most stupid thing you have done to your computer

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i'm hearing all these stories about overclocking video cards so i decide to see what kind of improvement i can get. i've got a leadtek geforce ddr and it comes with a utility to overclock. so i'm messing around with the clock setting. it starts at 120mhz and i go up an up till i get to 170mhz. it seems to run okay and i'm thinking "that's incredible! this huge heatsink must really be working!" then i click on the button that changes the setting in windows and then it stops. uh oh, okay that was too high. then i think okay i'll just reboot and change the settings. except every time i reboot it freezes before windows loads all the way. so i think i can change it by booting in safe mode. except that the program won't run in 16color mode. so i reboot in in 256color and it starts to load and then completely shuts off, power and everything. sooo, i go into safe mode and reboot in dos mode and format my hard drive. needless to say i won't try that again.

<font color=red>booyah, grandma, booyah..</font color=red>
 
I went to tech school and they gave us this laptop, (a rip off) but anyways the laptop was decent. school was ending, and i was thinking what the hell do i need a laptop for? i had a p2-233 in my room which i had buildt, and i wanted to get a 1 gighrtz, cuz thats all i ever talked about. anyways so i sold the laptop for $850.. and i bought all my new parts i would need for the new pc.. so i had a gigabyte socket a board, and then the atlon t bird 1000 (oem) and this no named heatsink... it was blue and round and it had a fan in it. so i put everthing togeather, and fire the thing up, and im seeing video, my day of glory is here! and then it fades away

what the f!
i had put the heat sink on the wrong way. so i called up the place where i got it and said it never worked. after 40+ emails and phone calls, after a replaced chip and a new motherboard the thing just didnt want to work. so here i am with a 1000ghtz paperweight....

6 months later
i started looking into getting a Dell...

i go to a computer show with my friend, and i was like aw what the hell and shelled out 500 bux and got a 933 intel, mobo and case.. so i got that home and was putting it togeather and it wasnt working...... i was about to go insane.... so i rip out the cables and i hook up a diffrent IDE cable, and it works! then i look at the one that i was hooking up and it was broken!..... so here im thinking holy god of all [-peep-].

Well aprently the ide cable shorted out the board, there for the atlons worked..... dlkf;as i needed to know if the one i had worked so, (my friend bout a atlon 800) we took the chip and put it in and it didnt work. Thank god.

I wish i would have just kept that laptop
 
You know, come to think of it, I remember running into something similar to that many years ago when working on a DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 computer. Only I seem to remember it being a lot easier to fix then. I mean it would boot in DOS mode just fine anyway, and I think there was a setting in Win.ini or something that I changed to get it to work again.

I think the moral of the story is just never let Windows accept new video settings until you're REALLY 100% sure that they'll work. And even then, don't try setting them to things that you know won't work. Heh heh.

We all live and learn.

- Sanity is purely based on point-of-view.
 
Just wanted to resurrect this, keeping with the current trip back in time feel going on at the moment. And all the new users should definitely be aware of this thread...is it still the current leader of views and posts I wonder?

DESIGN TEAM
 
My stupidest thing was I was upgrading a computer for a friend, I put all the parts in, then I loaded up everything, and something was wrong with the cdrom. After a little work, I find out its the ide card. (this was a long time ago, on a 486) Well just at that moment someone called on the phone, and as I'm talking, I pull out the IDE card, with the power on. Sparks fly, whoops fried mobo and CPU.
Thankfully I had a spare.

Aklein

Life is hard...Live with it.
 
$ su
$ *****
# rm -rf /

Oops. Meant to delete some file like /usr/src/RPM/SOURCES/something.rpm but my finger slipped and I hit the enter key before I hit the u.

Another computer wanted. Donations accepted. :^)
 
My mom put my Microsoft Bookshelf CD in the 5.25 drive on my 486.

The more you brag about your CPU, the more we realize how small you are in other areas.
 
