your worst computer mistake?

[Colonel Sanders]

I'll admit, so far my worst PC mistake was probbably killing Win98 with a Sony mouse(or maybe the partial shocking of myself while working with a neon light... miracle nothing bad happened). What are some of the mistakes you have made?

Logan

[highrisemech]

Somehow a few years ago I corrupted the disk #1 of my windows
95 setup. I forgot to run a check for viruses before doing the install and it had a boot memory sector virus on it, somehow it infected a write protected disk. Once I realized what was happening it was to late. I did manage to eat that bug with Boot sector antivirus that I keep handy on bootable floppy.

[Hosie]

My worst PC mistake...hmmmm It would have to after working on a mobo and CPU that a friend gave to me after we upgraded his system. Gigabyte GA-5AX and a 550 AMD K6-2, that would only clock at 250 mhz with the jumpers set according to book.(by the way, this is how it was running from the Pc Repair shop that built it for him) After checking the jumper settings, i found that it kept refering to a jumper that was not present... so after hours of frustration and trying random settings I got mad... Set all jumpers to ON and hit the switch.
SNAP!!! then nothing... lol. Removed processor and admired the new black scorch mark on the bottom. The worst part, was a few days later I went to Gigabytes web site and found the manuals for the GA-5AX. There were four revisions, all had the missing jumper except one... the board I had... The manual for it had entiring different jumper settings. I didnt know whether to laugh at my impatience and stupidity, curse Gigabyte for their changes, or cry over a perfectly good processor turned paper weight...;-)

[DrZaius]

My story is similar to Hosie's. I was tinkering with my first build, a K6-3 333@380MHz. Of course, I wasn't happy with 380MHz so I tried almost every settings possible to see if I could get it to 400 or 450MHz. After getting frustrated I just set it to some very high speed (680MHz if I remember correctly) and tried it out. It booted, and then froze at Windows. Realizing that it would never work that high I shut down and reset it to 380MHz thinking I'll just stick to that. Turns out I toasted the chip, it would still work but only underclocked to 200MHz . It all turned out well however, I went out and got a new board and CPU (Duron 750MHz). I still have the old Socket 7 board (luckaly nothing happened to it) running a K6-2 550MHz now.

[mairving]

Mine was several years ago before I knew better. I has a power supply go out on me with sparks flying and all. So my mistake was I took in to a local computer shop. They charged me $100 to put a new power supply in. The CD-ROM didn't work when I got it back, so I had to open the case and connect it. That was the last time I took my computer anywhere.

[RayH]

Buying a motherboard with VIA chipset!

[alber]

ummmmm, fdisking and formatting a friends hard drive with valuble data on it(he didn't tell me he had stuff on it, until afterwards)...i'm still busting my 'a**' to salvage it. he is not a happy camper, but i'm trying. BTW i think i'm having luck using R-Studio 2.0.

oh! and letting people know i know a few things about computers, ugh, now my apt. looks like a shop...it's hard to say no

[HAL9000]

Listing my phone number in the phone book. This has since changed because I get people who I barely remember, or an uncle's brother of a friend of a friend etc, phoning me at all hours because they can't find a document or their internet isn't working.

[poops]

Spending a half hour checking connections and wires only to
realize, hmmm what do ya know, plugging it in may just make it work.

[Jenni]

Turning a $1200 Fujitsu laptop into "spare parts". It came with a USB port, and Win95. Useless. So I tried installing Win98. Went fine. Installed DirectX 7. "Windows protection error, you need to restart your computer." Upon restart, laptop asks for "supervisor password". Supervisor password??? I never set a supervisor password...(bought the laptop refurbed from Fujitsu, think that somehow this never got cleared out of it from the first owner). So I decide to go looking inside for a battery to pull, or a clear CMOS jumper. Very carefully disassemble laptop. Find battery, soldered to board. No clear CMOS jumper. Carefully put everything back the way it was. Nothing. Fan spins, HDD spins for a few seconds, then nothing. Cry. Take it to brother. Finds nothing wrong, can't fix it either. Cry some more. Then sell parts on eBay and buy computer from brother. Probably didn't need a laptop as the only computer in the house with a 2 year old (at the time) anyway.

[reboot]

I "hot swapped" an Athlon XP the other day. POOF!

[DrZaius]

I "hot swapped" an Athlon XP the other day.

You swapped processors while the system was running??

[HAL9000]

LOL, Now that's funny Jim. The closest I ever did to that was plug in a SoundBlaster AWE64 while the machine was running, and guess what, plug and play actually works. I refreshed under system properties and Win98 detected and set up the card. Don't know if I would want to try that twice though.

[tedthebear]

I have Windows Me and one time I clicked on My Network Places and did the set-up wizard...my ADSL connection was completely messed up after that. I had to do a System Restore to undo it. I don't NEED to do a network since I only have one PC!

[Jomama]

Formatting and cloning a new HD. Didnt do a cold restart after redetecting the HDs and formatted the wrong HD! I hate it when that happens!

[Floppyman]

One was cutting into a 50 pin 5ft+ SCSI cable by accident while cutting the tabs off zipties as I was putting finishing touches on my new system. The other one was putting my laptop on its side while not realizing that the pcmcia network card and dongle where still plugged in on that side.....*crack* and "DOH", fortunately it still kinda works.

