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

[med2003]

A couple of years ago I noticed the PSU on my PC was making an "odd" noise. So I took it apart, while watching TV. Took the cover off it and fired the PSU up, then lost concentration to the TV so managed to touch a part of the PSU with a finger. Electracuted myself, blow up the PSU and fused all the lights in my house. Nice one! D'oh!

[kreeeee]

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

Geuss which pendrive i formatted? :X

I <3 getdataback

[Lee H]

Worst one I did was got very drunk on Christmas Eve and proceeded to go on my PC when I got home at 8am on Christmas day.

Being bleary-eyed and in a drunken stupour, I pressed what I thought was the key to load into BIOS as I had to rectify an earlier issue.

Except, this drunken numpty did not load the BIOS, instead I missed it and loaded the RAID BIOS and proceeded to press the wrong things. As a result, my 2 x 300 Gb Raid 0 array filled with music was cream-crackered and I lost it all.

Thankfully, I got a fair wedge of the music back by other methods and now I back them up to DVD and whack them in a folder.

[Tarffie]

I've done the accidental format thing. Backed everything important onto an external USB harddrive, went through all the stuff and blizted every drive that was there. I hadn't unplugged the USB harddrive =/

I got a X1900XTX back when they were costing about &#163;300-&#163;350. Took it out for some reason, plugged it all back up, switched it on and got that lovely burning smell I'm sure a lot of you would recognise. In my haste to get the computer up and running again I had plugged the PSU cable in the wrong way. Luckily there was no physical damage so I got it RMAd successfully, I just had to go through a few people because by the time I bought it, it was 3rd hand. OcUK only wanted to deal with the original buyer and the original buyer only wanted to deal with the guy I bought it from. Hassle.

[Dav0s]

you know on some of the older (i think samsung) hard drives there was a hole, with a little label next to it saying "do not cover this hole".

well i covered that hole just to see what would happen. cue one very busted hard drive.

[mycarsavw]

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?

I had a server containing everyone's (17 users) data since migrating 4 years ago. You know the feeling you get where you're not sure if you're going to shart or vomit? I had that for two days as I furiously tried everything I could think of to get the server to boot before finally giving in going right back to basics.

Yup, the power cable wasn't plugged into the back of the HDD

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?

Done that too, I emptied the contents of my stomach onto my keyboard twice in a two week period. The first time was due to a dodgy 11th pint, the second was while trying to clean the keyboard.

I also ran a copy of UWCleaner on one of my networked work machines. I ran a duplicate file scan and it found well over 400MB of cleanable files. I had a brief look through the file locations and whittled out what I wanted to keep which, as they were duplicates, wasn't much.

I hit "CLEAN" and sat back and watched the list of files shrink.

After hitting OK to reboot and waiting a while I was confronted with that awful message "XXX.dll is missing Windows cannot be started...." I tried Safe Mode, no joy, I tried a boot disc, no joy, I bunged in a Win 98 disc and ran through a minimal setup just so I could try and find out what was going on.

It turns out I was in G: and not C: when I started the duplicate file scan. G: is the mapped network drive of my other work machine. UWCleaner had compared G: with C: and wiped the duplicate files from C:

I was a little cross for a few months as I clicked OK to countless missing DLL file messages.

[joshwa]

I've...

Frozen a 486 (it survived)
Poured coke on the same PC (it survived)
Left it to rust (it survived)
Barbeque'd the PC (it died)
Poured Vodka on a running Hard Drive (it partially survivied, then died)
I've killed a IBM Cyrix CPU by running it without the heatsink, it died, very unspectacularly.

That's about it for stupid things, although I've dropped a few PCs, and Laptops, most of them survived.

I've also sat on a laptop cracking the (closed) screen. (this was accidental)
I've also spilled drinks on about 3 or 4 keyboards killing them to death.
I also managed to electrocute myself on an Atari ST power supply a couple of times.

Josh

[danroyle]

knocked a pint of coke down the back of my 1 day old LG 15" lcd that set me back almost &#163;300 at the time monitor was ok afterwards and was still 100&#37; working with no dead pixels 3 years later when i sold it

[iranu]

Some how I managed to break the little plastic tab (with the gold on) that is the sata connector for one of my drives whilst doing a new build. Yep the one with all my data on. I couln't believe it 160g drive dead but then I had the bright idea of supergluing the tab back on and praying that the sata cable was not too tight a fit. It's still working 18 moths later woohoo!

I also had a dodgy stick of ram but forgot to label it or throw it away. A few months later I thought hey I've got a spare 128mb sdram here, right that's going in. 2 days later at a lan party the whole machine was going mental with random BSOD. Took ages to figure out and held us up for a bit. When we figured it out my mate smashed the ram stick with a hammer to stop me doing it again. The reason: he new about the dodgy stick because it was him and me that worked it out six months before and he couldn't believe I hadn't chucked it.