What's the dumbest mistake you ever made on your computer?

[Doctor Q]

We all make mistakes when using our computers. Sometimes they are easy to fix, but sometimes not. What's the dumbest mistake you've made?

Wiped out your homework or Ph.D. dissertation or new novel by accident? Trashed a client's database without a backup? E-mailed a love letter to the wrong person? Posted your credit card number in a newsgroup? Come on, fess up!

I'll go first. I wanted to impress a magazine columnist with my clever analysis of an article he wrote. I pasted in a bunch of text from various sources, intending to pick and choose facts to summarize. I added a few notes to myself. Then I clicked Send instead of Save. I immediately sent an Oops - disregard previous e-mail message but I ended up looking pretty darn foolish.

Your turn!

[mattevil]

a long time ago i couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working and i found out i was using a phone cord rather than cat 5 wire (i knew needed cat 5 too)
that's pretty embarassing.

[vniow]

I bought Windows.http://img.ranchoweb.com/images/veronica/winky.gif

[edesignuk]

When I got my first PC and was totally new to the world of computing.
I (just about) figured out how to add a second hdd to my PC, a 10Gb drive as my 1.6Gb was almost full. I decided that I wanted my OS on the new drive (slave) and to then use the 1.6Gb as backup for files, so, being the novice I was i just cut and paste the 'WINDOWS' folder from the c: drive onto the new d: drive....I'll let you figure out what happened when I tried to reboot :( :p :rolleyes:

[diorio]

The dumbest thing I've ever tried to do is run a game with requirements about 5x more than what my computer can run, freezing up my computer. My video card also went out but I'm not sure what caused it.

[Taft]

I have a friend who tried to install an Airport card while his iBook was still on. It fried his logic board.

Taft

[beez7777]

i non commercially file shared, which led to the opening of a corrupt file. next thing i know the os cant recognize my hdd and i need to reformat, wasnt that bad tho, ive done worse things on my pc:)

[richierich]

I managed to crash OSX + XP simultaneously on my ibook and lovely Dell PC!!!!!!!

God knows how I did it, but probably my best to date........ apart from maybe the night before my professional Architecture exam (a 3 day exam done at work), I was printing out stuff at work and managed to totally crash the server so it wouldn't turn on again!!!!

I was in charge of the IT in the office so in between doing questions I was fixing it - total nightmare!

I think I am quite good at this...............

[fragiledreams]

I did put a memory module incorrectly resulting... smoke and fire :D

[ejb190]

I couldn't get a disk to eject from my Powerbook's VST Zip drive. In the process of getting mad at not getting the paperclip to work, I managed to break the drive. Costly mistake...but I did get the disk out.

[kenkooler]

forgot the root password on a linux box with 4000 mp3s...

[bomega]

Okay, my list of stupid things I did with my computer:

I once wrote a report of about 10 pages. I saved every 10 seconds because I didn't want to lose anything. Someone called me so I stood up and tried to press COMMAND S to save. But I missend and pressed COMMAND A then S and then COMMAND S which left me with a saved document which contained one "s"...

One night I left my Powerbook open because I was working on a book and I was almost finished. I was looking after someone's house and they had a cat, the cat peed on my Powerbook so the next day I turned it on and it didn't wake up but started to smoke...

A guy I knew didn't know what aliasses where but he did notice they did the same as programs. He even went as far as testing both files and yes, they funtioned exactely the same. So he made aliasses for all programs on all the computers in my school, tested them all and then deleted all programs.

Computers are great fun!

[scem0]

I deleted the HD without aking my sister, and I deleted about 20 'really important pictures' of her with her friends. I don't understand girls...... :o :rolleyes: ;)

[edesignuk]

Originally posted by scem0
I don't understand girls...... :o :rolleyes: ;)
I'm sure you're not the first to think that ;) :D

[Skandranon]

This thread is AWESOME. Thanks, Doc Q. You guys just made my day, man.

Alright, my turn:

I was sitting in a Mac computer cluster, working on a Power Mac G4. The desks were all side by side, rows and rows of Power Macs. I had two other people working on either side of me.

The setup itself was exactly like the one I had in my apartment, with the Power Mac tucked neatly by my feet and a brilliant 15" LCD flat panel display on the desktop. I was working on IE when the damn computer crashed on me. I barked an expletive and reached down to the Power Mac next to me and hit the reboot button.

