Your stupidest PC related mistake?

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » May 15th, 2007, 10:29

cashy wrote:I may have attempted this drunk, and i may of switched my hard drives around with the PC still on.
Also, i may be posting this from a laptop. LOL

Made me giggle and made me think back to the (many!) mistakes I've made in the past.

I've made so many I can't remember them all

My latest (minor) one was removing the linux partitions from my dual boot PC at work.. I immediately said "Bugger! I won't be able to reboot this PC now", then got distracted and forgot about it.
Days later that I rebooted my PC due to general "bit-rot" and was faced with a PC that didn't boot :D (Luckily at work surrounded by useful things so it was only minutes until it was working again, but still...)

Other than that I've dropped a hard drive down the stairs (ouch) and tried helping an overclock by "slugging" (removing the layer of aluminium and exposing the copper for assisting thermal dissipation) a P4 CPU by rubbing it on sandpaper. The theory is sound, but don't hold the chip by the rather delicate cache chips on the bottom, I found they fall off after being physically stressed ...

So I ask 5punk,what's the craziest PC mistake you've made?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » May 15th, 2007, 10:34

I've not had that many screwups, though i've had a few pretty close ones.

First machine i built was a 1ghz duron, i slipped fitting the heatsink and kinda chipped the edge of the core, somehow it still works fine many years later.

Worst non-screwup was funny, in a really bad way.

Was fixing a computer for a friend (he had an off the shelf job) Spent a while fitting a soundcard and cd burner for him, all went well until getting back into windows (Me

) and met a fair few BSoDs, so I just went ahead and sorted him an update to windows 2000.

All went as well as expected, everything worked fine, took it back to his place and got it setup. only for a *huge* thunderstorm to hit 2 hours later and kill his machine.

Less notable: dropping bukkake down a flight of stairs, somehow it got off undamaged.

Fitting an Arctic cooling heatsink on a 9800pro, accidentally overtightened the screws. dead.

Weirdest ever was my mother's computer, 20gb HDD, windows Me. Came to me failing to boot about half the time, so I backup the drive and get on with fixing it. turned out the machine had the most fragmented drive I have ever witnessed, less than 10gb filled but was totally fragmented.

So, I got on with defragging, only to have the drive die on the second pass.

Other fun one was a drunk attempt at linux, formatted over a good 10gb of music, managed to get most back with getdataback.

mrbobbins · Post by **mrbobbins** » May 15th, 2007, 10:42

Attempting to overclock my new machine whilst horrendously drunk.

Resulted in wacking up the FSB without unlinking the memory speed, obviously it failed and my drunken brain decided that it must be due to lack of CPU voltage, so I wacked that up as well.

Fortunately Asus accounted for drunken idiots and I didn't do any damage

Lateralus · Post by **Lateralus** » May 15th, 2007, 10:47

Mine is definitely my most recent reformat, where I accidentally formatted over the wrong drive.

Happened because I have 1 80GB Sata drive (The windows one) and a 80GB IDE one (general storage of crap and pagefile). I renamed the drive letters, but when I went to reformat I think it reverted to the original letters. This time I've just renamed the drives, and left the letters as they are. Recovered most of the important stuff with getdataback, but certain things just appear to be gone forever. Luckily the majority of stuff such as all my music and TV shows are on the third drive which is 300GB and therefore much harder to get confused with the others.

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » May 15th, 2007, 10:51

Not really a mistake but potentially dangerous:

Flashing the firmware on motherboard without access to a floppy drive. I refuse to own one as they are from the darkages. Which almost bite me in the arse one time but fortunately my PC was not booting because of config incompatibility with the new version of the BIOS. Resetting the CMOS with a jumper on the motherboard gave me access to the BIOS again.

Just remembered a proper one:
My first PC and first exposure to Win95. I was playing with the display settings and got into a situation where I couldn't even see the desktop to reset the settings, was like a detuned TV. Then spending hours reinstalling Win95 from floppies.

eion · Post by **eion** » May 15th, 2007, 10:55

My own mistakes:
Overtightening a (rather heavy) Peltier-based cooler on a Socket 7 mobo and snapping one of the mounting tabs off. Had to bodge a new mounting bracket for it that used the other tab. That chip - a K6-233 - eventually died about three years later, but I believe the mobo (Asus P/I P55T2P4, a lovely board) is still in use, with a Pentium 200 MMX, as a router of some sort.

