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

[Banquet Meal]

i got one. this is honestly pretty bad, and im not sure if it qualifies, but it has to do with computers i guess..
so my laptop was sort of lagging a bit, and i couldnt figure out why..so i just took off all of the security stuff on it. it kept popping up with "warnings" and constantly checking for updates, so i erased it all and disabled the rest...

and it did work a lot faster, but then it started trying to connect to random porn websites, like all at the same time somehow...i have NO clue what happened, and if i thought it was lagging bad before, it would barely work after that !
my husband got me a new laptop and told me to never do that again. he was ultra pissed, too.
(i fully admit to being a retard here, but whatever)

 

[Battlefield42]

Figured out that mobo wasn't the problem but the psu was. My nigger ass didn't think having a 4 pin cpu power wasn't enough to get fan spin. Bought a new cpu and mobo and had the same problem. Changed to the psu that does have 8 pin cpu power and shit booted just fine. Rip 200 euros spent on new parts i didn't need.

 

[Glaust]

Long ago when I built my first computer I checked everything, it worked fine. Then I hooked up the monitor, and kept wondering why the computer wasn't turning on. Too retarded to just realize the monitor needed to be turned on. Anyone else?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Long ago when I built my first computer I checked everything, it worked fine. Then I hooked up the monitor, and kept wondering why the computer wasn't turning on. Too retarded to just realize the monitor needed to be turned on. Anyone else?

I've had that happen with monitors that had the buttons and "joystick" on the back, except the power button wasn't one of them like a lot of other monitors, the power button was a soft and shallow pellet underneath the bezel.

 

[/AMP/]

My laser printer started printing black dots randomly and from my research, I decided it wouldn't hurt to try to clean the insides and fix the issue.

Imagine my surprise when the 1 milimeter dot turned into a fucking puddle of darkness printed on every page
Thankfully after some careful cleaning with no less than 40 qtips, printer is back to being good as new, those 10 minutes in between were quite stressful not gonna lie


I also managed to fuck up a motherboard in a spectacular fashion, I don't recall exactly what was wrong with it, but I remember it not turning on with a jumper enabled. With the jumper missing it did power up, but gave some error codes.
My big brained approach consisted of plugging the jumper into the motherboard after turning it on.
And that's how the motherboard gained a new but temporary LED.

The oldest fuckup of mine I can recall was playing around with one of those PGA Pentium 4 CPUs, I didn't know shit about computers back then, so after having a close look at it I attempted putting it back in the socket. Of course I put it the wrong orientation and fucked up half the pins.

I still have it as a keychain, and this way it's probably more useful than it ever was considering it's a Pentium 4

 

[Milkshake Sniffer]

My first (and only so far) AM5 build. All put together except GPU. Would rely on the CPU's video output while checking everything worked just to remove that potential point of failure. Powered on and was getting steady CPU and DRAM debug warning lights. Was not concerned as this was consistent with memory training and there had been a lot of publicity about AM5 taking it's time (sometimes minutes) to do this. Became a little more concerned at 5 mins with no change. Properly concerned at the 10 mins mark. Realised I had a real issue at 20 mins.

Powered off and checked DRAM was properly seated, NVMe drive properly fitted, all cables properly seated, nothing potentially shorting the MB. Even checked I hadn't tried to force the CPU in incorrectly. Couldn't find anything wrong but powering on again just gave the same result. After about of week of wondering what could be wrong I was coming to terms with the CPU and/or DRAM and/or MB being knackered and needing replacement though, as it was my only AM5 I had no suitable replacements to switch in to isolate where the problem was.

As a last resort before incurring serious extra cost I decided to dismantle everything and rebuild. I was not expecting a different result as I still could see nothing wrong. During dismantling I noticed that I'd misconnected the front panel pins. I had shorted the reset pins on the MB connector so, as far as the MB was concerned, the reset button was constantly being pressed.

Having reassembled and correctly connected those front panel pins all was well with the world though to this day on powering on I find myself glancing to check that the debug lights are going through their correct sequence.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

so my laptop was sort of lagging a bit, and i couldnt figure out why..so i just took off all of the security stuff on it. it kept popping up with "warnings" and constantly checking for updates, so i erased it all and disabled the rest...

As a kid I got a pc prebuilt by some fat guy my parents knew. It basically became the norm to have it formatted 2-3 times a year, but at one point I asked which programs I could close and he'd include the anti virus, basically setting himself up for more formatting pay down the line. Fat cunt.

As a last resort before incurring serious extra cost I decided to dismantle everything and rebuild. I was not expecting a different result as I still could see nothing wrong. During dismantling I noticed that I'd misconnected the front panel pins. I had shorted the reset pins on the MB connector so, as far as the MB was concerned, the reset button was constantly being pressed.

