Stupidest things you've ever done (to your comp) or stupid findings

[Entity_Razer]

Well I thought it'd be funny to know whta kinda jackasses we have around here :p:


I'll start with myself.

Today i'm OC'ng my GFX card back to normal because "for one or another reason" she gave artifacts during a warmer period. Now even at 420 MHZ (R360 core) I still get artifact, weird I think. I try everything untill I come to the conclusion that for over a month my cooling has been set to 7Volt instead of 12 volt :rolleyes:


Off course all of a sudden my OC improves again to normal :p:

[trance565]

stupidest thing ive done to my comp? hmmmm well, i took a shotty to a monitor once :) implosions are kool

[BMORIN]

1) I was turning a pot on my nf2 vdimm mod and I kept turning and turning and the voltage was not going up and I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly I discover I'm turning the WRONG VR. Without knowing it, I'm putting unheard of voltage through my chipset VR. I quickly shut down and somehow it kept working :)

2) I buy my very first hard drive years and years ago for my very first installation. It's brand spanking new, I plug it in and it doesn't work. *Cough*... my computer is running.

I can't even tell you how much stupid stuff I've done, I just can't remember it all.

[Snafu]

Cleared CMOS after adding a new processor and g-card late one night. Go to turn it on and nothing. A few head scratches and a drink or too before I realised that I hadn't moved the jumper back. It was too late and figured I better get to bed before I did anything more idiotic.
:slap:

[n00b 0f l337]

Done the jumper one.

I went to connect another heatercore into my loop, so I drained the system out, went to put the heatercore in to find dangerden gave me a 3/8" one. so I left it out and went and turned comp back on to go do the rma process with them.

1) forgot to turn pump on
2) forgot I had drained it

[perry_78]

Probably the stupidest thing I have done (apart from ebay), was trying to hog a K6 CPU from an old computer which was to be thrown out.

It was a warm winter day....

I needed a floppy to run memtest. My father, cheery man, told me they are throwing some old PC's out at his work. I merrily went by, hogged the floppy, GF4MX420, some 256mb of sdram, and decided to hog the CPU now that I was at it.

The problem was that the cooler was pretty much super-glued to the IHS. I did not know this, I though it was some nasty thermal pad. So, like a maniac, I pulled and pulled and pulled. Because even this brute force didn't work I applied more brute force. At this point I ripped the whole CPU out of the socket. However, while my hand flew backward, I sliced my finger cleanly on one of those razor sharp edges of the cheapo case.

To make a long story short, I drove a nasty piece of metal about 2cm parallel into my finger, resuling in 3 stitches :(

So, children, NEVER hog a K6 :p:

[TMM]

Being a young little n00b (and still am ;P) one day i discovered the bios. And in that bios there was a vcore setting...

... Lets just say the aftermath was a very toasted Pentium3 800 :D

[ZX7891]

I was taking my NF7 out to sell it. I was trying to figure out my northbridge was making noise. I found that a screw was stuck in a fan.

[deff_ins]

one day before i realised that i want buy dothan based system i removed ihs from my a64 3200 winchester. everyting was fine untill i turn on compueter with ccmos on... mainborads bios was dead and cpu too :(
there was no probmle to reflash bios but cpu is dead and there is no warranty ofcourse.
so i lose some money for system change...
sorry about my lame english :slap:

[Poly15]

The first machine I ever built would not start. I worked on it for about 3 hours wondering why the damn thing would not boot up. All I would get was FF on my epox board and it would not cycle through the codes. For hours and hours I checked and rechecked every cable. After hearing me curse for the past hour my dad (who does not even know how to turn the damn comp on!) walks in to see what the hell I am doing and he looks in my machine and says that stick isn't in all the way..... MY DAMN MEMORY WASN'T IN ALL THE WAY!