Next thing I know, my neighbor's LCD display winked out and the reboot chime resonated through the cluster. My screen meanwhile didn't even blink.

I could have sworn I heard this guy's neck crack the way his head snapped back. He spun around to face me with bulging, bloodshot eyes.

"What did you do." He said in a flat, murderous voice. I felt the blood rush from my face.

What I neglected to realize was that despite the fact that the setup mirrored my own at home, the computers in the clusters were situated to the RIGHT of each user. Since I've got my Power Mac at home on my left, it was only natural that I hastily lunge over in that direction for a reboot button.

I tried explaining this to the guy next to me, but when he started breathing heavily, I gathered up my goods and hauled ass out of there.

:rolleyes:

[solvs]

I installed Win98. First Edition. Almost as bad as WinME. Almost.

[scem0]

Oh yeah, and once I was at school, and while passing through the library I tripped over a cord, and all the computers turned off. I am a really good actor though (not to brag) and I acted like I didn't know who had done it. The librarians would have gotten pissed. The librarians at my new school are 10x worse though.... :D

[P-Worm]

One time I was working around in OS 9. I went to my home folder and decided that i didn't like the user name I had given myself and decided to change the name of it. This was before I realized how OS X works. Your home folder is actually the root deal and when I boot up into OS X I got the message saying that the computer couldn't find the Operating System! Needless to say, I had to almost clean install to get it back to the way it was before.

All I wanted was a different folder name...:p

P-Worm

[jelloshotsrule]

last year i was doing my first professional animation.... ie, getting paid for it. it was an after effects puppet animation. at some point after i finished the actual animation, but before the backgrounds and everything were finalized... i reformatted my drive. i had sworn i'd backed everything up.... well, of course, i hadn't

lost the original puppets and the ae file. luckily i had the rendered movie..... so rather than replacing the background layer. piece of cake. i had to mask it all and do it that way.. blah

but it got done.

and he was none the wiser... bingo

[King Cobra]

The dumbest mistake I ever made was coming to this thread and typing this. :)

But I did have a problem with installing Mac OS X 10.1 on my iMac 233, with only 64MB of RAM. Man, did that go slow. Even worse, I could not connect to the internet or load Classic. I spent probably a whole day trying to figure out WTH to remove, WTH to try, and WTF to do. I ended up removing OS X after reformatting the Hard Drive back to a single partition and installed OS 9.2.2. I now have 160MB RAM for that sucker. :rolleyes:

[Goblin2099]

Over this past summer I had an internship at a production company. One of their DVD players, the kind that are tall and long in the back but not wide at all, had a DVD stuck in it, so I offered to fix it. It turns out, in a move almost stupider than the one I was about to make, that someone was actually lazy enough to tilt the drive backwards while trying to eject the disk. Anyway, I start unscrewing things, keeping track of everything and not having any problems. Of course, these things aren't mean to be opened, and it's just one case within another within another...real pain in the ass, but only a few wires needed to be temporarily pulled out. I fish out the DVD, and put it back together, with an extra screw factor of three. I test it out, with a Krystoff Kierslowski movie if I remember, and, lo and behold, it works just fine. A couple hours later, I go back to it, touch the casing, and get the jolt of my life. I had managed to ground it wrong when I put it back together, and a charge had been building up in the case. All was fixed and in the end nothing was harmed, but the editor who saw me when I recoiled from the shock still won't touch the DVD player.

[coopdog]

1. My friend had just gotten his new iBook and called me to come see it. I went over there messed arround w/ it later that night there was a big glass of coke next to it i knocked it all over the keyboard. He and his dad spent hours and about 10 air cans cleaning the board. They took every key off cleaned, blew it out, washed it w/ distilled water, and put them in a weird H20 chamber thing. His dads weird. The next day they sent it to apple got all kinds of new crap for it. It didn't wreck his comp i was surprised!
2. I had my G4 tray open while holding a fruit punch i bent over to remove a ram chip forgeting i had the drink in my hand. Went all over. This also happened w/ my CDR.
3. I sent pay pal a bad email that i didn't mean to.
4. Reformated the wrong HD
5. Did the dock hack on a bunch of school emacs got in big trubble.
Thats about it

[FelixDerKater]

On the PC I decided to delete IE just for the heck of it to see what happened. I knew what the outcome would be, but I had to do it just to see for myself. Bad idea. On the C64, playing my favorite game, I forgot to close the latch on the floppy drive so the disk got screwed up and I could never play it again. Doh!

