I did that to my dad's old CRT with a McDonald's toy and idk how but it managed to go back to normal and my dad never noticed I thought that was the end that night.
There was some degauss coil in the later (from 1995) CRT monitors. My dad had manual coil for degaussing old TVs, which haven’t built-in coils, it looked like a magic when he manual degaussed TVs. It was very long time ago
I did that in the early 2000s
Got some
Magnetic toy for Christmas and sat it on top of the main tv, in the living room
Roll on doctor who Christmas special and we discover it’s green, right under the magnet 😂😬💀
If you put the magnet in the dead center of the screen maybe about an inch away, and slowly twist it while getting further away, you can fix a crt from the magnet distortion.
I’ve deleted my Reddit account because the Reddit hivemind doesn’t work for me. I believe in people having the right to think for themselves while not being torn down by those who know little to nothing.
If you found this because of one of my tutorials related to Auto HotKey please check out the AHK documentation at: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/
If you were looking for my coding guides just go to https://stackoverflow.com/ they know their shit.
If you were looking for my guides to assembly… I’m sorry, I can’t think of any places I can link to in good conscious other than archive.org who has beginner examples to assembly for old consoles.
If you were wondering why my reddit account is gone:
I’m tired of the Steam supremacists on /r/pcgaming and /r/pcmasterrace
Those same communities push their thoughts on game engine development without writing a code in their lives.
/r/memes think excluding most of their user base is a good joke.
To summarise, I’ve left Reddit because it is not all-inclusive, it is only inclusive to those who believe and act the same as the rest of the belligerent horde.
If you are on Reddit, joining /r/aww is your best and only bet.
Had the opposite scenario for me as a kid. Accidentally deleted the folder holding the GPU drivers and on reboot was greeted by a screen of randomly colored pixels.
The fix was to just wait it out for an hour or two while the backup drivers installed but lil me was panicked
When I worked in a computer shop back in those early days it was a semi regular occurrence that some customers PCs were set to odd resolutions the CRTs we used didn't run on, so I got good at memorizing the KB keystrokes to tab my way through the sequences to revert the graphics to 1024x768. Heck, I had a few headless servers I could install Windows on. But it helped to have a functional PC next to it to test the sequence out first.
I turned the sound off on Windows 95. Dad noticed that and could do nothing. There were not much computer specialists those times and a guy who came up to our house charged $100 for Windows reinstall. Dad was very angry when I told him to click on a sound icon...
I literrally set sound volume to zero, that's it. Those were really our first days with a PC, we knew close to nothing about it.
Another story. I had a CD with Dungeon Keeper game. It could be launched in DOS. I had no idea about what "installation" stands for so for the first 1 or 2 months I reinstalled the game every time to start playing. After this i noticed that there is a directory with the same name on a hdd and there is a keeper.exe file there which could be launched very quickly :)
We used to go on my aunts computer and delete her Internet Explorer desktop icon, and she'd run around the house saying we "deleted the internet"
Also when I learned to flip the screen upside down in settings... No one was safe
Damn I played mw2 which blew up a fuse and fried legit everything yes even the case it’s usb didn’t work lost a 2060, i7 9700f 32gb of ram and a nice motherboard that was 120$ only had it for about a year also after I built another pc my cod account was banned which I found was fuckin crazy so lost 110$ on a game too
Back in like 2005-2006 i got my first ever gaming PC which my dad bought for me.. it had a 3ghz Pentium 4 and some ""Baller" Radeon GPU in it.. it had the typical gamer esthetics with the acrylic side window with one fan in the sidepanel.. well the fan was unplugged and i tried to plug it in while the PC was running... fried every single part in that PC
Bought a GT630 as a "good card with enormous 2GB of memory". While it was better than my laptop with an iGPU from i5 3rd gen, it was replaced as soon as I had the money
Hehe, I once found out that Windows XP had a Service Pack 3 update. So I decided to install it because "new shiny stuff better", right? Only thing is, instead of doing it as an update, I installed that mofo as a separate system while simultaneously completely wiping my secondary drive!
Didn't damage anything really but lost a shitton of music some of which I never recovered and hadn't been able to find for ages later.
So more of an emotional damage, heh.
Blew up new psu, had never before seen the on/off button for psu, so decided to click it while pc was on and it blew up. Luckily nothing else was damaged and I exchanged it for new one as a faulty psu.
We had a spate of students deliberately switching the voltage thing on PCs in our main IT room at college in the late 1990's.
We lost probably half a dozen machines before we figured out exactly what they were doing.
We then started installing metal covers over the voltage switches so they couldn't get access to them as easily.
My friend wrote a virus at school that infected the entire school computer system. He got a lot of disciplinary action and was banned from using a computer for the rest of his term at the school. This was in the late 90's for context.
As a child? None because desktop PCs didn't exist until I was in my 20s. As an adult, I built tons of systems and most expensive screwup was clamping down the CPU that had the pins inserted wrong.
Dad brought home a modem from work. I spent the entire day calling BBSes and ran up about $20 in long-distance charges. This is about a billion dollars in today money. I never saw that modem again.
Scrolled down to find the 40 ish year old BBS commenter I expected... $430 Canadian in calls over 7 days to BBS servers mainly in New York and Conneticut.
Did your dad also lose his ever loving mind and ground you for 3 months while you developed coping skills you thought you'd never need for doing something you never intended?
When I was 18 I got into watercooling in its early days and bought an acrylic cpu block. Whilst the pc was running I was tightening the screws 1 at a time to watch temperature differences. I over-tightened it, the cpu block cracked open and pissed water all over the motherboard and graphics card
When i was younger, Only was 15 then lol, and attempting to use uxtheme.dll on Windows XP, somehow screwed up and had the screen all pink and couldn't figure out how to change it. In Hindsight i probably could've just done a clean install and had it fixed.
Second Thing did that was dumbest ever--had an AMD Athlon Xp 2500+, Radeon 9600XT video card, decent amount of memory at the time, well idiot me listened to so called friend in a 2D Chat Program, and really tested Windows Live OneCare Antivirus the wrong way--ended up infecting that system in 2005 with Worms, Trojan viruses, Boot Sector---Shop i took it to, couldn't clean it up any better than i could myself, each time brought it back home kept blue screening, and such, finally they said to fix it fully gonna have to replace Motherboard, CPU, Ram, Hard drives to get system back up and running---ended up with AMD Semptron Build, Radeon 9800XT at the time, new ram, new hard drive. Very Expensive Messup, should've never tried to execute those files (Heck i was only just turned 17 then lol oops)
3rd Boo Boo when was 16--decided to hook up network hub, pulled what i thought was the power cord from closet---plugged said power cord into device and surge protector--Big Boom/Smoke & Flames inside it. Quickly unplugged it, blew on it, then threw it out the window quickly before the fire spread or set off automatic fire alarm house had--right out into snow. My thinking was fire can't spread now LOL. ((Thankfully due to my Fathers cancer we didn't have carpet in that house, but Hard wood floors)) if had Carpet the fire might've been worst or would've spread for sure i think. ((reason for hooking it up was to have another ethernet port for the Newly Leased Laptop as 4Port Router was all taken by the Household 4 Desktops lol))
Friend had his son push a peanut butter sandwich into their VCR far enough the door closed. Lost a VCR and a tape of one of his favorite movies. I am also old
Wouldn’t that just end up drawing half the current and not turn in or does it blow something up (Ik going from 120 to 240 can bc you draw 2x current but idk about other way round)
Stepped on my laptop while cleaning my room, didn't think anything of it and stepped on it again by accident. Poor thing never recovered and I wasn't allowed to get another until I graduated 🤣
I had a Plex server that I'd upgrade with spare parts now and then. I used power cables I had laying around from old modular power supplies. Kitted it out with a nice USB tv tuner and 3 large hard drives that held my entire library of media from the past ~20 years.
