What's the dumbest thing you've done as an experienced computer user?

[manly]

Tried to hot swap a floppy drive.

Experimented with mission-critical software before having a current backup.

All ancient history, of course.

 

[Baked]

Burn 25 DVDs in a roll, on a hot day, damaging the DVD burner's laser.

Originally posted by: sharkeeper
I burned ATi Catalyst 5.4 driver to a DVD-R. 25MB out of 4,700.

A single layer blank DVD is 4483MB, not 4700MB.

 

[Thegonagle]

My most common error is to start reconfiguring my IDE cables before I remember to shut down...

Pull the CD-ROM cable--OOPS! I'd better turn the power off now.

So far, I've been lucky, and nothing's been damaged... Yet.

 

[rezinn]

Pressed down on my network card to see if it was seated completely while the computer was running.

 

[xcript]

A while ago at work I somehow managed to hook up a 5v line off the PSU to the sound card in an old HP (I guess I thought it was the audio cable coming from the CDROM.. it's so hard to see WTF is going on in those tiny HP cases).

POP.. FFSSSSSSSSS.. *smoke*.. dead.

Luckily there were no plans to use it for anything. It was just so stupid.

 

[imported_Tick]

Nothing....







































Yet....

 

[UncleWai]

Formatted my cousin partition that stored her pictures with friends and her nephews.
Scared the sh!t out of me, luckily I used easyrecovery to recover the pictures.
But I couldn't recover the folder names, so I changed them to crazy symbols so it looked like a virus attack.

 

[ohnnyj]

Originally posted by: kt

Originally posted by: AntisociaL
Id say mine is forgetting to plug the heatsink fan in after a build,turn it on and think wow kind of quiet....OH CRAP,then do the mad dash reach for the switch on back of the psu.

I think I got you beat there. Did the same thing except I finished installing an entire OS and wondered why it's running so damn slow with a clean OS. I am shocked that the CPU is still running after that and still is until this day. It's an AMD Athlon 1.2GHz.

Yeah those T-Birds are troopers, I had a 1.4 that went into Windows for a while until everything finally just shut down. Needless to say it was HOT!

BTW: This thread is funny as all heck. Couldn't stop laughing after this one:

Originally posted by: msi1337
I wish this was a thread about what I have seen in my years of being a pc tech!

anyways...the worst I did was when I just learned how to install an Athlon socket a processor I forgot to remove the plastic under the heatsink and it melted to the board... the same day (as if my boss wasnt mad enough) I dropped a seagate hard drive on the ground and watched it bounce a good 2 feet in the air (yes hard drives really do bounce)... after I picked it up it sounded like a jar of nails!

thankfully that was years ago, and I know better now!

 

[xcript]

Originally posted by: UncleWai
Formatted my cousin partition that stored her pictures with friends and her nephews.
Scared the sh!t out of me, luckily I used easyrecovery to recover the pictures.
But I couldn't recover the folder names, so I changed them to crazy symbols so it looked like a virus attack.

:laugh:

 

[ohnnyj]

My Story:

I buy a new Seagate hard drive to replace my WD that has put its time in. Get ready to install Windows again and reach the screen for formatting partitions. I see two partitions showing, one says Class Files, the other Unpartitioned Space. I looked at the Class Files and thought, I wonder why there is 74MB of used space here, maybe Seagate put some sort of utilities on its own partition. Lets get rid of this, I bought an 80GB hard drive and I want all the space I paid for. So I format Class Files, but now two Unpartitioned Spaces show up . So I say whatever, let's get Windows installed and I can worry about the other partition later. I get started formatting Windows and notice my Zip Drive plugged in. Then in dawns on me, Class Files is the name I gave to my CLASS FILES Zip disk for school (a lot of irreplaceable files...gone). Lesson learned -> NTFS long format a Zip Disk and you can kiss your files goodbye.

 

[Kanalua]

This is a recent one...downloaded some bad software (spyware doctor, that wasn;t legit). Spent over two hours removing the crap that it installed...

 

[omniviper]

Originally posted by: AntisociaL
Id say mine is forgetting to plug the heatsink fan in after a build,turn it on and think wow kind of quiet....OH CRAP,then do the mad dash reach for the switch on back of the psu.

lol same here.

however i have another one. i dropped a zalman 7000cu hs on a socket 478 proc. needless to say it took me days trying to straighten all the godamm pins. in the end, the proc went pffft

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

Originally posted by: ohnnyj
My Story:

I buy a new Seagate hard drive to replace my WD that has put its time in. Get ready to install Windows again and reach the screen for formatting partitions. I see two partitions showing, one says Class Files, the other Unpartitioned Space. I looked at the Class Files and thought, I wonder why there is 74MB of used space here, maybe Seagate put some sort of utilities on its own partition. Lets get rid of this, I bought an 80GB hard drive and I want all the space I paid for. So I format Class Files, but now two Unpartitioned Spaces show up . So I say whatever, let's get Windows installed and I can worry about the other partition later. I get started formatting Windows and notice my Zip Drive plugged in. Then in dawns on me, Class Files is the name I gave to my CLASS FILES Zip disk for school (a lot of irreplaceable files...gone). Lesson learned -> NTFS long format a Zip Disk and you can kiss your files goodbye.

