Your personal tech fuck ups - This can't possiblly go wrong.

[Stasi]

Share embarrassing tech fuck ups you or your friends made.

Many years ago when my family got an XP machine to replace our old Win 98 PC I was messing around with the old computer. I don't know if they still have them but PSUs used to have little voltage switches on the back, I didn't know what it was and wanted to see what it did. While the PC was plugged in and on. Not only did the PSU explode and scare the shit out of me but blew out the electricity in the whole house. Luckily my dad saw the funny side of it and didn't kick my ass. Probably helped that I blew up the old (and now useless) computer and not the new one.

More recently I bough an M.2 SSD, I had a quick look on the inside of my PC and it had enough space and the socket looked the same as the NVME drive I was buying. Apparently I'm an idiot. The computer only accepted SATA and not NVME so I bought an expensive bookmark. Thank fuck for Amazon's no questions asked replacement policy. I was so embarassed I was ready to swallow the cost as an expensive lesson to do my research properly next time.

 

[MidnightSto]

-almost fried a friend's cpu after i forgot to plug the fan back in after cleaning it;
-broke the needle used to push the button that opens the phone sim tray.Instead of getting a magnet i kept pushing it towards the button with another needle and now i cant open my sim tray anymore.
-got ransomware on family pc and lost thousands of photos and music
-broke a laptop fans and almost fried its cpu again

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Didn't know how thermal paste worked when I built my first computer. This ignorance resulted in a CPU going to the shut off temperature. Learned my lesson. Playing Half-Life 2 with a CPU running at 99C was quite an experience.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

I once tried ME after formating a 98 machine I used to have. It didn't last long. In a case of history repeating itself, I tried a custom Win7 sporting some edgy name like "Black Edition" or "Blade Edition" at the recommendation of a douchy upperclassman when I was in uni. That didn't last long either.

A friend forgot to plug the 6-pin connector in his brand new GeForce 7800 GT (I think, it was a long time ago). It was an AGP model, so at least he didn't fry his mobo.

Less blunder/fuck up and more raging retard, one of my high school classmates was another "angry german kid". Couldn't handle being a scrub in UT 2003/2004, so he frequently destroyed his mouse/keyboard/whatever he could. Kicked the side of his tower so hard once he broke the graphics card. His father had to hammer the side panel of the tower back into shape.

 

[Jones McCann]

Not changing my thermal paste after a couple of years. 4 years after my pc was built I was wondering why my game performance was tanking so hard. The thermal paste was absolutely dried up, I installed a temp overlay on my desktop (I never go without this now) and discovered it was hitting 100c.

 

[GrotesqueBushes]

My crowning achievement is calling tech support at 5AM because my Very Important Report that I needed to get to a client early morning wouldn't print. Some poor sod had to wake up at an ungodly hour to ask me if the printer was turned on.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

Spent an hour trying to figure out why my PC wouldn't post when I realized I forgot to plug in the 24-pin power connector

 

[Elysian]

I broke the laptop that I had before my current prebuilt by falling asleep while watching YouTube videos on it in bed and then rolling over in my sleep so it fell on the floor and the screen broke.

Also this one time like 10 years ago I accidentally filled the old Windows XP machine in my Nan’s spare room with adware. IIRC I was trying to install a pirated copy of The Sims but chose the shadiest installer imaginable that was basically just like 12 viruses in a trench coat.

I had a shitty netbook when I was 13 that I hated shutting down because it would take ages to boot up so I just put it in sleep mode all the time until it started doing the blue screen of death every time I turned it on outside of safe mode. Luckily my uncle managed to fix it without my dad finding out about it. From what I gather the meagre 1GB of RAM this thing had got all clogged up and the page file was used to compensate until that got too big to handle as well.

 

[PetrifiedTom]

By accident I have deleted all e-mails from business account. I have backup but not of the most recent e-mails. "Officially" I am solving this mysterious case... but for how long...

 

[nigger of the north]

The date is 2000, I'm using my grandfather's old Windows 95 machine that was used for little else except Scrabble, fucking around with The Magic Schoolbus interactive CD, and browsing/wanking to the female body in zoom mode in Encarta 95.

I decided there wasn't enough space on the HD, so I fired up the search tool from the taskbar, and tried numerous search terms until I got the highest number of results. I organised the returned files by size, then proceeded to willy-nilly delete every third file, thinking I was being so clever and getting rid of unnecessary disk space.

I then restarted the machine, and was welcomed with a command prompt. Totally fucked it.

