Funny (and noobish) things you've accidentally done

[aimeeandbeatles]

C'mon, don't be shy!

There's the time I accidentally tried to boot up the computer with a Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers CD. I thought it was my Knoppix disk.

 

[Aramazd]

I irradiated my computer because I thought it would turn it into a supercomputer.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Another one: I forgot the compression settings in VirtualDub and got a 15-gigabyte file for a 10-minute video. And it wasn't even that good quality! (It was a VHS rip, or whatever you call it when you turn analog into digital.)

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I spent several hours trying to fix my internet connection on this pc, never tried to cycle power ( using the switch on the back of the pc, to actually remove power to the motherboard, not just soft-off -- I hate soft off btw )

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I tried to burn a DVD once and for some reason it wasn't working. When I took the disc out I found out it was the clear disc they put in the blank disc container.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I accidentally lost a whole external hard drives worth of data at work by reformatting the external drive as a CD-Rom emulator.

That was on my birthday as well. So I immediately went to the pub instead

 

[GravityWave]

When I got an AMD Barton I quickly installed it but didn't actually lock the heatsink's clamps in place correctly which eventually caused it to catapult off (landing in the gap between the gfx card and the side panel). The whole rig still works fine years later.

 

[flyingchicken]

I broke a computer before backing everything up.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

My mom says she once took apart a computer and then she couldn't get it back together.

Here;s something funny, not computers but electronics in general: One time, I was maybe 5 or 6 I immersed a battery-powered tape recorder in the bathtub to "record the bubbles." Needless to say I wrecked both the tape and the recorder. And the batteries.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Last night I had a very strange dream.

I was playing an old game on my Windows 98, when the hard drive started squealing and stuff. (Later, I learned that in real life a neighbors car got stuck on the ice. The noise entered my dream.) So I shutdown the computer, took the HDD out, opened it up, and poured vegetable oil all over the inner workings before popping it back in the computer. And the computer booted up fine..

Figure it out yourself.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today in school (before I went home sick), I was in the tech class, and for some reason the monitor wasn't working. So I turned it off, then back on, and the light was flashing but no image. So I looked in the back, the connections were secure. And then it was then I realized THE COMPUTER WASN'T TURNED ON!!!!

.....gah.

 

[Aramazd]

That was not funny. Certainly not worth bumping a month long thread.

 

[Wolf52]

Forgot to plug power into my graphics card (i was young and this was just when they started needing it) and it later burned. Still took a few months though, im surprised it lasted that long in hindsight.

 

[Onionsoilder]

Several months ago I noticed my hard drive was almost full. It was something like 440 GB/500 GB. I thought this was somewhat odd(Usually it's below 300 GB), but I decided to delete some stuff I no longer used until I had it at about 400 GB. The next day I checked again: 460 GB. I was a little weirded out here, so I defraged everything again and ran several antivirus scans to see if I had some virus that was downloading stuff. For several days I kept clearing out stuff I no longer used, desperately attempting to lower the space that was being used on my HD to little success. Finally about two weeks later I figured out the problem. Several weeks before, I had downloaded FRAPS to take some videos feed from one of my games. Unbeknownst to me, I had accidentally turned it on earlier(outside of my game). I found 384 GB worth of videos, mainly featuring me deleting stuff off my computer.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Now that gave me a chuckle. You should have saved some and uploaded it: "Tutorial: how to delete stuff"

 

[lndm]

lol, or an epic saga...how to fix a filling hard drive.

 

[carmen510]

Computer Stupidities

Some are hilarious, some make me lose my faith in humanity, some are cringe-inducing.

All are great anecdotes.

As for what I've done, I once spent 30 minutes trying to find out what was wrong with my monitor not displaying anything before I realized the VGA cable wasn't plugged in.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I thought a missing pin on my floppy drive connector meant it was broken until I saw other pics of floppy drive connectors. The missing pin is there so you can plug it in correctly.

Also, to remove Firefox tags, I went through most my bookmarks manually deleting tags (incompatible with a firefox addon which I use a lot and I never use them anyways) until I realized I could click on the tag in library, go CTRL+A then Delete, and it would remove the tags all at once.

 

[Macha]

I bought a graphics card without checking the power requirements against my PSU first. It was a Dell so there was no spare capacity on the PSU. Then I wondered why it wouldn't work. Luckily the shop took it back (Couldn't afford a new PSU aswell as the card at the time).

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

When I was 8 or 9, I accidentally wiped the hard drive on the old Aptiva IBM by doing something I wasn't supposed to, just to see what would happen. Luckily we had a recovery CD.

Mom was not too happy....

I also took apart a floppy disk to see the inside. There was nothing important on it anyways, I checked before pulling it apart.