[HiJon89]

I don't know how many volts I was putting through my X800 XT PE because I don't know where I put my multimeter when I moved, but I just kept turning the pot until I could hit 7K in 3DMark05 (Check my sig). I had to overclock the card to 672/594 to break 7K, this was all just with an ATI Silencer 5 on the card. I guess I'm lucky the card didn't explode :p:

[[XC] leviathan18]

i toasted 2 floppy drives cuz i never remember how tu plug the power to the floppy disk so when i bought my new rig guess what i didnt buy floppy :P

[NickS]

I fried an athlon XP trying to do the pencil trick. *sigh*

[twiggy]

Slipped with a screwdriver trying to take of a CPU hs and scratched the mobo(but didnt notice), turned it on and it fried 2x512 Gskill LE's, 9800p and a 3400+ A64. Only cut 4 traces too.:(

Still got the mobo sitting here waiting for some 12 gauge shells. :hehe:

[DocGolem]

This didn't really affect my computer, but my room.

I disconnected my chiller setup to do some testing with air cooling and I disconnected all of the hoses that went to my blocks, so I had an open line coming from my pump. I have my pump powered by another surge protector, so I can just turn it on/off whenever I feel like it, independently of my computer. Anyways, I go to run upstairs to get some pop and somehow I flip the switch to turn on the pump.

I get back downstairs maybe 3-4 minutes later, and to my surprise, my floor is all green because my 3 gallon res has just been emptied all over my carpet.

So long story short, I had to get new carpet.

[perry_78]

This didn't really affect my computer, but my room.

I disconnected my chiller setup to do some testing with air cooling and I disconnected all of the hoses that went to my blocks, so I had an open line coming from my pump. I have my pump powered by another surge protector, so I can just turn it on/off whenever I feel like it, independently of my computer. Anyways, I go to run upstairs to get some pop and somehow I flip the switch to turn on the pump.

I get back downstairs maybe 3-4 minutes later, and to my surprise, my floor is all green because my 3 gallon res has just been emptied all over my carpet.

So long story short, I had to get new carpet.

:rofl: Nice one. Me and my father were going home from McDonalds with a 50L barrel of juice. Needless to say, our car still smelt like sugary juice half a year later :D

[[XC] leviathan18]

last year we had gas strike here in my country and my GF's mom went to a gas station a bought something like 70liters of gas and put it in a big plastic reservoir we went to a store to buy some food and when went back guess what the gas destroyed the reservoir and well....... the car smelled quite funny for a week

if that happens to somebody just put some pineapple inside the car is takes the smell out quite fast

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

i once was tired, and forgot my pc was one when i plugged in my burner. comp shuts off, burner never burns again :(. got my ear caught in a TT squirrel cage fan when i was trying to listen to it LOL :p:. when i was a super noob, i couldnt figure out how you were supposed to sleeve properly. so i cut all the wires, sleeved, and solder the wires back together :( :rolleyes:

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

last year we had gas strike here in my country and my GF's mom went to a gas station a bought something like 70liters of gas and put it in a big plastic reservoir we went to a store to buy some food and when went back guess what the gas destroyed the reservoir and well....... the car smelled quite funny for a week

if that happens to somebody just put some pineapple inside the car is takes the smell out quite fast


LOL!!!! you must have flew home after that gas leak!

[Entity_Razer]

when i was a super noob, i couldnt figure out how you were supposed to sleeve properly. so i cut all the wires, sleeved, and solder the wires back together :( :rolleyes:


Nice one :ROTF:

[perry_78]

Nice one playa :) I did the same with a Maxtor DiamondMax9 HDD. Guess what? Still runs fine :)

Love that drive, it's terribly noise but has yet to fail me, even after my psychotic (hardware-asylum, cough cough) abuse :D

[masterofpuppets]

I've:
Made a BIG scratch in my P4C800-E with a screwdriver when removing sealstring (I put a screwdriver under it to break the suction). It still works suprisingly, even though several exposed etches are bridged.

Powered up with the CCMOS jumper on, but very suprisingly, it didn't die.

Forgot to connect the fan on my 9800XT, causing many many artifacts in 2D mode.

Forgot to use neoprene when insulating!! I managed to run it for an amazing 36 hours with no load!! Then suddenly I lost VGA signal and discovered a puddle of condensation growing on my 9800XT, which still works.