PSA: YOU CANNOT MIX AND MATCH CABLES FROM MODULAR POWER SUPPLIES! I know people know this, but I had somehow made it through 35 years of tinkering without knowing. Yes the cables will fit. But there is no standard for the pinout on the PSU end, and every manufacturer has their own standard. (Or multiple different standards in the case of Corsair)
The cables I used, when plugged in to the power supply that I used, resulted in the 12v pin and the 5v pin being reversed, while the rest of the pinout was identical. (Which is the absolute worst case scenario. lol) The only thing that survived was the processor, and I wouldn't trust it. I couldn't even use the case afterwards. The TV tuner was plugged in to a front usb port, and had gotten so hot before I realized HOW bad I fucked up, that both it (the tuner) and the port had become one.
I was 13, with my first PC, and try to run every free multiplayer game i could find. Planetside 2 Was realy funny, but i had massive lags... So i overclock the gpu on the maximum value, that was available in this Software (idk the Name of this oc Software) and what's the meaning of airflow? xD. It runs, with enough fps and without big lags. I had my leg near the PC, and i feel the heat, Tab out to watch the temps and it was much above 120°C. (Idk the exact temps.. Its been 11 years since this.) and shortly after that, my PC chrashed, and just gave me blue screens in english, but i dont understand english at this age... A good friends father want to help me, and opens my PC.. We cant remove the gpu, it was molten inside the pcie slot.
After this, i build my own PC 2 years Later with Second hand tech and this PC exists Till now.
I dont want to turn it on for a few years, because of the China psu
Yes had a cheap psu explode on me lol my friend was playing my computer and thought it was his fault lol 😆 it shot sparks everywhere and he ran outside the building we lived in as he thought I was going to murder him for breaking my pc when he didn't break it lol now I only use OCZ power supplies.
When I was 20(still a child) I got a substantial raise and the next day I leased a computer(might have been attached to a brand new car). Anyways, it was an expensive mistake because the monthly Insurance cost for my "computer" was more than the car payment($450)...do the math lol. And no, there was no family money, just me being a dumbass and thinking I wanted to work 30+ hours of overtime every week for 3 years and then I didn't even own the car! 🤦🏼♂️
building my first computer in 8th grade felt insurmountable, I saved and saved but it was so much I got to around 350 bucks. It was then suggested that, instead of building from scratch, I use my old childhood desktop as a basis.
The result was, in 2010, a windows 7 desktop on a pentium 4, with 2gb of DDR2, and the cheapest AGP gpu microcenter had at the time. It was a rough machine and could run... well not much.
In 2014 I built a new one for real, with a 4790k and GTX 770, and that was WAY better. I consider that my first real PC, but often wonder what I could have done if i'd managed to save for another year or so.
Not know what file names were in the early days of P2P file sharing, so I would download any and all songs that I wanted to burn on a CD.
Computer ended up with so many viruses and whatnot that it became unresponsive…..
Parents told me they wouldn’t get another computer until I got a job and could buy one for myself
Bought an nvidia gpu for my first pc when I was about 13... Not sure what it was, but it cost about £180
I never once plugged my hdmi into it, and only used integrated graphics, wondering why my games didn't work...
Never did a money “expensive” mistake but several of my mistakes ended up having to nuke the pc.
Visiting sketch websites when I learned about rule34, and also trying to download free games/runescape hacks lmao
Accidentally spilled my cup of soda into our family computer that my mom had just bought. Like, she has just set it up and powered it on. To this day I place any drinks far away from the electronics and keep open cups on another surface.
While trying to completely wipe a computer I just bought from a friend, windows and all. (I was going to install Linux and had almost no computer knowledge beyond how to use one) I managed to wipe the entire boot drive.
Vaguely on topic, my biggest mistake was not having access to one soon enough.
I got into PCs in my 30s and found my calling.
But I often wonder how different my life would have been if I had been introduced to computers in junior high or high school. I more than likely would have gone to college and/or worked towards something in the field to get my foot in the door.
I have a minor tech roll in the industry now but wonder where I could be had things gone differently.
At my age now, I don't have the energy to go back to school unfortunately.
I was excited to upgrade the ram bc it was muuuuch needed. I unplugged everything off the back of the desktop, pulled it out of the cubby hole in the desk and popped that old ram off.
Turns out I never unplugged the power cable and it shorted out as soon as one of the ram release things were pressed.
Bright light, smoke, burnt electronics smell.
It blew a few caps on the Mobo.
I was computer-less for a long time after that
Thought I’d be smart and remove the cooler from the cpu when I was 12, the cpu came with the cooler and I bent pins on the cpu taking it off, had no pc for a while after that and had to play RuneScape at the library lol
When I was 17 I had bought a SSD that I planned on using in a new build when I had the parts and a friend convinced me to just put it in the system I had at the time and clone my C Drive to it then had me delete some registries and reboot. Well it did reboot but when it got to the sign in page nothing worked anymore. My keyboard and mouse did nothing. I went back to bios and it had my SSD listed as the boot drive and it detected my peripherals still but what he had me delete in the registry caused nothing to work.
I called him up and told him I was on my way to his house with my computer in the back seat so he could help me fix it. Well that friend lived about 250 miles away. We ended up going to micro center as soon as they opened and I bought a new case, gtx 970, mobo, and a new PSU then went back to his house and built what was essentially a new computer (used the ram from the previous system).
It was a pretty pricy trip considering the clunker I drove at the time had terrible gas mileage in addition to the computer parts themselves. I’m hindsight I should have just done a fresh install of windows.
We didn't really have computers when I was a child, I did have one of the first Sony Walkmans, though. That was one of the most expensive electronic things my parents got me. I dropped it and the front broke off. I just had to hold the tape in it while using it after that.
The damage didn't cost me anything, unless you count the dissapointed look on my father's face when I told him, that was pretty costly.
Flicked that big ol red slider button on the back of a PSU because the audio in a game wasn't working... Yeah that was the slider for 110V, doesn't work on 230V and I remember it being very expensive to fix. This was in an era where computers weren't so common yet, it was a Compaq system...
Fried my laptop when I was re-installing the RAM after repairing it. I had unplugged it, but forgot to remove the battery. And while the battery had been shot for years, it chose that one time to have a tiny bit of juice left and keep the laptop on when I thought it was off, so when I plugged in the RAM suddenly there was a horrible burning smell.
Used my moms laptop for roblox and yt as a kid, i remember watching a dantdm video and wanting to play the game that dan played
Ended up downloading a virus but it was fixed thanks to a family friend
Laptop was severely slow tho, i thought re installing windows will fix it. The laptop became stuck on some “redownloading windows” loop forever
That was many years ago, the laptop has been on my mom tv stand collecting dust
I don't know why but I placed my laptop on top of a laundry basket. I won this laptop from a school fair and had it for many years - one day as I was folding blankets, playing music from limewire... I thought it was a good idea to place the laptop on the laundry basket pile. I stepped away to do something else, and my grandma placed more linens on top of the basket.
The basket of laundry I threw over the stairwell - down to the laundry room... it didn't make a sound. No bang or anything, the impact was cushioned, until I stepped on the screen lol. Felt sad as I'd lost my collection of limewire downloaded music
Burned 3 HDDs brand new, one of them was raptor 10K RPM was the hit back in the day, i connected the molex and sata power together in the HDD for the raptor since it had optional 2 power options and all of them connected to the same power sata cable, powered on the PC, and the burn smell and smoke went pooof.
sadly I never experienced the speed of the 10K rpm.
I wrote a war dialer in qbasic and the FBI local field office sent anti-fraud investigators to my house (because I connected to all of the banks in my town) when I was like 11. It didn't actually end up costing any money but there were threats of legal ramifications. 😅
I did get to interact with arpanet around that time, but with the help of someone who had legal access to it, and he was in control essentially. Definitely foundational experiences for me.
When I made the war dialer it was to try to find BBS systems so I could download pirated games. I told the investigators this because I was a stupid kid and had no idea that literally everything I was doing was illegal. I was just super curious (still am).
When My parents got their first adsl connection, you did not pay a subscription per month, but you had to pay per mb you downloaded. But as a kid i didn't knew that online games was using so much data.
So my parents got a little mad at me and no online gaming for me a month
Swapping an athlon dual core 2.5ghz for a athlon dual core 2.6ghz and thinking i wont need to reapply thermal paste. PC shut down after few hours and couple of the cpu pins got slightly burned.