Dropping the above computer down some stairs. No damage.

Dropping a 1.2GB hard disk that was originally in above computer. Alcohol may have been a factor. Dead drive.

Plugging in power to a CD drive in above computer without powering off. Green sparks and a shutdown, but no permanent damage.

Stuffing a polartec fleece jacket into a drawer containing a SCSI card (and some alcohol - the fleece was intended to camouflage that fact, as this was in my study in secondary school). Shock horror, the card did not work afterwards.

Switching from Windows XP to Fista RC1.

Funniest mistake by someone else:
One of the people I shared a study with in secondary school had a seriously pimped-out rig - dual overclocked Pentium Pros, at least half a gig of RAM, a couple of 9GB fast SCSI hard disks, a SCSI CD burner, 21" Sony monitor, 3D accelerator, the works (this is circa 1998, by the way). Anyway, he'd just finished setting up Windows NT4 on his computer, installing all the apps and games, and most importantly - security. So, he declares the normal user accounts secured and asks one of us to test it. Someone walks over, takes a seat in front of it, has a quick play, and then tries to format the hard disk that the system is on. It works.
At that point, my friend realises that he was still logged on as Administrator. Talk about Schadenfreude...

Could have gone really, really badly but didn't:
Getting drunk and replacing all of the screws inside my fancy-ish (for the time) Athlon machine with thumbscrews, including some of the ones holding the PSU together and all of the mobo ones, without shutting down. Looks cool, and the machine still works perfectly.

Not really anything to do with a computer per se, but possibly amusing:
Playing with the latches on the rack doors in the machine room, when ADD struck while I was in there babysitting a Win2k install, and setting lots and lots of alarms off.

I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I've forgotten, too.

Post by **fabyak** » May 15th, 2007, 10:56

Flashing firmware on my motherboard with a screwy floopy disk drive (or disk) took several goes for it to boot properly from it to the flashing software (which I should have taken note of!), then removed the original firmware, put a new disk in with the updated firmware on and it wouldn't read the disk at all... cue buggered MB

Post by **Dog Pants** » May 15th, 2007, 11:04

spoodie wrote:My first PC and first exposure to Win95. I was playing with the display settings and got into a situation where I couldn't even see the desktop to reset the settings, was like a detuned TV. Then spending hours reinstalling Win95 from floppies.

Hahaha, I've had someone ring me up flapping because of that. I suspect it was a workmate because I don't think we let users fuck about with display settings. I just told him to boot in safe mode and set it back.

I had a near miss of bending about a dozen pins on my CPU last year while fitting a new heat sink. Got away with that one.

I've also done the Lat thing about 6 years ago, losing shit loads of stuff because I hadn't backed up.

I'd say my best though is the database I created for all our publications at work in Access. I thought I'd make it more user friendly by stripping it right down to just the front end. Unfortunately I removed so many features that the option to restore them disappeared as well and now I can't do anything with it. Oops. Oh well, I'm off to another section soon so it's someone else's problem

eion · Post by **eion** » May 15th, 2007, 11:12

Dog Pants wrote:I'd say my best though is the database I created for all our publications at work in Access. I thought I'd make it more user friendly by stripping it right down to just the front end. Unfortunately I removed so many features that the option to restore them disappeared as well and now I can't do anything with it. Oops. Oh well, I'm off to another section soon so it's someone else's problem

If you're talking about using startup options to stop that stuff from appearing, hold down the "Shift" key while opening the database, and you might be surprised.

Speaking of Access...
the first ever database I made in Access was a standard video store thing, just to teach myself how Access worked. Only thing is, I was teaching myself (without understanding how relational databases worked, as I was about 13 at the time). I ended up using AccessBasic to string the whole thing together, enforce all of the cascade deletes, that sort of thing... and then when I was all done after many, many hours of working on it, someone pointed out to me that it could have been done more reliably in 5 minutes using relationships.

