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

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Once upon a time I tried to do a remote firmware push and ended up making 300+ of the 1,000ish slot machines I was responsible for unplayable. It took almost a week to fix all of them as they each needed individually touched.
 
i was quite young when these happened
-took off the cpu fan and cpu from my pc out of curiosity, got cooling gel onto the pins. panicked, tried to clean it (with a cloth nonetheless), bent a few pins from the socket, broke a further few. the motherboard was 3 months old
-had one of those cheap flashlights. took off the led from it and plugged it into the mains. thing exploded and tripped the breaker.
-accidentally took a bath with my phone. it ran for a short while then died. i got it repaired it a couple times but it never ran right. it died again and i let it rest in peace this time.
-tried to install ubuntu as an 11 year old and lost all my data
 
I had an AMD Athlon XP 2700 CPU I was trying to install a cooler onto back in 2003. To install the cooler you had to use a flat blade screw driver to force a spring loaded latch onto a clip on the side of the CPU socket. I wasn’t paying attention and had my screw driver in the wrong part. When I forced it down the screw driver slipped and hit the motherboard, which scratched it and exposed some copper wiring. Fortunately everything still worked but it spooked me into using Intel CPUs for a decade.

My dad took the cake though. Back in the Windows 3.1 days, he was clearing up his hard disk space and decided it was a smart idea to delete the command.com file off the root of the drive, effectively deleting DOS. As a result had to break out a boot floppy and re-install Windows/DOS again…
 
solidus said:
I had an AMD Athlon XP 2700 CPU I was trying to install a cooler onto back in 2003. To install the cooler you had to use a flat blade screw driver to force a spring loaded latch onto a clip on the side of the CPU socket.
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Those were the worst. Lean into it, but not too much, don't let the screwdriver slip, hear the motherboard creaking while sweating like you're trying to defuse a bomb.
 
  • Have fully worn down one of the screwheads holding down my laptop's heatsink. Replacing the thermal paste in several years is gonna be real complicated.
  • When I was a teenager, I didn't plug a PSU cable in all the way after replacing my old one that died after like five years (Cooler Master) and casued a small electrical fire that fried my mobo. Didn't build another PC until very recently.
  • I have accidentally overwritten zip files via the command line on several occasions, losing tens of gigabytes of hoarded and often unrecoverable data.
  • Managed to fry a shitty Chinese VGA to RCA converter just yesterday, no idea how.
  • Spent like seven hours making absolutely sure that the metallic thermal paste I somehow managed to spill in a CPU socket was entirely, 200% cleaned off. The worst part, is it was an Intel socket. If you know, you know.
  • I somehow got the Skyrim bouncy titty mod to stop bouncing after no significant changes to installed mods or their load order and I haven't been able to get them to bounce again no matter what I've tried, rendering the game unplayable.
 
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Years ago when I last emigrated, I left my desktop PC behind for months and had it shipped over later. It didn't dawn on me that it would have accumulated months of dust and spiderwebs on the inside - stuff that is flammable if, say, someone were to turn it on and immediately boot something resource intensive.

The fire _only_ took out the graphics card and power supply, and left some scorch marks on the HDD.

I also more recently managed to perma-fry my motherboard so that it no longer posts, and it's old enough that I'm going to have to replace the processor and RAM too at a minimum alongside it.
 
Twitter Hate Mob said:
Years ago when I last emigrated, I left my desktop PC behind for months and had it shipped over later. It didn't dawn on me that it would have accumulated months of dust and spiderwebs on the inside - stuff that is flammable if, say, someone were to turn it on and immediately boot something resource intensive.

The fire _only_ took out the graphics card and power supply, and left some scorch marks on the HDD.

I also more recently managed to perma-fry my motherboard so that it no longer posts, and it's old enough that I'm going to have to replace the processor and RAM too at a minimum alongside it.
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Now I will know to keep an eye out for this. Valuable story!
 
The fun time sixth grade me had ruining a Socket 370 board out of a Gateway because I wanted to leave it running caseless on a windowsil and forgot one of the standoffs, meaning that one shift of its placement and the entire pinside of the PSU connection scraped a CD drive and burnt some rails right out. Doesn't help that nowadays S370 boards like to commit suicide and that was a nice AGP 2x board, gg retard me.
 