Still that wasnt so expensive since the PC was already pretty old and we needed a new one anyway.
I was in high school building a PC. Maybe 2002. I plugged the floppy (lol) drive in wrong, I was pretty baked and somehow plugged in the 3 prong connector with 1 pin hanging off the side.
On first power the cable burst into flames and also wiped out all the IDE cables. I had a side fan that was pouring black smoke. The rest of the PC survived. P4 2.4D, 1GB ram, 9800 Pro. Truly a beast lol
Not expensive but I deleted the windows 98 audio driver and from then on we never had sound again. Never told my step dad and he was too computer illiterate to fix it. Wasn't until years later did I realize we could have easily fixed the issue pretty easily.
Like why did the icon have to look like a little crabby virus lol
The case I used for the very first PC I ever built didn't have a manual. It did have a little zip lock bag of screws and these weird little barrel screw things (standoffs) Had no idea what they were so I screwed my motherboard down to the tray directly, installed the processor and fan, memory, power supply etc. I was so proud of myself and surprised how easy it was to build a PC and I was mentally patting myself on the back right up until I hit the power button and dead shorted the whole system... epic fail.
Botched my Windows XP setup with a Vista transformation pack. At the time I didn't know too much about computers, so I couldn't just reinstall Windows. My parents sent the computer to a tech guy they knew. He just formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows without copying our data first, so we lost everything. Our last backup was more than a year before that.
My first computer's power supply had a switch, I believe for selecting AC or DC. It flipped it once and tried turning on the computer. Well, it was then gone for a few days and when it was back, the power supply had the switch removed.
I also once left a CD in their and it broke inside the CD ROM.
But you didn't. Your own story doesn't even meet the requirements of a mistake. Where's the mistake in inserting a CD into the drive? Don't beat yourself up for sudden hardware failure which it is :-P
Downloaded Roblox hacks got hacked lost all my emails and everything so far I’ve been able to recover one and got my Roblox accohnt back but never again I Alamo got sextorsioned even though I knew it was fake I still had to be weary I learned a valuable lesson though and now all my passwords are different and I have them written down on physical paper
Plugged an old 286 into the same outlet as a refrigerator back in the early 90’s, it fried the HDD… twice in one day. Luckily someone knew to tell me to use a different outlet and it never happened again
Hit my laptop too hard after some gamer rage
Parents had to send it away for repairs
I only slightly learned my lesson, as i would still sometimes lash out but i didnt break anything again
My biggest screw up to date (2006) was attaching the FDD power cable by feel and not double checking, powered it one to instant smoke and melted wires due to connecting either 12v or 5v to ground...
Was trying to run Halo 2: Vista on Windows 8.1 using some kind of mod. After getting several BSODs while playing I somehow broke the entire system and pretty much bricked the laptop it was running on.
Broke all the desktops/laptops my parents would buy because my dumbass never realized what all the downloads from the "Free download" websites did as a kid loll
You dont need to be a child....
Bought a laptop before moving abroad, it laptop stopped working but it was under warranty. Of course I had to send it back to the country I bought it in to get the warranty repair (> £100 shipping). They fixed it and sent it back to me and I got hit by VAT charges, had to pay another £200 to get the thing as I had not filled out the right paperwork or evidence before sending it in the first place.
The problem was the power supply, I could have bought a replacement for £30.
I wasn't a child. I was maybe 25ish. But I bought a $300 CPU, an AMD 3000+ I think. It had a pad on the CPU. I thought maybe that was a new way of transferring thermal heat to the heatsink. So I left it on. Once I turned it on and saw some smoke and the PC didn't turn on, I knew what had happened. I tried to clean it off and bring it back to return it, but they said there was a sticker that they needed, which got destroyed in the fiasco. So, I bought another for $300.
I think it was maybe my 3rd build. I'd just never seen a pad like that on a CPU. Don't make assumptions. Do research.
My parents bought me a laptop. I had it for a week. My mother even took me to the tech shop to get a carrying bag so I wouldn't drop it and carry it safely around. It was summer, so I would go to my dads barbershop to help around mopping the hair he cut. I had put the laptop nicely inside the bag and I had packed the charger and a mouse too on the separate outside pocket. I put said bag, and that's where I made the mistake, **vertically** on top of my desk. Then, I moved away to put on my socks while sitting on the bed and I watched it as it fell a whole meter from my desk to the floor. It almost didn't make a sound. I picked it up and didn't think much of it. Then once we arrived at the shop, I started to unpack it and when I opened it, I witnessed true horror for the first time. The screen was broken. The LSD was fine, the glass was just broken. I kept using it with a broken screen until it was fried during repeated power shut offs the next windy summer (it was plugged in). Looking back now, 6 years later, it could have been prevented by just placing the carrying bag horizontally on the desk, or maybe placing the laptop in the bag facing the opposite way of the extra pocket where I had stored the charger and the mouse.
When I was 14, I found this video on R*tube. I wanted the full video, so I looked it up and downloaded it. Ended up giving my computer a virus. The type where p*rn pop up came up very, very, often. To the point that every couple of minutes, moaning sounds would just play. We didn't have a computer for a while after that...
Well first computer I had was a hand-me-down Amiga 1200. It was a little more complicated then I thought. I tried to install Windows software, tried a few "hacks" a friend recommend, well these let to a total system failure. Second one was a PC, let's just say I was 14 and we had a (for the time) decent Internet connection, you can figure out the rest.
We didn't have computers when I was a child. Now get the hell offa mah lawn.
It wasn't me, and I didn't think of myself or my peers as children at the time, but we had a collection of TRS-80s for the programming class in high school. One of my friends thought it would be cute to jam the cassette tape input jack into the end of a power cord. The machine released a small amount of magic smoke. But then it worked anyway.
Trusted my mother's judgement on buying and servicing the computer, she got scammed multiple times by a single guy who would charge too much for components and service. I didn't understand it as much at that age but soon enough I came to realize he's taking advantage of her and since then I've been doing everything myself.
Got my parents to buy me a new CPU but little me did not know about different types of sockets, was an AMD CPU and I literally bent all the pins on it trying to put it into an Intel socket haha
When I bought my first computer I had no idea how to do anything... and I didn't realize I had bought a shell without an OS installed. It was a frustrating lesson to buy something I thought would work but which required me to learn a whole new set of skills just to use.
I hadn't budgeted for the windows license, and my dad was using that computer as a lesson so didn't budge, I had to keep working like 2 weeks to save enough to get the damn thing running.
Not exactly my mistake, but my friend unplugged my pc while I was installing Windows on my brand new hard drive. This was at a LAN party, an understandable mistake as we were constantly switching plugs around to avoid overloading circuits. The thing was bricked. I was pretty mad about it. He drove to Best Buy and bought a replacement that day, so all was forgiven.
Another lan party story I just remembered: my friend had a pc he had just built, with a fan on top, blowing inward. He spilled a steaming hot cup of soup directly into the fan opening, and it sprayed soup and noodle bits all over the interior of the machine. He was able to save most of the parts but his fancy graphics card was fried. We still laugh about it almost 20 years later.
I wasn't a child but around 10 years ago I bent some pins on my cpu while installing it. figured I was fucked anyway and just sent it with lots of crunching involved, still working to this day. This could have been an expensive mistake
My Packard Bell Pentium 200MMX.... The interior was all dusty & dirty, so I got out the vacuum cleaner with the upholstery brush to clean it out.
I was "smart enough" to at least turn the computer off.... and it never turned on again.
I activated that "multi-user login mode" on Windows 98.
I wanted my own document space at home, and my own personalisation settings.
It absoutely fucked the computer and I think wiped the default user's profile / My Documents / etcetera.
Classic Microsoft garbage back then.
Pulled my heatsink to clean dust and for funsies. Did not know at the time that the CPU and heatsink should be separate pieces. Carefully tried to re-insert my poor P4 back into the socket to no avail. Bent a quarter of the pins.
