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

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Upgraded my media server, forgot how I set up the old one so I am having to fix problems that I fixed on the previous one again
 
Spilled coffee on my vita when I was 13, left it on instead of removing the battery and cleaning it. Miraculously, only the sticks and the right trigger broke.
 
Zeftax said:
A small one, but it just happened. I was just reassembling a T450 and screwed the screw under the battery too tight and made a dent on the keyboard side... At least it's only a visual blemish and everything still works fine. I was not aware just how little room there is.
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My personal rule on screw tightening in computers is turning the screwdriver (I use the slim Xiaomi/Wiha one, RIP that collab) with the tips of my fingers and stopping the moment I feel enough resistance that I'd need to start and hamfist it. It worked very well for me, changed the thermal paste on two laptops as well as two GPU's without causing any damage to the silicon and still having right temps. I once slightly overtorqued the CPU cooler and I heard an audible crack, but thankfully I didn't break anything, and ever since then I adhere to the fingertip torque rule.
Disco Inferno said:
I thought a 10 year old case with shit air flow and 4 fans could handle my rig.
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I invested in a better case in my long term upgrade plan before finally getting a new PSU and GPU since I knew my old case was a hotbox, my 1060 would hit like 80C on full load and after getting a new case I was able to keep it at like 70C with the fans being practically inaudible. Also it's a pleasure to work in. The side panels slot into the bottom of the case and have captive screws instead of the stupid "push the side panel against the case for it to latch on properly" bullshit of the old case. The PCIe brackets are recessed into the case, are all independent, come with thumb screws and the covers can be put back on, instead of the "break out a metal cover and be left with a hole you need aftermarket covers and also aftermarket screws and also all the brackets have to be unscrewed to take off the metal cover outside of the case to take out the PCIe cards becuase fuck you" neanderthal "solution" of the old case. Don't be a cheapskate and buy yourself a nice case just so that you have a good time working on your PC. I got a Fractal Pop Air Solid Black and it's relatively inexpensive, but also relatively well built, with good airflow and two 5.25" bays, albeit with limited 3.5" options.

Pro tip: if you get a refurbished GPU and it's temps are kinda high, get some PTM7950 and some thermal pads and change them yourself. In my case the seller dropped the ball on that and I've overspent on Arctic fans. On the plus side I can now push my GPU a lot and have both good temps and good acoustics with all the retardation I did to it.
 
Slav Power said:
Don't be a cheapskate and buy yourself a nice case
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Yep! I've built a new PC ~1 month ago and I was shocked by how far the case technology had come. I don't think I've sworn once during the assembly (If I ignore the first try, when the case was broken AND I couldn't find the manual AND the CPU cooler fan refused to hold onto the fins...)
 
I love my old retro case. No cooling problems. Problem is I had to move my "desktop" into a bigger case as the old retro case wouldn't fit 2 GPUs. Now the retro case is the gaming/retro gaming/flight sim machine.
 
When I was a kid and got a PS1 for Christmas one year the RCA jacks on my TV were not color coded, they were just black like the rest of the TV and so I ended up plugging the white audio cable in the the video input on the TV and thought the PS1 was defective, my dad insisted that we try getting an RF adaptor before we return it so we did and that worked but I had to wait two days to play my new Playstation because all the stores were closed for Christmas and I spent three years playing it through RF and getting interference whenever the vacuum cleaner was running or my dad was shaving.

I felt a great sense of shame when a friend finally showed me how to hook up the RCA jacks and saw just how easy it was.
 
Recently managed to compromise two machines. Wanted to install something off GitHub, installer didn't seem to work on my laptop so tried it on another machine. That also failed so I gave up.

Get contacted by work IT the following day saying they think I've been compromised. I'm assuming the corporate IT saw a login attempt from an unknown source.

I spent almost a whole day reinstalling windows.

Still not sure what the fuck happened, either I wasn't paying attention and used a fake GitHub page or the legit page was somehow compromised.
 
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I got reminded of this when i posted somewhere else about my very first PC build today: I jammed the DVD drive (yeah, it's been a while) so hard into its slot because it just wouldn't slide in properly that the cable that connected the power button of the case to the mainboard got damaged. So badly that the PC did not turn on after i was finished building it. I "switched" on that PC by bridging the power on the mainboard with an insulated screwdriver (this was a tip from a user on the PC Games Hardware forum, to this day i don't know if he was kinda fucking with me but it did definitely work) before i figured out what the problem was for at least a month. After i figured out what the problem was i had to let the power button hang out on top of the case by its cable in a certain angle that sort of mended the cable connection so that i could use the actual switch to power it on, for the remaining life time of that PC. I spent 1400€ on that build.
BubbaRobot887 said:
When I was a kid and got a PS1 for Christmas one year the RCA jacks on my TV were not color coded, they were just black like the rest of the TV and so I ended up plugging the white audio cable in the the video input on the TV and thought the PS1 was defective, my dad insisted that we try getting an RF adaptor before we return it so we did and that worked but I had to wait two days to play my new Playstation because all the stores were closed for Christmas and I spent three years playing it through RF and getting interference whenever the vacuum cleaner was running or my dad was shaving.

