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

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I bought a portable DVD Player from a garage sale thinking I could get a new battery for it off of Ebay.

I later learned that the kind of batteries needed for them were recalled immediately a few months after their market date because they had a tendency to overheat and explode.

Fuck.
 
Bought an Intel CPU as a kid without checking my motherboard first, and naturally, it turned out that it was AMD-compatible. I'm pretty sure I was aware of the difference at the time so I really don't know what the fuck was I thinking. Also had to endure a very embarrassing lecture from the store owner as a result.
 
I bought gguitar hero:world tour for £20 because I wanted the nostalgia buzz of GH. So mad was I at that piece of fucking time wasting shite, that I smashed the guitar on the floor and snapped the disc in half.

The fuck up was buying it before reading the reviews.
 
My friend and I hosted a Team Fortress (og) server back in the day. We had an old dual Xeon server set up and I kept it under my desk near the ac vent in my room. We would control it by logging in from our own PCs remotely, using realVNC there was a server side and a client "viewer" program. One day I had to shut it down to put some bigger ram in it and I found someone had logged into the remote viewer and were just cruising through the hard drive. Neither me nor my dopey friend put a password on the client side (:_(luckily the only thing on the hard drive was Windows XP and whatever the Half-life server client program was.

Back then we both used Visual Basic to make stupid programs and just fuck around really. We got this idea to make keyloggers or game cheat programs (usually just ripping off another cheat program by sniffing the packets it used and just adding them to ours". This is when everyone used AIM. We would ask classmates to test them out. But what we didn't tell them was that it changed a registry setting that turned on file sharing via AIM and turned off notifications for it. So anytime they were on AIM we had access to their PC and could transfer files to us.
Let's just say more than one highschool kid was downloading CP (:_((:_((:_(usually via limewire, ares, kazaa, Morpheus, or bear share.
Some of those file names haunt me to this day. We would call the person out and they would blame a sibling or something.
Wish we took it further
 
Was flashing a bootable OS to a thumb drive, started dd which started working without issues, after a few seconds looked down to see the thumb drive on the table not plugged in to anything. Realized I had just obliterated the partition table of an internal drive I had some old stuff backed up on. Just careless on autopilot and I gave dd the last drive fdisk -l was showing me, because dats normali were da usb showz up. Managed to recover 90% of the important stuff, but it was a mess.
 
I once plugged a switch into itself. Thankfully it didn’t break it but it made me sweat bullets for a bit.
 
I shoved a giant cooler on a tiny motherboard. Works just fine except when I go to get my video card out. To get the video card out I have to press down on a lever to release it, problem is my cooler is so girthy (ladies) that I can't even get to it once everything is installed.

Only way I can get in there is with a metal spatula but even then only a tiny sliver of the lever I have to push down on is accessible that way. If that spatula slips I could possibly destroy my motherboard so I dread having to remove that cooler for any reason.

My other fuckup is forgetting to clean thermal paste off processors before taking them out of the socket. My fingers get paste on them and then it gets transferred to the processor's pins (I use AMD so the pins are on the processor itself unlike Intel). I shamefully admit I've had to buy a toothbrush and some rubbing alcohol more than once to get thermal paste off processor pins.
 
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I once purposefully dropped my phone from arm's height in school to show how well it was protected, and it fell screen down lead to the screen protector getting cracked. But the screen remained unscathed and the phone kept working for a few more years, I only replaced it last year because it started acting up too much to be used, but it's still impressive that it has survived so long and didn't become an absolute paperweight, the LG G3's were known from being unreliable. So yeah, it was indeed well protected, and I never changed the screen protector, and the case's rubber was falling apart.
 
When I was like 11 I asked my parents if it was ok I formatted the hard drive on our family PC to install Linux.
They said "sure".

A few days later my father acted stunned all his work files had disappeared. I told them I had explicitly asked for permission. This was the first time in my life I realized adults did not understand the technical terminology that I at elementary school age had already learned via the internet. They never got angry because they understood my position, but I'm pretty sure I wiped a few year's worth of work. Possibly PhD papers in progress. I never inquired further.
 
I almost toasted our family PC in the early 2000s by using a shady keygen I downloaded off limewire or emule or something to try to pirate Diablo 2. Luckily it was some shitty virus that was easily removed, could have been much worse if I stumbled on a more malicious one.

It was a good time to be alive though. Kids these days won't know the feeling of finally downloading that One Piece episode only for it to turn out to be porn. Good times.
 
Stasi said:
It was a good time to be alive though. Kids these days won't know the feeling of finally downloading that One Piece episode only for it to turn out to be porn. Good times.
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Limewire was particularly bad in that way for new movies, if you wanted a cam or workprint day 1 release about 85% of the time it was porn or some renamed movie.
 
Stasi said:
It was a good time to be alive though. Kids these days won't know the feeling of finally downloading that One Piece episode only for it to turn out to be porn. Good times.
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Back in my day I had to carry my 50 pound CRT and computer uphill in the snow to a LAN party so I could download movies from some guy's local FTP without racking up the phone bill for weeks.
 
