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

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Not mine but an ebay seller's.
Its possible to put a ryzen cpu back in its plastic clamshell upside down, slightly bending every pin on the corners in the process.
 
Kikkoman said:
Not mine but an ebay seller's.
Its possible to put a ryzen cpu back in its plastic clamshell upside down, slightly bending every pin on the corners in the process.
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Its possible to fix with a dull razor. Mind that the pins didn't break off.

I did drop a fx 6300 one time and was able to fix it described above.
 
The company I worked for brought a 3D printer back in the day when they were the hot new thing for rapid prototyping. They brought the kit version because it was slightly cheaper and had a quicker delivery time. I was tasked with putting it together, so I scanned through the manual for how to put the mechanical parts together but not paying attention to the electrical because I knew about that stuff.

Built it turned it on.. dead. Then go through the manual properly for troubleshooting and find out I'd put in the PCBA upside down. My fault for not RTFM. Just returned it for a replacement saying it was DOA.

However, the way you were supposed to put the PBCA in was actually upside down (Components side down). Who the fuck designs a product like that? Who makes it possible to install a PCBA the wrong way without having some kind of physical post in the cabinet molding to make it impossible, or have the outside connectors still line up when its installed the "wrong" way or not needed anything like an excessive force to install it wrong? I've never seen that ever.

Start-up tech bros that's who.
 
I made the mistake of using a Chromebook that had the eMMC soldered onto the motherboard. This of course means you cannot easily remove or access the device unless ChromeOS/Google Firmware is working. I fucked up the Google firmware and as a result all the data on the eMMC was no longer accessible, and I had no way to easily get at my data.

Moral: Don't buy / use shitty hardware.
 
Virgo said:
forgot to add insulators on screws that attached motherboard to my case
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I did this about 15 years ago - I'm guessing you mean the risers that hold the motherboard away from the metal? The computer actually did turn on and the fans turned on, but the diagnostic LEDs were just in a configuration that didn't show up in the manual. While I was trying to figure it out, I heard a crackling sound and the magic smoke escaped from the motherboard. I had spent all the money I had on that computer so I was devastated.

The thing is, I was such a retard back then that I didn't realise my mistake, so I took it back to the computer shop, said it blew up, they gave me a new one and I did the same thing again. Eventually one of my friends who had done this before took a look and explained just what an idiot I was.

Fortunately the computer shop was equally as retarded as I was so I brought it back with the PSU this time and explained that the PSU was probably to blame, I got a new motherboard and a new PSU and played soldier of fortune all fucking night. It was a great day.
 
I was trying to copy some of my save games from my Xbox 360 to a flash drive.
Now I don't remember why but it failed to copy, and deleted my saves. Goodbye 3+ years of progress in my Minecraft worlds.
I learned to use Cloud saves that day, they may be slow but they won't self delete.
 
Stasi said:
:optimistic::optimistic::optimistic:
I've had google drive randomly decide I didn't need files anymore and delete them without permission. I think its always a good idea to have local backups if possible.
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100%. :agree:
Having a backup that works when the internet does not is useful all on its own, but thumbdrives (while not 100% reliable either) are also dirt cheap and acceptably fast these days.
20-30$ gets you a halfway decent 125 or even 256gb USB3.1 drive.
Just be careful with old/heavily used ones as flash storage does degrade over time/use.
 
When I was 15 I saved up allowance money to buy a new processor for our old family PC. I made double sure to avoid static discharge (rubber gloves and all) but I forced it the wrong way in and bent several pins. I tried straightening those out with pliers and broke them off completely. I then tried supergluing the pins back in place to try and get a replacement at the hardware store, but my bullshit didn't work.

More recently, I bought a PinePhone with the massively optimistic intention of replacing with it my current ancient phone. Unfortunately, mobile Linux is raw, and I am still stuck with the old one. Though to be fair to the Pine development team they sell the phones at a massive discount for enthusiasts and put up full warning the thing is not ready just yet.
 
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Forgot to ground myself and zapped my GPU and 8GB of my RAM.

Spent hours trying to add 8GB of RAM to an ancient Optiplex when it turns out the motherboard only supports 3GB.

Tried to download free Minecraft on my Mom's tablet. It was not free Minecraft, it was a shit ton of adware (This was 10 years ago). Formatted the tablet and she got justifiably really pissed at me.
 
Since the forum dilatation of this year I was setting up a VPS to run a Tor bridge, configured a vpn to access the server instead of exposing the ssh directly, and then:

sudo ufw deny ssh

alright, so far so good, I cannot access the ssh from the external IP, let me try using the vp- oh.
welp, guess I have to start again.
 
I accidentally turned my Siri Greek. Not sure how. It's greek though. Won't answer English, messages are all in Greek. Rest of the OS, all the settings, say English. But my phone has a retarded Greek woman possessing it now I guess.
 
Many years ago, I set up a computer where I had two 7200RPM IDE drives hooked up to a RAID card in RAID 0. TWICE THE SPEED! HALF THE RELIABILITY! One day, I finally chickened out and decided to stop living dangerously, and dutifully backed up my data to an external drive, switched to RAID 1 mirroring, and restored my data. Not long after, the external drive I used for a backup died, but I didn't think much of it.

A few months later I noticed that movies I'd downloaded kept having weird graphical glitches, and I likewise heard strange noises in some of my MP3s. Doing a little more testing I discovered that the RAID card was having write errors, and introducing errors in anything saved to those drives - which of course, would then be faithfully mirrored to both drives.

This is how I learnt that RAID is not a substitute for having backups.
 
burntwater said:
I was redoing the thermal paste and heat sink on my Athlon Thunderbird (1.2GHz version I think) and used alcohol to clean up the die. I guess I used too much and it ended up removing the feet that kept the heatsink balanced on the die. I found some similar feet somewhere and stuck them on but I guess they were just slightly too thick so the heat sink didn't sit quite right and the processor ended up letting the smoke out.

All I could afford for a replacement was a Duron 900.
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To be fair, it was weird of AMD to design it without any heat-management features whatsoever, to the point where it will happily cook itself to death if the heatsink isn't installed properly.
 
IamnottheNSA said:
To be fair, it was weird of AMD to design it without any heat-management features whatsoever, to the point where it will happily cook itself to death if the heatsink isn't installed properly.
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Things like that was the reason for Intel/AMD adding temperature sensor and shutting down if it got too hot. This was years before CPUs were smart enough to regulate clock speed and voltages so they don't flogiston themselves.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Things like that was the reason for Intel/AMD adding temperature sensor and shutting down if it got too hot. This was years before CPUs were smart enough to regulate clock speed and voltages so they don't flogiston themselves.
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Took 'em long enough to figure out that an emergency shutdown feature is essential if your CPU can literally fry itself to death if certain conditions aren't met.
Hindsight 20/20, I know. But at that point it's already been years since heatsinks on CPUs became a requirement, so they really should've known better.
 
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