Um... 1st of bonding my p3 and a alpha heatsink with artic silver epoxy. This was stupid cause I then could not lift the ziff lever on the socket 370 to put it in my new mobo... I try ever way to get it off with alcohol and a screw driver with no luck. So I get the bright idea the <b>hacksaw</b> the protruding part of the heat sink that was obstructing the ziff lever... Needless to say I have a 1.2 ghz T-bird in the mail now. :smile: Damn hacksaw took out a few pins on my p3... ARG! :redface: Sheeeeettt I'm an idiot... lol

Computer: $2000 Internet Access: $40 Registering for forums: Free A good signature: Priceless<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by BuGaLoU on 05/14/01 00:02 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
Nice thread.. here are some of my stupidities:

I was upgrading my computer to a P133. For some reason, it would not boot;
I took out the motherboard to verify jumper settings, and threw out everything except ram and video card.. .. To make things a bit easier, I put the motherboard on top of the case, that way the PSU cables were just long enough. I connected the keyboard and monitor and pressed the power button.. sending sparks all over the place.. I forgot to put something between the naked case frame, and the underside of the motherboard. :-(

My cleaning lady also did something very smart. I had assembled a P-166 for her, with old junk I had laying around. She took it home, and it didn’t seem to work. Knowing nothing at all about computers, she opened the case to see if anything had come loose during transportation. She saw some cables that where disconnected (I had been too lazy to connect the HD and power LED’s), so she plugged them in somewhere on the motherboard.. how brave ;-) Turned the thing on, and smoke came out of the psu.. When I came over, most cables inside the psu had their insulation burnt. An IDE cable had also melted.. A new psu and IDE cable, and the machine is still running. Oh, and in case you wonder.. the reason it did not work right away was the monitor cable she forgot to connect !

I should have known connecting LED cables is important with cleaning ladies around. Many years ago, I was running 3D Studio 3.0 on a self made 486-33 with 4 (yes, FOUR) MB Ram and no working leds. I participated in an animation contest. It took my machine about 15-20 minutes to render one frame (640x480). It had been running non stop for over a two weeks 24/7 to render the final animation. Until the householder (or whatever you call that in English) found it necessary to take the dust of that thing.. thereby pressing the “reset” button.. I can tell you, I wasn’t happy !!
 
He he. this looks like fun :)
mate of mine upgrading his bios (when you had to get a new chip not just flash it) puit in in backwards. a little spark and a burned out bord.
taking out dx266 to the shop for somthing (i cant remember might have been upgrade but cant think why) i droped it in the shop needles to say the drives didnot work but every thing else was fine. (apart from a dent in the case)
then decide to put 2000 on my 233 not a good move the disk was pirate. first time ive ever had a bad virus (ive ben using computers since i was 6ish) i put it in the drive and ti loads up the nice screen try to install. it crashes. ok i think this wont be a problem how wrong can you be after about a month of problems the computer died. ive since discoverd that the cd has win95 cih on it.
also stupid was using windows 3.0, 95 beta (that was the worst os EVER), 98 beta (im a sucker for punishment) and trying red had 5.1 on the 233 how the hell do you get rid of sodding lilo??

(fdsik /mbr if your wondering of lowlevel format)

and the best on yet. (thank god this isnt me)

my tech techers wife broke 20 laptops by spilling coffie over them!!!
 
Well I hate to admit this, but after reading this thread I don't feel so bad saying it now.

Put together a new 1 gig rig.

T-bird 1 gig
Asus A7v kt133 mobo
256 sd133 ram
Geforce 2 ultra
WD 40 gig ata 100 @ 7200 rpm
Soundblaster Live Value
Creative 12x10x32 Burner
& that old 36x cd rom (the only old piece in the case)

Well it took me 3 weeks of tweaking, posting in this forum, & learning in this forum to get the computer stable. Then I found out that the old 36x cd rom sounded like it was spinning its guts out when it was accessed. I thought it was going to spit the cd out like a Frisbe, so I bought a 50x cd rom to replace the old one. Now you'd think replacing a rom would be a piece of cake after what I'd been through. That's where things went awry!!!

I'm an early riser. On my work days I get up at 4am every day. It's no different on the weekends. I love that time early, up by myself, no distractions, & peacefull, I seem to be the most productive early in the am like that. So I brew up a fresh pot of coffee, pour a large mug-24 ozs. & sit down to the computer desk to go to work. I have this large pull out drawer that my mouse & keyboard hides in. I pull out the cpu (never keep the sides on the case, want it to be as cool running as it can be) & start tipping it on it's side so I can see into it to start taking out the old rom. That's when all hell broke loose. Bumped the drawer closed with my arm leaning over the cpu & dumped the whole cup of coffee right on top of the case & it was pluged in at the time. My heart hit the floor along with the coffee on the silver carpet. I had cd's floating in it. The bottom of the case had at least a cup of coffee in it. Did I mention that I also drink my coffee with plenty of sugar as well? Woke the whole house up with the scream, wife & kids plenty upset to say the least.

