What are your worst computing mistakes?

[devHead]

The two worst things, this was a while back.

1. My buddy was tinkering with his Gateway 2000 machine back in 1994 trying to change the Windows 3.11 boot splash screen with the logo for the New York Rangers hockey team. He was proving unsucessful, so one afternoon when he was out I had a go at it. I didn't really know what I was doing, and while in DOS, i renamed this bitmap of his (ranger.bmp) to autoexec.bat. As you can imagine, this image was quite a bit larger than the batch file, so when I typed win, I kept getting the message that there wasn't enough memory available to load Windows. Not knowing DOS would automatically create an autoexec.bak file, I ended up taking the Windows 3.11 disk and reinstalling Windows on it! He banned me from his PC for a few weeks. I think back now how much stuff I learned after doing some really stupid things.

2. I had an old Cyrix 586 chip I was going to put into my motherboard, but placed it in wrong. After turning the computer on the sweet smell of burning ceramic came from the board. I toasted the CPU and MOBO. That was a real bummer. Thank goodness for ZIF sockets now!

[f0rk_b0mb]

1. Deleted an old Gmail account only to remember it was tied to my Steam Account. It was really fun getting Valve to change my email for me, as I couldn't get the conformation code. I will never do that again!

2. Bought a G4 PowerMac off my friend for 100 bucks. I should have just flushed it down the toilet.

3. Spent 400 bucks on Windows Vista Ultimate. It was OK after SP1 and NVIDIA came out with decent drivers.

Live and learn!

[Ice_Blue]

Format c: /s /u

without switching back the IDE cables

[threesixtyflip]

Buying a G3 iMac in 2011 and expecting it to be usable. Rookie error :p

[eliokh]

run a sql script on a wrong db schema.

deleted important tables on the development database.!!

back up was 2 months old

:rolleyes:

[ManMountain]

Bent four gold pin connectors on my 486 dx2 66 but with gentle coaxing managed to straighten. Chip lasted years :)

[Ci7]

back in my early days on computing (2005 , Windows XP P4 custom built computer ), had no clue what backup is at that time.

end up losing gazllion of personal data/software/stuffs when my hard drive failed :(

---

some time dec 2006 end up wrecking XP , for some reasons XP hated my shiny new Core 2 Upgrade :s guess it was MS support hotfix needed

installed Vista , problem solved

and happy ever after , LOOL XD

luckily never screwed up Hardwares ever

[Som]

i was copying info from a hard drive for a customer, i left it on the counter and seconds later it was on the floor, took weeks to get the info back...

ooh ooh ooh forgot, when i was about 10 i typed del *.* into my dos pc, thought it would free up space, don't know how my sister fixed that one haha

[ShMaunder]

Personally, the worst probably was formatting the wrong CD-RW with a load of pictures on it after re-installing my computer.

Second was updating Ubuntu which had a dodgy GRUB update haha - but that was about 3 years ago when I didn't know anything about Linux.

[Hum]

lessened learned from that? I took it into a shop and got a new bios put in. I wasn't meant to touch things I had no idea about

My lesson learned was Don't give up, (tho the local repair shop wouldn't touch it)

and the reason the flash update did not work, was that my OS is 64-bit, but the 'new' BIOS program was written in only 32-bit.

[J_R_G]

Put all my mp3s (1,000+) on a truecrypt drive, set a long password, promptly went to sleep and forgot the password the next morning, with no other copies. doh.

Installed Linux once. (hey, we can all be childish, right?) Anyways, it, Kubuntu, was a crash fest on my sig machine from first boot, which is probably much worse than the win 8 experiences various people are complaining about, but whatever. It also made my Win 7 install that I put a lot of work into on another drive unbootable, apparently some issue with grub barfing on UEFI dual boots. Still mad about that. No need to suggest another distro or obscure fix, I'm happy with Win 8 now.

Other than that, I'm fairly careful so no other big mistakes.

[insomniac9]

I bought a Packard Bell PC with Windows ME installed. Dark days!!!

