What's the stupidest thing you've seen someone do to their computer.

[BlackWob]

My friends little brother asked me for some help two years ago. He said he would save files and about an hour or so later the file would be gone. Also, other files mysteriously kept disappearing. I went to his room and saw about 12 nice-sized Domino's magnets attatched to the side of his computer. Of course, I said "I'm not good at computers. Ask your brother."

I've had other people asking me how to set up their computer, a prompt 8 months after their purchase. People like this shouldn't own computers.

 

[Killbat]

That's bunk. Even IF refridgerator magnets were powerful enough to frizz a HDD through the computer case, they wouldn't be so strategic as to carefully manipulate the FAT.

 

[mollymawk]

Killbat is right. Very fishy. Maybe the guy was saving his files to floppies, and exposing the floppies to the magnets? Or maybe this is one of those "urban legend friend-of-a-friend" apocryphal stories, hmm?

 

[JohnnyKnoxville]

Install windows???

No I've seen kids all the time yank the Power Macs out of the workstations at school while its running to borrow firewire cables and such.Good way to crash the hard drive.

 

[DaHitman]

<< Install windows???
>>




NOPE!... It would have to be a tie with:

1) RE-INSTALLING windows instead of deleting it and using the CD the drink holder it is destined
to be..

2) UPGRADING WINDOWS... futily paying more and more money to microsoft in the false hope that THIS TIME they finally have come out with something that is not a piece of sh!t... especially after Microsoft tells you that you need to upgrade because the new verion is much better than the old unstable one you are running... which they of course told you the SAME thing about IT when IT came out.

 

[Zach]

I took a call from a guy that messed up his HD with some BSD so badly that he could no longer use even the BSD to change his partitions. I found a set of commands to give debug in DOS and we manually cleaned the HDD's partition tables &amp; MBR. Fun.

What else? I talked to a sys-admin that insisted we hald him reinstall NT on several computers he ordered, except he made sure that didn't have CDROM's. He had a network right? Guess what, he never made any 3 disk sets.

And, I had a few people that used thier computers during mid western lightening storms. If they didn't say that was what happened (you could get the impression, hint hint) I could replace them.. but &quot;acts of nature&quot; weren't covered if they mentioned lightening.

Oh, and there was the guy in Africa that kept his PS set to 120 and plugged his computer into a 240. Puff.

 

[EvanFerguson]

some old lady tried faxing by shouting &quot;fax fax fax&quot; in to the mouse

i dunno, weird

 

[J3anyus]

I discharged a nice amount of static into my motherboard last night, that was fun. But I actually know what I'm doing (mostly) with computers.

There was my boss that was worried when I replaced his power supply, because he couldn't find drivers for it. That was a good one

 

[Platypus]

Seen white-out on the screen... you think im kidding....

 

[SavageDubz]

<< Seen white-out on the screen... you think im kidding.... >>

HAHAHA....that's good comedy

 

[sohcrates]

a user in a lab i help manage put her CREDIT CARD in the floppy drive and got it stuck while trying to ONLINE SHOP

i kid you not either....yikes!

 

[pulse8]

My sister used to do light tech support and once got a call saying that his cup holder broke. He was referring to his CD-ROM.

 

[Sugadaddy]

some of those aren't even funny anymore, how can people be so dumb?


A friend of mine did tech support for a company that sells comps. He got a call from a guy saying his machine ate floppies. Every time he put it in the drive, it would disappear and not come out. They went over to his house and discovered he was actually putting the floppies in a crack between empty drive bays. They opened the case and found like 10 floppies in there.

 

[trmiv]

This one isn't an urban legend, but a stupid friend.

I was helping one of my friends build a new computer one time. We went and picked out all the stuff, and the next day I was going to come over to help him build it. Well, he decided to take matters into his own hands and put the thing together. I decided to have a bit of faith in him and try to install the OS without checking his handy work (I mean, dude is a cop. I figure if they let him have a gun, I could trust him on this). I try to get the thing booted, yet the floppy drive won't work. I'm like, what the hell????

I open the machine, and he has the floppy hooked up to one of those floppy cables with two connectors. The floppy is on the end and hooked up right, but on the second connector he has connected an IDE Zip Drive. Yes folks, IDE. Obviously the IDE connector on the back of the ZIP drive is a bit bigger than a floppy connector, so what did he do? He kept pressing the cable onto the back of the Zip drive until the extra pins bent to the side!!!!!!!! He thought this would work!!! I could not believe it. I was like, &quot;This is like legos, how could you not notice that the connectors were not even close to the same size?&quot; And he says, &quot;I didn't look, I just kept pushing it on there till it stopped.&quot; So I said, &quot;I can't believe they let you have a gun AND a car.&quot;

 

[Cybermastif]

While I was in college I was part of the lab support team, we had to support 8 labs containing roughly 400 coputers split evenly between Macs and Dell PC's. All the systems had Zip disk's since the college has a very large graphic arts department, that has several graduates working for ILM. Never the less we on average would lose a zip disk a day, not from click death, but from idiots jamming floppy disks in there.

Unfortionatelly we only caught the morons about 50% of the time. Granted it is ever so wonderful when you call upon a student and tell them that they have to pay for the drive they just ruined and tried sneaking away from. And they say &quot;No it wasn't me!&quot; Granted when most profs have ya label the disk with your name....