:laugh:

 

[gooseman]

I had two drives in my computer, needed to reformat my main drive but was drunk and reformatted the wrong one.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: OverVolt
Tried to boot a computer with a busted PSU FOUR TIMES thus shocking the living hell out of it.

me: 'hmm it didnt boot, let me try AGAIN :evil:'

I kept trying thinking it was something minor until the PSU literally blew up.

Is that why they call you overvolt?

 

[Calin]

Originally posted by: MCrusty
Deleted a partition that I shouldn't have :Q

Overwrited a partition that I really did need it

 

[DaFinn]

I ONCE ACCIDENTALLY WONDERED TO ATOT :Q

 

[Mo0o]

Originally posted by: Calin

Originally posted by: MCrusty
Deleted a partition that I shouldn't have :Q

Overwrited a partition that I really did need it

Suck is grammar you!

 

[Squisher]

Originally posted by: ArjSiv
............I decided to use the nossle on my vaccum cleaner.....
...... I slipped a bit and the nossle hit some of the capacitors on the motherboard loose and sucked them up.... DOH

Hahahahahahehehehe

 

[pray4mojo]

Originally posted by: ArjSiv
Mine:

I installed a new wireless card, I decided not to put the screw in figuring that something would go wrong with my luck as ususal and I'd have to start trying different PCI slots.

I boot my computer up, everything's fine so I decide to put the screw in. Being the clumsy oaf I am, I drop the screw and it starts rolling around on my sound card and motherboard. All of a sudden my computer shuts off.

Power button... nothing. Tried resetting via power bar... nothing. Then finally I left the power off for a few minutes and then turned it on again, it worked, apparently my motherboard had some capacitance left in it so it just needed a reset.

My computer turns on.. everything seems fine.. but Linux wont recognize my sound card... i boot into Windows... nothing.

Tried all sorts of stuff, I blew my sound card that day

Another stupid thing I did: with my old PC, I noticed my PC was really dusty so I decided to get rid of the dust a bit. Instead of using the conventional means of getting rid of the dust, I decided to use the nossle on my vaccum cleaner.

So... I started sucking up the dust all around my PC... and it was getting pretty tidy, I was impressed with myself for thinking of such a great idea! Me being clumsy again... I slipped a bit and the nossle hit some of the capacitors on the motherboard loose and sucked them up.... DOH

Luckily I had just bought the motherboard and the guy at the computer store I bought it from was a real jerk and an idiot so I just exchanged it

I thought of a similar idea to clean up my keyboard. Needless to say, I had to sacrifice the Pause key for the Q key. He was useless anyways.

 

[quakefiend420]

Originally posted by: gooseman
I had two drives in my computer, needed to reformat my main drive but was drunk and reformatted the wrong one.

haha i did the exact same thing when i was 15 or so :laugh:

 

[loic2003]

Forgot I had my 80Gig HD in my backpack, then went mountain biking. Luckily it still kinda worked, although it's much slower than it used to be. Got all the data from it so all is well.

 

[grrl]

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
The stupidest thing I've ever done?

Back in the Windows 3.1 days, I put every single .exe on my 119MB Hard drive into an "EXE" folder. I put every single .dll into a "DLL" folder. I put every single file type in it's own little folder.

Needless to say, the computer gave me the finger when I tried to boot it next time. I was around 5 at the time.

 

[nageov3t]

screwed a motherboard directly into a case. totally fried the power supply.

and one time at work, I mixed up the source and destination drivers for a ghost. totally wiped all of the client's data

edit: I thought of something better. I had my Athlon XP 3200+ underclocked for a year and a half. I guess at some point when I was originally setting it up, I hit "load fail safe settings" in the BIOS, and it knocked the cpu speeds down. my computer wasn't giving me any problems, so I never had any reason to check the speed at which the cpu was really running. it wasn't until I was thinking of upgrading and starting going through my old newegg invoices that I realized that the CPU I paid for 18 months ago was supposed to be running faster than it was. :Q it was running at 1.4 GHz; once the speed settings were readjusted in the BIOS, I had it running stable at 2.2 GHz.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

think the dumbest thing ive done is this

i was sorting out what pci cards go where got them sorted turned on everything was good. then coz the naff case i have doesnt use screws to secure the pci cards, but them rubbish bolt action slider things, i was pushing really hard to get all the pci cards in so they would shut....while the comuter was on.

i was then using a screw driver for some reason, and then messing round with one of the PCI covers on the case. screw driver met pci cover and i nearly got blinded by a big blue spark! computer went off imediatley, but it turned on a again fine.

thats the last time i play with a screw driver inside a running computer.

2: oh and i have a thing abot needing tp touch things that move, jus to see. and i put m fingers rather close to a TT smart fan on full power (80mm) and finger went too far, chopped half my index finger nail off, and tore a fan blade clean off....i had to use a fan with a missng blade for a week....even on low power it vibrated like a rampant rabbit