[Mal]

On my lime iMac, I ran the restore disc on "erase and install" instead of running the install disc because I thought it would just fix all the problems with the system software. I've since learne better, and I'm now an Apple Tech, but that was pretty embaressing. :p

JW

[Sun Baked]

I always like the smoke test portion of computer repairs...

After I finished checking a drive out, one time puff of smoke and a capacitor spews the gut of its winding all over the inside of a floppy drive. Worked after installing a new cap and ribbon cable.

Then the monster internal fans connected directly to the main power - ooops crossed wire blowing by the surge strip and trips the breaker. :(

Also cutting the wrong cable/wire is always fun.

At least I know how to take apart the Apple Pro Keyboards and clean up a spill quite quickly and easily now.

[Stelliform]

At a clients office I was preparing to reconfigure the SCSI drives in the server as an extra container on the RAID. I would only have a few minutes to work, so I decided to remove the drive while the server was powered. The drives were all unplugged so I didn't think it would be a problem.

Well when I removed one of the drives I snagged a power line to a fan and pierced the casing against the case. The power line in turn acted like a heating element and burned off all of the casing the length of the line. :eek: The smoke was impressive, and the remaining fans blew the smoke into the office before the server shut down.

There was some minor panic that ensued, but everything booted back up ok. (well minus a fan)

:D

[dnte42]

Well, let's see. A while back my iPod was acting up so I took all of the non-music files off of there, despite the fact that they were backup up files. Since the Powers hated me, my hard drive died that same day (and I hadn't installed the os 9 drivers, so I couldn't recover the data). The iPod could have been easily repaired and recovered, but I was just not thinking.

Back in the high school days my friend and I decided to be idiotic and change the name of the hard drives in the library computer lab (to something brilliant, I'm sure, such as 'poopy' or 'i hate school'). Anyhow, the librarian managed to see this (I'll never know how) and she caused a huge commotion and she, no joke, wanted to have us suspended or expellend. We snuck out when she wasn't looking. Some people...

[beatle888]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
We all make mistakes when using our computers. Sometimes they are easy to fix, but sometimes not. What's the dumbest mistake you've made?

Your turn!


i threw my main document partifion before...
it had everyone of our customers graphics files on it. but with my extreme work ethic at the
time...i was able to make up for the loss.

[j763]

well, i needed to back up my important docs onto CD.

so, i inserted the CD, copied the files across (progress indicator) then ejected the CD.

Wiped the HD then realised I'd forgot to click file->burn disc...

oops! :D :) :p

[scem0]

Originally posted by coopdog
[B]1. My friend had just gotten his new iBook and called me to come see it. I went over there messed arround w/ it later that night there was a big glass of coke next to it i knocked it all over the keyboard. He and his dad spent hours and about 10 air cans cleaning the board. They took every key off cleaned, blew it out, washed it w/ distilled water, and put them in a weird H20 chamber thing. His dads weird. The next day they sent it to apple got all kinds of new crap for it. It didn't wreck his comp i was surprised!
2. I had my G4 tray open while holding a fruit punch i bent over to remove a ram chip forgeting i had the drink in my hand. Went all over. This also happened w/ my CDR.


*** Note to self: Try to keep beverages away from computers... ***

[MacBandit]

One time when I was really drunk and in an altered state of mind (I was livin on campus at the time). I was installing and deleting software, repairing and reorganizing general end of the month type stuff. Well when I woke in the morning I found that my computer didn't start. When I finally got it to start with a boot up disc I found that most of the files on the drive were gone and the rest of them had missing files and things. Also the reason it wouldn't start is somehow I had managed to damage/corrupt the hard disk driver.

This actually was not that unusual of an experience for me. I had had similar experiences in the past when it was like 4am and I had been working on the computer all night and I decided to do maintenance.

