Great PC mistakes that you have made <Nerd Mode>

[Parapunter]

Ok, geeky in the extreme, but Mr Dastards comment about grown men weeping when they can't work out why wi fi isn't working...because they didn't hit the on switch rings a few bells.


Shiny new 5.1 speakers. Only getting sound from two, so onto the internerd, new drivers. Nope. Uninstall, reinstall with old drivers. Nuh-uh. Check & re-do wiring to speakers. Nix. Undo pc, remove sound card, brush a bit of dust off, re-seat sound card. Nada. Try new drivers again. Start crying.

Call IT professional mate who comes round, hmmms a bit, then turns the balance fader round to the middle & Da da!

We can all learn from me:ugh::}

[Saab Dastard]

The worst thing that ever happened to me with computers -

Years ago (1995) I was administrator of a Novell NetWare system. At that time, all the login scripts were held as a single file, with "if username=nnnn then do" statements. Not my idea - someone else's bright idea, considering there were about 450 people on this system, over multiple servers (I seem to recall that each server had a 250 user license, and there was much duplication of accounts to access shared information).

Anyhow, while working on the system in building B, with the server in building A, the network link went down - while I was editing the syslogin file (I can't actually remember the file name now, it is over 10 years since I last used NetWare!).

Imagine my horror when I got back onto the server to discover that the syslogin file was now blank...

For some reason that I have now forgotten, the backup tapes were unusable also.

That was a real "kicked in the nuts by computers" day.

SD

[empacher48]

I can think of a few;

Installing new ram into a machine without earthing myself in the process, therefore I ended up with cooked RAM.

Formatted a Hard Drive on the assumption I had backed it up, when I actually hadn't.

Did a BIOS upgrade, when halfway through it, the power failed. Said a few swear words, then waited for the power to come back on to see if the install had been successful or not.

[frostbite]

Back in 197* buying a diy 256 byte (yes, 1/4K) RAM computer with just a two-digit hex display for £300+ and having to take it home in a bag and solder it all together.

That was just the start..........

[seacue]

Person X was under pressure to get some personal things off the department's PDP-10 (it was that long ago). In a hurry, he logged in as administrator at the root of the file system and typed DEL *.* Cleaned the file system out really well. Some users were really upset since their work hadn't been backed up.

I met him again some years later when he was employed as a computer security expert.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Trying to free up some space on my 1.0GB Win95 box, deleted a big, apparently unused file called system.dat ...


:uhoh:

[Flap Track 6]

After disconnecting everything and moving it so Mrs could vacuum up all the accumulated dust ... was putting everything back together and inserted the speaker power supply into the cable modem ...

Hmmm what's that funny smell? Smells like burning electronics ... Where's that coming from?

[amanoffewwords]

Buying a new hard-disk to install Win2k to avoid the risk of losing any data.

...

Then fdisk'ing the old drive by mistake.

Three year's worth of Mrs Word's work (teacher) zapped. :D

[Mac the Knife]

rm -rf /

yes folks, I really did it :\
Thought I was just pruning a branch...(but it was few years ago)

:ok:

[Loose rivets]

When I wuz a computer company owner, people used to pay me a lot of money to tell them things. We'd progressed to DOS 6.22 by then and as a CAD specialist, I made the famous prediction that Windows was just a load of pretty rubbish...and would never catch on.:\

[Nightrider]

Rivet, actually you were not far off reality prediction.....weren't you? :E

[forget]

Not computers - but close, and world class stupid :ugh::ugh:

An 'important' fax came in but the paper feed got jammed. The sheet ended up like a concertina. Not a problem, switch on the electric iron and sandwich the fax between two paper sheets. One minute later - one A4 fax sheet of smooth paper - but solid black. :hmm:

[frostbite]

"I made the famous prediction that Windows was just a load of pretty rubbish...and would never catch on"


If only you'd had the foresight to say Vista.

[BRL]

Just this afternoon spent around an hour and a half on the phone to btinternet call centre being talked through everything trying to get wi-fi to work on a brand new laptop that belongs to a mate.

I had to take it out of the box and get it all started up and everything as my mate is clueless and always asks me to help him with things like this.

Anyhow, setting up the wireless router from BT I spent a long time on the phone as I say trying everything, pressing the 'Internet' button along the top of the lappy a few times, no joy, pressed FN+F2 the wireless button, no joy, woman on other end really struggling now as to what to do.(she had connected to his laptop and was trying everything from her end)

Whilst I was waiting for the laptop to restart after another failed attempt I was looking again through the manual. Looked at the diagram for the front of the unit and looked right at the switch on the left underneath, Wireless On/Off....................................... :O

[frostbite]

You've reminded me of something, BRL. Not computing, but SD's a very patient guy.

Notoriously short-tempered mate was installing quite expensive cordless telephone system in his warehouse. Ran an extension lead to the 'command centre' for all the phone extensions.

