Just looking through another forum and they were talking about the days when they first started out building there own pc's and mistakes made.

Just thought I would ask here what fuckup you've done over the years?


Thought I might add that when I first got into building pc's 1999 I didn't have a clue, first time round I screwed the mainboard onto the back plate without the brass pins in place to mount it and totally fried everything (myself included if I would have touched the case when I turned it on) its a shame really I took the tower unit to the guy in the shop and he just looked at me like an idiot when he saw what I had done. I was lucky he gave me a new board (cpu was fine)

2nd time I did it right only months later I tried to plug a cd writer in while the pc was switched on and the power cable sparked at the back of the cd rom and the pc shut down, it wouldn't start for about 10 minutes, after that it never worked right and it killed the graphics card as it never worked 100% after that.

Lesson learnt over the years.

Thought I might also add that not too long ago 2004 when AMD used to have shit CPU fans that you couldn't get off the mainboard and I had my brothers pc to build I needed to take the fan off I dont know why now.

So I used a screw driver to try and get it off slipped and slid across the board and damaged the circuits. cost me another £60 for a new board. even after that I paid for the proper tool to get the CPU fans off and managed to damage a board putting pressure on and cracked it.

messing with a 286 and dos I didn't do much bad, but when I built my 486 installed dos 6.22 and wfw 3.11I was constantly fucking things up and reinstalling.
when win95 came out that's when I went of a rampage of daily trashing the OS. never fried anything though. seen others fuck shit up real bad though.*LOL*

I remember the win 95 days my mates brother had a p75 was like the top of the range pc at the time that I remember and you had to go through dos to log into windows.

We were only about 11/12 at the time and his brother was like touch my shit and your all going to die. he was built like a brick shit house. So of course as soon as he left the house we had to try it and managed some how to fuck it up in the process.

So like the good old days we tried to fix the windows and it was the win 95 that was on floppy disks about 25 of them or something stupid. can safely say it didn't work. I never went round to his house for about 2 months after that.

one of my students I had hired on day 1 sated the cpu wrong and forced the clamps down bending most the pins. it was also his last day working for me.

working for a consulting company, this engineer who thought he knew it all was always fucking up.
once he put a static charged screwdriver on a 1K raid controller and fried it.
another time he striped some server drives and the drives were not compatiable and lost all the data.

another time at a large lawfirm he decided to clean out a production novell server bringing business to a complete halt and I had to go in that evening to fix his fuckup. he fried the board and cpu.

*LOL*

my daughter at the time was 6, I built her a pc and over time the cpu fan became loud so she decided to jam a pencil in it to stop the noise.*LOL* I ended up replacing the cpu and fanless heatsink.
I would come home and she would have her pc apart.I mean apart. she would jack my screwdriver and go to town on it. her excuse was it was sick and needed surgery.

First PC I built came together quickly. It was an XP3200+ based system. As the months went on, that thing started running pretty hot, I had to clean and regrease the block a couple times before it held respectable temps. What did it in was a surge overload from a storm (I did have a surge protector on it). The duplex I was living in had shoddy wiring that was anything but to code, so it probably didn't help.

Not PC build related, but I lost a file once while saving to an external disk (write caching related) when my house lost power. Turned out a teenage girl was driving on her way to work, swerved to avoid another car and hit the utility pole carrying power directly to my house. Though I lost some significant work I was glad the girl was okay, but... wtf are the odds of that happening?

I would have gone out and bitch slapped her just for hitting the post

I wasn't happy for sure, I lost a lot of work although I was stupid to keep saving to a single file. I did enter the scene thinking Who the fuck just crashed into my pole. xD But she was crying and her head was bleeding from hitting the windshield so I stayed with her until the ambulance came. She was fine but no doubt was sore for a couple days.

I still have the file. It's 0KB and of course won't do anything, but I'm hoping someday something will change *lol*

*LOL*

I would've done the same thing.
harryb: are you okay? I called 911.
harryb: you wouldn't happen to not be wearing panties would you?
harryb: I live down the street, we can be back before the paramedics arrive.
*LOL*
harryb: are you bleeding anywhere else if you know what I mean.

only f up was me trashing the mac OS
and I mean I trashed the OS folder by putting it in the trash bin ! it was ok till I rebooted . woops off to the apple store
hey that was way back apple II then I just built a 286 then upgraded every time a new cpu come out
that shit got old after I got to amd xp2600 now I just wait years before upgrading damn did I waist alot of coin back in the day

First computer I helped my dad build was a 286 running dos with a monochrome CGA monitor. 10 MB hard drive and 1 MB memory. Managed to never mess anything up too bad. Mostly software/driver issues more than anything else. Especially soundcard stuff. Those things were some finicky sumbitches back in the day.