(Note to self do not operate computers under the influence or when mentally unconcious.):)

[krossfyter]

around the time when i first got my pc (before i saw the light)... i compressed the c drive on it.

http://celica.net/ubb/graemlins/hihi.gif

[irmongoose]

Well I was trying to fix my PC which my mom had insisted on buying.. before I became too pro-mac for her to control :p anyways, a CD wouldn't come out, and the pin hole didn't work... so I decided to go inside the machine. I opened it all up, and at last the CD drive was out. Then I tried to carefully take the CD out, but somehow the gears inside suddenly fell apart, and two seconds later the thing was literally in pieces. The machine still worked, and as my mom never used the drive, and I never used the PC, it was fine.

A few weeks later I got a CD drive from a friend who had a spare one, and tried putting that in. I opened up the machine again, and this time being very careful, I took the broken CD drive out, and put the new one in, and connected all the wires back perfectly. Well, whaddaya know? When I put everything back and turned the PC on, it wouldn't start up!

Plain stupid... anyways, I got my mom to start using my old Beige G3 so I guess that's ok...



irmongoose

[groovebuster]

The worst thing that happened to me was to use Norton Utilities to defragment my HD after upgrading to System 8.5 I guess... or was it 8.0? I don't remember exactly... anyway, when it was finished also my HD was finished. All the data was scrambled and I was stupid enough to not back-up the files for a while. So everything was lost... files of current projects, important papers, everything! For example: I had to call all the companies I worked for the last 9 months before it happened, to send me a copy of the bills I they got from me, because I only had a "digital copy" on my hard-drive. That was embarassing...

There were known issues with the Norton Utilities regarding the back then new OS version, but I was so busy with work, that I failed to hear about them in time. That taught me a lesson using tools like that on a new system without having a back-up of all data.

groovebuster

[mcrain]

Originally posted by krossfyter
around the time when i first got my pc (before i saw the light)... i compressed the c drive on it.

Been there, done that.

I once had a friend of mine set up a new hard drive on my computer. He asked me if I wanted the hard drive partitioned, and I said sure. I ended up with a bunch (around 10) of partitions on a roughly 2 gig hard drive. It was miserable, and I couldn't figure out how to undo it.

[Fezwick]

The dumbest thing i have ever done on my computer has to be when i was hooking up my DOS card in my Powermac 8600. The card comes with this adapter cable which has different ports for the monitor, a joystick stuff like that. Well, the joystick port had the same amount of pins as the monitor cable. Needless to say, i hooked in the monitor to the joystick port, booted up the machine and there was smoke and fire. The machine booted up fine after that though.

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by groovebuster
The worst thing that happened to me was to use Norton Utilities to defragment my HD after upgrading to System 8.5 I guess... or was it 8.0? I don't remember exactly... anyway, when it was finished also my HD was finished. All the data was scrambled and I was stupid enough to not back-up the files for a while. So everything was lost... files of current projects, important papers, everything! For example: I had to call all the companies I worked for the last 9 months before it happened, to send me a copy of the bills I they got from me, because I only had a "digital copy" on my hard-drive. That was embarassing...

There were known issues with the Norton Utilities regarding the back then new OS version, but I was so busy with work, that I failed to hear about them in time. That taught me a lesson using tools like that on a new system without having a back-up of all data.

groovebuster

I guess it's too late to tell you that I recovered 3 or 4 drives that were screwed by Norton durring the whole 8.5 or 9 (I don't remember either) debacle.

All that needed done was to start up off a System disc and use Disk Utilities to reinstall the hard disk driver. Sometimes it wouldn't take on the first try but if you did it a few times the hard drive would start up and all your data would be there and all you needed to do then was back-up and reformat to guarantee the fix.

[Ambrose Chapel]

I had a little accident of spilling some hot tea on the keyboard of my brand new Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio) last spring. I was also soooooooo careful when drinking around that thing too, and this time for some reason my hand shook a little and some tea splashed on the keyboard. So then I tried to dry the keyboard with a hair drier, which I left too close to it...and melted half the keys.

Needless to say I came home with a new keyboard that night.
:D

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by Ambrose Chapel
I had a little accident of spilling some hot tea on the keyboard of my brand new Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio) last spring. I was also soooooooo careful when drinking around that thing too, and this time for some reason my hand shook a little and some tea splashed on the keyboard. So then I tried to dry the keyboard with a hair drier, which I left too close to it...and melted half the keys.

Needless to say I came home with a new keyboard that night.
:D

You didn't have a powerbook that you did the same thing to did you?:D :p


There was a thread started here a few weeks ago with an image of a Powerbook with all the keys melted out from the middle.