I felt a great sense of shame when a friend finally showed me how to hook up the RCA jacks and saw just how easy it was.
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Just reading "PS1" triggered an ancient memory, on one TV i had my PS1 RGB scart cable did not fit because of the TV's construction and i proceeded to just rip some of the plastic out with a pair of pliers to make it fit. I was smart enough that i unplugged the TV before doing that but i don't think it was an entirely smart idea in the first place. It did work. To my defense, you needed to use an RGB scart cable to play import games in color here in Euroland so i was ready to do anything to make it work.
 
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Used Clonezilla to image my 1TB boot drive onto a 5 TB backup drive. Simple enough.

Go through the process and it tells me it will take 6 hours. 6? I don't remember it ever taking that long before, but okay. Come back a few hours later and it had stopped because it ran out of room. 1<5? I couldn't kill Clonezilla so I manually shut down the PC.

Reboot it and it shows the PC's splash page and then nothing. Reboot it again, same thing.

Boot into the Grub command line and eventually discover my boot drive was 100% full, not 36% full. Turns out Linux doesn't boot on a 100% filled boot drive. Also turns out that I fucked up and was imaging the backup drive and was writing to my boot drive.

Delete folder with aborted backup drive image, PC boots up again normally. Realize that although I've been using computers since the Carter administration, I'm still occasionally a gigantic idiot.
 
Slav Power said:
Pro tip: if you get a refurbished GPU and it's temps are kinda high, get some PTM7950 and some thermal pads and change them yourself. In my case the seller dropped the ball on that and I've overspent on Arctic fans. On the plus side I can now push my GPU a lot and have both good temps and good acoustics with all the retardation I did to it.
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Interesting stuff, but hard to come by. I'd just use a good thermal paste. The Halnziye HY-P 17 I use in my laptop has twice the conductivity rating, and is applied at half the thickness, so I can't imagine that it's any worse.
 
Used a vacuum cleaner to remove dust from the inside of a case. Staring at a broken GRUB prompt and the wheels started turning... hmm... could this be why three drives failed in two months? I've been vacuuming the dust off all my electronic devices. I am very stupid.

I'm lucky the boot drive bounced back after a few reboots but it sure scared me straight.
 
I don't know if this counts, as it was yesterday. I put back together my "retro" PC with a new power supply and different GPU as I stole those parts for another system. All wired up, push power button, nothing. Check power cable, etc. all good, outlet good. Try shorting power on pins thinking the old power switch is dead, nope, still nothing. Order PS tester from Amazon. Continue testing. +5VSB on the ATX connector is live. Jumper the power on and all the rails look fine. Finally remove and disconnect everything except fans from the MB and it powers on fine. Plug in cables in reverse order, first one is USB-C from front panel. No power on... WTF. Look at it, it looks symmetrical, Try it the other way, now it powers on. Check pinout, plug may be mostly symmetrical but the pinout isn't.

Cancel power supply tester order.
 
DavidS877 said:
Plug in cables in reverse order, first one is USB-C from front panel. No power on... WTF. Look at it, it looks symmetrical, Try it the other way, now it powers on. Check pinout, plug may be mostly symmetrical but the pinout isn't.
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I had something similar, but that was no user error. The USB connector from the front panel cable was actually faulty, it wouldn't let any PC power on properly.
 
Curry Teafag said:
I had something similar, but that was no user error. The USB connector from the front panel cable was actually faulty, it wouldn't let any PC power on properly.
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That was my guess until I tried it the other way since the front panel is an insert made in the finest Chinese sweatshop.
 
I bought a small SSD (500 GB) because I only wanted to run the core of the computer on it. However, some games I play forever to load on HDD so I have to put them in the SSD. This has caused it to fill up...
 
Just deleted most of my home folder while trying to clean some things up with qdirstat. Turns out it lets you delete higher up on the file path when you search for something and press the wrong part of the path in said search.

Edit: can't recover shit, just full reinstalling my entire OS. Easier to start from scratch.
 
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