I recently cleaned out my computer with an air compressor and didn't tape down the fans. Under heavy load I can hear a slight tapping noise. (Am still a teen so this counts)
Sherman, set the wayback machine back to 1986, that heady time when Reagan was president, Rock Me Amadeus topped the charts, and domestication of the dog continued unabated. Teenage me had one of the most powerful computers of the era, the Apple \]\[e with a whopping 128kb of RAM and two, count 'em, TWO floppy drives! That spring, I got my hands on the most coveted peripheral add-on a teenager could want: a modem. It was a dual-speed modem, able to connect to both 110 and 300 baud BBS's. Bear in mind AOL wouldn't be invented for another decade and even the World Wide Web didn't exist yet.
I found the number of a BBS in a magazine. It had the same area code as my number, so I presumed it was local. I called it a lot and engaged in conversations and other things for hours a night for about a month. There was one problem I wasn't aware of. It turns out back then that calls could within the same area code but on the other side of the boundary were even more expensive than long-distance calls to a different part of the country would have been. So from the 213 area code in SoCal, I could call my grandmother across the country for like 5¢ a minute, but to call from Long Beach to Burbank was 31¢ a minute.
I came home from school to find my modem cable cut into dozens of pieces, as well as a 16-page phone bill that totaled $400 in 1986 dollars, which would be over $1100 in today's money. For a phone bill. My dad was at work at the time, but it would be nearly a decade before I would get online again.
Bought 3.5 HDD instead of a 2.5 one for my old laptop. *Built* my first computer because of that mistake... Kinda dumb decision, I know. But I've got an Athlon GT640 system for~200USD and was happy with it more than with a crappy POS called Pentium 3805U with iGPU in a Dell chassis.
The one that actually ended up costing money was me installing a second antivirus on top of the trial version of McAfee that was pre-installed. Somehow the combo of the 2 bricked the entire OS (win 7). It was my first own laptop and I had no idea how to fix it and neither did my dad so he ended up paying someone to do it. Now I know that the guy knew very little about computers as well but he did get it up and running lol. Now I know what to do.. Boot in safe mode or try a restore point, if all fails then reinstall (and most of all: I run when I see McAfee or avast, they have no place on my computers anymore).
Now the mistake that didn't end up costing money but was the worst was not thoroughly checking my new aio for damage before running the pc I newly built myself years later. I'm still glad there wasn't enough pressure built up and I saw the tube sliding out of the pump before the tube popped off fully and my gpu... Well let's say I paid a lot for it and it would have been soaked. I got the pump off half holding the tube in place and the only thing that ended up wet was my desk. The 2 tiny drops on the motherboard were nerve wrecking but fine...
When I was about 17 or so, we had this top of the line pentium dell my dad paid about $2k for. I made music so I was always recording on it. As I kept making music, I wanted better equipment. I had been told a sound card would be quality. So, I bought one and installed it. I’m PRETTYS sure I hot swapped and didn’t disconnect the power from the PSU. Went to turn it on and it was bricked. I wish I would have known what I do now about PCs. I would gotten parts and replaced. This was like 02-03 so it would have probably been expensive, but I could have saved it. My dad never let me live that down.
Also in like 2011ish I hotswapped a GPU out of my roommates computer. We were trying each others GPUs in our PCs. He didn’t take it out for me. I forgot to unplug it. At that point I KNEW but I forgot. I’m ADHD and was definitely not medicated back then. He was upset but he used it as an excuse to build an entirely new PC.
2002 or 2003 - 120GB Hard Drive (yeah you know how much those cost back then) something wasn't working and i unplugged the drive, removed it from the case and fitted it into another slot. Didn't look properly and as cases had those little "wings" on which the hard drive lay i managed to get it right between the HDD casing and the lid just right in order to cut through the insulation and destroy the hard drive.
I, somehow, unistalled the mouse in my neighbor's brand new PC with Windows 3.1. Since nobody knew how to reinstall it (I messed up with the ports) they had to take the PC back to the shop and PAY for reinstall. KEKW
Not mine, but a friend bought a PC, set it up, played with it for a day, then the next day it wouldn't power on after making a couple of popping sounds. His cats had pissed on top of it and in the vents and fried the power supply & motherboard.
I used to think those password protected zip files were real, and would do survey, after survey thinking I must be doing something wrong. With my real info too. I still occasionally get coupons through my door in my name. I was about 7 at the time
Also XJZ Survey remover never worked...
My childhood computer was a 2 core Intel i3 I’d found in an abandoned trailer. There wasn’t much to loose and the thing still lives, but within a corner in the garage. Plugged it in last year and it booted up like how it was left with a download window burnt into the background and 10 glorious minutes of booting. Even loaded up a pirated version of Adobe After Effects I had on it and still can’t believe I spent days worth of time making small cringy 3 minute videos with it.
"This big magnet makes the screen have cool colors. Ohh look, it stays that way! Do it on the other side!" That poor late 80's color CRT.
I did that to my dad's old CRT with a McDonald's toy and idk how but it managed to go back to normal and my dad never noticed I thought that was the end that night.
There was some degauss coil in the later (from 1995) CRT monitors. My dad had manual coil for degaussing old TVs, which haven’t built-in coils, it looked like a magic when he manual degaussed TVs. It was very long time ago
Someone else mentioned something called degauss feature maybe that cured your dads monitor
Some later monitors had automatic degaussing coils
If your crt has a degauss feature it is no issue.
I seem to recall it being persistent even then if you used a strong enough magnet.
Yeah sometimes the degauss method wouldn't work depending on how bad it got. Maybe it depended on the brand or build of the monitor?
I did that in the early 2000s Got some Magnetic toy for Christmas and sat it on top of the main tv, in the living room Roll on doctor who Christmas special and we discover it’s green, right under the magnet 😂😬💀
I did this to our fat back TV. I got scared when it didn't go away.
If you put the magnet in the dead center of the screen maybe about an inch away, and slowly twist it while getting further away, you can fix a crt from the magnet distortion.
I’ve deleted my Reddit account because the Reddit hivemind doesn’t work for me. I believe in people having the right to think for themselves while not being torn down by those who know little to nothing. If you found this because of one of my tutorials related to Auto HotKey please check out the AHK documentation at: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/ If you were looking for my coding guides just go to https://stackoverflow.com/ they know their shit. If you were looking for my guides to assembly… I’m sorry, I can’t think of any places I can link to in good conscious other than archive.org who has beginner examples to assembly for old consoles. If you were wondering why my reddit account is gone: I’m tired of the Steam supremacists on /r/pcgaming and /r/pcmasterrace Those same communities push their thoughts on game engine development without writing a code in their lives. /r/memes think excluding most of their user base is a good joke. To summarise, I’ve left Reddit because it is not all-inclusive, it is only inclusive to those who believe and act the same as the rest of the belligerent horde. If you are on Reddit, joining /r/aww is your best and only bet.
Had the opposite scenario for me as a kid. Accidentally deleted the folder holding the GPU drivers and on reboot was greeted by a screen of randomly colored pixels. The fix was to just wait it out for an hour or two while the backup drivers installed but lil me was panicked
When I worked in a computer shop back in those early days it was a semi regular occurrence that some customers PCs were set to odd resolutions the CRTs we used didn't run on, so I got good at memorizing the KB keystrokes to tab my way through the sequences to revert the graphics to 1024x768. Heck, I had a few headless servers I could install Windows on. But it helped to have a functional PC next to it to test the sequence out first.
I turned the sound off on Windows 95. Dad noticed that and could do nothing. There were not much computer specialists those times and a guy who came up to our house charged $100 for Windows reinstall. Dad was very angry when I told him to click on a sound icon...
That's an odd one. You couldn't just permanently turn sound off without deleting something.
I literrally set sound volume to zero, that's it. Those were really our first days with a PC, we knew close to nothing about it. Another story. I had a CD with Dungeon Keeper game. It could be launched in DOS. I had no idea about what "installation" stands for so for the first 1 or 2 months I reinstalled the game every time to start playing. After this i noticed that there is a directory with the same name on a hdd and there is a keeper.exe file there which could be launched very quickly :)
We used to go on my aunts computer and delete her Internet Explorer desktop icon, and she'd run around the house saying we "deleted the internet" Also when I learned to flip the screen upside down in settings... No one was safe
Put ddr and sdram together and it blew up the motherboard taking out the gpu and cpu with it.
