The DUMBEST screwups/mistakes you've made when working on a computer....

[schuck6566]

Let's all make a thread with our most embarrassing things we've done when working on a comp. I'll start with my latest screw up.

While I had Windows installing the latest greatest feature update to my wifes computer in the background,I noticed it still had the AMD software on it even though I put my old nvidia card on for her instead. Soo,I figured "Hey,I'll just run the AMD uninstaller to remove it while I'm waiting on the other stuff..." BIG mistake! I ended up with a hard drive with SIX partitions, Windows wouldn't recognize any password,and couldn't even boot into safe mode because it always booted to some new account that started in hibernate mode.  I ended up having to put the drive on a different comp,copy her files to an external drive,and perform a clean install of Windows on a wiped drive. Next time I will wait and run ONE program @ a time when Windows is updating.

Edited November 9, 2020 by schuck6566

[ENTERPRISE]

Well about a year ago I was messing with my WC reservoir when in my system and undrained. I was messing with the Heatkiller Res which has 4 outer struts (I actually cannot remember why I was)

 

Me like an idiot to unscrewed the bolts which loosened the top cap and struts...not thinking at all. Luckily the pressure kept a seal but I could see the glass tube sitting on the O-ring at the bottom of the res clear as day, that was how far I got. I was like "OMG WTF AM I DOING". 

 

Very fortunately I managed to put it back together in situ without the coolant going everywhere in my PC. Beads if sweat running down my face honestly.

[schuck6566]

20 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Well about a year ago I was messing with my WC reservoir when in my system and undrained. I was messing with the Heatkiller Res which has 4 outer struts (I actually cannot remember why I was)

 

Me like an idiot to unscrewed the bolts which loosened the top cap and struts...not thinking at all. Luckily the pressure kept a seal but I could see the glass tube sitting on the O-ring at the bottom of the res clear as day, that was how far I got. I was like "OMG * AM I DOING". 

 

Very fortunately I managed to put it back together in situ without the coolant going everywhere in my PC. Beads if sweat running down my face honestly.

lol,that's like when I tried "delicately" moving the radiator on my AIO while it was still running from the back to the top of the case and the stiff rubber tubing pulled it outta my fingers and tossed it against the bottom of the case. THAT'S probably why I'm looking @ having to rebuild my AIO cooler. I do stupid shyte without thinking sometimes.

[UltraMega]

I'm sure I have some dumb mistakes but atm I can't think of any good ones that I caused but I had a customer the other day who brought me a desktop PC for repair. It was a middle aged woman with no PC knowledge and she had figured the PC was too loud because the fans inside were dusty, so she took it upon herself to remove the CPU heatsink to clean it, but she didn't use the latch on the heatsink and rather unscrewed the mount that the heatsink latches on to and then didn't reattach it after, so the heatsink was just hanging there by a loose screw and she had no idea what the issue could be. 

 

Turned out her hard drive was failing.

Edited November 9, 2020 by UltraMega

[Mistio]

6 months ago I was cleaning my partner's laptop. 
It is a rather old one, with a platter HDD. 
There was an annoying fan sound and could not troubleshoot it. 
So I placed the laptop sideways without a bottom cover. 
Little did I know that by doing so and running Cinebench to ramp up the fans, I would f-up the HDD. 

The laptop HDD now makes a noise when you shift left around a horizontal axis. 

[ENTERPRISE]

20 hours ago, schuck6566 said:

lol,that's like when I tried "delicately" moving the radiator on my AIO while it was still running from the back to the top of the case and the stiff rubber tubing pulled it outta my fingers and tossed it against the bottom of the case. THAT'S probably why I'm looking @ having to rebuild my AIO cooler. I do stupid shyte without thinking sometimes.

 

Ha, that sounds about as special as I was being then:P 

 

20 hours ago, Mistio said:

6 months ago I was cleaning my partner's laptop. 
It is a rather old one, with a platter HDD. 
There was an annoying fan sound and could not troubleshoot it. 
So I placed the laptop sideways without a bottom cover. 
Little did I know that by doing so and running Cinebench to ramp up the fans, I would f-up the HDD. 

The laptop HDD now makes a noise when you shift left around a horizontal axis. 

 

Wait...confusion. How did that screw up the HDD ?

[Mistio]

43 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Ha, that sounds about as special as I was being then:P 

 

 

Wait...confusion. How did that screw up the HDD ?

 

I think the needle is loose or something ...

[ENTERPRISE]

38 minutes ago, Mistio said:

 

I think the needle is loose or something ...