Post by **Dog Pants** » May 15th, 2007, 11:24

eion wrote:If you're talking about using startup options to stop that stuff from appearing, hold down the "Shift" key while opening the database, and you might be surprised.

Woo! Thanks for that. Although I have no amusing anecdotes now.

Ooh, a mate of mine once built and installed a Take That Win 98 theme onto another mate's machine, complete with a full song as the startup sound. Got removed straight away naturally, but we were pissing ourselves the first time he saw/heard it.

I once took a screenshot of a colleague's desktop, set it as his background, then deleted all his icons (well, the ones I could). I sped up his mouse speed and click speed to maximum too. Took him ages to figure out what was wrong.

Lateralus · Post by **Lateralus** » May 15th, 2007, 11:28

Dog Pants wrote:I once took a screenshot of a colleague's desktop, set it as his background, then deleted all his icons (well, the ones I could). I sped up his mouse speed and click speed to maximum too. Took him ages to figure out what was wrong.

Fucking genius. I love it.

eion · Post by **eion** » May 15th, 2007, 11:29

Lateralus wrote:
Fucking genius. I love it.

This.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » May 15th, 2007, 11:29

Lateralus wrote:Fucking genius. I love it.

That

Post by **fabyak** » May 15th, 2007, 11:36

I once had a collegue play (what he thought) was a great old wheeze on my machine (as he was part of the IT Team too he had admin rights) and he thought he was very clever. He thought less so when he came in the next day and started his machine up to discovered what looked like an OS9 login screen once he logged in (in fact a website with an emulator type thing running from IE in kiosk mode) and once he got round that (well, I told him what I had done with a big smirk on my face) he also discovered that I had stuck a nice group policy on there meaning he had no start menu icons, no right click, no CTRL+ALT+DEL and pretty much nothing else

He never tried to play a joke like that on me again

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » May 15th, 2007, 12:59

Another to add to the list:

Asus Striker Extreme.

On paper, a shit-hot motherboard, in reality, A shit-hot motherboard with a taste for memory.

*RMAs another 2 sticks*

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » May 15th, 2007, 14:32

My collegue Chris, with a particularly sticky USB problem, removed the USB hub drivers... the didn't reinstall, and then realised it was a USB only (i.e. kb+mouse) system, no PS2

That made me giggle.

I've just bought 4x250Gb IDE drives to run FreeNAS on a old PC in the office.. of course, said old PC doesn't support >127Gb drives..... Now I have to find and buy a PCI IDE controller

eion · Post by **eion** » May 15th, 2007, 14:37

cheeseandham wrote:I've just bought 4x250Gb IDE drives to run FreeNAS on a old PC in the office.. of course, said old PC doesn't support >127Gb drives..... Now I have to find and buy a PCI IDE controller

Are you sure? What operating system are you using?

(I ask because I was pretty sure my 6+ year old (i.e. old) A7V133 wouldn't support >127GB drives, but lo and behold, Windows Server 2003 recognized a 160GB drive properly. Apparently Windows XP SP2 does the same magic as well.)

edit: Oh, FreeNAS. Looks like you'll be buying that IDE controller after all.

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » May 15th, 2007, 14:58

That's FreeNAS looks quite nice, if I had a need for it. But I don't because I have a Bubba. Which I should write a little review on.

eion · Post by **eion** » May 15th, 2007, 15:04

I have an old Athlon 1.4, stuffed with hard drives and a couple of ethernet cards, running Server 2003 Enterprise and ISA Server 2004 (configured for traffic-shaping and ad-blocking goodness). A lovely little NAS/firewall/router box, really.

Sadly, it's on the other side of the world in a shipping crate.

Fear · Post by **Fear** » May 15th, 2007, 15:10

eion wrote:I have an old Athlon 1.4, stuffed with hard drives and a couple of ethernet cards, running Server 2003 Enterprise and ISA Server 2004 (configured for traffic-shaping and ad-blocking goodness). A lovely little NAS/firewall/router box, really.

Sadly, it's on the other side of the world in a shipping crate.

I trust you are using my adblock felcher set?
http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/news.php#msisaserverxml

:-)