[Jenni]

I have also "hot swapped" things that really shouldn't be, like floppy drives. The first time I did that, I unplugged the ribbon and power cables from the old one, no problem. I plugged the ribbon cable into the new one, no problem. Plug the power cable into the new one, and hear my brand new HDD spin down! AAARRRGGGGG, please, no, anything but that!!!!! Luckily, apon reboot, both the HDD and the floppy worked. They were on the same power chain from the PS. Now, the HDD is all by itself, lol, in case I ever want to do it again.

[RJ]

1) Back to my old Pentium 133 days. . I discovered some utilities on the floppy that belongs to the hard drive. Hmm, low level format, what's that ? Executed it. Well, in former days I only had one hard drive. . .

2) Also back to my old Pentium 133 days, but about a year after 1). Got Win98 First Edition, wanted to try. Installed on C:, no problem, wanted to convert C: to FAT32. Saved all my data to hard drive D: and converted C:. And guess what ? After the conversion I had no access to D: anymore, what ever I tried. About 100 MB of data got lost. . . (hey, that was a big amount in these days. . )

3) With a friend of mine, somewhen in 1999 or early 2K. Due to the space we needed to insert a sound card we pulled out the PS/2 - USB riser card (AT mainboard you know. . ) from its slot, but it was still connected to the board. The riser card lay directly on the blank metal, and after turning the PC on heavy white smoke came out of the PC. The cable of the riser card was burned the whole length and one wire was totally blankened. I still have it here. . . I will never forget it.

RJ

[Orcmonkey]

Where to begin! Perhaps the time I tried to install 98SE over XP without even thinking about it. Then I lost XP, and had to reload everything... ::Shrug:: Or the time I spilled water on my keyboard and fried it.

[Gintaras]

Most stupid things I did on my 1st ever PC very 1st ever month of owning PC:
Tried to get more space on HDD by deleting "not needed" files in C:/Windows

Listening to someones suggestion and installing/running Norton Utilities.

Turning PC off while on the rush by pushing button while Windows still were running(forgot about: Start> Shut Down)

[Colonel Sanders]

Shutting off the PC that way aint too bad, I've had to do that a few times...(while I used to with the 'ol Intel chip).

Just remembered: My stepbrother was looking for pictures of a pirate to draw, and the one he liked was a little 1in by 1in, and he was determined to resize it. While in paint, we stumbeled across the image/attributes(this was before I knew any better, and on a 486 100MHz), I knew what pixels were and thought maybe that is how many pixels will be in the image...(not the SIZE of the image). Like an idiot I blurted that out and he proced to increase the number to about 10,000 or 100,000 pixels....(this is on a 486 100MHz), and he was determined to get the image, and the hour glass stayed on for about and hour seeminly locked up. Hmm, go play SNES(back befor PS days....) The end result was not pretty. There were about 4 BLOWN UP pixels across the screen and some scroll bars, the picture still looked as bad as before(OK, a little worse), and thus I(don't know about him) was educated about using MS Paint on a slow PC.

Logan

[glc]

Plugging in the power connector on a 3.5" floppy upside down. Poof!

Installing McAfee antivirus.

[Carl Price]

Originally posted by poops Spending a half hour checking connections and wires only to realize, hmmm what do ya know, plugging it in may just make it work.

Been there done that. Also monitors show better pictures when they are plugged into the computer.

[archie]

Perhaps not the worst ... once upon a time, a porcelain object on top of a monitor broke as I lifted the monitor.

[Christoph]

Hey, beat me - I decided to have a 'fried floppy' for dinner. That stupid thing didn't work so I decided to do something stupid, too and switch power the other way. Good thing was - it's a cheap part anyway and this one was old, too.

Oh, well - lesson learned!

Christoph

[BeardedClem]

Put a 128MB stick of ram in the slot backwards...

Why won't it post I sez?... and what's that burning smell I sez??

Amazing that I didn't fry the board too.

[oryx]

The worst thing I ever did was to tell my wife about E-bay.

[Colonel Sanders]

As of about 5min ago I have another to add to this. I read on that floppy connectors were removable, and could be moved along the cable. Then I remebered my CD-ROMs are close togother and far away form the connector on my MB, so I have to use both cables, and thus run my HDD at ATA 33 . So I decided to parctice on my floppy cable, floppies are not imporntant. I got the large connectors for ancient floppies off with out any problem, the I moved onto the "current" floppy connector(which uses the same latching mechanism as the ide cable). I couldn't get the thing cracked open, so I got out my trusty knife and decided to pry and force the top and bottom apart. So I started pying, and eventually heard a nice *pop* all-right! on to the next side *pop* "uh-oh". I have the two halves seperated, but the clips which should be on the bottom seciton are still locked in the top. However, I think I know what I need to do to make this work on the IDE cable and thus improve my HDD speed.

Logan

[Jenni]

SOmetimes that doesn't go so well though, Logan, because the little "pins" don't always come out of the ribbon cable, and it is a real pain to get them back where they are supposed to be. When that happens, plan on buying a new cable.

[StunGunz]

Had a wet pc, and for some reason that only God understands, I decided to turn it on and and let the fans dry it out...POOF!