Dumbest thing you've ever done with a computer

[jonantice]

I decided to update the BIOS on my dell laptop (I thought I had to do it to get APM working). Now it doesn't turn on. I then proceded to take it all apart to see if the chip on the motherboard was replaceable. I have no idea what the BIOS chip looks like and even if I buy a new motherboard it probably won't work if I put it back together.
The very first thing I did with a computer, other then play games, was delete a month of my dad's work. He forgot to label the disk so he had nothing on me though. He was pissed but not at me.

[void_false]

Once i gnawed the cable that goes from sound card to CD-ROM.

[Kojak]

The dumbest things:
- installing Linux on the wrong harddrive in my Mac, thus flattening OSX and all my data
- plugging a wrong PSU unit (too much voltage) to a box, frying a graphics card along the way
- heavily comlaining vs. the computervendor that a laptop's harddisk is faulty (trashing the partition structure repeatedly and freezing temporarily), only to find out later that it was a kernel bug. (oops!)
- inserting a broken floppy into a floppy drive. When I wanted to remove the floppy, 50% of it remained in the drive. Drive ruined.

I guess the best things were still done by a friend of mine. Spilling orange juice over a new and expensive keyboard multimedia and dropping a brand new harddisk on the floor when trying to install it, thus breaking the harddrive. That sad drive wasn't even booted up once.

[a12ctic]

installing windows

[carlosponti]

well on my power supply there was this little thing that looked like a fan plugin. i plugged it in on my motherboard to an empty fan plugin. next thing i know the fans are not working and i cant figure out why. i switched all the fans to be powered directly off the power supply.

[Roxoff]

I've done lots of dumb things - its one of the best ways to learn how to do things properly...

I remember a while ago (maybe '95 or '96) we were preparing a company presentation at a trade show in Dallas, Texas, we were flying out of the UK to do this show, and lots of work had gone into it's preparation. We'd had a few teething troubles with the software we were showing, and we'd been up late doing final configs, by about 11pm we'd just finished. We were carrying the PC pre-configured out with us in the hand-luggage (it was a small box so it wasn't a problem).

Our flight was out at about 6 am, long haul. We did all our final checks and shut the PC down, finally I leaned over, knowing that the last thing we wanted to do was plug this in on a trade stand and have it blow the PSU, so I switched it from 240v to 110v. Unfortunately I'd left the UK power connected, and there was a pop and a flash from the PSU in the back of the PC. We were 7 hours from takeoff, with a 3hr drive to Heathrow, and with no shops open (nobody, and I mean nobody in the UK had 24 hr opening in those days); we had no chance to get replacement parts - it was either fix it or we're f**ked.

So we took the PC to pieces, and found that it wasn't that bad - the PSU had blown a fuse, big sighs of relief, but there was no way we could get a 2.4amp psu fuse before we left. So we did the whole trip with the psu carrying a regular UK power socket 3 amp fuse taken from one of the lamps in my front room! That's certainly a mistake I wont make again.

[djap]

I remember when I was about 12 years old I tried to take a PC into pieces and then put it back together just because of curiosity and for fun...

And the dumb part :
The PC I was using for this wasn't mine and I didn't even have a permission or any experience to do this... I still remember the horrifying feeling when I tried turning it on for the first time after doing this and realized that it's not booting... And the relief after I checked a few cables and it came back to life.

( Don't tell my brother, he still doesn't know... )

[janrocks]

After last night's escapades with win32parite...

installing windows

[Apollo]

Lets see.
Installing ancient ram on a fairly new pc and frying the mobo is the supidest thing i'v eever done
Another time me and a friend were trying to figure out why his DVD drives weren't working, sand we kept swtiching them. We forgot to turn the power off once and then as both of us reached near the drive with our cables in hand, a GIANT blue spark shot out of both drives and into our hands. We were like ARGHHHHHHHH, turn off the power bar and roll around on the ground twitching for like a year. Then hugged each other like little girls and thanked our God that we were still alive. Hands fellt funny all night.

[vixenk]

About a year or two ago, I killed an HP motherboard by trying to flash it with another motherboard's rom in an attempt to give it a bios with more functionality *they were both ASUS motherboards, had the same features, looked the same, etc. so it wasn't ENTIRELY stupid but it WAS pretty stupid*.