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

[Sayer of the N-Word]

My dad had recently gotten DSL and a problem had cropped up which I needed phone tech support to fix because I was fourteen and stupid. I eventually wound up talking to a pajeet who himself seemed to struggle to read his script. He was guiding me through some piece of software when we hit a wall because the script read "Now click on box X", which I told him wasn't in the window. He accused me of lying to him and we got into an argument about whether or not the box was on my screen. After a few minutes of that he let out a crazy bellow and hung up. I tried to poke around and see if the answer to my problem would present itself, and it was then that I noticed that box X was in another window and the pajeet had been right all along.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

My dad had recently gotten DSL and a problem had cropped up which I needed phone tech support to fix because I was fourteen and stupid. I eventually wound up talking to a pajeet who himself seemed to struggle to read his script. He was guiding me through some piece of software when we hit a wall because the script read "Now click on box X", which I told him wasn't in the window. He accused me of lying to him and we got into an argument about whether or not the box was on my screen. After a few minutes of that he let out a crazy bellow and hung up. I tried to poke around and see if the answer to my problem would present itself, and it was then that I noticed that box X was in another window and the pajeet had been right all along.

That, my friend, is why you screenshare with the pajeet. And make sure to trust him when he shuts down your monitor to "scan da virus", only for the CMD to pop up and display an error message "you have 128 virus, please contact Window support" after an ipconfig message dump.

Anyway, if your CPU is stuck to the cooler with thermal paste, floss can free it really fast, no damage. Don't ask how I know.

Oh and "It's just a tiny bit of battery acid, the flashlight will work just fine" is a cope.

I did this with a laptop of mine from a few years ago. Tried nearly 100 passwords until calling Dell support, spending 3 hours proving to them I was the owner of the device, then them issuing a key that's supposed to overwrite the password (glowie backdoor technology) and even that failed.

Ended up waking up in the middle of the night with the correct password and unlocked it lol.

Some brilliant, Einstein level IQ DEI at Microsoft decided it is a good idea for older Windows phones to double the time between password unlocks every time you get the password wrong; first 15 seconds, then 30, 1 minute, 2 minutes... I still have to wait about 3 months till I can try again.

 

[Gatdam Animal Person]

Anyway, if your CPU is stuck to the cooler with thermal paste, floss can free it really fast, no damage. Don't ask how I know.

When trying to swap motherboards for my server, I tried to remove my CPU cooler. It was well held together, but with just a little more force... oh great, now the CPU just got ripped out of the socket. No bent pins so that's cool.

Tried to be lazy and put the CPU inside the newer socket while still having the CPU cooler attached... but the little socket bar holder couldn't phase through the cooler's tubes.

I think the dental floss trick would've have been useful then. But now everything just werks!

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

That, my friend, is why you screenshare with the pajeet. And make sure to trust him when he shuts down your monitor to "scan da virus", only for the CMD to pop up and display an error message "you have 128 virus, please contact Window support" after an ipconfig message dump.

This was in the early 2000s, long before pajeets were able to set up call centers inside their hovels with only a few rupees.

 

[Adash]

tried to repaste my PS3 slim because the fans were running extremely loud and also because i wanted to overclock for some reason, i stripped one screw and lost 3 of the others, so the console is still rotting in my drawer while taken apart because retarded me doesn't know how to unscrew stuff correctly. or maybe the PS3 is a bitch to repair

i should probably try to fix it again or pay someone else to do it because i am an idiot

werent all of these rootkitted out the ass

yep, all they were was 139841089408912480912 programs automatically installed to windows and at least 5 of them were trojans

 

[Aljam]

I decided to install gentoo once and said to myself I would go to sleep when it's done compiling. I however stayed up for 4 days trying to debug a circular dependency and figure out what nvidia driver I needed to install. It then devolved into me trying to "debloat" my hardware and looking for bugs in my walls. Then the shadow people came to take me away.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Wallmounted a monitor only to have the mount, bolts and anchors all come out at once and crash to the ground shattering it. Still mad about this 3 years later; it was a nice 144hz 2560x1600 too.

Fucked up massively trying to chip a gamecube due to the strange way the modchip attaches to the board (effectively SMD soldering except it's floating ~5mm off the board on top of a couple SMD caps/resistors and you have to bridge the gap with solder) and pulled a trace, and couldn't disassemble it further because (iirc) it needed a second smaller size of triwing screwdriver than the one I had.

 

[Adash]

I decided to install gentoo once and said to myself I would go to sleep when it's done compiling. I however stayed up for 4 days trying to debug a circular dependency and figure out what nvidia driver I needed to install. It then devolved into me trying to "debloat" my hardware and looking for bugs in my walls. Then the shadow people came to take me away.

Your first mistake: Installing Linux on Nvidia hardware.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

Software: I fucked up the install of grub (Ubuntu) some years ago. Probably the partition was replaced and I could not get in Linux whatsoever. Happened 3-4 times sporadically.
Hardware: I put too much thermal paste in between my CPU and cooler, and got hot, naturally. When I decided to remove and do better, I jammed too hard, that I bent the CPU pins, needing to buy a brand new CPU.