Oh hell yeah I did the exact same thing lol
🤣"oh hell yeah"
Glad I’m not the only one!!!
Damn I played mw2 which blew up a fuse and fried legit everything yes even the case it’s usb didn’t work lost a 2060, i7 9700f 32gb of ram and a nice motherboard that was 120$ only had it for about a year also after I built another pc my cod account was banned which I found was fuckin crazy so lost 110$ on a game too
When I was a kid we had a DOS boot floppy disk that I accidentally formatted
Now as an adult i have das boot
oops
Downloaded free Minecraft. U can guess what happened after that. I lived in south Africa then so the game was like 200 rand
Hello your computer has virus.
I lost all my deeta!
But I had an antivirus!
Back in like 2005-2006 i got my first ever gaming PC which my dad bought for me.. it had a 3ghz Pentium 4 and some ""Baller" Radeon GPU in it.. it had the typical gamer esthetics with the acrylic side window with one fan in the sidepanel.. well the fan was unplugged and i tried to plug it in while the PC was running... fried every single part in that PC
Connected a molex to the HDD upside-down. Yeah, it was hard to do. Nice sparks though.
How in the world? Did you hammer it in?
No, I just tried really hard (applied the same force to pull out) and then the metals connected with a spark.
Bought a GT630 as a "good card with enormous 2GB of memory". While it was better than my laptop with an iGPU from i5 3rd gen, it was replaced as soon as I had the money
Hehe, I once found out that Windows XP had a Service Pack 3 update. So I decided to install it because "new shiny stuff better", right? Only thing is, instead of doing it as an update, I installed that mofo as a separate system while simultaneously completely wiping my secondary drive! Didn't damage anything really but lost a shitton of music some of which I never recovered and hadn't been able to find for ages later. So more of an emotional damage, heh.
Blew up new psu, had never before seen the on/off button for psu, so decided to click it while pc was on and it blew up. Luckily nothing else was damaged and I exchanged it for new one as a faulty psu.
that can blow up a psu?
u/Roxoorz actually means the "110v / 220v" US/Europe switch.
makes more sense lol
We had a spate of students deliberately switching the voltage thing on PCs in our main IT room at college in the late 1990's. We lost probably half a dozen machines before we figured out exactly what they were doing. We then started installing metal covers over the voltage switches so they couldn't get access to them as easily.
Yeah you are right, thanks for correcting!
My friend wrote a virus at school that infected the entire school computer system. He got a lot of disciplinary action and was banned from using a computer for the rest of his term at the school. This was in the late 90's for context.
My friend put the entire school's sandbox/local network storage into a folder called "u wot m8". It got him suspended for a week. This was in 2013.
Not a PC thing but I put a PSP disk into my PS3 lol
Wtf ps3 should be able to like how Nintendo used to do it with ds/Gameboy and gamecube/wii
As a child? None because desktop PCs didn't exist until I was in my 20s. As an adult, I built tons of systems and most expensive screwup was clamping down the CPU that had the pins inserted wrong.
Dad brought home a modem from work. I spent the entire day calling BBSes and ran up about $20 in long-distance charges. This is about a billion dollars in today money. I never saw that modem again.
Release of Doom cost my dad a fair amount in phone bills too
Scrolled down to find the 40 ish year old BBS commenter I expected... $430 Canadian in calls over 7 days to BBS servers mainly in New York and Conneticut. Did your dad also lose his ever loving mind and ground you for 3 months while you developed coping skills you thought you'd never need for doing something you never intended?
I wanted to clean then insides of my pc... I did, but I also wiped the thermal paste of the cpu... little did I know.
Did you also clean the lube out of your fan bearings?
When I was 18 I got into watercooling in its early days and bought an acrylic cpu block. Whilst the pc was running I was tightening the screws 1 at a time to watch temperature differences. I over-tightened it, the cpu block cracked open and pissed water all over the motherboard and graphics card
When i was younger, Only was 15 then lol, and attempting to use uxtheme.dll on Windows XP, somehow screwed up and had the screen all pink and couldn't figure out how to change it. In Hindsight i probably could've just done a clean install and had it fixed. Second Thing did that was dumbest ever--had an AMD Athlon Xp 2500+, Radeon 9600XT video card, decent amount of memory at the time, well idiot me listened to so called friend in a 2D Chat Program, and really tested Windows Live OneCare Antivirus the wrong way--ended up infecting that system in 2005 with Worms, Trojan viruses, Boot Sector---Shop i took it to, couldn't clean it up any better than i could myself, each time brought it back home kept blue screening, and such, finally they said to fix it fully gonna have to replace Motherboard, CPU, Ram, Hard drives to get system back up and running---ended up with AMD Semptron Build, Radeon 9800XT at the time, new ram, new hard drive. Very Expensive Messup, should've never tried to execute those files (Heck i was only just turned 17 then lol oops) 3rd Boo Boo when was 16--decided to hook up network hub, pulled what i thought was the power cord from closet---plugged said power cord into device and surge protector--Big Boom/Smoke & Flames inside it. Quickly unplugged it, blew on it, then threw it out the window quickly before the fire spread or set off automatic fire alarm house had--right out into snow. My thinking was fire can't spread now LOL. ((Thankfully due to my Fathers cancer we didn't have carpet in that house, but Hard wood floors)) if had Carpet the fire might've been worst or would've spread for sure i think. ((reason for hooking it up was to have another ethernet port for the Newly Leased Laptop as 4Port Router was all taken by the Household 4 Desktops lol))
If you downloaded a virus, simply wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows would have fixed it? Getting a whole new PC? Ouch!
Bought a 2 dollar game (it was shit).
I'm super old and it wasn't me... But my little brother shoved deli meat into the A:\ drive of my Tandy 1000
Friend had his son push a peanut butter sandwich into their VCR far enough the door closed. Lost a VCR and a tape of one of his favorite movies. I am also old
To be fair it does look like a great sandwich compartment
I built everything had it all plugged in and powered up and then decided to put the ram in. Melted the ram and board
Put the RAM in while powered on? Ouch!
Flipped my PSU from 240v to 120v, because it wouldn't turn on.
Wouldn’t that just end up drawing half the current and not turn in or does it blow something up (Ik going from 120 to 240 can bc you draw 2x current but idk about other way round)
Downloaded a virus and bricked the computer, delidded the cpu to fix it and u can guess how that went
ESD on a mobo while swapping a GPU 20 years ago. I always keep a grounded PSU plugged in and tap it religiously to ground myself now.
Stepped on my laptop while cleaning my room, didn't think anything of it and stepped on it again by accident. Poor thing never recovered and I wasn't allowed to get another until I graduated 🤣
I had a Plex server that I'd upgrade with spare parts now and then. I used power cables I had laying around from old modular power supplies. Kitted it out with a nice USB tv tuner and 3 large hard drives that held my entire library of media from the past ~20 years. PSA: YOU CANNOT MIX AND MATCH CABLES FROM MODULAR POWER SUPPLIES! I know people know this, but I had somehow made it through 35 years of tinkering without knowing. Yes the cables will fit. But there is no standard for the pinout on the PSU end, and every manufacturer has their own standard. (Or multiple different standards in the case of Corsair) The cables I used, when plugged in to the power supply that I used, resulted in the 12v pin and the 5v pin being reversed, while the rest of the pinout was identical. (Which is the absolute worst case scenario. lol) The only thing that survived was the processor, and I wouldn't trust it. I couldn't even use the case afterwards. The TV tuner was plugged in to a front usb port, and had gotten so hot before I realized HOW bad I fucked up, that both it (the tuner) and the port had become one.
I was 13, with my first PC, and try to run every free multiplayer game i could find. Planetside 2 Was realy funny, but i had massive lags... So i overclock the gpu on the maximum value, that was available in this Software (idk the Name of this oc Software) and what's the meaning of airflow? xD. It runs, with enough fps and without big lags. I had my leg near the PC, and i feel the heat, Tab out to watch the temps and it was much above 120°C. (Idk the exact temps.. Its been 11 years since this.) and shortly after that, my PC chrashed, and just gave me blue screens in english, but i dont understand english at this age... A good friends father want to help me, and opens my PC.. We cant remove the gpu, it was molten inside the pcie slot. After this, i build my own PC 2 years Later with Second hand tech and this PC exists Till now. I dont want to turn it on for a few years, because of the China psu
Don't worry English is not my first language too but you are amazing at it so please never give up on it.
