Bought a computer from Radio Shack. Enough said.

it went something like this...

<<
FLASHBIOS LOADING
56421 K

KEYBOARD INSTALLED
MOUSE INSTALLED


Cannot Find Drive C:\
_

>>

You can immagine what happened after that.

memories..
 

i got some pretty funny/idiotice stories, here goes

i was once putting in a new video card for a friend. When i was pulling out his old card....BANG ....i slipped with his old card into his sound card snapping it in half and ripping up the top left corner of his mobo, yep i was 800 dollars broker :(

This was recently at work while running an economics experiment on a Sun box, I tried to cut and paste some stuff from one terminal to another. So I highlighted the text in the term that was running the experiment and, thinking I was on a Windows PC, I hit ctrl-c to copy. I ended up killing the experiment, and when I tried to restart it, somehow there was a memory leak and everything went to hell. Somewhere in there my supervisor did the same thing with the ctrl-c instead of copying. Ugh.

On a gentoo box, doing an `emerge -u world` a week after finishing building it.

There goes two weeks of work (slow box, slow compiles).

Second would have to be a bad crimp on an ethernet cable bending a connecter pin in my dsl modem. Put a good cable in there and that wouldn't work 'cause of the bent connector! A half a day of downtime later as well as a smack to the forehead, and I get high-speed internet again :D

I did an rm -rf on one of the data directories. Lucky for tape backups. Although it was from a week ago, they only lost around 4 hours of work.

one time i was looking in my bios at my settings (didn't change anything) and then i just hit the power switch before exiting my bios. well my bios got corrupted and my registry got corrupted and it couldnt find ntldr which was the windows loading thingy. so basically i had to flash my bios and reinstall everything. wasnt fun and i had no idea that could happen by simply turning off your computer while in bios

Deleted my Documents and Settings more than once - agony and heartbreak ensued

I have a 200W power supply in my shuttle mini pc and a Radeon 9800 Pro in there and everything runs fine. :D

I got the brilliant idea to shoot compressed air into my CPU fan and see if temps decreased...

However i was holding the can upside down and launched a stream of liquid into my case... Luckily the only thing i broke was my NIC (that was a huge spark)

These are good ones, at least I am not alone in the blunder department. Once formated the wrong HD , 6 gigs of data gone but I got it all back with data recovery software.My biggest one was installing a super ORB on my new ASUS mobo and seeing after a week it sucked so I tired to remove it. Now if you have ever used a super ORB you know these things are one MF to remove, anyhow I was using two screw drivers to try and get the damn thing to unclip and then SLIP SCRATCH OH FUCK NO! there went the mobo. After several hours of sobing I had to go buy a new one.

Printed Circuit Board

I once put my heatsink on backwards, but noticed before I turned the computer on, luckily, heh.

I was attempting to update the C libraries on a linux box I was toying around with a few years back. Of course, it wouldn't install because the current libraries were in use. Without thinking, I renamed the old one and attempted the install again. Whoops. I hadn't considered that all of the command line tools are dynamically linked with that library. You know you're hosed when even 'ls' doesn't work.

In hindsight I could've just booted off a floppy and copied a proper version back over, but oh well.

I uninstalled my virus scanner once because the update subscription thing kept coming up and was really annoying. Ended up getting W95.CIH off of Kazaa (yes I was THAT stupid) and had to reformat.

i plugged in usb2 connectors backwards and that part of the board was fried after the smoke cleared. doh. oh well. it justified me gettin a new mobo. :)

oh yeah.. also.. i was installing msdos 6.2 on the secondary drive, and booted off a disk, it didnt ask me if i wanted to choose a drive and i realized it 4% into formattin my primary drive. shit.

Deleted one more registry key than I should have. Not backed up.

There's no heat sink compound on my processor now.

I fell off my dorm loft when trying to get out of bed. Shit, it hurt, I hit my back on the chair and my desk (it was under my loft). My fiance laughed before she asked me whether I was alright. Haha, but she fell out of her loft later in the week after I left. Best of all, it was because she tried to get the phone and it was a telemarketer. That is some funny shit!!

:D :D :D

Did you fall onto a computer? ;) ;)

Putting together a new system for my young cousin and had him help to teach him.

Explained the importance of fans for heat disbursement, etc. Neglected to remove the protective tab from the bottom of the heatsink that covers the thermal pad.

5 seconds into the boot and I smell smoke. Slow motion reach for the power button but it's too late. Brand new 1 GHz Athlon is now a display item - pretty cool scorch mark on it, too.

laptop + half full beer + cat

you do the math, very messy, very stupid of me to set my beer down

I was working on my parents computer once, something was wrong with the power supply, so I unscrewed it, tried some other power supplies on the computer, and when I tried the original one again, it started smoking! So I threw it out the window and got it later.
...I never did figure out what I had done to make it smoke

First time venturing into dual booting. Somehow fubared the dual boot making it only load up Linux and not Windows. Age 14.

4:00 in the morning. Can't sleep. Decides it would be best to use up my time by overclocking the video card. With a few slips of the hand, accidentally overclocked the video card to 400%. Age 14.

Placing in new RAM for friend. Slipped, broke said RAM, creates an inch long cut on my finger. No stitches required. Age 15.

First adventure into the world of soldering. Plan: replace drab HDD activity LED with more brighter, spiffyer blue LED. Fubared the job, burns half of pinky finger. Nothing a little cold water couldn't fix. A week ago.

Hey, everybody makes mistakes right? I just seem to do them repeatedly. :-p

In college I had a bunk bed, with my desk directly under my bed.

Was drinking Hawaiin Punch, choked, and everything just splattered on my monitor. :o

THat same night, as I climb up to my bed, my big toe tips over that SAME Hawaiin Punch bottle, which happened to dump about 6 oucnes on the site of my monitor where the VENT HOLES are.

My monitor was off while this happened. After I tried cleaning everything back up, I just sat in front of my monitor, hoping that it would not explode when I turned it on. Luckily, nothing happened, though I know for CERTAIN that there is still dried up Hawaiin Punch inside of my 19inch Viewsonic p95f+ right now as Im typing this message.

Evil Hawaiin Punch...

hmmm...my two major blunders are

1.) When trying out the desktop replacement Litestep, I ended up having disabling explorer in windows. So it would start up, but then not do anything.

2.) Found a "game" under Kazaa one time and tried to run it. At first I thought it didn't do anything. Later released it was a virus and made a host of dummy applications that just would kill my computer's resources. Took me a couple of weeks to finally isolate the problem and get rid of it.

No, it was closer to the wall, I fell on the edge of the desk and my chair. Sucked!!

Overclocked a cpu...got so hot it burned the ziff socket right off the motherboard....twice

bleed on a mother board, i cut my self on the SIMM (long long ago in a galaxy far far away...) and i did not notice, it shorted out the entire system and ruined teh system.

I downloaded some warez from Kazaa and installed it. It completely deleted all my mp3 and jpeg files

I've managed to fry a couple of harddrives by plugging them in wrongly. I've also managed to fuck up several more, probably by handling them incorrectly, a real shame...
I also installed Bonzi buddy :/

In the ancient days, I was consulting at my uncles... forgot to run "park.exe" before shutting down.

Ooops.

i update AVG scanner, suddenly it tells me something is a virus. instead of double checking this strange behaviour for a false positive, i just said ok delete the file.

used a crack i found on kazaa without first verifying it is legit; began deleting my system files.

didn't remove a 1GB fat32 partition before using HP's destructive recovery; it tried to reinstall winxp in there without even asking.