What are your worst computing mistakes?


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We bought a 60in LG Active 3D Plasma HDTV. Mounted it to the wall. Went out for dinner. Come back, sit in my recliner, grab the remote, to watch the game, point it to where the TV should have been on the wall. TV is now on the floor. Screen is shattered.

We bought a 60in LG Active 3D Plasma HDTV. Mounted it to the wall. Went out for dinner. Come back, sit in my recliner, grab the remote, to watch the game, point it to where the TV should have been on the wall. TV is now on the floor. Screen is shattered.

What was the cause?

Once flashed a readme file to the bios chip. I will share the full story if anyone thinks I should, but it was a curiosity thing. Was definitely crazy though.

I work for a large company that starts with an A and ends with a vnet. Yeah so Avnet. I work in the B2B division as a system integrator. basically I test and install software on servers and workstations that one company orders for another company. We had an order of 50 servers that were due to be shipped in 8 hours. I was running the installs on on rack of 10 and didn't notice the other 40 had FINISHED installing and running diags. so like a retard I started installing the OS and applications. I didn't catch my mistake until the shipping manager and my boss asked if they were ready to go to outbound to be boxed up as they had to be on the truck in an hour. Yeah they take 3 hours to install everything and required by the company a 4 hour burn in and testing. I was 20 minutes into the burn.

So yeah got screamed at and written up for negligence.

And one time I trashed $5000 worth of windows license keys.

Fortunately, I haven't had any major mistakes really. I did dump my entire iTunes library when iTunes 4 came out. After using winamp for so long, I had my own file structure. With iTunes everything got "copied" (or so I thought) into the Library. Didn't really care for iTunes at the time so I went to remove everything from the Library...that was all she wrote. All my music, gone.

I remember an old Packard Bell computer my mom bought in 1993 or so. I was really getting into Tele-Arena at the time on a local BBS with some high school friends. I thought it would be fun to start my own BBS (with one phone line, HA!). Somehow, I borked that computer many times messing with stuff. Got to the point where my mom no longer did any of her work on that thing :)

Now, my dad on the other hand! If he were alive he would have some stories. I'll just say this: anytime I think of re-installing WordPerfect from floppy, I shudder.

My most expensive mistake at work (i'm a techy) but not entirely down to computers... one of our photocopiers stopped working and throwing errors about waste toner. I popped it open and had a look, found something that looked like waste toner in 4 compartments so i proceeded to empty all 4 of them into a bin, i replaced the units and still wasn't fixed so we called an engineer.. He said 'someone' had emptied the fusing/magnetic something or other material out of each toner unit, which was a costly mistake. It was ?250 per unit and 4 units needed replacing so it cost us ?1000, i seriously thought i was going to lose my job but my manager was understanding. In my defence it's my responsibility when i don't know much about photocopiers at all.

Another costly mistake was not having up to date virus software on all of our machines, we got stund with a dodgy USB disk and it ripped through our network infecting every single PC, it didn't really cost us any money but it certainly took me a long time to fix.

Also when i was just curious as a child i was messing around with the insides of my brand new PC and when re-seating the graphics card i pushed too hard and cracked the motherboard.

I cannot understand why you still have a job with that company.

Firstly you interfere with something you know diddly about.

Then you infect your companies network because you didn't do your job.

That is what is wrong with Britain.

Anyways, back to me.

Buying from a seller on amazon.co.uk a PSU as it was cheap.

It lasted 3 weeks and could have killed everything within my system, it was an 'Alpine 500W Quiet Silent PC Power Supply PSU 120mm Fan' . ?14.82

I did buy 'Cooler Master RS650-ACAAE3-UK GX-Series 650W 80 Plus Power Supply Unit ' with a 6 year guarantee and worth every penny of the ?43 I paid for it, after

getting a refund from the previous purchase.

Repeatedly trying to overclock my old computer past the point it wanted to go. The first time that it took a hard reset to get it to reset settings and get me back to the BIOS which took FOREVER then doing the same thing about 5 times after that thinking "it will work this time." It's not the best example but I suppose that's the biggest mistake.

I attempted to bio flash a video card on a Compaq, I ended up killing the MOBO.

It was a best computing day of my life. I started building my own from there.

Well until I started to buying laptops. lol

Years ago at college i was getting cocky and being a bit of a know it all.

So we did this trouble shooting test and i went in thinking it would be easy. Everybody else was easy but mine i couldn't work it out. I tried everything. Turns out all they did was turn the brightness down on the monitor.

What a moron :laugh:

Maybe you should try your hand at something other than computers :p

Show me someone who has never made a mistake and I will show you someone who has never done any work!

P.S With that level of mistakes he should become a manager! haha

When I was 12 we got a new computer running XP, I found out about Windows Blinds and installed what I though was a kick ass theme. When I went to shut down the computer the screen went blank so I just held in the power button. Next time we turned it on it blue screened, turns out whoever made the theme had forgot to add in images for the shutdown screen and it had been installing updates, when I forced it to shut down it corrupted a couple of files. Back then I knew nothing about computers so we took it to the local repair shop and the guy told us the computer was fried and we needed a new one.... d**k

Not my fault in particular, but it was me who made the call to get the part replaced.

Had a faulty RFID reader where I work. Made the call to get it replaced, as it was a quiet period and I could guarantee about an hour of downtime. Whatever happened during the replacement procedure brought the entire system down. What should've took 20 mins turned into 14 hours of downtime. It turns out that something was dragging the power down in one of the relay cabinets. Last I heard, the entire cabinet was being rewired (everything else had been chased up).

Never found out if the changing of the reader caused the fault, or if the fault was already there and caused the reader to fail.

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