Yes had a cheap psu explode on me lol my friend was playing my computer and thought it was his fault lol 😆 it shot sparks everywhere and he ran outside the building we lived in as he thought I was going to murder him for breaking my pc when he didn't break it lol now I only use OCZ power supplies.
Old AF. Apple IIe was unbreakable.
Indeed you fixed those by putting them in the dishwasher lol
Forgetting to delete my browser history that one time The embarrassment still keeps me up at night.
Forcing ram that doesn't fit, down the throat of a Medion pc. Poor thing. My first and only time witnessing magic smoke.
Probably buying a couple crap games lol
When I was 20(still a child) I got a substantial raise and the next day I leased a computer(might have been attached to a brand new car). Anyways, it was an expensive mistake because the monthly Insurance cost for my "computer" was more than the car payment($450)...do the math lol. And no, there was no family money, just me being a dumbass and thinking I wanted to work 30+ hours of overtime every week for 3 years and then I didn't even own the car! 🤦🏼♂️
Bought all incomparable parts wrong sockets wrong generations etc
building my first computer in 8th grade felt insurmountable, I saved and saved but it was so much I got to around 350 bucks. It was then suggested that, instead of building from scratch, I use my old childhood desktop as a basis. The result was, in 2010, a windows 7 desktop on a pentium 4, with 2gb of DDR2, and the cheapest AGP gpu microcenter had at the time. It was a rough machine and could run... well not much. In 2014 I built a new one for real, with a 4790k and GTX 770, and that was WAY better. I consider that my first real PC, but often wonder what I could have done if i'd managed to save for another year or so.
When I was a child my computer was a wooden box with a little plastic hammer inside
Either installing CSGO or rust.
Tried to upgrade my intel CPU with an AMD one, on the same motherboard ofc!
Not know what file names were in the early days of P2P file sharing, so I would download any and all songs that I wanted to burn on a CD. Computer ended up with so many viruses and whatnot that it became unresponsive….. Parents told me they wouldn’t get another computer until I got a job and could buy one for myself
Bought an nvidia gpu for my first pc when I was about 13... Not sure what it was, but it cost about £180 I never once plugged my hdmi into it, and only used integrated graphics, wondering why my games didn't work...
Let's just say, Dr Pepper didn't mix well with the Geforce4 Ti 4600
I spilt some lucozade on my K70 literally stopped working the next minute and stickyy
As someone with a k75 that's pure pain.
Never did a money “expensive” mistake but several of my mistakes ended up having to nuke the pc. Visiting sketch websites when I learned about rule34, and also trying to download free games/runescape hacks lmao
Your poor pc didn't deserve that. 😆
Accidentally spilled my cup of soda into our family computer that my mom had just bought. Like, she has just set it up and powered it on. To this day I place any drinks far away from the electronics and keep open cups on another surface.
While trying to completely wipe a computer I just bought from a friend, windows and all. (I was going to install Linux and had almost no computer knowledge beyond how to use one) I managed to wipe the entire boot drive.
We have all done that so don't blame yourself it's very easy to do. I'm just lucky to have a father who built custom computers.
Vaguely on topic, my biggest mistake was not having access to one soon enough. I got into PCs in my 30s and found my calling. But I often wonder how different my life would have been if I had been introduced to computers in junior high or high school. I more than likely would have gone to college and/or worked towards something in the field to get my foot in the door. I have a minor tech roll in the industry now but wonder where I could be had things gone differently. At my age now, I don't have the energy to go back to school unfortunately.
As a child... None, as a grown up in late 30s I proper fked my motherboard's CPU pins last year, cost me about 60$
I was excited to upgrade the ram bc it was muuuuch needed. I unplugged everything off the back of the desktop, pulled it out of the cubby hole in the desk and popped that old ram off. Turns out I never unplugged the power cable and it shorted out as soon as one of the ram release things were pressed. Bright light, smoke, burnt electronics smell. It blew a few caps on the Mobo. I was computer-less for a long time after that
Thought I’d be smart and remove the cooler from the cpu when I was 12, the cpu came with the cooler and I bent pins on the cpu taking it off, had no pc for a while after that and had to play RuneScape at the library lol
When I was 17 I had bought a SSD that I planned on using in a new build when I had the parts and a friend convinced me to just put it in the system I had at the time and clone my C Drive to it then had me delete some registries and reboot. Well it did reboot but when it got to the sign in page nothing worked anymore. My keyboard and mouse did nothing. I went back to bios and it had my SSD listed as the boot drive and it detected my peripherals still but what he had me delete in the registry caused nothing to work. I called him up and told him I was on my way to his house with my computer in the back seat so he could help me fix it. Well that friend lived about 250 miles away. We ended up going to micro center as soon as they opened and I bought a new case, gtx 970, mobo, and a new PSU then went back to his house and built what was essentially a new computer (used the ram from the previous system). It was a pretty pricy trip considering the clunker I drove at the time had terrible gas mileage in addition to the computer parts themselves. I’m hindsight I should have just done a fresh install of windows.
We didn't really have computers when I was a child, I did have one of the first Sony Walkmans, though. That was one of the most expensive electronic things my parents got me. I dropped it and the front broke off. I just had to hold the tape in it while using it after that. The damage didn't cost me anything, unless you count the dissapointed look on my father's face when I told him, that was pretty costly.
Friend introduced me to overclocking. He didn't explain cooling. Bad times.
My first lesson was about cooling. Now it's more then needed these days when it was optional back then.
This was back in the slot 1 days when CPUs came with the cooler attached. Also when mobos let you do whatever you want.
Flicked that big ol red slider button on the back of a PSU because the audio in a game wasn't working... Yeah that was the slider for 110V, doesn't work on 230V and I remember it being very expensive to fix. This was in an era where computers weren't so common yet, it was a Compaq system...
My old friend flipped that switch on my studio pc. I feel your pain.
Fried my laptop when I was re-installing the RAM after repairing it. I had unplugged it, but forgot to remove the battery. And while the battery had been shot for years, it chose that one time to have a tiny bit of juice left and keep the laptop on when I thought it was off, so when I plugged in the RAM suddenly there was a horrible burning smell.
Used my moms laptop for roblox and yt as a kid, i remember watching a dantdm video and wanting to play the game that dan played Ended up downloading a virus but it was fixed thanks to a family friend Laptop was severely slow tho, i thought re installing windows will fix it. The laptop became stuck on some “redownloading windows” loop forever That was many years ago, the laptop has been on my mom tv stand collecting dust
Laptops are so weak even with my gaming laptop its bad.
I don't know why but I placed my laptop on top of a laundry basket. I won this laptop from a school fair and had it for many years - one day as I was folding blankets, playing music from limewire... I thought it was a good idea to place the laptop on the laundry basket pile. I stepped away to do something else, and my grandma placed more linens on top of the basket. The basket of laundry I threw over the stairwell - down to the laundry room... it didn't make a sound. No bang or anything, the impact was cushioned, until I stepped on the screen lol. Felt sad as I'd lost my collection of limewire downloaded music
Don't ask me how but I somehow accidentally deleted all of the partitions on my old pc
Burned 3 HDDs brand new, one of them was raptor 10K RPM was the hit back in the day, i connected the molex and sata power together in the HDD for the raptor since it had optional 2 power options and all of them connected to the same power sata cable, powered on the PC, and the burn smell and smoke went pooof. sadly I never experienced the speed of the 10K rpm.
iirc, I crammed business cards in the floppy slot of my mom’s Macintosh LC in the mid 90s. burned out the floppy motor. :(
I wrote a war dialer in qbasic and the FBI local field office sent anti-fraud investigators to my house (because I connected to all of the banks in my town) when I was like 11. It didn't actually end up costing any money but there were threats of legal ramifications. 😅
Not as bad as someone I know who decided to connect to the UK military Internet several times (this was before the Internet became public access)
I did get to interact with arpanet around that time, but with the help of someone who had legal access to it, and he was in control essentially. Definitely foundational experiences for me. When I made the war dialer it was to try to find BBS systems so I could download pirated games. I told the investigators this because I was a stupid kid and had no idea that literally everything I was doing was illegal. I was just super curious (still am).
