What are your worst computing mistakes?

[Vambo]

Moved some precious photo's onto a iomega Zip drive and a week later the disk got the "click of death" :cry: and I lost the lot.

Now I religiously make several copies and backup them up.

[CG-88]

oh I suppose my biggest mistake was writing a piece of software for uni. I had a login system integrated that used windows authentication and I managed to delete all user accounts and BSOD my computer. I honestly dont know how to this day as the code itself was correct apart from one line which would have had nothing to do with user accounts, especially not deleting them.

Thanks god for backups though.

I felt like crying that day for being a fool lol

[f0rk_b0mb]

OCZ SSD's - I've had too many of these rubbish SSD's fail and I still keep buying them because there so darn cheap! - I must hate myself.

Yeah, I have a 128GB Vertex 3 and I'm noticing a slow down. I just secure erased it yesterday and reinstalled. Meh...Maybe I was wrong for standing up for OCZ. What are some of the signs they are failing?

[Detection]

Show me someone who has never made a mistake and I will show you someone who has never done any work! P.S With that level of mistakes he should become a manager! haha

I have to give you a 'Like' like this because for some reason there was no button on your post !

[Fraud OS 11]

I don't do mistakes, only Microsoft does. :p

[Rudy]

- Installed WinME on my computer (was running Win2k, lets just say I went back to Win2k in less than 48 hrs)

- Got an external wireless card for my laptop and it got banged by accident and completely ripped the port inside the computer (I managed to get it fixed for free though)

[cropcircles]

Made allot of trial and error mistakes and when I wasn't sure what to do I'd come to Neowin and OSNN and ask you experts what to do. I'd say wiping out a partition where my primary OS was installed and various other dual or triple boot idiotic mistakes. Frustrated a few times on some old cases (Gateways and HP) where there was no room trying to manuver my hands around the old flat strap IDE cables and trying to install some memory where I could barely see where the slots were. I think I tried installing the wrong memory a couple times also.

[Art3x]

Installed WinME :(.

Hated every minute of that awful OS

[Denis W. Veteran]

Not really a mistake, but:

A few days after building my HTPC in December of '08, I brought over a 250 GB hard drive from my desktop. Up until building the PC it had all my important data on it. The HTPC was plugged into an outlet in the living room, but this particular outlet had an on/off switch located beside a light switch for the front door area. I guess it was used in the old days when lights lacked on/off switches? Anyways, my mom accidentally hit that particular switch where the HTPC was connected to, while it was on. Turned the HTPC back on, and... bachunk, bachunk, bachunk from the hard drive. The timing of the transfer of my personal files was just right!

Oldest mistake was early 2000s when my Win95 computer refused to boot. I tried the IBM Aptiva recovery disks but they failed. I think the cause was the partition table was shot and had to be redone, but of course I knew none of that in those days. This computer repair guy... his solution was to use Norton Ghost with a probably bootleg copy of Windows 98 to fix the problem. Cost? About $55, and losing my earliest schoolwork documents dating since March of 1999.

Not-so-costly mistakes, but the most serious: running a bunch of partition recovery tools when my data partition containing my personal files came up as "RAW". The tools made it worse. The partition came up as FAT12. :rofl: Fortunately undelete software was able to recover my files, but after half a day of crapping myself :p

Related to the above mistake: purchasing an AMD Socket 939 motherboard with a Nvidia nForce 4 chipset. Bloody piece of **** chipset kept messing up SATA connections and corrupting my data. To this day I swore never to get another board with a Nvidia chipset ever again. Their graphics cards though, they're still good :p

Buying a HP tx1000 Convertible Notebook a few years ago while I was in the Navy ... would get so hot you couldn't pick it up. Returned.

Hah yeah, friend got that laptop and it was unbelievable how hot the bottom was! Not surprising the GPU eventually killed itself and the laptop was a brick thereafter.

[threetonesun]

Installed WinME :(.

Hated every minute of that awful OS

This! I bought a Dell laptop back in 1999, and they said I could either get Windows ME, which was coming out soon, or Windows 2000.

Made the wrong decision there.

[Denis W. Veteran]

I can sympathize there - about 2 months ago, accidentally left out a where clause on a sql script, ended up deleting every entry on a table...

Sorry but the thought of leaving out "where" in DELETE * from TABLE is really hilarious :laugh:

[kkick]

I accidentally ran 'takeown /f C: /r' on my computer overnight.

[techishere]

Last year I accidentally opened Google.com on my personal computer and I had to ask my bank to change my debit card details ! (Google is famous for stealing personal information)

[BillyJack]

1. I was dusting the graphics card and the dust rag got stuck on a SMD resister and ripped it off the board. I had to buy a new graphics card and it was out of my upgrade cycle.

2. Bought and installed Windows ME. Waste of money and time.

3. Buying ASUS motherboards. They always die or fail on me.

4. Buying ATI graphics cards. ATI drops support for older graphic cards only after a short period of time. The graphics card still performs great but I have to upgrade due to lack of support.