[groovebuster]

Originally posted by MacBandit


I guess it's too late to tell you that I recovered 3 or 4 drives that were screwed by Norton durring the whole 8.5 or 9 (I don't remember either) debacle.

All that needed done was to start up off a System disc and use Disk Utilities to reinstall the hard disk driver. Sometimes it wouldn't take on the first try but if you did it a few times the hard drive would start up and all your data would be there and all you needed to do then was back-up and reformat to guarantee the fix.

I heard about that too, but it wouldn't have worked. Since I ran NUs from the Startdisk with the regular system, it only defragged non system files. The Computer still booted, but the parts where NU was writing data were unusable. The files still existed, but the content was scrambled. So it wasn't a problem of the hd driver.

Believe me, I wasn't a computer illeterate back then and I tried really EVERYTHING to get my data back. But NUs screwed the file system while defragging and wrote the blocks to other places than claimed in the catalog. There was just no way to undo that, since I also always let NUs delete the unused blocks and fill them with zeros to prevent the HD from defragmenting bigger files right away again...

All this is a few years ago, so it's just something I can laugh about now for having been that stupid. ;)

groovebuster

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by groovebuster


I heard about that too, but it wouldn't have worked. Since I ran NUs from the Startdisk with the regular system, it only defragged non system files. The Computer still booted, but the parts where NU was writing data were unusable. The files still existed, but the content was scrambled. So it wasn't a problem of the hd driver.

Believe me, I wasn't a computer illeterate back then and I tried really EVERYTHING to get my data back. But NUs screwed the file system while defragging and wrote the blocks to other places than claimed in the catalog. There was just no way to undo that, since I also always let NUs delete the unused blocks and fill them with zeros to prevent the HD from defragmenting bigger files right away again...

All this is a few years ago, so it's just something I can laugh about now for having been that stupid. ;)

groovebuster

Well then, I thought I had you for once. ;) Oh, well I don't use Norton any more do you? Screw me once or twice or three times shame on me but screw me four times.:D

[groovebuster]

Originally posted by MacBandit


Well then, I thought I had you for once. ;) Oh, well I don't use Norton any more do you? Screw me once or twice or three times shame on me but screw me four times.:D

After that experience I only used Norton a few times again... on Macs of other people! :D ;)

But serious, I didn't trust that thing anymore... It's like as if your wife cheated on you. You can forgive, but you can 't forget it. ;)

groovebuster

[sparkleytone]

Originally posted by kenkooler
forgot the root password on a linux box with 4000 mp3s...

haha

but easy to fix. :)

sudo passwd root

[Gaz]

I managed to drop my TiBook on my brick drive last week, that was more of an expensive mistake than anything else.

In fairness it still works but looks a bit damaged. Can't use the internal DVD drive anymore as the case is bent so it scratchs CDs/DVDs, bugger!

Think a new one is in the cards next year.

[Rower_CPU]

Here's a Terminal boner for you to enjoy:

I was roadtripping this summer, taking pictures at Yellowstone, etc and travelling with my TiPB. When I was over at my parent's house I decided to do a little maintenance and clean up the HD a little.

You know those annoying OS 9 files that get left on your machine (Desktop DB, Desktop DF, etc.)? I was cleaning those up in Terminal, but I made one critical mistake; I typed the following at the root level:

sudo rm -r Desktop * instead of "Desktop *" or Desktop\ *

I realized what was going on when I saw all my applications going by on the screen. I stopped it in time to prevent it from taking out the system, but I lost everything but System Prefs and Utilities from my Applications folder. :eek:

Word to the wise: Think twice before using "rm -r(f)"

[Taft]

Originally posted by Skandranon

Next thing I know, my neighbor's LCD display winked out and the reboot chime resonated through the cluster. My screen meanwhile didn't even blink.

I could have sworn I heard this guy's neck crack the way his head snapped back. He spun around to face me with bulging, bloodshot eyes.

"What did you do." He said in a flat, murderous voice. I felt the blood rush from my face.
...


I did something like this once. Except it was much, much worse.

I was also in the lab, and was at a line of computers working on the computer closest to the wall. I adjusted my position in the chair and my screen went blank.

Then I started to hear the agitation of the users all down my row of computers. I look over and all of the screens in the row were blank. Then I looked down at my feet and noticed the plug lying between them. Hoping to avoid being caught, I quickly reached down, grabbed the plug and trying to plug it back in. But I was too slow and couldn't find the plug.

