What are your worst computing mistakes?

[c.grz]

User was using a laptop and their profile somehow got messed up as it had created a new one. User didn't tell anyone about this and asked that we clean up his PC. After getting his laptop back; he calls and says that none of his desktop shortcuts work. We find out that he knew about the issue and "resolved it" by just creating shortcuts to the documents in his old profile.

In cleaning up the laptop; we deleted all old profiles. When we told him what we did; he broke down crying. I've never seen a man cry over missing data.

[tsupersonic]

Which might suck... might not. To be fair, the 4-series are two generations and two operating systems back now.

The ATI 4xxx series went up against Nvidia's 2xx series, and I still have driver updates for my GTX 260. That's the one thing I hated about ATI - they dropped support for my laptop's integrated graphics like 1.5 years into owning the laptop. I like Nvidia's driver architecture better - supports older GPU's much longer.

Though considering that, for example, the 4850 was the answer to the 8800 GT, and the latter *is* being fully supported in Windows 8, and Nvidia has gone through about three generations, and on top of that Geforce 6000/7000 users still have one last Forceware 300-series drivers for Windows 8... I'd say AMD needs to get their act in gear. (Plus their control panel is a chaotic scene to navigate through, and I was a bit surprised to find out they only supported application-specific profiles not so long ago. Nvidia's been doing that for years!)

I agree, Nvidia's control panel is much nicer to navigate than ATI's. The 4850 was released in June 2008, so was the GTX 260 (though the 4870 probably is a direct competitor to GTX 260)

[threetonesun]

The ATI 4xxx series went up against Nvidia's 2xx series, and I still have driver updates for my GTX 260. That's the one thing I hated about ATI - they dropped support for my laptop's integrated graphics like 1.5 years into owning the laptop. I like Nvidia's driver architecture better - supports older GPU's much longer.

I agree, Nvidia's control panel is much nicer to navigate than ATI's. The 4850 was released in June 2008, so was the GTX 260 (though the 4870 probably is a direct competitor to GTX 260)

Not disagreeing, although the fact that two generation old cards can still play current games is tied into the whole industry being held back by 5+ year old consoles. Last time I had an ATi card that I didn't get rid of before they stopped supporting it, it was struggling to play modern games anyway.

[CrashG]

I once mixed up the two 6pin power connectors on a AT PSU. I hit the power button.... the mobo went *poof* and let out the magic smoke.

[PGHammer]

I once mixed up the two 6pin power connectors on a AT PSU. I hit the power button.... the mobo went *poof* and let out the magic smoke.

Fried the (included) external power-feed on my ATI AIW 9700 Pro AGP (gradually) - amazingly, the story has a happy ending; turns out the cable was Molex to 3.5".

Direct-connecting a floppy-drive cable was the fix.

(This particular AIW is of sentimental value - to me - it's the last AIW I ever bought, and I've owned six; original, Pro, 128, AIW Radeon 7200, 8500DV, and the 9700 Pro. All were AGP, and the last two were the only ones to never see a non-NT-based Windows other than in a VM. It's one of four AGP cards I keep around as spares (the card that replaced it - the X1650 PRO AGP - is the other powered AGP card in my spares section; it has a 4-pin Molex plug designed into the card itself, ala the PCI-E power connectors of today).)

[Denis W. Veteran]

Not disagreeing, although the fact that two generation old cards can still play current games is tied into the whole industry being held back by 5+ year old consoles. Last time I had an ATi card that I didn't get rid of before they stopped supporting it, it was struggling to play modern games anyway.

Good point. Frankly it's better that way. More bang for your buck. :) Also forces game developers to put more quality into their games than taking advantage of every possible visual goodies they can get their hands on.

[DrJohnSmitherson]

When I was little I deleted mspaint cause I was trying to delete things I didn't want. Only to want it back so I did a reformat and lost all my dads files. No backup. >.<

[Andre S. Veteran]

Formatted my aunt's PC and upgraded from Windows ME to Windows XP with the backup usb stick still plugged inside the PC - when the reinstall was done, the USB was unreadable and she lost all her data. Mind you, that was just her outlook contacts. Still, she stopped trusting me to help her with her computer since. :/ Oh and she had some other dude reinstall Windows ME :/

[*RedBull*]

Had Compaq back in the day. I tried to install a RAID card or something without properly flashing the BIOS. Well that's when I started building my own.

[The King of GnG]

Oh, and there was a time (the 80286 age) when I fixed computer problems by smashing my fists on keyboards, monitors. Well, it mostly worked but the keyboards didn't like the treatment on the long run :-P

[cork1958]

If I had posted that, it would have been removed :laugh:

If I had posted that it would have been removed AND I would've been warned, again!! Not really to much freedom of speech here, at times.

I would have to say that the worst thing I have done is installed that bloated Ubuntu on a computer for my brother. He tried it for half a day then was crying I want my Windows back!!

Otherwise,

Never really screwed anything up much!!

