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

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I did a clean instal of XP, all the updates, drivers, etc. My mouse started lagging real bad????? I unistalled/reinstalled mouse drivers, video drivers and everything else I could think of. Mouse still lagged. I formatted and reinstalled windows only to find the same issue. Then I noticed the power plug for my USB hub waas not plugged in. PLugged it in and all was fine. Wasted a good hour or two.
 
It was a new build.

Had a Enlight 7237 case. Tried for hours to get it to power up. Nothing. Thought I had a DOA motherboard. Thing was I had the sides and the front panels off the case ... everything was setup right ... no power up. About 4AM I'm in the kitchen pulling my hair out and my wife says " are you sure you are pushing the power button " ! I almost beat her right there I was so pissed and agitated I wanted to throw the dam case at her .... then I looked ... looked ... I had been pushing the " reset " button all along !


Hit the " real " power button and it booted .... DOH !
 
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!
Click to expand...

Been there.
While working as a laptop tech, I had unscrewed the door that held the HDD in on one of those little bitty Toshiba portege's, and the phone rang. So i went to answer the phone. I came back and forgot that the screw was out of the laptop. I picked it up and went to turn it over and the HDD came flying out and hit the floor. The drive sounded like a maraco afterwords. 🙁
We ended up taking the drive out of a new computer in the store and RMA'ing that new computer. Told the owner of the laptop with the now screwed HDD that he had a bad virus and we had to reformat his drive. We charged him for it too.
 
Once deleted the personal FTP space that one of the company executives was using. Luckily my boss was able to point out that I'd followed the rules in deleting it, as there was no corresponding user id or special notes about the account. Needless to say, the space wasn't touched afterwards.

Also, once had a HD slip out of my hands and fall on the speaker magnet in the bottom of my case. The computer booted once ok, but crapped out shortly afterwards.

Finally, once did a reformat of XP and forgot about the SD card that I had sitting in my reader. XP defaulted to the card, and not paying attention, I tried to install XP to it. Made it most of the way before running out of disk space.
 
I set a client up with HomePlug powerline networking in her apartment. Didn't do any config, just plugged the suckers in (never worked with them before). A week later she calls me stating her downstairs computers (ones connected via homeplug to router upstairs) can't print on shared printer or get on internet. I go over, troubleshoot it for an hour o so. I keep trying to log into the router from downstairs, but my password isn't working. Look closely at the login screen and realize it's not their router! The homeplug devices were connecting to someone else in her building's powerline network! I didn't even think of that when setting it up (hell, I didn't think anyone actually bought powerline stuff). Changed the passphrase on the plugs from default and all was fixed.
 
When putting a non-retail HSF onto a brand new Thunderbird purchased at a computer show, I crushed the corners of the protruding core... not realizing what I had done because I had never had to deal with that type of processor before (any socket chip before that point I had installed never had any protruding easily damagable parts)
 
Nearly every time I work on my computer, I flip the switch on the back of the PSU to make sure the power is off. Then when I'm done and I go to turn the power back on, I freak out every time because I forget to flip the switch again and it doesnt boot.

15 years of working on PCs and I still do it.
 
Originally posted by: Ramma2
Nearly every time I work on my computer, I flip the switch on the back of the PSU to make sure the power is off. Then when I'm done and I go to turn the power back on, I freak out every time because I forget to flip the switch again and it doesnt boot.

15 years of working on PCs and I still do it.
Click to expand...


I did that with my brand new LCD. Went to turn it on with the front power button: nothing. Checked power and data cables: nothing. While poking around with the cable connections on the back I noticed the switch: worked.

 
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. 😀
Click to expand...
Awesome - I did a similar thing - I needed space on my Windows 3.1 machine and started deleting files I didn't know the purpose of. OOPS. 😀 The guys who sold us that machine weren't too happy with mom when she brought it back in to them.

On another note, (which I'm sure many of you have done before)... zipped files for a new machine (pre-XP) and the new machine didn't have an unzipping program.
 
