Biggest computer mess-up

[jsanchez]

What has been u guys biggest computer oopsie? i recently formatted a computer w/o creating a backup at work.

[Werewolfdaddy]

buying a Hewlett Packard
seriously, my biggest oopsie

I turned on my computer and to my surprise, there was no deafening windows boot music. I opened up winamp and could get no sound. At this point I was beginning to panic. I had recently installed a soundblaster 5.1 and was paranoid about it not working correctly, because nothing ever worked right in the HP machine I had. Well, I checked in device manager and everything was fine. I looked in sounds and multimedia and everything was ok. I was beginning to get panic, so I downloaded the latest drivers and was preparing to do a reinstallation of the soundcard. Well, I pulled the computer up to unplug it so I could take out the sound card when I noticed the speakers were not plugged in.

[Floppyman]

There's probably more than one, but the best one to date is that I broke off a little capacitor or something similar when I tried to take my Matrox G550 out of the AGP slot (It was in there very tight). I ended up buying another one assuming this one was a goner, but I don't know, maybe it still works. I guess I've never tried it again.

[Billnodeal]

While working late one night on a box for work, I was listening to music with the cd drive on my pc. I went to change the disc out & turned to the other pc I was working on to hit return or something. I then loaded another cd on top of the one already there. More is not always better since the cd did not like the added disc. It made alot of noise & even smoked! Scared the living daylights out of me too! I thought it was the pc I had to get ready for work by 8am that fried!

[Xayd]

Broke 2 processors in one day once.

Chipped the hell outta an Athlon I was using and fried it. So went to assemble an old temp machine from parts I had around that included one of the K6-3 laptop processors.

Being a bit adventurous I went ahead and popped that stupid aluminum cap offa the K6-3 so I could push it up to 550 or 600mhz at least, which went fine, until I decided for some reason that it might be a good idea to try to put a big ass Alpha Socket A heatsink on a Socket 7 CPU.

So, that CPU got chipped up pretty bad too.

Nothing like having to call MWave and pay for overnight shipping because you're stupid :|

[HAL9000]

Dropped an AMD K6 with attached heatsink not once, not twice, but three times onto a concrete floor which finally cracked it.

Had a slave hard drive connected to my benchmachine and typed in FORMAT C:/Q/AUTOTEST instead of D: (for those that don't know, the /AUTOTEST goes and does the format without any warning or verification... there went my bench machine drive.

[Tuf]

I set the resolution and refresh too high on three brand new Sony 21" Monitors. They all failed within hours. Sometimes it pays to read the instructions.

[setfree]

I was installing some case fans in my old computer. I had just finished wiring them and I turned the machine on to make sure they were working. To my horror there was bare wire touching the motherboard which made my computer restart and before I could fix the problem the wire touched the mobo again and this time it never turned back on.

[lokgotz]

took out an old vga card from a PII machine and put it on a PIII motherboard.....i didnt know what went wrong....but there was smoke comming out.....its a brand new asus board....sigh....

[Confused]

Since you didn't specify PC, just computer oopsie. Working in CICS on a mainframe running wide area network for 15 states from Mississippi river to Atlatic, and New York to Florida I meant to enter command to check status of a node, left out a comma and shutdown CICS. 5000 customer service terminals went blank.

I have been very careful since that day to double check, and check again before hitting enter.
Chas

[Confused]

My next biggest one I didn't actually do, but was neverless responsible for.

Back in the IBM 360 days we had a model 50 (with a staggering 512K of memory) fully loaded. Running 8 jobs at once, all 12 tape drives spinning and three printer running. The guy setting at console was a exciteable and nervous guy and I knew it. When his back was turned I reached around the display console and turned the brightness all the way down so that the screen was black. Well John turned around, saw the black screen, jumped about three feet, landed and hit the IPL button without checking anything. I just kinda slinked away. Took about 4 hours to recover from that one.
Chas

[reboot]

Hot swapped an AGP video card. Blew the card, the mobo, the RAM, and the PSU. Nice cloud of stinky blue smoke.

[Werewolfdaddy]

Originally posted by reboot Hot swapped an AGP video card. Blew the card, the mobo, the RAM, and the PSU. Nice cloud of stinky blue smoke.

ouch


I had a two friends hot swap hard drives recently. One friend had a instant reboot, the other is looking around for new motherboards.
I'm too paranoid; I never hotswap anything--not even fans.

[reboot]

Well, I didn't do it on purpose It was way too early, pre-coffee time. I have been known to hotswap BIOS chips, and a few other things with no dire consequences though.

[Blakhart]

Lol@hal and confused....!
Fry two xp1700s by tipping the heatsink off the cores. And then there was the time a gf4ti4200 heatsink was not snapped back into place after applying artic silva, the time a heatsink fell off a gf2 and...

[Alienware_Dude]

Originally posted by Billnodeal While working late one night on a box for work, I was listening to music with the cd drive on my pc. I went to change the disc out & turned to the other pc I was working on to hit return or something. I then loaded another cd on top of the one already there. More is not always better since the cd did not like the added disc. It made alot of noise & even smoked! Scared the living daylights out of me too! I thought it was the pc I had to get ready for work by 8am that fried!

I did the exact same thing in my Pioneer DVD-116! My drive survived, though, and so did both CD's. My 'biggest' PC "oops" so far is I was cutting a wire tie inside a case, and I accidentally cut the IDE cable to the HDD. I had a sneaking suspicion, so I double-checked before I closed up the case, and the thing was sliced in half. Replaced it right away. Checking to see if it was really cut before I booted the system up saved me a lot of potential troubleshooting hassle.

[pstj]

Back when the family computer was a 486 SX, I did something quite stupid (I was 14 at the time). One time, I was sitting at the computer. The keyboard cord was really long, and I always got my legs stuck in it - it was really annoying. So, eventually I grew tired of this. I decided to take my father's "monster stapler" and to stable the wire on the desk, to keep it from dangling. My intention was not actually to staple the cord, but to immobilize it with a staple without having the stable going into the cord. So, I'm under the desk, trying to staple the darn thing. Just when I press to release a staple, my hand twists and the staple goes right through the keyboard cord. I hear a high-pitched noise, and just as I come up from under the desk, I see the screen going blank. Turned out I had fried the mobo... the tech guy who came to check the computer couldn't believe the story (I was not very computer-knowledgeable at the time...). The guy probably though I was somekind of weirdo...

Now the good thing is, as a result of this accident, my parents bought a brand new, "super-powerful" PII 350 (that I still have ).

pstj