Threw some old parts together in a PC for a family member. It wouldn't boot. Checked all wires, gave up, pulled them all out and reinserted for the 5th time. Suddenly it worked. I fucking hate tech so much. And while building this one, I used my weakest spare cpu on which some pins got bent. Now I'm super paranoid about that happening if I get a new one for my main build.

I don't mind building PCs if it's not my own, but the idea of pulling my own apart; my online lifeline, is terrible.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Threw some old parts together in a PC for a family member. It wouldn't boot. Checked all wires, gave up, pulled them all out and reinserted for the 5th time. Suddenly it worked. I fucking hate tech so much.

Might just as well be the manufacturer's fault.

Consider this: I've had disk access issues with some older machines for years; specifically, these two PCs with Asrock mainboards. I used to think it was some controller fault. Turns out it was the cheap SATA cables Asrock had included with their mainboards. They were of such bad quality their contact pins would turn green after a few years. I only noticed when I bought some new SATA cables recently. After connecting them, all issues suddenly disappeared, so I started inspecting the old cables, and bingo!

 

[iScream into the void]

I had to set a BIOS password to use some features on a laptop I have. I forgot the password, and now because of how the laptop is I can't unlock it because the method for doing so is no longer offered by the company (Thanks, HP). So now I'm gonna try flashing my own BIOS! Fun times.

Threw some old parts together in a PC for a family member. It wouldn't boot. Checked all wires, gave up, pulled them all out and reinserted for the 5th time. Suddenly it worked. I fucking hate tech so much.

If you aren't superstitious when you start working with tech, don't worry, you will be by the time you're done.

 

[Curry Teafag]

I had to set a BIOS password to use some features on a laptop I have. I forgot the password, and now because of how the laptop is I can't unlock it because the method for doing so is no longer offered by the company (Thanks, HP). So now I'm gonna try flashing my own BIOS! Fun times.

You should be thankful a BIOS reflash is enough to restore access.

If it was a ThinkPad, your only way to restore access would be sending in the laptop to Lenovo, paying them a few hundred bucks, and getting it back with a new mainboard installed.

 

[oprichniki]

Back when I was learning C, I thought it would be good idea to inline a recursive function. The compiler I used didn't have guards to detect that error, so it just went in an infinite loop of "substituting itself" until it ran out of resources and crashed. It took me a while to figure out why hitting "build" would crash the whole IDE.

 

[/AMP/]

I managed to make a DHCP server shit itself by simply restarting my router, what fixed it was restarting the damn thing yet again

Such behaviour makes zero sense until I tell you it's a TP-Link router

 

[Zyklon C]

See, what you don't want to do is disable Secure Boot on your Surface Book 2 to try Linux on it, because once you re-enable it, there's almost a Biblical level of certainty that it's going to demand your Bitlocker recovery key. And because you don't actually have a key for a machine that's eight years old because you shut down your Microsoft account without saving that key, you're fucked.

So, I must thank Microsoft for actually forcing me to install Linux on the SB2 whether I was ready or otherwise. Thanks to that fuckery, I know have a 100% Linux ecosystem.

Fuck up or?

 

[Zyklon C]

After a bit of work, I managed to get Ubuntu and the Surface-kernal installed on this Surface Book 2. Ubuntu probably wouldn't have been my first choice but I'm familiar with it and everything I read suggests that touch works best with GNOME.

Some fun earlier today when I found out that the hard drive I used with my Windows backup couldn't be read by Ubuntu. Luckily I found a Windows 10 laptop under a pile of stuff and was able to transfer all of my my files on to a USB thumb drive and then back on to the SB2.

I have to say that GNU/Linux is running better on the SB2 than I had expected. Battery life seems fine, touch works, detaching the keyboard from the screen has been flawless. Once again, I'd like to thank Microsoft for forcing this move.

 

[Zeftax]

Just spent maybe half of an hour, maybe more, trying to figure out how to write a dead apex*; only to realize that what I wanted to write was a dead macron.

---

* What the relevant symbol name from keysymdef.h is, or what it's unicode codepoint is.

 

[jeanblunt]

I was trying to set up a VM on Virtual Box and I got an error. The error told me to reinstall akmod. I reinstalled it and rebooted. At this time I was still new to Linux and knew akmod was crucial but though reinstalling it wouldn't do anything. Well lesson learned, my entire PC starting shitting the bed. Good thing though is I managed to restore it prior to the incident. Fuck Oracle for shitty instructions.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Fuck Oracle

Correct.