Epoxied a heatsink to my Pentium II, then forgot about it. Fast forward a few years later, *tries to remove heatsink*, *pulls die from PCB*, many laughs follow.

I've done several more stupid things but these are only a few.

[GazC]

I've done lots of things, the one that springs to mind though was losing my finger-tip in a Delta fan.

The other one was turning the pot on my 9800pro the wrong-way and putting over 2.6volts through the GPU. Happy to say it survived it though.

[trance565]

lol, my first build, few months ago, teh computer im on, i fried my gigabyte 939 ultra mobo, taht i originally planned on using, forgot to put spacers in, RMA'd it, along with the cpu, cuz i couldnt figure out wtf was wrong, so when i get my cpu, and msi motherboard, i did the same thing, took it to a computer store, payed 170 fior the dude to fix it, said he did a professional wiring job, still looks missing, and he charged me extra 10 bux for the spacer screws which i coulda baught for 50 cents at sears, so 180 bux total, really pissed me off, cuz he put my ram in the wrong slots too, and he put hdd jumper in wrong, so my 80 gig hdd, had to be replaced, he did a couple other retarded things, but i forget wut

[Reznik Akime]

Thats when you would beat the jerk senseless with the computer.

One thing I did was totally erase my xbox's onboard tsop. I have a 1.0 Box with the 1mb chip in it and I added switches to seperate the banks into four of em. I dunno what the hell I did wrong.. Still dont to this day.. But I had all the switches in the off position and when I tried to flash, it erased half the chip and wouldnt reflashed what it erased.

Well.. I didnt learn. I fooled with the switches again and tried to reflash it.. but ill be damned if I didnt erase the other half of the chip. Yes, without flashing.

Ended up having to buy a modchip to bypass the thing. So it still works.

Oh, Also fried my 6800's memory by using the wrong VR. Aint gonna do that again, thats fer damn sure.

[Master_G]

:ROTF: this thread is comedy gold!!!

My own personal one was:
I was up late at night playing about. I had already spent 5mins wondering why it was beeping at me then discovered i hadnt plugged in graphics card molex, so should have taken the hint then to stop.
But did i stop then? Hell no.
I was putting in VGA watercooling. Had pump on seperate PSU (from a 386 :D) as I was running the pump to get most of air out before i installed and couldnt be bothered to change the wiring.
Turned on computer but didnt turn on 386 PSU. Got into windows, display goes teary and funny, i'm like "hmm" (too tired to think, turn it all off and then work out what is wrong). Start poking at things (quality troubleshooting method), touch back of graphics card, burn finger and quickly pull out plug.
Cursed myself for being an idiot and a noob, let it all cool down (including my finger) and carried on.
25mins later i did it again.
That's when i called it a night.

G

[TMM]

if that happens to somebody just put some pineapple inside the car is takes the smell out quite fast
rofl, thats so random :lol2:

[Entity_Razer]

Nice thread we have going here. but I can't believe thats all the stupid things we people here did :D

I'll post another one. This time from a frend of mine (since I'm not THAT big a noob)


My frend has, like me, a asus A7n8X-X rev2. Now one day he see's something on his bootscreen reading NVIDIA BOOTAGENT which had to do with the fact (I just found out) that he didn't have is HDD pluged in.

Now what did the guy do? not knowing that his HDD wasn't plugged in.

He turned of his comp, RIPPED THE HS OFF OF THE AMD 2500+ CPU, put paste on it again, reinstalled it.

Still gave the bootagent so he called me :)


That MUST have been the funniest repair I EVER DID.
Walk in, ah your HDD isn't connecter, *plug in* boot ....

