From the Forums: What's your worst computing mistake?

We’ve all done it; made one mistake whilst using a computer which has caused you nothing but heartaches, headaches and days of cursing, worrying, rage and anger. But what’s the one mistake (or mistakes) you’ve made that’s stuck with you and has forced you to change your rash clicking or keyboard mashing way?

Neowin Forum member RATiO has started a thread asking people about the biggest or worst mistakes they’ve made while using a computer. I can definitely relate! I’ll kick this one off.

In the summer of 1996, I had not long upgraded to Windows 95 from Windows 3.11. It was a lovely experience, but my wee partitioned 400MB hard disk was starting to feel the strain of the bigger OS coupled with my games, documents and pictures. So I decided to do a bit of spring cleaning, and instead of using the new Windows Explorer, I went old school and used DOS.

I still have nightmare about these keys :(

To cut a long story short the C and D keys are the worst placed keys I’ve ever had the experience of working with. Let me break it down like this, my command for the deletion of all files on the D drive should have been this one:

del D:\*.*

But no, in my haste I hit the wrong key and my command came out a little differently…..

del C:\*.*

My spidey sense started to tingle when it took a lot longer than I expected to delete the files from the disk. I double checked the command, realised what I’d done and promptly pulled the power cable from the back of the PC. Luckily I didn’t completely corrupt the disk, and thanks to the most unreliable of storage mediums, the floppy disk, I was able to recover most of my school work and GCSE coursework.

So, what started out to be a routine task one Saturday afternoon, turned into a 3-4 day exercise in rebuilding the OS and installing all my applications and games, some of which were stored across multiple floppy disks (I’m looking at you Microsoft Works).

Suffice to say, I always double check my command line inputs now, before pressing return!

So go on, tell us what you’ve done that’s made you literally slam your head on the desk in frustration.

Source: Neowin Forums, thanks to member RATiO for starting the thread!