Ahhh yes that will do it.

[Bastiaan_NL]

The only thing I remember (and it's something I still forget) is that it's dangerous to work on a running pc, high speed fans can cause a lot of pain

@UltraMega That's one of the biggest problems with someone working on something they don't understand, they always mess it up and have no clue what's wrong.
I've been working as a car mechanic for 10 years, the s..t I've seen there was sad, frustrating and funny at the same time. Glad I left..

Someone trying fill up his engine with oil to the cap was the best one I've ever seen. We drained and measured it and it was more than double the volume, the engine ran like crap 

[schuck6566]

10 minutes ago, Bastiaan_NL said:

The only thing I remember (and it's something I still forget) is that it's dangerous to work on a running pc, high speed fans can cause a lot of pain

@UltraMega That's one of the biggest problems with someone working on something they don't understand, they always mess it up and have no clue what's wrong.
I've been working as a car mechanic for 10 years, the s..t I've seen there was sad, frustrating and funny at the same time. Glad I left..

Someone trying fill up his engine with oil to the cap was the best one I've ever seen. We drained and measured it and it was more than double the volume, the engine ran like crap 

lol,my brother in law did that to a van of mine(sort of) He kept adding a quart of oil when the oil light came on not realizing it was coming on @ stop signs/lights because I had the idle too low. Ended up jumping timing about 180 degrees. We drained 2 gallons of oil out & were still above the full mark.

[Bastiaan_NL]

3 minutes ago, schuck6566 said:

lol,my brother in law did that to a van of mine(sort of) He kept adding a quart of oil when the oil light came on not realizing it was coming on @ stop signs/lights because I had the idle too low. Ended up jumping timing about 180 degrees. We drained 2 gallons of oil out & were still above the full mark.

Classic
Did it run as it used to afterwards? (after fixing the timing and everything)

Edited November 10, 2020 by Bastiaan_NL

[J7SC_Orion]

1 hour ago, Bastiaan_NL said:

The only thing I remember (and it's something I still forget) is that it's dangerous to work on a running pc, high speed fans can cause a lot of pain  (...)

 

  

I never make any errors - coz once I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken  

 

...so getting one of my finger caught in a 3K rpm fan (yes, there was blood) never could have happened...nor the time I wanted to clean a complex custom water loop w/ CPU and 4x GPU blocks and decided to speed it up by putting the whole bottle of concentrate in (instead of the recommended number of drops per liter)...bye bye O-rings

[Diffident]

The only dumb thing I remember doing is, many moons ago I was installing Fedora to try out.  I intended to only install it to 1 of the 3 drives in my system, but I guess I wasn't paying attention and it installed an LVM partition across all 3 drives.  So I had to re-download a lot of porn.

[Snakecharmed]

Technically, this wasn't working on the computer so much as it involved an external component connected to my computer, but it was a bad mistake.

 

I used to have a Virtue Audio TWO.2 amplifier for my desktop. I bought it used and with extra accessories, but it was something like $449 new if I recall. It was a very nicely crafted piece of audio hardware.

 

What happened was that in the midst of moving my desk and reconnecting all kinds of wiring after I had a carpet installer restretch the room's carpet, I had bare speaker wires that were still connected to the back of the TWO.2 amplifier sitting on the desk. The speaker wires fell from the desk to the floor, shorting out and landing right on the coaxial terminals on my uninterruptible power supply. I definitely should have taken more precautions, but that was some BS luck of the highest order. The speaker wires sparked on the coaxial terminals, fried the amp, and tripped the circuit breaker for the room I was in.

 

Virtue Audio had already stopped selling new products when this happened. Their website didn't have any functioning email addresses or a phone number despite them saying they were still providing customer service for their existing customers. I eventually just sold the dead amp for parts on eBay.

 

I ended up getting an SMSL Q5 Pro to replace that TWO.2. It's not as elegant of a piece of hardware as the TWO.2, but I do like that it has an LED display and a remote control.

Edited November 11, 2020 by Snakecharmed

[schuck6566]

Smoked a bit until the oil that'd blown by into the exhaust finally burnt off but it actually survived.

[schuck6566]

OUCH! That's just bad luck of a massive order!

[UltraMega]

Once a long time ago when I was working a remote support job, I had been remote connected to this old guys PC who had a virus..I had the finished removing the virus and so I called rh customer to let him know I was done and his computer good to go. I was still remote connected at this point and while I was on the phone with the customer he went to his computer and typed "hand jobs" into google, clicked a link and started playing a video. He was apparently testing how s computer to make sure it worked normally with the stuff he wanted to use it for again. I guess he also did not realize I was still connected to his PC while I was on the phone with him.... So I disconnected and hung up without saying anything. 