In the end, I was caught red-handed. And boy did I get a good reaming from the row of users to my left.

That sucked.

Taft

[dnte42]

Heh, my friend used to "accidentally" trip the power chord in one of our old high school web design classes. Funniest part was that no one ever caught on to what was happening (and yet our teacher noticed when he removed the Micron logo from the montior, and failed him because he couldn't find a replacement :eek: :p :p :p). It was all ok, because we never did anything anyway, it was basically a free period to check e-mail :p.

[MacSlut]

Reading this makes me feel extremely lucky. I've been using computers for about 25 years now and have only spilled coffee on my keyboard once. I did PC/Mac service for a few years and never did anything more than just break a couple of extremely fragile "they're almost supposed to break" ribbon cables and plastic clips.

The stupidest thing I ever did with a computer...
I was working for a major top-ten Website. We had spent about 3 months doing a complete overhaul of the site. It was a redesign, new tech, new content organization, new sections. It was major enough for us to have a party after it launched.

I had to upgrade one of my sections after the site relaunched, so I stayed behind while *everyone* went to party. I then accidently entered the wrong URL for the site update script. I entered an old URL which was still active. The result was that shortly after the New and Improved site went live and our PR department was starting to promote it to the press, I had swapped out the entire site with how it looked, not just prior to the update, but 6 MONTHS PRIOR!

And of course I couldn't fix things myself, so I had to go to the party and get some drinking sys admins back to their desks.

[rt_brained]

One time, I accidentally used a cat. 6 T568A modular connector instead of a cat. 5e insert coupler on the end of an RJ45 cat. 5 (T568B)!

I know, pretty funny, huh?

[SilvorX]

mac: deleted the finder icon from system folder on os 8.6....yikes
windows: partitioning linux onto my puter for the first time :eek: :eek:

[patrick0brien]

-Well guys, here are my stupid things. The overriding stupid thing is that they are on the SAME MACHINE. Needless to say. I killed it.

Two years ago I bought a new G4 450 Dual Processor Powermac. I hauled it home, and proptly core-dumped my old machine and the 13 years of stuff onto it. Once I got all the prefs the way I like 'em. Just to put icing on the the newness, I decided to run Norton 3 on it. The same Norton that I used on the 7200 I was replacing.

Ok, all you Mac guys out there can probably see what is coming.

By action of omission "forgot" that OS 9 uses HFS+ file system instead of my 7200's HFS. Well, Norton, not recognizing HFS+ reported a "problem" and I said "Fix".

The moment my finger relaxed off the mouse button, I "remembered" this fact.

OH SH**!!!

Well, due to some creative computational acrobatics, I did manage to save my stuff, but this gets worse...

I used this machine for a year and a half, including the migration to OS X, before it drowned in a sea of kernel panics this January.

I'd fried the logic board and both processors - literally.

How you ask?

By using the machine for heavy 3D rendering and Final Cut operations ONE FOOT AWAY from a radiator so hot that water boils when spilled on it!

:-B

Well, I'm impressed that it lasted a year-and-a-half in this environment at least. :D

[Doctor Q]

My second dumbest mistake (see the start of this thread for my first) was when I could not diagnose a problem for months even though the problem was obvious in hindsight.

I had a Power Mac 8600/300 that crashed (total freeze) on and off, sometimes not for a week, sometimes multiple times in a day.

Thinking I was being a systematic detective, I kept doing tests to see if it was a hardware problem (e.g., bad RAM) or a software problem (e.g., extension conflict). I looked for patterns of what I was doing when it crashed. I removed preference files. I ran Disk Warrior and other diagnostic programs. The usual stuff. No clues emerged.

Then I tried more radical approaches:

(1) To see if I had a software problem, I did a clean reinstall of Mac OS, reinstalled the applications I used, and gradually redefined preference settings. The freezes continued, so I concluded that I did not have a software problem.

(2) To see if I had a hardware problem, I got hold of another Power Mac 8600 and moved my hard disk into it, along with the PCI network card I had installed in the first 8600 so I could use two Ethernet interfaces with my firewall software. The freezes continued, so I concluded that the only possible hardware problem could be the hard disk. But changing to another disk drive didn't help either.

