PCs - Ever done anything really stupid to or with them?

[Premium]

Adding some new RAM and a CD rewriter to PC one day, squatting on the floor.

Sneezed and lost balance...


...crack goes the motherboard


The RAM and CD drive were fine though

[Mad-Max]

Having a coffee to close to the keyboard and then spilling it all over it

[mallett]

I havent broken any part of my computer (yet, toughing any wood I can find) but I did manage to loose all data on my hdds when I ballsed up the RAID on them. Took me a day of trying every combination of plugging in each hard drive every which way i could think of and trying to install windows, before I realised that I hadnt turned off the RAID function on the mobo

also my dad managed to format the wrong drive the other week, I almost pissed myself laughing!

[iranu]

Worrying about and desperately trying to troubleshoot a new HDD for around a half hour before realising I hadn't plugged in the SATA cable?

Quality. Stupid is as stupid does = all of us at some point in our lives. No more so than when messin' with the PC. I like it.

I also recently received a text from a friend saying "What does the 240/115 switch on the back of a computer do...it blew up"

I am sure that this was a carefully calculated ploy for the PSU/hardware manufacturers. I can see the reasoning behind the switch but surely the voltage could ahve been applied to the elevent market.

[mroz]

I've un/plugged a few components from assorted mobos then realised I should probably have cut the power first.

I once made a joystick from a rug hook, squash ball & watch presentation box, then preceeded to melt a hole in the side of my computer, feed the lead through & solder the wires directly to the keyboard pcb.

After that the joystick didn't work & neither did the keyboard.

Thankfully I managed to desolder the leads & the keyboard came back to life. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I found out my idea was sound but for the fact the joystick cable was naturally over 18" at which point its capacitance screwed with the keyboard.

This was incidentally with a Sinclair ZX81 which at the time was my only computer & a prized possession.

[ACiD303]

Fried just about any component, although technically it's not my fault, my mates wanted to push more against my advice. Though I've fried my motherboard, cpu, graphics and ram of my own to know better. Keep it within limits or start saving for items lost!

And I threw a school computer out the window once in angst....not at the computer (albeit a 286) but I wasn't taking abuse from teachers who think they're the be all and end all. Pretty much an idiot, but I couldn't help it at the time. There's a lot more about the computing department at my school that I did, which if I was my own dad I'd be thinking "what happened"? Not so cool...

[Jakg]

I think most of us will have at some point formatted the wrong partition/drive or deleted a large and important folder and not been able to recover them. I know I have.

Get new pendrive, cut important coursework onto newer, faster pen drive. Format old pendrive.

Geuss which pendrive i formatted? :X

[Nick]

Ooh I just thought of another one....

I installed Vista!

[Vroomparrot]

Also, I remember in my youth I flipped the 240v/110v switch on the back of my uncle's IBM XT, while it was on ......slight kerboom.

What sort of fool would do that?........Ok I admit it, I once did exactly the same. I can only imagine someone else at the same time was flipping a switch in my brain from intelligent to stupid. Or maybe it was just the Imp of the Perverse.

[jackvdbuk]

Get new pendrive, cut important coursework onto newer, faster pen drive. Format old pendrive.

Geuss which pendrive i formatted? :X

nice! what did you do after that?

[Mad-Max]

Ooh I just thought of another one....

I installed Vista!

[Nabobalis]

Spilled god knows what on to various keyboards. Once emptied most of the Windows folder to see what would happen and flashed a BIOS in windows with bad results.

[OV3RCLOCK3R]

Get new pendrive, cut important coursework onto newer, faster pen drive. Format old pendrive.

Geuss which pendrive i formatted? :X

Same!

[EvilWeevil]

I am sure that this was a carefully calculated ploy for the PSU/hardware manufacturers. I can see the reasoning behind the switch but surely the voltage could ahve been applied to the elevent market.

It turned out that it happened while the computer was turned on, and a combination of curiosity and lack of common sense overwhelmed him

However only the PSU was fried, so not too many tears were shed

[BEANFro Elite]

I guess I'm a bit lucky with liquids being spilt on my mean machine, I've vomitted on my keyboard, but loads went in my PC as well, well I DID have arseloads to drink, what do you expect?

Another time, my girlfriend and I were having a rather animated early morning drunken discussion and she knocked over a full glass of orange juice on my PC, on both occasions, it has survived completely unscathed .

Other stupid things I've done are: I've broken two CPUs through being too heavy-handed when swapping CPU coolers. LOL!

[dangel]

Forgot to put the heatsink on a cpu, turned on, BANG, smoke the lot..

Many incidents of keyboard destruction through beer..