[sanctified Veteran]

Bought a Dell Laptop.

[thealexweb]

Deleted the wrong partition because I forgot for tech things numbers start with 0 not 1 xD

[KRazpopov]

I had my old 160GB hard drive connected to my PC as an external drive, so I could copy over the data to my new drive. The power connector on the case I was using for that drive was kinda flimsy. Whilst looking through the contents of the disk, I decided to move the disk's case ever so slightly. The power cable disconnected. When I turned the drive back on: "Local Disk (G:) | 133GB free of 133GB ".

[nub]

Deleted the wrong partition because I forgot for tech things numbers start with 0 not 1 xD

Went to reformat usb drive using linux terminal, not use to keyboard, wiped out windows partition instead.

[+Xinok Subscriber²]

Took cpu fan off, CPU came with it. Broke/bent pins.

I've done the same thing. When I tried to straighten the bent pin, I ended up breaking it off.

I assembled a PC for my sister, but I was trying to keep costs down so I went with cheaper hardware. Within the first year or two, both the motherboard and GPU went. They were replaced with higher quality components and it's been running fine for a few years now. That's how I learned to never go cheap, you'll just end up paying more in the long run.

I was trying to disconnect an IDE power cable from the DVD drive in my PC. I was applying a lot of force, so when it finally came loose, I banged my hand into the CPU heat sink causing that to come loose. Luckily nothing broke, but I still learned my lesson.

Many years ago, when XP first came out, we were having problems with the PC. Basically, folders wouldn't open, Explorer never showed. So to solve to problem, I uninstalled XP which downgraded the PC back to Windows 98. Smart. :cool: It did fix explorer though. :p

[D!ABOL!C]

I've got a couple.

Spending over $200 on an AGP video card when my mobo only had PCI slots. Oops.

The other fun one was installing a temperature sensor for my CPU and putting the sensor between the CPU and Heatsink no realizing it should not go there. Toasted CPU... yikes.

[NEVER85]

Using Windows XP.

[Detection]

What are your worst computing mistakes?

Building one.

[.Neo]

I installed Windows Vista on my 2007 iMac once. I don't think the poor thing ever truly recovered from being violated like that. After that godawful experience iMac just didn't chime as cheerful as before when starting up. It ended up committing suicide by burning out its Logic Board.

This is how I found iMac after returning home from college:

[primexx]

back in the XP days, which was also when I was learning the most rapidly about computers, I'd reinstall it every half year because I'd have messed something new up with it. Learned a lot though. The worst was that one time I ignored the "don't flash your BIOS when overclocked" warning, and proceeded to erase my BIOS and promptly fail at flashing the update. Mistake #1. Then I proceeded to try to restart the computer hoping that I didn't, in fact, just brick my BIOS, instead of just leaving the running computer on so at least I can still use it. Mistake #2. Fortunately, the BIOS chip was slotted so it ended up costing me $30 to buy a new chip and plug it in. I have gone on to successfully flash various BIOSes without incident, and also stopped overclocking because I figured that stock is more than powerful enough these days for everything I would ever want to do.

[Detection]

I installed Windows Vista on my 2007 iMac once. I don't think the poor thing ever truly recovered after being violated like that. After that godawful experience iMac just didn't chime as cheerful as before when starting up. It ended up committing suicide by burning out its Logic Board.

I think Vista burned out my logic board too, the one in my brain

[ACTIONpack]

Overclocking my AMD Athlon 1.1GHz to 3GHz!

[Shane Nokes]

Hmm. I think the time that I accidentally hooked up the power cable for a floppy drive incorrectly. It was a brown box floppy drive, and the pins didn't have the usual housing over them. So when I plugged into the 4-pin connector from the PSU it was somehow 1 pin over to the right. I couldn't see that it was hooked in wrong.

Powered it up and poof the smell of ozone and a very small fire. It didn't kill anything other than the floppy drive & PSU. I replaced both of those and the machine was back up and running.

It shouldn't have happened though. The PSU was supposed to have protection in to prevent exactly that scenario...