Since it wasn't hardware and it wasn't software, I was baffled. Then, one day, while telling a friend how there was no possible explanation, it came to me. I had moved the hard disk AND the PCI card. Duhhhhh! Bad PCI card.

I tossed out the card, switched to a hardware firewall solution, and haven't crashed for months!

[Billicus]

I was working on the high school librarians computer, and it was freezing, so I decided to run Norton Disk Doctor on it. I think it was an older version that was supported by OS 8.1, so it really sent the computer for a loop. It took our computer teachers 3 days to fix that computer.
Another time, I was working on the same computer, when I couldn't access some Quictime content on the internet. So, I downloaded the newest version (some version of 5 at the time) and when I restarted it just froze. After a bit of investigation I realized that one of the quicktime extensions was freezing the computer. I had to deinstall the new quicktime version.
I changed the browser on a different teachers computer, because I prefered IE at the time, and ended up deleting all of her old email. :rolleyes:

[Choppaface]

cleaned the inside of my G4, but neglected to clean the fan near the outside.... about two years of 24/7 SETI crunching later, fan breaks down, and the power supply dies X_X

[G4scott]

When all else fails, FDISK :D :cool:

i was working on a paper, and playing with the wires under my desk with my feet, and all the sudden, my power went out... I was mad...

but not as mad as I was when I accidentially pushed my keyboard into a power-controller, and the wire coming out of the back pushed the computer power button... not the monitor or auxillary, but the computer...

I've hit a couple of Pee-cee's with a baseball bat and a sledgehammer, and my neighbors and I set one on fire with a crude napalm mixture :eek: :eek: :D :cool: Of course, that was probably the smartest thing I've done ;)

[rainman::|:|]

Well the smartest thing i ever did to a PC was carefully taking it apart, piece by piece, then crucifying it... don't ask...

the dumbest thing i did to a mac... a few years back, i was major broke and couldnt afford ANY parts, but needed my computer, so of course i broke a pin off of my hard drive. brilliant. Tho after an all-night pulling-my-hair-out session, i finally just stuck the pin *into* the cable. as long as you didn't touch the computer case much, it worked quite well :) thank god i never got that soldering iron to work or the thing would have been toast.

As they say, the simplest solution is usually the best...

pnw

[isogonic]

Long ago.. I needed to install a 40mb(?) HD in a Mac SE. After creating a case cracker with part of an allen wrench, a wire hanger and some duct tape, I managed to open the case. Not wanting to waste money or time on cables or mounting brackets I simply spliced wires here and there and the duct taped the unit into place. Only problem was, I recieved a phone call immediately after I cut the wires, and could not remember which way they went. Needless to say I didn't get it right and cooked the HD quite nicely.

[scem0]

Originally posted by paulwhannel
Well the smartest thing i ever did to a PC was carefully taking it apart, piece by piece, then crucifying it... don't ask...

the dumbest thing i did to a mac... a few years back, i was major broke and couldnt afford ANY parts, but needed my computer, so of course i broke a pin off of my hard drive. brilliant. Tho after an all-night pulling-my-hair-out session, i finally just stuck the pin *into* the cable. as long as you didn't touch the computer case much, it worked quite well :) thank god i never got that soldering iron to work or the thing would have been toast.

As they say, the simplest solution is usually the best...

pnw

No, that isn't the simplest solution. That is the ghettoist solution :D.

[xelterran]

the dumbest mistake i ever made was when i hit the start button on a PC only to realise it was the box that the guy next to me was working on (yes he was very pissed!!)

[zed]

The dumbest thing that I have ever witnessed.... At school we all have laptops, all have G3 powerbooks, and we switch the drives (hot swappable drives) alot in class. So one day, this guy has his cd bay completely empty with a full cup of fresh hot coffee right next to it. Needless to say someone bumped the coffee and sent it right inside his computer....

not sure if he ever got it working again. :(

Dumbest thing i ever did was right after i got my first mac, a 333 powerbook g3. I was having problems with it (they sold me a display model, as new... the place is out of business now...) and the apple tech told me to put the cd in and hold c. I had a vague idea of what this was doing, but not really... later after I had done all that he told me to do, I couldnt get the cd out of the drive... duh...

manually ejected it and wow... it was an amazing site :) pretty colors.... I have never seen anything like that again,,, except for maybe the itunes visualizer :)