What's your worst mistake just goofing off with computers.

ouch....byebye cpu...
i smashed a p 133 (on purpose) with a brick to break that tough outer shell and see what was inside...oooooh nice and sparkly...
later i found an article that shows how to make a keychain from those. DARN...
iv been trying to find another one ever since with no luck...

My first computer I built had a ABIT SE-6 MB. I was putting on the HS with a screwdriver and slipped hitting a couple of the capacitors. I was kicking myself figuring I killed the MB and have not even applied power to it. Still runs to this day at my in-laws house. ABIT can make one tough board!

I have dropped numerous things on to them from my mini maglite to screwdrivers, and they still work.

For a couple hundred other "fun" stories of the same regard here in the forums: "What's your most stupid comp mistake?"

Back when I had a 1.8a I wire wrapped 2 of the CPU pins to get more Vcore. When I booted up I heard a poof, and that was the end of my CPU, Motherboard, and PSU.

I decided my metal case looked to plan so I put some frigde magnets on it. Luckly for me they are to weak to do anything. Haha just messing though they probaly would be to weak. Any way its not thw eorst but still pretty bad. I was building a pc with someone I know. we had it running to see if it would start(had no diogram to get the led lights working so it was hit or miss) any way he stuck in a pc of ram with the pc still running. I didnt even notice unti smoke start to come from the case. I am using that pc of ram to run firefox right now.

- broke sata L shaped male data connecter in my old drive.. still works fine though after glowing it.
- about long time ago i tried to plug in a 486 processor and i had it installed wrong side.. most pins were bent.. took me about 4 hours and fix them all very good. and it worked.
- fried a PSU after pluggin it to elec. on 110v lol.. wasnt really my fault some1 switched the 110/220v to 110 in the dorms.. my friend was playin with the dwitch while it was off and left it on 110.. a huge smoke cloud went out lol.. (i was using the PSU to make a cd player with an 8x cd drive only connecting it to the power supply and playing audio cd's.. cudnt afford a cd player then
- broke power connecter in a cdrom was in very hard lol.. broke the micro data cable holder when i was cleaning my 4x goldstar(LG) drive i was openin it
- spilled Pepsi on my natural microsoft keyboard and guess wot?? bye bye keyboard..

many more lol

I've only built 2 PCs, but my worst mistake so far is...

...forgetting to install the stand-offs on the Mobo

I just got done primering the top of my laptop to be repaited to the stock color.......On my way back into the garage, the laptop slipped and fell off the box I was painting it on.

The laptop fell FOUR FEET to the cement floor, and I paniced. I brought it inside after the primer settled a bit and powered it on. No cracks in the screen, HD still works fine. To say the least, I'm VERY relieved.

Considering this is a Gateway Solo 5300......

One day I was playing plug and pray roulette on an old system. I was trying to get it to recognize a second video card. I would move the card and boot up and see what I got with the reshuffle. I did this so many times that I just lost track of what I was doing. Next thing you know I'm moving the PCI cards, but I neglected to turn off the computer! The screen went black and I thought the board was a goner, but when I rebooted it worked fine. I was very LUCKY. Don't try this at home!

-Back in the day of XT computers, I was putting in a new motherboard for my 10 MHz PC. I accidentally switched the P8 and P9 connectors on the power supply and turned on the switch. POP! Big white flash and the power supply was no more.

-Later on, a friend and I were running a BBS off his 286 machine and were having some connection problems. We accidentally ripped the modem out while the machine was on. What was worse is we proceeded to panic and slammed the modem back into the machine while it was still running, at which point it proceeded to smoke.

-On my 286, somehow the wire for the Reset button got wired wrong and melted into slag. I have no idea how that happened.

-I had one customer who had a laptop, which was very unusual at the time. He had been running his entire business off of this one program for the last 3 years, and had transferred said program to his laptop (this is back in the days of DOS 3.3). Well, a brand new product had just come out that supposedly doubled your drive capacity. This product idea was eventually incorporated into Windows 95 years later, but this was long before then.

Anyway, he bought the product from our store and asked me to install it. I was new (and maybe 14 years old at the time, working under the table), so I put the floppy in and installed it. We rebooted his computer to find out that his drive had been erased. He had absolutely no backup of his business records, not even on paper.

-I had a tech working for me once who was working on a customers computer and 'accidentally' removed their partitions and lost all of their data. He also 'accidentally' made a new partition and I couldn't figure out any way to get the data back. After that, I made customers sign a waiver to free us from any liability regarding lost data.

I'm sure I'll think of more.

-once i was bored, and i was re-flashing my videocard bios... i thought it froze, so i just hard-offed my computer hehe.... turns out that i couldn't see a DAMNED thing on my screen...i boot it up, and everything looks good... my dads like "well, ibuypower is crappy, i am NEVER buying from that bad company again!"... hehe

well, anyway, i made an nVflash floppy, and i remembered by BBS popup (when i start my computer and hold F8 during post, a boot menu pops out and asks what drive you wanna boot from.. my floppy drive was the third drive down, i think).... so i popped the floppy in my comp, and then booted from the disk... then i MEMORIZED the nvflash command and the bios filename.. then i flashed it... without being able to see ANYTHING... hehe, im awesome (at least i had my dads spare gateway to make the floppy and memorize the thing).,... and my card is still running strong haha

-hmmmm....well, i was installing Kanotix BH9a on my computer... i got partition magic 8 (hehe) and then i made my NTFS partition like 10Gb smaller for linux to fit in...then i booted up into kanotix's liveCD, and then i tryed to install.. i didn't know i needed an riserfs part.... anyway, kanotix tells me that there is no empty space on my harddrive (i made the 10gb "partition" unformatted...).. so i told it to get into the partitioning program, QTParted... BIG MOFOING MISTAKE!!! holy crap, this program gave me the WORST problems...anyway, it tells me my drive has the 70GB NTFS windows partition. and 10GB of raw data... so i make that raw space 10GB of riserFS... then i go to the install screen again, its still like "NO!! NO KANOTIX FOR U!!".... so i still set everything up in qtparted... turns out that program just anihillates your MBR and partition record.. so after, it didn't install, i was gonna go into window snad partion... well, turns out it wouldn't boot form the HDD cause qtparted just ruined my HDD partition table... so there goes my 60GB of stuff... anyway, i get kanotix installed (more partitioning in qtparted, with a 2gb swap partition).... then i go to boot with grub.... Grub error25: cannot read data.... WTF???? so anyway, after 3 days of work and help from the nice ppl in #kanotix, i got my dualboot workin... but i had to re-acquire everything i had...... i ended up using cfdisk in kanotix to write partitions... now i got 60GB windows, 5GB swap (fat32) and about 12GB for linux (reiserFS).... whee

i like the kanotix story.

its still like "NO!! NO KANOTIX FOR U!!".... <--that made me laugh

I was "upgrading" a PSU and accidentally grouned the hot 120v wall wire to one of the heatsinks inside the PSU.

RIP PSU, MOBO, RAM, CPU.

I cracked my xp2800+ core, putting on a thermalright cooler, while the motherboard was in the case, and really crowded.
Thanks

ouch...i feel your pain...