Got out towels & hair dryer & went to work on it. I didn't much care about the carpet, however that's another tale. I figured that it was toast to say the least. Took about 3 hours before I was ready to hit the power button again. With my heart in my throat I hit the power & it booted just like nothing had happened. Was I ever lucky & glad that I didn't need to lay out another grand on parts. Well I finished up putting in my new rom about 5 hours after I started & was happy about it.

Moral of this story: Never put your coffee on the work bench & take the comuter out of its desk & put in on the work bench to work on it. I'm a believer now!!!!!!!!!

Skinny

How do you eat a elephant? One bite at a time!!
 
Well, my stuff doesn't look so bad after some of these stories. I have two tales of woe.

1) My first involved my "new" quantum 13.6 gig HD to go in my kickass K6 300. My old drive was a measly 460megs, but I needed it to load windows onto the new drive (all I had was an upgrade disk, not a full install). So there I am, holding the new drive in my hand ('cuz there wasn't an extra bay) waiting for win98 to install. My arm gets tired and I decide there's nothing wrong with laying the drive down for a sec. I layed it on my desk on top of one of the case screws that I hadn't noticed. There was a pop and then a dead system. Luckily the only thing that fried was the HDD which I pretended never worked in the first place and got replaced for shipping and handling.

Number two was not really a screwup in that nothing was destroyed. I just got one of the MSI K7T266 Pro MoBo's (I guess that counts as a screwup) with a T-Bird 1000 (266). I noticed that sometimes the case gave a high pitched noise. I opened it up and did not notice anything that could be causing it. I did notice that MSI puts a little heatsink on one of their chips, Northbridge I think. I touch the heatsink (of course it's hot) and the noise stops. I'm like "this is pretty cool." So what do I do, I go and get an ice cube from the freezer and wrap it in a paper towel. I touch the cube to the heatsink and the noise goes away again. I hold it there and try a few programs and I swear everything ran smoother. After a minute, I pull the cube away, I didn't want it to melt too much and drip water onto my rig. The cube has a perfect replica of the heatsink burned into it, but nothing went wrong. If only I could figure out a way to do this without changing ice cubes or screwing up my PC, it'd never hang again...

Are we there yet?
 
1) Hooked a hard drive from a PS2 machine into a 8086 machine. Killed the drive. (That one was a LONG time ago!)

2) Installed a 486 DX2 66 CPU in 90 degrees off. Killed the mobo and chip.

3) Actually tried to fix a floppy drive. (Try it, it never works). I have the aboslute worst luck with floppies. My current computer doesn't even have one.

4) On my linux system, typed rm -rf /*. Really. I was explaining it to a friend online and was in the wrong virtual terminal. Luckily it doesn't affect other partitions mounted under /. Had to reinstall the system though (and felt pretty goofy).

5) After getting married (well, not *right* after), I was messing around with the HSF assembly with the machine on and running. My new ring shorted a capacitor in the GF2 card in the system! Oops! That never was a problem before! It kind of spot-welded to it too, not hard but a little sticky. The screen made some funny chars and I powered down. Came back without a problem though! Whoo hoo! A little marriage advice for you.

z
 
The stupidest thing I have done was sale my PIII 800EB for an Athlon 1.1 GHz on an Asus A7V. Lol, had nothing but problems with it. Good thing it is gone now.

(note, I am not ripping AMD, only commenting on my experience)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned in life: It goes on." -Robert Frost
 
Hmm I tried to Flash my bios on my Asus P2B board from windows. And guess what system locked up. GG windows 98!
My Bios was F*ucked and I had to order a new one from Asus in cali. Hmm not to bad considering I live in canada and that little bios chip cost me $70 after exchange rate and shipping and handling! LOL it was a learning experience!

"When in doubt, don't Flash it" -Makaveli
 
Fried a joystick and caused it to smoke because I plugged it into the monitor output on an extremely old PC.

Or maybe the time I was first learning computing and del. the Autoexec.bat on a 386.
 




Most epic necro ever? 8 years...that must be a record...
 
Didnt blow my computer out for 2 years, I opened it up and there was a solid coating of dust on the mother board and about 2MM of it caked on the fan heatsink. this was after everything went haywire.
 
I watered flowers and held water bottle over my PC which was in open case at 3 unit rack. You guess rest?

One tiny water drop slipped by side of the bottle in to the mobo -and computer fried immediately. I was listening music and there was pretty annoying silence for a while..
 
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