 

[HarblMcDavid]

This is a more recent one, and I've obliquely referenced this elsewhere here.

Was replacing the cooler on one of my monero rigs (single tower to dual tower, a peerless assassin specifically) and forgot to remove the "remove before install" plastic on the bottom of the new coldplate. In fairness to me, the plastic on the models I got was surprisingly easy to miss compared to other coolers I've purchased over the years, not a lot of overhang past the edge of the coldplate and it was mostly clear plastic.

Suffice to say the computer started idling at 80c and hitting 90c and higher on bootup (though I couldn't see this since I didn't go into bios first). All I got was massive instability. When I did finally make it into windows I noticed that Ryzen master was reporting red temps and knew something was very very wrong (these units were fine with 120mm noctua single tower coolers, for reference), so I figured it must be a bad mount.

Take everything apart and what do you fucking know, there's the plastic, just hanging out, all covered in paste and the source of all my problems. A bad mount, just not in the traditional sense. Ultimately did have to nuke and pave that install because something about that instability really fucked up the system files, but fortunately the underlying hardware was completely fine.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

I often use the rented server hosting my website and everything else for its superior Internet connection. To make a long story short, a downloading program was out of date, so I tried to update it.

I couldn't use SSH to get back into it once I logged out after the failure. The libcrypt.so was missing. I had to login to my provider's dashboard to get direct access without SSH. I'm not even going to go into other details that made using it hellacious.

I backed up my big e-mail file by dropping it into /var/www/html/ and downloading it that way. How did my website work without what may be the encryption library? I don't believe in TLS. None of the e-mail gets encrypted in transit either, so downloading it this way was fine. I checked the SHA256 hash checksum digest on both ends.

I still need to backup the rest and wipe the server to start over.

 

[Sharpeteer]

I got a great fuckup that I'm sure will make at least one experienced user laugh at my idiocy.

I use an Nvidia GPU in my computer w/ Manjaro installed, so naturally I do need a little mindful when it comes to certain updates, but I didn't think of this one day after one reboot, all the sudden my installation was broken, booted to a black desktop.

I tried so many different things - ranging from TTYing out of the broken desktop and trying to reinstall the desktop GUI, reinstall the opensource and proprietary versions of Nvidia drivers, trying to look for any bad programs I installed recently, trying to boot it with and without the graphics card installed, you name it, I probably tried it, except for one stupid obvious thing, you'll see, in fact you probably guessed it.

Finally having given up, I decided to reinstall Manjaro from scratch. Not the worst thing since all my data is kept on my secondary drive and my file server. Got it installed, rebooted, same problem with the broken desktop. So I reinstalled my OS all for nothing, was quite pissed.

Finally, I thought: "Hey, what if I just need to update my kernel?"

Updated kernel via GRUB, and what do you know - PROBLEM SOLVED. Everything works perfectly fine after. I felt so incredibly stupid, I couldn't even get mad at that point. I just laughed at my own stupidity for not thinking of something so damn obvious.

But, in the end, putting all my software and settings back took a few hours, so it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and was quite the learning experience.

 

[Adash]

i should probably try to fix it again or pay someone else to do it because i am an idiot

i successfully put it back together and it still sounds like a jet engine lmao, well hey at least I can still play midnight club L.A

 

[TETRABAX]

 

[Nambona890]

Linux, last year. I was trying to overwrite a partition on my newest SSD with my Windows 10 VM's disk image, to see if it would increase performance. I forgot the partition number when typing in the command. The whole SSD (which also contained the disk image file) got wiped. Thankfully since it was my newest one it didn't have too much on it, but I still lost a few projects. I also have a Super Mario World level I made before the wipe that I can't really fix any code issues with unless I do ridiculous spaghetti patching on the ROM.

 

[Neodanthril]

> want to use dads old pc as a media server/ emulator host
>bloated to shit so i wipe it and do a clean install of the first windows 10 torrent i can find
> spend an entire day letting windows do all its fucking updates
> spend another day transferring files and setting up my local network to make it easy to pull files from my main computer to this one
> discover the version of windows installed is some stupid bespoke shit that removed some shit that servers need to run that cannot be installed after you install the os
>cant even use the pc for hosting emulators for my living room because the singular video port is an HDMI IN port
and thats how i finally took the plunge into linux

 

[Gigantic Penguin]

I bought a M.2 WiFi card once since my motherboard didn't come with one and had a free M.2 slot.

At the time I did not know there were multiple types of M.2 connectors.

 

[Drael]

I (temporarily) broke a WAS-110 by updating the firmware without having all involved components on some kind of backup power. Naturally the 1 time every 9 months or so the power flickers was during that short update.

 

[NSA MIND CONTROL DEVICE]

Was doing malware analysis, right clicked on "open" instead of "select", ruined my virtual machine. Lesson learned.

 

[Dr. Puncherillo]

Must have been 13-14 building first pc 2008 maybe 09. Think I'm hot shit because I saved enough money to buy everything. After putting it all together and boot up no post. After an hour of "troubleshooting" I bent more than half the cpu pins. Project on hold for another 4 months after that.