Actually I'm not - I'm using one of my own, based on an anti-ad/spyware/trojans/viruses etc. set. It's pretty comprehensive. I've also got it checking files for certain signatures that match ad-serving javascripts, and blocking them. I'm sure there's a small performance hit associated with that, especially on my old t-bird 1.4, but it's a price I'm willing to pay. Took me a while to get ISA Server set up smoothly, mind (especially getting it not to eat all of my resources, and the QoS stuff).
It's like adblock but it works better and it works with IE.
amblin wrote:Half an hour of bending PCB, smoking moderately illegal things and worrying about £60 worth of kit I couldn't afford to replace I could've avoided by reading the damn instruction manual!
There's two things there that would have saved me hours and hours and hours of troubleshooting in the past when working on personal kit.
1. Reading the instruction manual instead of getting all excited and ripping it out of it's packaging.
2. Not smoking moderately illegal substances before playing with said new and exciting kit.
I bought an E6300, two gigs of Ram and a shiny new Asus mobo at the start of year to replace my aging AMD 3500+. Got back to my house, warned my brother to stay the fuck out of my way and set to work. Put all the new bits together and put it all back in the case, flipped the power switch and........nothing....na-da........not a sausage!!!! Turned the power off and tried again......still nothing!!!! ARGH I shouted as I began to remove things from the case. Stripped it right down and built it back up again, this time the lights came on for five seconds before the dreaded crackle-fizz and pop of an entire row of resistors burnt out. The acrid smell of dead chips filled the air as I shouted NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Three days later I tried again, just to have the same thing happen again. I was so pissed off at this point that I accidentally pulled a resistor of my decidedly price 7950GX2. Turns out that when I pulled the old mobo out I hadn't moved one of the mobo mounting screws at the time. So this silly metal thing was frazzling the mobos faster than I could buy them. Cost me £250 in the end
Not so much "stupid mistakes" as silly/naughty things I've done.
All on school computers years ago.
Attempted to overclock one and broke it.
Did the screenshot of the background thing and set it to hide desktop items and the taskbar.
Switched over all the monitor cords on a bunch of computers (there was a line of desks with computers on each side, so in a fit or boredom I switched them all around). People spent ages trying to figure out why their mouse wouldn't move (or would move by itself).
Dragged a hundred Werd documents filled with obscenities in huge font into the start up folder of a friends user account. Oh how he enjoyed logging onto the system.
Was dragged into the headmasters office at my old High School. He then placed a rather thick envelope in front of me, before opening it and reading the url's of a fair few hundred pron sites I'd tried to look at the previous week
So far, surprisingly, I've not really managed to cock up anything on mine.
I'm fairly sure I broke my "BT HomeHub" by trying to set up port forwarding and ip routing on it, but that's not confirmed yet.
Although I did once buy a graphics without having a clue what I was doing. I had a PC game that needed a graphics, so I went to PC World, took a cheapish one off the shelf and took it home. Didn't bother to check any system requirements (not that I would have known what system I had at the time anyway) so needless to say, it wasn't compatible.
Same thing when I first upgraded my RAM. Walked into shop:
"I would like some RAM please"
"What sort?"
"RAM please"
"DDR2?"
"No, R-A-M"
I cant think of any comically spazzy things ive done to a computer. Ive done plenty of low grade spazzy things though (formatting the wrong HD, deleting the wrong partition, and I dont think ive ever made a new machine without putting the floppy drive cable in upside-down).
We did go through some very entertaining things at college though: We did the screenshot and icon delete thing, and also a cariation on the monitor swap. Our college machines were decidedly ropey, and would regularly freeze up. Most peoples response to this was to reach for the reset button on the machine. So we got a bunch of the machines, in pairs, and swapped the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Everything would function as expected untill the machine froze, they hit the power button, and the person next to them yells in rage as thier machine unexpectedly turns off. Oh, the laughs.
I understand what you're saying, but this is in my professional role, customers get a bit funny when you start blowing up 20 HDD SCSI SAN's (or attaching them to the the wrong cluster). They have no sense of humour about these things.
Joose wrote:and I dont think ive ever made a new machine without putting the floppy drive cable in upside-down).
Amen
Joose wrote:So we got a bunch of the machines, in pairs, and swapped the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Everything would function as expected until the machine froze, they hit the power button, and the person next to them yells in rage as their machine unexpectedly turns off. Oh, the laughs.
cheeseandham wrote:
...customers get a bit funny when you start blowing up 20 HDD SCSI SAN's (or attaching them to the the wrong cluster).
Pffft. Accidents happen, and they just have to understand that. Anyway, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
Joose wrote:...and I dont think ive ever made a new machine without putting the floppy drive cable in upside-down
I just stopped putting floppy drives in my machine and using a USB external where necessary. Problem solved.
The motherboard headers for power/HDD LEDs, on the other hand...
Oh, and in another tangentially-related-to-computers screw-up, I once knocked over a cup full of smartwater (the special genetically-engineered glue/dye stuff we used to mark our kit with), which at the time was ungodly expensive (and stained the carpet). Oops.
To tack onto the college muffups, a lad in the opposite class to Rabbs and myself somehow managed to horse a stick of SD-Ram into a machine...the wrong way round.
buzzmong wrote:To tack onto the college muffups, a lad in the opposite class to Rabbs and myself somehow managed to horse a stick of SD-Ram into a machine...the wrong way round.
I nearly managed that once, having checked the notches and everything. Was wondering why it wasn't simply poping in, and upon closer inspection realised it was upside down
and ripping it out of it's packaging.
this. Only difference is I know exactly what came over me. Curiosity and Stupidity.
