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Whats the dumbest thing you've ever done to your PC?

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My swiftest move would have to be getting into an argument with my husband and tossing my laptop onto the table with force... and then watching it MISS the table and fall to the ground.. resulting in a replaced keyboard, replaced hdd, and replaced casing because that cracked too.. THANK YOU WARRANTY!

*controls temper a lot better now*
 
When i got my very first computer, I was running out of hard drive space and started deleting random files (including config.sys and autoexec.bat) to clear up some space.
 
I had a floppy in the drive when I turned it on and I got the "Replace System Disk" error, so I was like "wtf? well ok..." and went and put in the "system disk" that had come with the pc. (this was just after I had gotten my first pc) . It was a boot disk, so I put it in, and followed along with what it was saying which eventually led me to reformatting and installing windows. All I had to do was take the disk out!!! 🙁
 
How about waking up in the middle of the night and pissing on your open-cased computer? I didn't remember a thing!
 
I lead a pretty charmed life when it comes to hardware, but I did one incredibly moronic thing in my recent quest to make my PC almost dead silent.

Having swapped my thin-walled PC case for a Antec P180, the next thing for me to do was replace the stock CPU fan on my Intel P4 2.53 GHz CPU with something quieter and more efficient. I picked the Zalman 7700Cu as the winner and picked one up locally.

Immediately, stuff started going wrong. After 3 years of using the stock HSF, the Arctic Silver I applied way back then between the CPU and HSF acted as a pretty strong glue and pulled the CPU out with the HSF, even though the safety lever was down. No pins bent, oddly enough. Okay, fine. Close call but no harm done.

Read the directions, and proceeded to mount the Zalman HSF onto my CPU. Only, not knowing it then, I did it with the wrong length screws. Proceeded to grind the screws into the motherboard itself like a complete moron and effectively ended the life of that motherboard. 🙁
 
Originally posted by: BroeBo
How about waking up in the middle of the night and pissing on your open-cased computer? I didn't remember a thing!
Click to expand...

HAHAHHA!!!!!
omg thats pretty good.

The worst thing I have done is plug a molex into my new CD drive when I thought the computer was off. Plugged it in wrong at first and watched a blue flame shoot out. Good thing newegg was good with RMA's.
 
I think the worst one we did when we ran our sales/service business was when I was working on a customer's computer and we were in a big hurry to get it back so we borrowed my mom's computer (while she was on vacation, naturally) and did a hot-swap on the bios chip. My spouse put it in backwards and fried my mom's mainboard, so we had to buy her a new one. 🙁 When she got back, I told her we decided to upgrade her computer for her, hehe. 😱
 
Was trying to OC my old PII350, but my motherboard only had a few settings... IIRC, there was 66,100,133,140, and 166. It worked at 140, but I wanted more, so I tried 166... it corrupted all the data on my HDD.
 
I once plugged the floppy drive power plug off by one pin and caused a huge short, which fried the mobo, video card, PSU, floppy and DVD-ROM.
 
Originally posted by: Cheezeit
Originally posted by: BroeBo
How about waking up in the middle of the night and pissing on your open-cased computer? I didn't remember a thing!
Click to expand...

HAHAHHA!!!!!
omg thats pretty good.

The worst thing I have done is plug a molex into my new CD drive when I thought the computer was off. Plugged it in wrong at first and watched a blue flame shoot out. Good thing newegg was good with RMA's.
Click to expand...

yeah I am actually pretty lucky I didn't electrocute myself 😱
 
Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
I ****ed up bad. The overheat warning on my PC lit up, i took the case side off, and accidently dropped a soda down below the cpu. heres where i ****ed up- i temporarily mopped up the soda with a sock and the sock got sucked into the cpu cooler after about 5 mins of soaking. its wrapped around the fan shaft-im pretty sure thats what it is... and i need some advice on how to get it out without shelling a sh!tload of money out to Dell to take it in there. should i unbolt the top piece there and cut it out and then flush the whole thing with some stuff from Fry's or just try to cut it out piece by piece through the hole with a sharp razor and take the pieces out with needle nose pliers and then flush it?

please any advice or help on this crap move i made would really really really help me out.

thanks to anyone who replies

Edit-Note to self, never use a sock to soak up a coke in your desktop PC.
Click to expand...

I guess the real question is... what are you doing with socks by your computer???
 
Wasn't really my fault, but I was replacing an old AT-style power supply. On those, you had to connect the power leads properly to the power switch (Black, White, Blue, and Brown leads), which I did. The PSU had two of the leads swapped internally (I think it was the white and brown were reversed inside the PSU, don't remember to well - it was about 12 years ago), resulting in a terrific electric spark shower when I plugged it in. It also destroyed the server I was working on.
 