Reimaged a spare hard drive so I coudl then transfer data over. But forgot to swap the drive so reimaged the user's actual drive and they lost everything. Oops.
 
At a previous job, I installed a new network server - it was the first real server the company ever had. Their previous server was only used as a print server and for running a script that backed up networked pc's hard drives nightly. Setting up the nightly backup job on the new server was something that I kept putting off because I was extremely busy doing other things. Some day soon I was going to get around to it. Then one morning weeks after most recent backup was performed, I came into work to find out that the vice president's hard drive sounded like a circular saw, and wouldn't boot anymore.

DOH!
 
This was wierd more than stupid, although with the sheer number of systems I wrecked that day... I felt pretty dumb.

So I am working as a tech at a local computer shop one day on a machine that simply didn't respond (other than fans) when the power button was pushed. It had a slot 1 proc (this was around the time that these were on the way out) and I needed to test whether it was the processor or mobo. I take a new slot 1 processor, put it into the machine. Nada. Ok, the mobo must be bad. So I take the board out of the system and put in a new board with the old processor. Nada. Umm ok. I then take the new processor and put it in with the new mobo. Nope. Just wow. We only had a couple of boards in the office at the time that would work with that particular cpu... one was the new board that I had tested initially with, the other one was a board that was fairly new in the machine that my boss was using. So I take both cpu's and ask my boss if I could try them in his machine. He agreed... and I first tried the new proc. Nothing. grrrr. I then tried the old cpu. It failed as well. Scratching my head, I reinstalled his old processor into his machine, hit the power button, turned and went back to the bench. As I am looking at all of this stuff trying to figure out wth is going on, I hear "What did you do to my system?" from my boss' office. It had now died with the same problem. No boot.

The fix for both my boss' system and the problem computer was to entirely replace both cpu and mobo.

so..

New CPU... fried
New Mobo... fried
Boss CPU... fried
Boss Mobo... fried

I guess the one nice thing was that those cpu's and mobos all were RMA'd.

Oh yeah, and after taking the mobo out of my boss' system... it made a tingling sound that varied in pitch and volume as you moved it around. FREAKISH.

I think after all was said and done the diagnosis on the original system was demon posession.
 
Yesterday I re-imaged somebody's PC and forgot to back up her Favorites. She's not too pleased.
Click to expand...

Yeah that happens a lot and is a common mistake! Redirection of the favorites folder to one of the network shares (if you have a server) can save you - just make sure it works!
 
Originally posted by: sm8000
Yesterday I re-imaged somebody's PC and forgot to back up her Favorites. She's not too pleased.
Click to expand...

This is why we leave the onus on the user to back up all personal data before rolling out/reloading machine.
 
I was going to format my computer...started backing up my data. Got interrupted by someone, left my desk. When I got back I thought I backed up everything. I didn't.

Lost a bunch of data.
 
bought a 4x AGP card, went home and installed it and didn't notice much of a performance gain, called up the shop, b!tched like an assh0le, went into BIOS and noticed AGP was set to 2x. oops
 
installed an xp2400 and couldnt figure why it kept locking up. turned on and off enough times to finally look back in the case and notice I forgot to plug in the hs fan back in. unfortunately it was little too late.
 
modded a psu supply a higher rail voltage for overclocking...well accidently when screwing the potential back on i had it touching the side of the psu thus creating a short grounding the circuit...ended up sending a full 12V to cpu, fans, hd's, etc ... started a small electrical fire in case....
 


was a new build.

Had a Enlight 7237 case. Tried for hours to get it to power up. Nothing. Thought I had a DOA motherboard. Thing was I had the sides and the front panels off the case ... everything was setup right ... no power up. About 4AM I'm in the kitchen pulling my hair out and my wife says " are you sure you are pushing the power button " ! I almost beat her right there I was so pissed and agitated I wanted to throw the dam case at her .... then I looked ... looked ... I had been pushing the " reset " button all along !


Hit the " real " power button and it booted .... DOH !













quality
 
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