Arm_of_the_Lord said:
Bought an Intel CPU as a kid without checking my motherboard first, and naturally, it turned out that it was AMD-compatible. I'm pretty sure I was aware of the difference at the time so I really don't know what the fuck was I thinking. Also had to endure a very embarrassing lecture from the store owner as a result.
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Wasn't it odd how hanging out at the computer hardware store and talking computer hardware with the seller/owner was just a thing? There was a time in the city I live in where there were tons of these small computer stores just about everywhere and it was a normal thing to just visit the different stores when you went shopping and compare prices and see who had what and talk to the people a bit. Can't even imagine anymore today. The stores are all gone too. Same with video games.

If you put too much voltage into an eprom the die starts glowing. I wish I could say that only happened once. Also 5V logic doesn't like +12V. That one happened way too often to me.
 
I did tons o troubleshooting things and thought my motherboard was dead on arrival but turns out the 24 pin power cable just wasn’t quite plugged in right and the computer started working after I wiggled it. :stress:

I took the CPU cooler off while I was troubleshooting though because it was covering the RAM slots and it’s gonna be an absolute bitch to get back on. I had to get my dad to help me with it the first time and even he had a really hard time with it, it’s super fiddly to get screwed on and the fan clips are quite a tight fit. I hope I won’t have to remove the GPU to get a good enough visual underneath to make sure the cooler is lined up either - it has a clip on it like the RAM slots but it’s a super tight one that you have to press on super hard to remove the GPU. My sister’s boyfriend had to help me with it since I dropped one of the GPU screws deep into the case when I was trying to secure the card and he pressed hard enough that he managed to cut both his thumbs in the process of getting it out.
 
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I bent the pins in my USB 3 port by wiggling the cable to make sure it was plugged in right when I saw it wasn't working.
Not the end of the world since I can just attach a USB hub to the back of the PC and use that instead, but RIP. Guess I have no front panel USB until I eventually upgrade my motherboard.

((Also one of my RAM sticks isn't working but that's not a me-being-a-pc-building-virgin problem since I bought it secondhand from CEX and got a broken one. I'm gonna see if I can exchange it for a working one since everything you buy from there has a 24-month warranty but I hope the RNG gods smile upon me and it's not a very tall stick since it needs to fit underneath my low profile cooler - CEX list their RAM by type, size and speed but not brand so you get whatever heat spreader they give you pretty much. I bought from them because not only was it cheaper than buying a new stick but also they use a stock image of a plain RAM stick with no heat spreader on it for the online listing and the stick I harvested from my Dell prebuilt also has no heat spreader on it; I didn't realise it was a stock image so I was like "if I buy from here I'll get a plain RAM stick and then they'll both match aesthetically and won't be too tall"))
 
In my youth while in training I saw Darwin in action. Well many times. One of them is a electrician, rewiring a ballast, while on a metal ladder between rain showers. And that fucker was making $15 more than I in 1984. He was finally forced to retire at the age of 72 a few months after the incident.

You can't help the stupid.


As far as myself? because of being in tech for so long and due to injuries. I am unable to use a normal keyboard. It has to be a Mircosoft Natural Elite. The old school ps/2 style. They are getting expensive now even for used. I've tried other styles similar to it and I start having issues.

2 years ago I was in a hurry and spilt soda on it.... and poof it was dead....

I'm also trying to find a replacement for my Etekcity delux M910 mouse... The problem is that it has a nice wrist sled and it would great win reducing the wrist issues I have.

As we get older the things was get used to our bodies mold or make changes to it. I've got a kitchen knife I've used for over 40 years. It's got a very slight bent to base of the blade from all of the cutting done on it. I've been some good money on some good knives but I've always go back to that particular one. The tools you use sometimes become part of you by use.
 
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Elysian said:
I did tons o troubleshooting things and thought my motherboard was dead on arrival but turns out the 24 pin power cable just wasn’t quite plugged in right and the computer started working after I wiggled it. :stress:

I took the CPU cooler off while I was troubleshooting though because it was covering the RAM slots and it’s gonna be an absolute bitch to get back on. I had to get my dad to help me with it the first time and even he had a really hard time with it, it’s super fiddly to get screwed on and the fan clips are quite a tight fit. I hope I won’t have to remove the GPU to get a good enough visual underneath to make sure the cooler is lined up either - it has a clip on it like the RAM slots but it’s a super tight one that you have to press on super hard to remove the GPU. My sister’s boyfriend had to help me with it since I dropped one of the GPU screws deep into the case when I was trying to secure the card and he pressed hard enough that he managed to cut both his thumbs in the process of getting it out.
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If it attaches to the backplate then brackets and screws are enough to set the cooler right, don't worry about it. But while you're spelunking, figure out if the new cooler inconveniences you if you add more ram. And figure out how to unclip/unseat the GPU, that is good to know.
Elysian said:
((Also one of my RAM sticks isn't working but that's not a me-being-a-pc-building-virgin problem
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Check the chips, if you bought it secondhand it might be registered ram or something.
 
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