5. Typed rm * in the root directory of linux. All files including system files started to get deleted. The OS started to not respond so I rebooted to discover I had deleted everything and the OS was no longer usable. I had to do a reinstall.

[Rudy]

Last year I accidentally opened Google.com on my personal computer and I had to ask my bank to change my debit card details ! (Google is famous for stealing personal information)

You're missing a jk or something :rolleyes:

[threetonesun]

4. Buying ATI graphics cards. ATI drops support for older graphic cards only after a short period of time. The graphics card still performs great but I have to upgrade due to lack of support.

Still? I did run into this issue with an old 7500, but the last ATi card I had (4850?) seemed to have a decent lifespan.

[BillyJack]

Still? I did run into this issue with an old 7500, but the last ATi card I had (4850?) seemed to have a decent lifespan.

I have two 4870x2 which still performs great and I would not have to update for a long time but ATI is not going to support the 4000 series in Windows 8. I have read a lot of other people with the same problem. ATI is going to provide a generic driver so that people can migrate to Windows 8 but will not support these cards anymore.

[xrobwx71]

Sometime in the late 90's I was soldering some jumper pins on a motherboard so I could overclock. The solder iron slipped and knocked one of the tiny transistors/diodes of of the motherboard. Would not boot after that. I only had it about 6 months and as it was an HP, I called HP (did not mention the soldering part) and went through the proper steps of the call, is it plugged in etc. He asked me turn it on and he did not hear it beep as in the POST beep. He then advised me that they would send a box fedex for me to ship it back to HP. I received the box next day and shipped it out that day. I received a brand new motherboard in about 9 days installed in my tower. Worked perfectly. I did not try to solder those jumpers again I just saved up and bought an overclockable ASUS mobo.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

How in the hell did u do that?

Fairly long story, so I'll be brief, but it is my desire to push limits that got me in that box. I was well aware that flashing a ReadMe.txt to the BIOS ROM wouldn't be smart, but I wanted to see if the BIOS flash utility would reject the file. This was in like 1999 so most BIOS utilities have since fixed that issue and they run checks on images before flashing them.

When I flashed the file though the BIOS utility took it and immediately rebooted the machine when done! If it had not done that I could have easily flashed the regular BIOS without issue since the BIOS is only loaded as initial power on (there after it runs from RAM). The computer then wouldn't boot. Just a black screen with the CPU fan spinning, but otherwise nothing.

This was pretty early in my computing career so I figured the computer was dead for sure. It was also my only computer so I couldn't go online with the hope of finding some cleaver way out by someone who knew more than I did at the time. I called every computer repair shop in Philadelphia asking what they could do and the universal response I got was "you killed that board and you'll need to buy a new one." I didn't have money for a new one so I had to fix this or go without technology for a long time.

I spent something like 18 hours trying every possibly combination of things I could think of to allow me to get this machine to boot. I did the usual, re-seating the CPU, clearing the CMOS, cleaning the components, etc. all to no avail. The last thing I tried, as a last ditch effort -- and probably a sign of desperation, was to connect an old ISA video card I had lying around that I wasn't even sure worked. Once I did that the BIOS showed on screen with a large number of errors being reported, but I was able to flash the real BIOS and get the machine back to full working order. I'm still not sure why this worked, but I never fully understood ISA either since it was far on its way out by the time I got started in comps in 1998.

It was a combination of my biggest tech blunder and biggest tech rescue and I'm sure I'll never get to experience anything on that scale again.

[threetonesun]

I have two 4870x2 which still performs great and I would not have to update for a long time but ATI is not going to support the 4000 series in Windows 8. I have read a lot of other people with the same problem. ATI is going to provide a generic driver so that people can migrate to Windows 8 but will not support these cards anymore.

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

[Nerd Rage]

I was installing an SSD in my desktop at home, and when hooking up the power and SATA cables, the black plastic on the SSD where they are plugged in snapped off rendering the SSD unusable :(

I must have applied too much pressure or something.

[BillyJack]

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

I know they are two series back but they push the FPS I need on my 30" monitor just fine. The only thing they lack is DirectX 11. Oh well, I will upgrade :)

[ZakO]

Deleted a cloned git repository after working on it for 10 days without pushing it back to the origin... that was a pretty stupid mistake :p

[Charisma Veteran]

Oh yeah, a fun one recently that I'd rather forgotten about--not a terrible mistake (as it was easily fixed and I didn't lose anything), but a stupid one:

Was having trouble getting a new build to work. Tried disabling different components in the BIOS to rule them out. Disabled the USB ports. Rebooted. Forgot that my only input device options were USB. No way to interact with the system after that. Tiny moment of panic until I remembered I could clear the CMOS with the jumper and restore the defaults... phew.

[Denis W. Veteran]

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

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!)