WORKS :D

[afireinside]

Haha lets see:

ripped very clean TEC cooled 9500pro and watercooled 1800+ AXP rig out of case because it wouldn't boot. Only to have my dad walk in and tell me that I taped both the TEC wire together and it shorted :stick:

Same rig, I was benching A64/9600XT so when I went back to TEC rig I forgot pump. Started watching a movie and 5 minutes in rig shuts down. Results? Brunt cold plate, burnt maze4 base, and charred 80 watt TEC. All still works though :D

Trying to get PSO to work, I installed a USB network adapter because the game is picky with DFI NF3 onboard LAN. All of a sudden my PC starts rebooting. Once again, I rip my clean set up out of its case and throw it on the table. Swap out to my VNF3-250 and same thing started happening as soon as I pluged the network adapter in. Than it took me about half an hour to realize it wasen't booting because the HDD IDE cable wasn't hooked up.

Went through FIVE (5) AXP chips and chilled liquid on the CPU and NB before finding out my board (NF7-S) was holding me back **cries**

[wfarid]

lol, i remember i tried taking out a pci modem and i was wearing wool... lol... all i heard was a zzzt and then that modem never worked again.

[HermS]

Went to get my old X850 vmodded at my brother's workplace, All went fine and my little bro did a sterling job (one of the neatest Vmods I've ever seen) Unfortunately on the way back I was holding the card in my hand as I got out of the car and got a nasty static shock when I went to close the car door. RIP X850.

Drinking coffee next to my rig I knocked the cup off the desk and it landed on top of my case, coffee flowed through the blowhole and the fan splattered hot sweet coffee over the entire inside of my case. Every single thing had coffee on it and there was a fairly large puddle of coffee in the bottom of the case. Luckily the only thing that died was my NF7-S, however my 9800 smells of coffee to this day. Suffice to say I now keep my PC case about 5 feet away from my desk.

[Lithan]

Hmmm Stupidest thing I've ever done to a computer part....


Bought a 8500se off forums for $25 (When they were worth about $45). The catch was fan died so he put on a zalman northbridge sink, but that didn't cool enough so he used a slot fan to get air movement across it. I got the card, said *&%^ this and removed the zalman. Sadly about half the gpu's heatplate came up with it. So I took a grinding disk on my dremel and set to work. About ten seconds later I saw what the inside of a gpu looks like (pretty much what the pictures showing you the components (cache, etc) of a cpu). I now have the card screwed to the outside of my bedroom door. (You have welcome mats/keep out signs. I have dead computer parts.)

[Mr. Tinker]

I've made a lot of stupid purchases. I bought the Zalman GPU waterblock. I will NEVER use that POS. I also bought the Ahanix Iceberg I watercooling kit. Worse than good aircooling.

[MaxxxRacer]

dumbest thing i ever did was forget to turn on my pump in my WC'ing ssytem. well the system is running and MBM5 starts going ape:banana::banana::banana::banana: with noises and flashing lights telling me my cpu is to hot. it was at 60C.. i freaked and dove under the desk realizing i handnt plugged in my gigantic iwaki pump (no relay). so as i plug it in i think everything is fine. i get back up.. go to move my mouse.. nothing.. i quickly look under the desk and realize that the tubing on the cpu block heated up alot and stretched out. because of htis it was spraying water everywhere at an alarming rate. it drenched my x800 (got it when it just came out) , mobo, and raptor HDD..


but in the end all was well. the vid card, mobo, and hdd was ok.. nothing died in that incident.

[Daveb2012]

hmm, about the worst thing I think i have done was plug in a floppy molex upside down and fry the floppy drive in one of my classes.

[[XC] leviathan18]

well when the willamete come out i bought an intel 850gb mobo and a 1.5ghz p4 i came home and installed everything turned on 3 orange lights and puff all dead changed the mobo and cpu came home again and the same well never knew why but i changed my video card sound car for new ones and the third time all was ok :S

[freecableguy]

This one is still painful to talk about...

I did some computer modding that required me to remove my TEC'ed waterblock and all. I reinstalled my 3.4EE ES (yes, this was an Engineering Sample) and attached the waterblock. Hooked up the wires for the TEC and powered up. Hmm...no POST. WTF. Well, after about 5 minutes of steady-on power I realized that I had reversed the polarity on my TEC. I had just cooked my 3.4EE ES. My best estimates were upwards of 160C. The base substrate had actually warped. What a sad day that was... :(