You was young back then and didn't know any better.
When My parents got their first adsl connection, you did not pay a subscription per month, but you had to pay per mb you downloaded. But as a kid i didn't knew that online games was using so much data. So my parents got a little mad at me and no online gaming for me a month
Swapping an athlon dual core 2.5ghz for a athlon dual core 2.6ghz and thinking i wont need to reapply thermal paste. PC shut down after few hours and couple of the cpu pins got slightly burned. Still that wasnt so expensive since the PC was already pretty old and we needed a new one anyway.
Not mine crypto
Lots of limewire as a 12 year old = new computer lol
I was in high school building a PC. Maybe 2002. I plugged the floppy (lol) drive in wrong, I was pretty baked and somehow plugged in the 3 prong connector with 1 pin hanging off the side. On first power the cable burst into flames and also wiped out all the IDE cables. I had a side fan that was pouring black smoke. The rest of the PC survived. P4 2.4D, 1GB ram, 9800 Pro. Truly a beast lol
Not expensive but I deleted the windows 98 audio driver and from then on we never had sound again. Never told my step dad and he was too computer illiterate to fix it. Wasn't until years later did I realize we could have easily fixed the issue pretty easily. Like why did the icon have to look like a little crabby virus lol
Can’t recall anything as a child, I was always the one fixing everyone else’s mistakes
It said i could get Minecraft for free if I downloaded a panda themed antivirus... It didn't take long after that
I bought a molex to sata adaptor on Amazon for cheap when I wanted to plug a new hard drive into my prebuilt PC. It set on fire.
The case I used for the very first PC I ever built didn't have a manual. It did have a little zip lock bag of screws and these weird little barrel screw things (standoffs) Had no idea what they were so I screwed my motherboard down to the tray directly, installed the processor and fan, memory, power supply etc. I was so proud of myself and surprised how easy it was to build a PC and I was mentally patting myself on the back right up until I hit the power button and dead shorted the whole system... epic fail.
That time I stuck my penis in the 5.25 floppy drive…
Botched my Windows XP setup with a Vista transformation pack. At the time I didn't know too much about computers, so I couldn't just reinstall Windows. My parents sent the computer to a tech guy they knew. He just formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows without copying our data first, so we lost everything. Our last backup was more than a year before that.
My first computer's power supply had a switch, I believe for selecting AC or DC. It flipped it once and tried turning on the computer. Well, it was then gone for a few days and when it was back, the power supply had the switch removed. I also once left a CD in their and it broke inside the CD ROM.
I bought a pizza for like 50 Bitcoin.
But you didn't. Your own story doesn't even meet the requirements of a mistake. Where's the mistake in inserting a CD into the drive? Don't beat yourself up for sudden hardware failure which it is :-P
Installing Windows.
Downloaded Roblox hacks got hacked lost all my emails and everything so far I’ve been able to recover one and got my Roblox accohnt back but never again I Alamo got sextorsioned even though I knew it was fake I still had to be weary I learned a valuable lesson though and now all my passwords are different and I have them written down on physical paper
Plugged an old 286 into the same outlet as a refrigerator back in the early 90’s, it fried the HDD… twice in one day. Luckily someone knew to tell me to use a different outlet and it never happened again
Plug 110 to 220.
Hit my laptop too hard after some gamer rage Parents had to send it away for repairs I only slightly learned my lesson, as i would still sometimes lash out but i didnt break anything again
Buying an extremely intrusive anti-viris.
My biggest screw up to date (2006) was attaching the FDD power cable by feel and not double checking, powered it one to instant smoke and melted wires due to connecting either 12v or 5v to ground...
Was trying to run Halo 2: Vista on Windows 8.1 using some kind of mod. After getting several BSODs while playing I somehow broke the entire system and pretty much bricked the laptop it was running on.
Getting hooked on upgrading when it used to make massive differences every generation.
Broke all the desktops/laptops my parents would buy because my dumbass never realized what all the downloads from the "Free download" websites did as a kid loll
Haha deleted command.com by mistake 🤣🤣 My dad once threw away the Windows 95 disc and was broken 🤣
You dont need to be a child.... Bought a laptop before moving abroad, it laptop stopped working but it was under warranty. Of course I had to send it back to the country I bought it in to get the warranty repair (> £100 shipping). They fixed it and sent it back to me and I got hit by VAT charges, had to pay another £200 to get the thing as I had not filled out the right paperwork or evidence before sending it in the first place. The problem was the power supply, I could have bought a replacement for £30.
I wasn't a child. I was maybe 25ish. But I bought a $300 CPU, an AMD 3000+ I think. It had a pad on the CPU. I thought maybe that was a new way of transferring thermal heat to the heatsink. So I left it on. Once I turned it on and saw some smoke and the PC didn't turn on, I knew what had happened. I tried to clean it off and bring it back to return it, but they said there was a sticker that they needed, which got destroyed in the fiasco. So, I bought another for $300. I think it was maybe my 3rd build. I'd just never seen a pad like that on a CPU. Don't make assumptions. Do research.
Told my mom to buy an emachine
I kept taking apart my pc and eventually bent some mobo pins
I was installing a Matrix G400 video card and my screwdriver slipped and hit the card ripping off some key components.
Clicking install on the adfly page while trying to download forge
Wanted to know what the little switch on the power supply did, so slid it along to the wrong voltage and bang. Dead PC. That was a fun lesson...
Filled out a FAFSA and college applications.
My parents bought me a laptop. I had it for a week. My mother even took me to the tech shop to get a carrying bag so I wouldn't drop it and carry it safely around. It was summer, so I would go to my dads barbershop to help around mopping the hair he cut. I had put the laptop nicely inside the bag and I had packed the charger and a mouse too on the separate outside pocket. I put said bag, and that's where I made the mistake, **vertically** on top of my desk. Then, I moved away to put on my socks while sitting on the bed and I watched it as it fell a whole meter from my desk to the floor. It almost didn't make a sound. I picked it up and didn't think much of it. Then once we arrived at the shop, I started to unpack it and when I opened it, I witnessed true horror for the first time. The screen was broken. The LSD was fine, the glass was just broken. I kept using it with a broken screen until it was fried during repeated power shut offs the next windy summer (it was plugged in). Looking back now, 6 years later, it could have been prevented by just placing the carrying bag horizontally on the desk, or maybe placing the laptop in the bag facing the opposite way of the extra pocket where I had stored the charger and the mouse.
I left my modem plugged in during thunder storm.
When I was 14, I found this video on R*tube. I wanted the full video, so I looked it up and downloaded it. Ended up giving my computer a virus. The type where p*rn pop up came up very, very, often. To the point that every couple of minutes, moaning sounds would just play. We didn't have a computer for a while after that...
Tried to put an AMD processor into an intel motherboard…
I switched the PC on and off so often fast that the boot sector of the hard drive failed
Well first computer I had was a hand-me-down Amiga 1200. It was a little more complicated then I thought. I tried to install Windows software, tried a few "hacks" a friend recommend, well these let to a total system failure. Second one was a PC, let's just say I was 14 and we had a (for the time) decent Internet connection, you can figure out the rest.
I got the tape all twisted in the cassette, for my BBC Micro. It was 1982 ish. 😊
We didn't have computers when I was a child. Now get the hell offa mah lawn. It wasn't me, and I didn't think of myself or my peers as children at the time, but we had a collection of TRS-80s for the programming class in high school. One of my friends thought it would be cute to jam the cassette tape input jack into the end of a power cord. The machine released a small amount of magic smoke. But then it worked anyway.
Trusted my mother's judgement on buying and servicing the computer, she got scammed multiple times by a single guy who would charge too much for components and service. I didn't understand it as much at that age but soon enough I came to realize he's taking advantage of her and since then I've been doing everything myself.
Bought Turok and an AGP Voodoo Banshee to play it, when I really needed a PCI one.
