranty so it can't be modified like the old one 🙁
 
I toasted a SS7 mother board by plugging in the IDE LED while it was running. POP...sizzle.....hmmm, whats that smell? System locked up. MB never booted again. Just tonight I found the chip that MELTED. One of those little ones. It has a plastic bubble in it now. 🙂

Another funny thing not related to this. If you let one of the wires in an APC UPS touch the metal frame while batteries are connected, you can make a perfect smoke ring. I also heard the UPS screaming (BEEP...BEEp...BEep...Beep...beep...). UPS never worked again.

Learned from an Abit BE6 and MSI 6163Pro that you should unplug a system before playing with anything. If you touch ANYTHING on an Abit BE6 (HDD cable, CMOS clear jumper, etc) it will turn on. MSI 6163Pro just turns on at random.

Touched a VooDoo3 3000 heat sink (with no fan). Nuff said. 🙂
 
Worst experience: kill Athlon removing case, or overtightening the bolts of the Arctic Circle. Scariest: GFD falling off the processor while running 🙁
resinboy: loved your "Oh Sh*t! Oh Sh*t" dance - recognise it perfectly!!!
 
Not too long ago I was flashing the bios on this mobo. The manufacturer had to revisions of the board and without taking it out of the case, I couldn't figure out which version I had. I randomly picked one, and flashed it w/out error. It didn't boot after that, so I reset the cmos by jumper. Luckily it booted, so I flashed it with the other version and it worked! 🙂
 
i don't know if this counts as me doing something stupid or what but i was installing some kind of drive (this was a while ago it was an additional drive to the system) and the damn thing got hot and i dropped it into the open case that was sideways. well i shut it off pull the drive out and it booted fine well anyways i wasn't sure what all was wrong w/ it so i figured it would be good to back it up so i unplugged the power connector from the new drive and stuck it in the tape back-up i had (it was the last one) booted it up same thing happened and i dropped the thing in the machine again but this time before i could turn the thing off a chip shot off the tape back-up drive accross the room. well the machine still worked fine after i took the drive out. and upon further inspection i saw that they had reversed the + and - on the power cable.

amazingly the first drive i was putting in still worked
but i think the tape back-up was shot
 
Techno, you are right! 🙂 You got the best story.

Don't you learn though after your first and second experience? 😉
 
A friend desperately showed up at my office with his laptop in a plastic bag. "Help!" was all he could say. I wondered about the plastic bag, but soon it all became clear. Apparently, his cat had pissed on his laptop WHILE IT WAS RUNNING.

Believe it or not, I managed to save all of his data. I also cleaned the machine out (piss is ACIDIC!) well enouch to send it back to Dell for repair.

Cats are great, but dangerous around computers...
 
This didn't happen to me, but a guy I used to work with:

He was a netadmin for an industrial molded plastic company. He was giving a tour of the LAN room to some of his friends. "Look at my new hot-swappable RAID!" he said, indicating the main production and engineering server. He then popped a drive out. His friends gasped. He laughed and re-inserted it. The server shut off and would not boot back up. When he re-inserted the hard drive, it was not lined up correctly and it disconnected the backplane from the rest of the drives. He had to re-initialize the array and restore all data from backup. Took about 20 hours straight.

Several years later, this same guy put extra RAM into an older Dell server (during the middle of the day). He kept rebooting and rebooting because there was an error message about the size of the memory being misreported or changed. Finally he turned extremely red in the face, picked up the server, ran out of the server room, down the hall, and into his cubicle. "What did ya'll do to my server?!" he yelled as he ran past. After 5 minutes of Dell tech support, he ran EISA config and let it update the memory settings. I watched the whole thing. It was hilarious. In retrospect, I don't think the rest the company thought it was hilarious when their e-mail was down for that period of time!

 
I've got two...about 10 years ago I worked for a small computer dealer, builing & repairing pc's. This other tech I worked with accidently plugged the powerleads into a system (this is AT days, when there were two sets of leads) backwards. You're supposed to have the black wires inwards...he had them outwards. The entire building went dark. Now this was a decent sized building, had 4 other business in it. He tripped the main breaker....

Oddly enough, the system itself was fine.

#2 This family brought a pc in that had stopped working. It smelled a bit funny too. I opened up the case to find it full of mouse droppings & urine. Who ever built the thing left some of the back plane covers off, and there was enough room for mice to get in. It sat on the floor of their old farmhouse basement, and the warmth drew in the mice. Motherboard fried on it, had to be replaced. I made sure to cover all the backplane holes when I replaced it...
 
Oddly enough the two worst things I've ever done to a computer happened to the same computer 😛 I was replacing an AT power supply on an old P166, and couldn't remember how the 4 wires connected to the case switch. For some bizarre reason I figured I could just try a few different combinations and ended up being half blinded by a brilliant blue arc. Thot I'd killed the power supply until I realized a circuit breaker had tripped. Then I found out I had killed the power supply. 😛

Well anyway, after that I had to put in another power supply and I decided to actually connect it to the case switch to make sure I had the wiring right 🙂 I actually took the time to figure out where the wires should go and tried to connect them, but couldn't quite reach the switch terminals with my big thumbs. So I decided to take the switch out of the case since it was only held by one screw. I removed the screw and tried to remove the switch but it wouldn't budge. Finally I ended up breaking the switch cuz I hadn't removed the button from the front of the case! 😱 I just told the guy who owned the computer that he would need a new case 😛.

Oh yeah, I've ghosted an image the wrong direction (target -> source), wiping out my only backup 😛 In retrospect, I should probably give up my profession.
 
My little story goes back to the days when you had to install win95 oem via floppy disks . On a 486 dx50 , it took like two hours to get the job done and you had to sit there and feed the disks into the drive as it asked for them . I had formated my hard drive and was re-installing windows , keep in mind that it was on about 24 disks , I had a meeting to go to in 2 1/2 hours so I figured I had enough time to finish the job , ...Two hours later I was down to loading the last disk in the floppy drive , BUT instead of pushing the button on the floppy to remove the next to last disk , I reached over and hit the power button by mistake.....it wouldn't let me take up where i left off , and I had to sit there 2 more hours the next day and re-install windows . Shortly after that I bought a cd-rom and a windows 95 on cd
 
A couple of 'em...

I had been given a monitor to tide me over for a bit while my monitor was being repaired. And given that the temp monitor supported sleep-mode, I would just leave it on and walk away when I was done. Well, it was such a beautiful morning, I left the window directly behind the monitor open and went to work. By the time I left, it was storming outside and the monitor was fried, I thought. So I quickly unplugged it, took it apart and prayed that it would work.

Fortunately, it turned back on the next day.


A few months ago, I was playing around with my new SCSI drive. But for the life of me, I couldn't get linux off of it to install Win98. Frustrated, I shut down the machine using the start-menu. The screen went black and I immediately moved the unplug the drive. SNAP! Drive died. The computer hadn't shut down completely. I lost that one. 🙁
 
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