Your biggest PC blunders?

[skylanepilot]

Hi all,

What are your biggest pc blunders? Over the years, what have been your most memorable bonehead moments when working with, building, or just being around computers?

My top 3:

Years ago bought a brand new antec power supply. Upon removing it from the packaging, I dropped it 5 ft on to a wooden floor. Amazingly, it still worked.

Back in the amd thunderbird days (aka the chips that heated an entire house), I was doing temp testing on my tbird 1.4 and pulled the cpu fan to see how long id have on just the copper heatsink. Fried the cpu with smoke and all.

Was at a job clearing out an office. Had about 10 dell desktops stacked on a cart while loading them in to a big truck. The entire stack fell from the truck making them all look like they survived a war. Most of them had at least a few issues.

 

[Elemential]

Well
I dropped a GTX 980 before and some sticks of ram before.

That's kind of all

 

[Eximo]

Bought a GTX580 DCUII, triple slot card. Then I spotted one on ebay about two years later on the cheap. I was already aware that the GPUs wouldn't fit with my motherboards spacing. But I planned to get a new motherboard anyway.

When I did get a new motherboard I installed both cards, no problem. Six occupied expansion bays, and I mean occupied. Instant overheating.

The solution was more expensive then the used card... : http://pcpartpicker.com/b/D89

There were no appropriate water blocks available that weren't generic, and I didn't feel like tackling a custom loop anyway.

Older story:

I was using a Celeron 466 socket to slot adapter (Pentium III era) and the computer was finally starting to show its age.

So I started eyeballing the Athlon Thunderbird. So I went to the local computer show (internet hadn't quite caught on in the Midwest, most of us were still on dial up). Read through some motherboard manuals, picked a motherboard, new memory, and a new Geforce MX.

Slapped the machine together, everything seemed to be fine. Within 12 hours Windows 98 SE was corrupt. Windows XP had leaked, and since I was without an OS and hanging out with someone who had access to a DSL line, we immediately downloaded it. Worked for about 4 hours, corrupt. Installed Windows 2000, lasted a whole 2 days, corrupt.

Start part swapping with friends. Motherboard works, memory works, GPU works, power supply is good, CPU is good. Everything works, just not together.

So I am sitting with a brand new pile of parts that refuse to operate together, so I start selling it off. Memory is too fast for my other machine, so it goes to a friend's new build. CPU gets swapped in partial trade for a Duron 750. I keep the GPU. (I can't recall what came of the motherboard actually)

So AMD released the first Athlon XP, went and got that, new memory, and a very expensive motherboard. Problem solved, only wasted about $500.

 

[badboyrog2]

i unfortunatly bought 2X KINGSTON ram kit ..and the both kit failed to simply work
bought a KINGSTON ssd and 2X failed to simply work
so i never bought kingston stuff after