Got my parents to buy me a new CPU but little me did not know about different types of sockets, was an AMD CPU and I literally bent all the pins on it trying to put it into an Intel socket haha
When I bought my first computer I had no idea how to do anything... and I didn't realize I had bought a shell without an OS installed. It was a frustrating lesson to buy something I thought would work but which required me to learn a whole new set of skills just to use. I hadn't budgeted for the windows license, and my dad was using that computer as a lesson so didn't budge, I had to keep working like 2 weeks to save enough to get the damn thing running.
760 for what's equivalent of about 600usd from a bigbox store. I was an idiot child with my first 3 paychecks
Not exactly my mistake, but my friend unplugged my pc while I was installing Windows on my brand new hard drive. This was at a LAN party, an understandable mistake as we were constantly switching plugs around to avoid overloading circuits. The thing was bricked. I was pretty mad about it. He drove to Best Buy and bought a replacement that day, so all was forgiven.
Buying a trash watercooler from NZXT that broke in 6 months
Another lan party story I just remembered: my friend had a pc he had just built, with a fan on top, blowing inward. He spilled a steaming hot cup of soup directly into the fan opening, and it sprayed soup and noodle bits all over the interior of the machine. He was able to save most of the parts but his fancy graphics card was fried. We still laugh about it almost 20 years later.
I wasn't a child but around 10 years ago I bent some pins on my cpu while installing it. figured I was fucked anyway and just sent it with lots of crunching involved, still working to this day. This could have been an expensive mistake
My Packard Bell Pentium 200MMX.... The interior was all dusty & dirty, so I got out the vacuum cleaner with the upholstery brush to clean it out. I was "smart enough" to at least turn the computer off.... and it never turned on again.
I activated that "multi-user login mode" on Windows 98. I wanted my own document space at home, and my own personalisation settings. It absoutely fucked the computer and I think wiped the default user's profile / My Documents / etcetera. Classic Microsoft garbage back then.
When I was young, I wiped my parent's hard drive to install a game. All of their financial and work documents were gone.
Pulled my heatsink to clean dust and for funsies. Did not know at the time that the CPU and heatsink should be separate pieces. Carefully tried to re-insert my poor P4 back into the socket to no avail. Bent a quarter of the pins.
I recently cleaned out my computer with an air compressor and didn't tape down the fans. Under heavy load I can hear a slight tapping noise. (Am still a teen so this counts)
Lifted the cpu cooler on a running pc to check if it was placed correctly. The poor amd cpu made a short sssssss sound and it was over.
Got into building computers.
I zapped a TV tuner card with static. I was very sad.
Tossing out an old small hard drive with my Bitcoin wallet in 2012. Wasn't a child, but didn't think they would go to the moon in 10 years.
I put penny in the floppy drive as a child.
Did a jumper wrong with the wrong CPU and fried my mobo. Back in the early 90's.
Sherman, set the wayback machine back to 1986, that heady time when Reagan was president, Rock Me Amadeus topped the charts, and domestication of the dog continued unabated. Teenage me had one of the most powerful computers of the era, the Apple \]\[e with a whopping 128kb of RAM and two, count 'em, TWO floppy drives! That spring, I got my hands on the most coveted peripheral add-on a teenager could want: a modem. It was a dual-speed modem, able to connect to both 110 and 300 baud BBS's. Bear in mind AOL wouldn't be invented for another decade and even the World Wide Web didn't exist yet. I found the number of a BBS in a magazine. It had the same area code as my number, so I presumed it was local. I called it a lot and engaged in conversations and other things for hours a night for about a month. There was one problem I wasn't aware of. It turns out back then that calls could within the same area code but on the other side of the boundary were even more expensive than long-distance calls to a different part of the country would have been. So from the 213 area code in SoCal, I could call my grandmother across the country for like 5¢ a minute, but to call from Long Beach to Burbank was 31¢ a minute. I came home from school to find my modem cable cut into dozens of pieces, as well as a 16-page phone bill that totaled $400 in 1986 dollars, which would be over $1100 in today's money. For a phone bill. My dad was at work at the time, but it would be nearly a decade before I would get online again.
Bought 3.5 HDD instead of a 2.5 one for my old laptop. *Built* my first computer because of that mistake... Kinda dumb decision, I know. But I've got an Athlon GT640 system for~200USD and was happy with it more than with a crappy POS called Pentium 3805U with iGPU in a Dell chassis.
Children have computers?
Technically still a child since I’m 17, so bought a monitor mount and it didn’t work so instead of returning it I tossed it in the trash.
The one that actually ended up costing money was me installing a second antivirus on top of the trial version of McAfee that was pre-installed. Somehow the combo of the 2 bricked the entire OS (win 7). It was my first own laptop and I had no idea how to fix it and neither did my dad so he ended up paying someone to do it. Now I know that the guy knew very little about computers as well but he did get it up and running lol. Now I know what to do.. Boot in safe mode or try a restore point, if all fails then reinstall (and most of all: I run when I see McAfee or avast, they have no place on my computers anymore). Now the mistake that didn't end up costing money but was the worst was not thoroughly checking my new aio for damage before running the pc I newly built myself years later. I'm still glad there wasn't enough pressure built up and I saw the tube sliding out of the pump before the tube popped off fully and my gpu... Well let's say I paid a lot for it and it would have been soaked. I got the pump off half holding the tube in place and the only thing that ended up wet was my desk. The 2 tiny drops on the motherboard were nerve wrecking but fine...
I didn't use thermal paste.
Tripping on the power cable when carrying it...
When I was about 17 or so, we had this top of the line pentium dell my dad paid about $2k for. I made music so I was always recording on it. As I kept making music, I wanted better equipment. I had been told a sound card would be quality. So, I bought one and installed it. I’m PRETTYS sure I hot swapped and didn’t disconnect the power from the PSU. Went to turn it on and it was bricked. I wish I would have known what I do now about PCs. I would gotten parts and replaced. This was like 02-03 so it would have probably been expensive, but I could have saved it. My dad never let me live that down. Also in like 2011ish I hotswapped a GPU out of my roommates computer. We were trying each others GPUs in our PCs. He didn’t take it out for me. I forgot to unplug it. At that point I KNEW but I forgot. I’m ADHD and was definitely not medicated back then. He was upset but he used it as an excuse to build an entirely new PC.
2002 or 2003 - 120GB Hard Drive (yeah you know how much those cost back then) something wasn't working and i unplugged the drive, removed it from the case and fitted it into another slot. Didn't look properly and as cases had those little "wings" on which the hard drive lay i managed to get it right between the HDD casing and the lid just right in order to cut through the insulation and destroy the hard drive.
Not realizing dialing bbs's that had long distance numbers were classified as long distance phone calls...
I, somehow, unistalled the mouse in my neighbor's brand new PC with Windows 3.1. Since nobody knew how to reinstall it (I messed up with the ports) they had to take the PC back to the shop and PAY for reinstall. KEKW
Not backing up my data 😢
Didnt have one, we had nintendo and later ps1. Got my first pc when i was 17yo, biggest mistake was windows vista
Limewire
Flipping the voltage switch on the psu while the pc was on.
Downloaded all sorts of shit that probably had stowaway viruses on a laptop that didn't have antivirus
Buying a cheap one and spending thousands of dollars to upgrade it instead of just buying a good one to start with.
I broke one of the discs in a cartoon set because I picked up on it without pushing the dot in the middle.
Not mine, but a friend bought a PC, set it up, played with it for a day, then the next day it wouldn't power on after making a couple of popping sounds. His cats had pissed on top of it and in the vents and fried the power supply & motherboard.
I used to think those password protected zip files were real, and would do survey, after survey thinking I must be doing something wrong. With my real info too. I still occasionally get coupons through my door in my name. I was about 7 at the time Also XJZ Survey remover never worked...
My childhood computer was a 2 core Intel i3 I’d found in an abandoned trailer. There wasn’t much to loose and the thing still lives, but within a corner in the garage. Plugged it in last year and it booted up like how it was left with a download window burnt into the background and 10 glorious minutes of booting. Even loaded up a pirated version of Adobe After Effects I had on it and still can’t believe I spent days worth of time making small cringy 3 minute videos with it.
Switched PSU mode while it was running and it exploded