Edit: it's worth mentioning I was a semi computer literate 10-year old at this time. Primary school 'Java Club' and my own tinkering on the family PC had instilled me with a technological hubris comparable to Nero.

 

[OneMillionRPM]

Paying for a copy of XP despite having a cracked copy (Pro, even) courtesy of one of mom's friends. Was trying install a wifi card on 98, it asked for 98's CD, I couldn't find the thing, so I thought to upgrade to XP at that point. Except I couldn't get the disc we had to work. I imagine it was something simple that I just wasn't doing due to being 13 and dumb.

On the hardware side of things, I once neglected to repaste my first laptop's heatsink while taking it apart. I knew what thermal paste did and that the paste on mine was dry, but I didn't think it was anything critical. Couple months go by and it cooks itself dead.

 

[Octane]

1. broke a mini USB port when i was a kid
2. phone magically cracked inside my backpack
3. broke the disc tray on my pc

dont know if this counts but i also got banned from the Microsoft discord because i told somebody i used LTSC

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Didn't know how thermal paste worked when I built my first computer. This ignorance resulted in a CPU going to the shut off temperature. Learned my lesson. Playing Half-Life 2 with a CPU running at 99C was quite an experience.

Not changing my thermal paste after a couple of years. 4 years after my pc was built I was wondering why my game performance was tanking so hard. The thermal paste was absolutely dried up, I installed a temp overlay on my desktop (I never go without this now) and discovered it was hitting 100c.

You guys are lucky you didnt build computers with old thunderbird processors, that didnt have any form of thermal control and would literally melt if they got too hot.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I once built a PC and wondered why my CPU wasn't posting turns out I didn't take off the plastic covering on the base covering the pins. Thankfully there was no damage and no harm done but I went an entire day without being able to figure this out.

More recently I destroyed a motherboard by having one of those ultra tall heat sinks which after having move my PC around a little bit too much to put in a new stick of RAM I ended up bending the pins on the motherboard and I could not get them bent back into shape so I just ended up chucking the Mobo and got a slightly cheaper model.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

I was moving out of my college dorm when my Freshman year wrapped up and I had the BRILLIANT idea, to take apart the metal frame of my loft bed without moving any of the stuff underneath it out of the way.

This included my laptop. Sure enough, I dropped part of the frame, and it landed on my laptop.

The machine was still usable, but the damage to the display gave me a screen that showed a snowy red fuzz.

Lesson learned. Pack up your shit before you start taking the furniture apart, especially if you have something valuable and important stored right underneath said furniture.

 

[Rusty Crab]

One time I was trying to get me sim card out of my phone in the kitchen, pressed too hard and it popped out and flew into the garbage disposal.

 

[stares at error messages]

Years ago I was writing a Python script to change some files around. I used os.listdir() and would iterate over the items in the list and remove items from the same list. Because the same list was being shrank and iterated over, it would always stop without having gotten to the end of the list. But want also through me for a loop was that when the script would call .remove() on the items to remove them from the list being iterated it was deleting those files from the hard drive. remove() deleting the files really surprised me. I wouldn't have expected it to being doing that. I was stuck on seeing the files get deleted but not consistently because the rule in the loop wasn't being applied to all the files in the directory (the loop would exit before it had gotten that far).

What need to be changed was the list from os.listdir() to be saved as a variable and then not edit the same list the script was iterating over. I had guessed that Python created a copy of the list when it iterated over it which was wrong. So I ended up adding what I didn't want to remove from listdir to a list of good files. Alternatively I could have copied the list with list() and then iterate over one of the copies while only editing the other copy.

This might be obvious to you, but I really didn't think that changing the same list that script was editing would be a problem for the loop. The dataloss was contained because after the first run, I copied files I tested the script. This incident caused me to enable automatic file backup.

 

[serious n00b]

[...] custom Win7 sporting some edgy name like "Black Edition" or "Blade Edition" [...]

werent all of these rootkitted out the ass

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

First time building a computer, I had never in my life used a GPU. All my prior computers were pre-built desktops and laptops with onboard graphics. I didn't notice the HDMI port on the GPU and instead plugged the cable into the motherboard. I couldn't figure out why the PC was using the onboard graphics and not the GPU I plugged it in with. I spent the entire first day with my new PC struggling to figure it out only to then notice the HDMI port on the GPU. I felt like such an idiot when I finally got it working.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

>shorted my phone when it was wet by screwing in one of the screws while it was on
>broke off my keyboard connector on my laptop
>somehow fried my better playstation controller
>scrambled my new Vegas mods multiple times so that it was unplayable
I'm bad with things.