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

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Steveo989

Not officially involved with AAR
Joined
Dec 16, 2004
Location
Minnesota eh
I had a 1ghz athlon 2 months ago, started it with the heat sink off and basically a nice loud pop and a little smoke appeared and I was like f^ck. I tried starting it again to no avail. I wish it still worked cause I would have a little more folding power.
PS I know there is a thread already but 200+ posts= too much lol.
 
If you call that a mistake I would be a victim of my case fans many many many many times. The worst part it takes for ever for it to heal and it hurts like hell.
 
Ya.. the time my finger got caught in the 60mm highspeed fan... bad news
or when I felt the bottom of my harddrive and a spark went off and my computer restarted w/ corrupted data. Luckily a scandisk or whatever fixed it.
 
Had 2 power supplies 1 for a printer and 1 for a scanner, same voltage same plug,looked the same but different mA, wasn't paying enough attention and plugged wrong one into scanner. Scanner was brown and ozone smelly. DOH!
 
1. You know those lovely molex connectors? That are made especially so you cant plug it in upside down? There goes my first CD RW...i some how managed to plug that in upside down.

2. Various fan accidents/inncidents. I've been needing a new cpu fan so i found a 3000rpm PSU fan and put it on there, wanted to make sure it was spinning, finger got to close *WACK* The blade went about 2mm into my finger (and finger nail).

Cleaning out computer with leaf blower - was blowing directly at a fan when finger slipped and hit blade. Finger = hurt, blade flew off.

3. Killed my TI 4200 by overclocking. It wouldnt have died unless windows wasnt stupid. I put it in a different computer because i upgraded. Tested the overclock, wasnt stable due to temps, so i put it at stock speeds. Windows 'didnt' want to 'save' my new temps, it slowly roasted over time...im so sorry Ti 4200 /crys

4. Various cases where forgetting to plug in the cpu fan resulting in a nice burn when figuring out why CPU temps are in the 70's, i got a scar from that.

5. Slipped a cup of water on my laptop...it survived it though, luckyly. Plastic warped a little from the drying process.

6. Somehow, no clue in hell how, a few dots of super glue landed on my laptop screen... /gg ...and i tryed to use nail polish & alcohol to remove it, seemed to be working great till i didnt realize it made it though the superglue and started to eat the anti glare screen...it doesnt look to bad, you dont notice it when using the craptop

7. Broke my keyboard out of frustration of CS... <-- id really hate to admit this one but there comes a time when we all must admit somethign like that. Anyone remember Diddy Kong Racing for N64? my god...

8. Moving my tower when dropped it about 1 ft to the ground, on my foot. It weights...alot...tower is made of steel plus all the crap i can think of on the inside, it hurt very bad.

*whew* all for now...i just need to turn my head around in my room to realize all the things ive done lol
 
ziggo0 said:
1. You know those lovely molex connectors? That are made especially so you cant plug it in upside down? There goes my first CD RW...i some how managed to plug that in upside down.

Oh crap... I did that too. What's worse is I had shaved the molex down so I could five volt stuff and I guess I wasn't paying attentnion... I killed a fancy DVD drive :(
 
Plugged the power converter for my scanner into my router when I moved into this place. Bye bye D-Link, hello LinkSys. It's a better router anyhow, at least I keep telling myself that. :D
 
When changing motherboards for an Athlon T-bird B 1.3 ghz processor, when in the process of re-clipping the heatsink back on, skidded the processor across the heatsink and crunched the core. I knew that the processor got damaged after turning it on again, because it failed to POST, there was nothing except for the LEDs lighting up, the fans spinning and the HDDs spinning. There wasn't even any bleeps. There was no sign of life at all. W00ps!!!

That was back in October, 2002. Only had that processor from July 5, 2002 to October 13, 2002. It was never OC'ed at all. I was happy with it, even when at stock.

RIP Athlon T-bird B 1.3 ghz. :(
 
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Sentential said:
Static + Clumsy Sen = Dead NF7 #2 = -$100 :cry:

Is it really that easy to static kill something? I've never done it before so i dont take any procausion.


RJARRRPCGP said:
When changing motherboards for an Athlon T-bird B 1.3 ghz processor, when in the process of re-clipping the heatsink back on, skidded the processor across the heatsink and crunched the core.

Back when i had my AXP 2000+ 1.6ghz and hurting for a new cpu, my friend gave me his old cpu, AXP 2600+ to test, i popped it in, put on his old heatsink...just for it to slip off the clip holder when i was going to finish attaching it to do this:

AthlonXP2600.jpg
 
Two things:

First, at a job, I was forcefully pulling a hard drive out of a really small, cheap, bad case. I broke something off the circuit board on the hard drive.

Second, my cousin did this really, but I was there with him, so I kind of did it too. We had messed-up the Dropline install, so many things weren't working. One of these things was PAM. We didn't know what PAM was. My cousin said that we should get rid of it because "authentication" wasn't important, but I was thinking that we should keep it because "authentication" sounded very important. We uninstalled it, and it turned out that I was right; we rebooted eventually, and we could not log in because PAM could not check the password.
 
Okay do you all know those little liquid filled geletin type balls? That expand when you squeeze them and what not? Anywho, I had one of those and I would just sling it around and what not while waiting for stuff to load. After awhile it finally snapped. It went all over my keyboard and monitor. Fortunately the $200 monitor survived. The keyboard was no more though.
I also have a strange obsession of sticking my finger in fans. I finally toyed around with the thin zalman fan for my heatpipe enough that 2 blades snapped off.
The worse thing I have done was flipping the switch on the back of the psu to 230v and actually screwing a motherboard into the case with no standoffs.
 
I'd say my worst mistake was about 3-4 months after I got my first computer (P166 with 32MB RAM running Win98). I was playing with some old software on 5.25" floppies that were recovery disks for another comp I had lying around. Being a n00b to computers at that point of time, I played with every program on the disk, no knowing what each was.

Turns out I played with fdisk and removed my main partition and lost all of my schoolwork on that as well o_O

That was four or five years ago, now look at me! :D
 
when i had my 1st 200mhz computer, i accidently kicked it, the HDD died, some dude replace it for me and i got charge 200 bucks in 1997, that was still alot of money back then (and still alot now) for a 8GB HDD, i swear if i see that dude again, i'll take my 250GB and bang it on his head for revenge. and i made countless other mistakes lol
 
a few years ago, i had just gotten rid of my PII (gave it to a friend) and had gotten an Athlon (Slot A) 800Mhz. When i took the PII over to him, he and i decided to fool around a bit and try to overclock it. During the fooling around attempts, we broke the clamps that held the Heatsink onto the CPU. We decided to hold it on with Superglue.

It held like a charm... until the CPU got hot. Then the glue lost its grip, fell off, ARCED the ram (just like an ark welder!) and landed on the harddrive, causing a big dent in it.
 
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