*lol* "No, this isn't a thermometer, no..."

*LOL*

hold still lady, I'm trying to take your temperature.
yeah I know it feels bigger than normal but it's also monitoring your vitals.*LOL*
never let a good lie go to waste.

I remember one time in high school when they had the really old macs there. I was messing about and found an option that would limit the amount of RAM used. The thought process was: " lets see how this affects things!" the thing couldn't shutdown because it didn't have enough memory to do it haha. After a quick panic and I found the RAM option again and fixed it haha

I remember the old cream tower units no side panels you had to take the whole shell off to get inside.

Or the old tower unit my girfriend used to have it was like a nuclear bunker I couldn't get in the f'ing thing and was as heavy as a 500lb bomb

I used to have an Amiga A500+ I never bothered much with the others until the CD32 came out and got one of them

I wanted an Amiga, but I worked with what I was given, a 386. I still have term papers I did from high school.

Yeah, the old machines were built and weighed like a tank, that's what made them great. And the keyboard I had looked like a friggin' battleship. You could plunk down those keys with authority, and if anyone gave you shit, you could easily club them with it.

I've got a disk drive with all the oldschool Amiga stuff, sometimes I load an emulator for them and pretend like it's still 1990 XD

*LOL* I held on to some relic cases which would now be considered a weapon. and those AT keyboards, now those were heavy duty. I remember typing and a id was messing with me and I picked it up, whacked him in the head and continued typing and not one damaged key.*L*
I got the nickname keyboard killer.

Kinda the opposite of "worst thing you broke", but once a friend of mine was having me build him a computer (probably around 2001, 2002) and he bought the processor from some crazy cheap Korean site. When it came it had a bent pin, but it was in the far corner, so I was like "I got this!" and grabbed a pair of pliers and tried to get it back into place. It wasn't pretty, but somehow it worked.

Same friend, a few years later called me up and was like "dude, what do you know about (first gen) MS ergo keyboards" and I was like not much why? He proceeded to tell me he took it apart, like COMPLETELY apart to clean it out, and couldn't get this ribbon to line back up so nothing worked. I just told him it was toast, and not to be so stupid next time. Like I'm going to fix that shit.

My mates brother once had a desktop that ran off a 250watt power supply, I'm not 100% sure what went wrong with it but I called round one day and the fuse had blown in it so they got a piece of tin foil and stuck it in the fuses place.

I have to admit it worked great for about 24 hours then it went bang big time the force was that much the fan at the back of it flew off and was half stuck in the wall.

*L*

good thing no one got hurt.

The first time I did a clean install of Windows for someone other than myself was for my boss. I believe it was NT4 at the time. Didn't have enough network space to back up more than just the C: partition, but I thought that was good enough....just format C: and reinstall. Somehow managed to wipe the partition table and format the whole drive.

*LOL* I've done that before.

Exploding power supply reminded me of another story. A buddy of mine got a 52x CD drive from his dad's work back when that was like BLEEDING EDGE technology, well, it turns out that for some reason the drive would spin up really fast and then freak out sometimes, and the only way to get it to stop was to open the drive and let the CD go flying across the room like some sort of blade launcher.

Never did figure out what the deal with that was, but it was definitely worth a laugh or 2, until it exploded his Diablo 2 CD.

I still have my XT in a closet. Now the XT keyboard was a killer. The case is a desktop where the top flips open (hinged at the back). Great to work on. It's an 088 (8MHz/12MHz (w/ Turbo)) with 1MB of RAM. Paradise video card and Adlib Gold soundcard. I should get that thing out and see if she'll start up. I believe it's DOS 5.0 with Direct Access menu app. The late 80's were great.

During all the years of building computers I've never had any bad moves. I messed with shit all the time (that's how I learned), but I always had a backup plan or put careful thought into my actions.