Enig said:
The fun time sixth grade me had ruining a Socket 370 board out of a Gateway because I wanted to leave it running caseless on a windowsil and forgot one of the standoffs, meaning that one shift of its placement and the entire pinside of the PSU connection scraped a CD drive and burnt some rails right out. Doesn't help that nowadays S370 boards like to commit suicide and that was a nice AGP 2x board, gg exceptional individual me.
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The only Socket 370 Gateway motherboards I recall seeing were ones in their SFF machines that only supported Celeron cpus with 66mhz front side bus. If it was one of those it was no great loss. Most of the ones you weren't allowed to touch just need to be recapped to get them going again, like my old Tualatin ready Soyo SY-TISU that has been in storage forever. If it powers on but doesn't output video that is what I would look at.

I think my biggest tech fuckup was disposing of an old (Asus based if I recall correctly) 486dx2 66mhz and 2-3 Sound Blaster opl sound cards some 10 to 15 years ago. Exceptional people are paying exceptional prices for old stuff these days. For some reason a nice Pentium 1 motherboard with processor and ram sell for ~$100 but stuff from only a few years prior that use to be dirt cheap now sells for upwards of 200-300 that with people asking as much as 400-500. Even the old cookie cutter 386/486 Dell systems that my school must have had 500 of growing up sell for stupid money these days. I just don't get it are there that few of them left out there?

Aside from that I inadvertently plugged in the AT power header on a no name Socket 5 board in reverse once and produced quite the smoke show.
 
Mid teens. Assembled PC. Had done this before like 5 times. Wouldn't post. No beep, no bios, no nuffin.
Went through every ram config, taking one out and leaving the others in, then only one at a time, disassembled and reassembled everything besides the cpu/mainboard.

Was so frustrated I finally took it to the shop that sold me the parts. Shop bloke opened it up, gave me a raised eyebrow and plugged in the power cable from the psu into the motherboard which had been obscured by a heatsink.

I had plugged in and nicely organized every single cable, while failing to plug in the main power for the mainboard. I troubleshot for 3 hours and never noticed.

F.M.L.
 
my sorry ass made the mistake of skimming through the process of activating 2fa, normally that wouldn't be bad, but this was discord, which basically tells you "you're on your own" if you get locked out of your 2fa enabled account.

don't make my mistake.

never touch 2fa on your discord, and if you do WRITE IT THE FUCK DOWN.
 
Astute Observation said:
The only Socket 370 Gateway motherboards I recall seeing were ones in their SFF machines that only supported Celeron cpus with 66mhz front side bus. If it was one of those it was no great loss. Most of the ones you weren't allowed to touch just need to be recapped to get them going again, like my old Tualatin ready Soyo SY-TISU that has been in storage forever. If it powers on but doesn't output video that is what I would look at.

I think my biggest tech fuckup was disposing of an old (Asus based if I recall correctly) 486dx2 66mhz and 2-3 Sound Blaster opl sound cards some 10 to 15 years ago. Exceptional people are paying exceptional prices for old stuff these days. For some reason a nice Pentium 1 motherboard with processor and ram sell for ~$100 but stuff from only a few years prior that use to be dirt cheap now sells for upwards of 200-300 that with people asking as much as 400-500. Even the old cookie cutter 386/486 Dell systems that my school must have had 500 of growing up sell for stupid money these days. I just don't get it are there that few of them left out there?

Aside from that I inadvertently plugged in the AT power header on a no name Socket 5 board in reverse once and produced quite the smoke show.
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It was a board out of a full size tower from 2000 or 2001, which makes it even more of a painful loss since even those from a cookie cutter shitter like Gateway are worth decent money now. Then again I stopped caring about S370 boards once I realized the Athlon XP is cheaper and is basically the equivalent of a roid raging Coppermine.

Also I have yet to experience the fun of red + red cable plugging, the closest I have gotten to that overall is trying to power a DMG Game Boy with a reverse polarity which just burnt out the small board the DMG puts the DC input on.
 
Splinters RCVD said:
While using Linux, as root, and trying to write a custom keyboard layout, I accidentally deleted the system folder where the files for the OS to recognize and understand mice are kept. Cue messing around with the keyboard and another Linux computer to fix it.
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Yeah I did this where I deleted my DE and had to re-install Arch because my laptop's wifi wasn't working (and I couldn't be fucked using NetworkManager with that absolute shitshow of SSID's and BSSID's).

Remember to set your DE as your default on bootup friends...
 
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