 

Have at least two other remote support stories just like that.

[ENTERPRISE]

On 11/10/2020 at 7:09 PM, Bastiaan_NL said:

The only thing I remember (and it's something I still forget) is that it's dangerous to work on a running pc, high speed fans can cause a lot of pain

@UltraMega That's one of the biggest problems with someone working on something they don't understand, they always mess it up and have no clue what's wrong.
I've been working as a car mechanic for 10 years, the s..t I've seen there was sad, frustrating and funny at the same time. Glad I left..

Someone trying fill up his engine with oil to the cap was the best one I've ever seen. We drained and measured it and it was more than double the volume, the engine ran like crap 

 

Man don't get me started on running PC and fans. I was unfortunate enough to get my finger nicely cut up on some cheap fan...as it was cheap it had sharper edged fan blades. 

 

I suggest only jamming your finger into a premium fan lol.

[Supercrumpet]

24 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Man don't get me started on running PC and fans. I was unfortunate enough to get my finger nicely cut up on some cheap fan...as it was cheap it had sharper edged fan blades. 

 

I suggest only jamming your finger into a premium fan lol.

 

EHW, providing only the best PC building tips and tricks. I love it.

[Bastiaan_NL]

The fan that was able to cut my finger was a premium one, a Scythe ultra kaze 120mm 3000 rpm fan. That thing was a beast and a skinpeeler

[J7SC_Orion]

...My fan-blood experience was with a GentleTyphoon 3K rpm servo (below / left)...lots of torque   Good thing it wasn't the even bigger and faster Sunon server fan (below / right)...

 

  

 

 

Edited November 11, 2020 by J7SC_Orion

[schuck6566]

Not a FAN cut,but one time I ran my finger down the side of an amd duron cooler to pull the build up off and ended up with 5 or 6 slices gushing blood from my finger tip.To make matters worse when I did it I hollered a profanity loud enough to get the wifes attn so she comes to see what's the matter and ask me how I got paper cuts working on the computer.

[Supercrumpet]

6 hours ago, schuck6566 said:

Not a FAN cut,but one time I ran my finger down the side of an amd duron cooler to pull the build up off and ended up with 5 or 6 slices gushing blood from my finger tip.To make matters worse when I did it I hollered a profanity loud enough to get the wifes attn so she comes to see what's the matter and ask me how I got paper cuts working on the computer.

 

This whole time I've been thinking I know I've done plenty of stupid stuff around PCs but I just can't remember any specific incidents, but this one's relatable. Both a friend and I have cut ourselves on separate incidents on the old Intel stock CPU coolers. Those fins were obscenely sharp for some reason.

[InverseTundra]

Ive got a pretty simple yet hilariously stupid one. About 4-5 years ago on the release of skylake (6700K) I had managed to nab a 6700k just after release while i was on vacation no less. Well all the parts got delivered while i was still gone. After a 12 hour drive home, instead of sleeping out of exhausted excitement i decided to build the system and test it out. Well i was apparently so tired that i spent over 20 min attempting to install my 8-pin cpu connector backwards/swapped and I just could NOT get either side to plug in and i was dumbfounded. Ended up calling EVGA support and saying i think the connector is defective. Had me line up the notches one more time and try it. "Click" no issues. There was like 15 seconds of silence from me before i said, it worked. I apologized and had a laugh with the guy ( EVGA support is top notch ) But yea, not my brightest moment xD.

[ENTERPRISE]

2 hours ago, InverseTundra said:

Ive got a pretty simple yet hilariously stupid one. About 4-5 years ago on the release of skylake (6700K) I had managed to nab a 6700k just after release while i was on vacation no less. Well all the parts got delivered while i was still gone. After a 12 hour drive home, instead of sleeping out of exhausted excitement i decided to build the system and test it out. Well i was apparently so tired that i spent over 20 min attempting to install my 8-pin cpu connector backwards/swapped and I just could NOT get either side to plug in and i was dumbfounded. Ended up calling EVGA support and saying i think the connector is defective. Had me line up the notches one more time and try it. "Click" no issues. There was like 15 seconds of silence from me before i said, it worked. I apologized and had a laugh with the guy ( EVGA support is top notch ) But yea, not my brightest moment xD.

I have learned that building tired or in a rush is just not worth it for that exact reason lol