I've had my share of hardware failures (a few PSU's and a Deathstar hard drive mainly), but I don't recall ever having caused such a failure myself...

However, after I had first gotten Windows 2000 over 5 years ago, I had gotten into encrypting all my files since I thought it was a cool idea (in retrospect, I have no idea what kind of sensitive documents I thought I had to protect at the age of 15). Basically, I didn't backup the recovery key, so upon a later reinstall of Windows, I lost access to everything. That was pretty dumb.
 
Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
I ****ed up bad. The overheat warning on my PC lit up, i took the case side off, and accidently dropped a soda down below the cpu. heres where i ****ed up- i temporarily mopped up the soda with a sock and the sock got sucked into the cpu cooler after about 5 mins of soaking. its wrapped around the fan shaft-im pretty sure thats what it is... and i need some advice on how to get it out without shelling a sh!tload of money out to Dell to take it in there. should i unbolt the top piece there and cut it out and then flush the whole thing with some stuff from Fry's or just try to cut it out piece by piece through the hole with a sharp razor and take the pieces out with needle nose pliers and then flush it?

please any advice or help on this crap move i made would really really really help me out.

thanks to anyone who replies

Edit-Note to self, never use a sock to soak up a coke in your desktop PC.
Click to expand...

I call BS

 
i had just gotten my new motherboard from newegg, the last piece to complete that system build. got everything plugged in, turned on the power, and nothing happened. so after a little troubleshooting, i decided to see if it was the psu causing the problem, so i unplugged both power connectors from the mobo (but not the drives), and then shorted the two wires on the 24-pin connector that i was supposed to to get the psu to turn on (a safe thing to do, if EVERYTHING is unplugged, i know this now). well, my brand-spanking new motherboard started shooting sparks. appearently, current had traveled down through an ide connector or something, and fried my mobo, video card, and memory. luckly newegg took it back and sent me a replacement. whoops
 
Well when I was in college I had the side of my case off, and it rained in the window while I was sleeping one day... that cost about $400 to replace the fried components.
 
Originally posted by: mugs
Well when I was in college I had the side of my case off, and it rained in the window while I was sleeping one day... that cost about $400 to replace the fried components.
Click to expand...

Yeah I tried that excuse too. I definitely went to the bathroom on it. But hey, it gave me an excuse to upgrade it 😀
 
Originally posted by: BroeBo
How about waking up in the middle of the night and pissing on your open-cased computer? I didn't remember a thing!
Click to expand...

When I was 7-8 I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I guess I turned the wrong way and went into my parents bedroom instead of the bathroom. Once there I lifted the lid on the "Hi-Fi" cabinet and peed in it. I never knew a thing until our room door burst open later that night and my father came in mad as hell yelling "who pissed in the stereo cabinet?". Fortunately he had not put the equipment in it yet so I lived.
 
rofl @ Linflas

Mine was probably when I accidentally damaged my old video card when I pulled a little too hard on my hard drive and it smacked into the card. I had to wait like 2 weeks to get a replacement from Chaintech...not fun.
 
Dumbest thing I ever did on my own PC was when I yanked the network card from my machine without turning off the ATX power supply. The motherboard survived that with no problem and I never realized I did it until I went to stick it back in and heard that ominous POP through the speakers. It was a P3B-F board and I toasted it. It definitely cured my ISA day habits of never unplugging the machine before working inside of it.
 
too much thermal paste which fried my T bird 1.4.

And tried to save time by screwing a hsf onto the heatink when it was already mounted. Forgot to add this metal piece that stops you from screwing the screw too far and ended up drilling a hole in the cpu.


 
I almost installed Windows XP Tablet Edition on a PC. Friend of mine at work caught it before I could even start the install.

And on that note, ARE YOU PEOPLE INSANE?! WHY ARE YOU DRINKING AND EATING AROUND YOUR OPEN CASE?!?!
 
Originally posted by: BroeBo
How about waking up in the middle of the night and pissing on your open-cased computer? I didn't remember a thing!
Click to expand...


Hehehe. Normally I'd call shens but I once saw a guy p!ss all over a bedroom door thinking it was a toilet.😕. He was incredibly intoxicated and a moron on top of that. It was my Buddy's bedroom door so we ended up taping him to a hockey stick with the intent of throwing him out in the snow. Well we ended up dropping him on the stairs.😱
 
Umm, not my own but a true story...

Technician at XXXXXX computer store was told to upgrade windows 98 to ME way back in the day. Well he decided since he was given a full version of ME that he would reformat the computer with ME instead. Besides the fact that the customer lost all of her data, she was comissioned to write a novel. That novel was never backed up and was only located on that computer.

They fired the guy immediately and sent the drive to California for data recovery or what not.
 
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