[nekkidtruth]

Lightning hit the house and blew out my PC. Bought a new one, put it all together and I have NO idea WTF possessed me but I felt the need to stick something into the CPU fan to see what kind of a noise it would make...one of the blades snapped off.

Needless to say I don't really do stupid things such as that anymore. It really was a one time really odd and stupid immature thing to do. To this day I still have no clue why I did it Lol

[CG-88]

Lightning hit the house and blew out my PC. Bought a new one, put it all together and I have NO idea WTF possessed me but I felt the need to stick something into the CPU fan to see what kind of a noise it would make...one of the blades snapped off.

Needless to say I don't really do stupid things such as that anymore. It really was a one time really odd and stupid immature thing to do. To this day I still have no clue why I did it Lol

That is the most amazing thing I have read in this thread! Legendary status has been assigned! :D

[MikroMan]

Many, many BSODs in my childhood for installing shareware and browsing the net without AV protection... Local tech guy was coming by our house almost regularly every two months to reinstall Windows :D

No fried hardware. Yet.

[Knife Party]

the old classic partitioning cockup, deleted some luckily useless data! Also, using linux for the first time and the grub/bootloader not being present any more

[Dot Matrix]

I installed Java once.

[Nashy]

Installing Windows ME.

[cooky560 Veteran]

Installing Windows ME.

And then trying after the 4th BSOD in three hours that this wasn't a waste of money

[J_R_G]

There was this one time, that makes me laugh now, I had went over to a friend's house and used her computer, I was 12 or so, it was MS-DOS on some kind of PC, back in the early 90s. I was trying to play a game, the game was complaining about something probably memory related but I don't remember exactly now, so I decided to edit her config.sys, I used word perfect. Unfortunately, when I saved the new config.sys, word perfect did not store it as a plain text file, it saved it as a word perfect formatted document. So when I rebooted, the PC displayed a bunch of garbage and error messages and stuck there. I realize how easy it would have been to fix it now, just boot off a diskette and redo the config.sys, but at the time I had no clue. I turned off the PC and walked away like nothing happened since I was alone with the PC. The next day, a friend of our parents, who was kind of a computer help guy for the military base our parents were stationed on, ran into me and said the girl's PC was messed up and asked if I knew anything about it, I just said "nah, no idea." heh. :)

[Kelxin]

Forgot to print and lockup a copy of my TPM security key for bitlocker on a pair of 2 TB RAIDed hard drives... Windows updated the boot sector throwing the TPM into freakout mode.

I now have both drives sitting in my safe waiting for someday, hopefully a decent brute force bitlocker encryption cracker comes out. About 10 years of data, pictures, programming, etc sitting on those drives >.>

[Guth]

When I was about 14/15 I saved up for AGES to buy parts to build my first pc

The day the parts came i was so excited, rushed into everything, ripping packaging off and throwing it all over the place. Was too excited to read instructions, had never built a PC before.

Installed CPU the wrong way round (didnt see the marker triangle in the corner), pushed lever down, snapped off every. single. pin.

CPU was ?150 (in 2004/2005)

My whole budget was only ?400.

Cried for ages, eventually convinced my dad to buy me a replacement

[ncc50446]

I was playing around with Linux, and learnt that you can format your Linux partition, while you're still using it...Went to reboot, and had no OS lol

Bought a video card to upgrade my computer so I could play Star Wars Jedi Knights II, but then turned out it was AGP, and I only had PCI lol

Bought an eMachine with Windows ME

Installed Windows Vista (Was fine after SP1, but before that was horrible...)

When we had Windows 3.1, I went through, and deleted all the empty folders, or files that were like 1 byte...I was trying to clean things up..Windows 3.1 didn't work after that lol Was stuck with DOS.

Lots of viruses from Kazaa haha

No mistakes that have costed me or a company any money luckily.

[articuno1au]

I accidentally wiped out my entire business' login database (about 300,000 entries >.>).

I had a complex SQL query in place but somehow I accidentally highlight

DELETE
FROM accounts

and left the where clauses unhighlighted. So when I hit execute, it just executed the highlighted part D:

Also accidentally wiped out 6tb of personal storage due to a Windows 7 bug I was aware of but didn't think of because I was enormously sleep deprived :(

[Steven P. Administrators]

One time I was swapping out a CPU (think it was a AMD K2, socket 7 or something) at work and managed to bend some pins, gave it to Redmak and after trying to unsuccesfully straighten the last one, he broke it off, inserted it and it still worked! :p

Personal fail: Quantum Fireball 4GB bigfoot drive (circa 1999-2000) got stuck in the bay of an old tower PC I was replacing, I got the drive out eventually, but not before it went sailing across the room! (pushed it out from the back and wheee...) Needless to say the drive didn't work after that.

[remixedcat]

I had 2x 20GB QUANTUM FIREBALL!!!! dives in my parent's dell we ended up burning in the middle of my parent's field!!!! it's funny how we had a bonfire with that and another crappy PC... we finally got closure becuase that pc started world war 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,and 10 at my parent's house....