222 replies to this topic 3 votes

[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 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]

ChrisJ1968, on 03 September 2012 - 20:53, said:

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]

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]

thealexweb, on 03 September 2012 - 22:34, said:

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]

nub, on 03 September 2012 - 20:39, said:

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. It did fix explorer though.

[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.

[MajinDark]

Using Windows XP.

[Detection]

What are your worst computing mistakes?

Building one.