Mounted same at various stragegic locations throughout the building. Switched on - nothing. Tried extension in another wall socket - nothing. Plugged something else into both wall sockets - worked fine.

Totally lost control and smashed command centre to pieces.

When I checked later, the fuse in the extension lead plug was blown.

[BRL]

Ouch!!!!!!!!!!!! :D:D:D

[empacher48]

Back in the days when I was at Uni, I was aiming for a Computer Science Major, so knew how to program in C, Java etc etc. I was able to create a cool program for DOS based computers that would make the hard drive search for files, but display the DOS prompt saying that it was formatting C: and counting up to 100%, no matter what keys were pressed, even the reset button was disabled. :E Really nothing went wrong at all and guys had a good laugh at the end of it all.

But what was worse, was that one night after a few drinks, and a few bets from mates, I tried to reprogram the program to go into the CompSci network, spread itself through the network, and all at once, start running through the procedures mentioned above. Except in my slight inebriated state, I forgot a few lines of code, and at the appointed moment, I was able to format the Hard Drives of over 200 terminals, servers and the backups and standby units. :sad:

My university career ended at that moment.

[Spinflight]

Long one this and about as frustrating as anything I've ever done!

One of mates dropped off and old stack that he no longer used, he thought the memory was dodgy and knew it would take longer to fix than the cost of just buying a new one.

Being a bit of a geek he only had Fedora 6 loaded on, though it wouldn't boot, he reckoned because of the memory problems..

Ok so I've got copies of 98 and XP on an external HD and bought a linux mag with the latest issue of fedora on...

Computer won't boot, just sits there looking at me. Rebuild it carefully, it only recognises half the memory but eventually success. Upgrade the Fedora installation, no probs.

Couldn't boot from USB so I need to burn a disk... Pooter boots very occasionally and crashes 5 times during burning of xp disk. Odd. Took it apart reseating memory very carefully and it boots fine everytime.. Until I plug the rewriter and CD back in... Starts playing silly buggers again...

Rebuild system again sans DVDs and look in the boot logfile... Hundreds of processor interupts which shouldn't be there... Wtf is going on thinks I? The CPU fan is ancient and naff so I replace it, no difference... Buy a new secondhand CPU, no difference.... Memory now checks fine every time....

Rip out the graphcs and audio cards and system seems to work fine, burn windows CDs for XP and 98(just in case) and try to boot from CD. XP falls over, out of memory.... Good job I've got the 98 CD burned so try to run installation. 98 does exactly the same.... 512 meg system and 98 setup is OOM?????

Has to be a virtual memory problem so I figure I need a dos partition on there. No floppy in stack and I don't have a dos floppy anyway....

Back to Fedora and after only 2 hours of looking through man pages I find a utility which allows me to change the filesystem to dos. I do that, XP setup still moans so try 98. Marvellous idea, seems to be working..... except that it insists on formatting the HD. Not a problem except that 98 is more used to being run on 40meg hds, not 160 gig ones... 2 hours in and 7% complete... Bugger.

So need to create a small dos partition... Means loading Fedora on again, oh well it only takes about an hour. Create partition and load 98 on the system. Right, time to load XP on from my external HD, no problem just need to load USB drivers on. Small cd with drivers on won't work, too scratched after years of disuse > library > burn CD with drivers on.

External HD up and running so load XP in.... just need the code which I have stored in my online........ email account. Ouch, only got a wireless network, and no drivers for a wifi card are likely to work on 98 anyway. Fedora wouldn't detect the wifi card at all.... Get code from library computer access and replace Fedora partition with NTFS. All seems fine but..... Xp doesn't recognise my wifi card. Check wifi card for manufacturer. Solid stainless box covers the pcb so no clue as to what it is... Ouch. Can't even try a generic driver as can't get on t'internet without said driver for wifi card.

Phone mate, neither of us thinks we can ID the card under windows. Oh thinks I, Unix has pciconfig which will tell me what it is..... Would be great if I still had Unix on the system.... Reload Fedora onto the machine, which happily decides that it will wipe the drive of any other filesystems...

Go out and get exceptionally drunk very early in the day. Attempt not to kick said machine as I stumble in later.

Find type of wifi card under Fedora > library > burn Cd with drivers > create small partition > 98 setup > USB drivers > Win XP > load Wifi drivers > internet access! Success!

So I blissfully re-install audio and graphics cards, along with the extra CD drive that I'd left out and even go as far as putting the case back on. I should have known better. . Pooter refuses to boot, doesn't even get as far as the memory test. It sits there, looking at me and refusing to do a sodding thing.

Soooo.... There was another problem.. I sorted it but can you guess what it is yet? :)

[Jhieminga]

Power issues? Either that or the mainboard was dodgy, that's my best guesses (would've started kicking way earlier :})

[gingernut]

Spent two years studying "computer science," back in the early eighties. Spent a lot of time writing programs in "BASIC," which were run at a local University, and outputted to a "teletype."

I never thought it'd all catch on, so pursued a different career.

Now my kids have to show me how to get my MP3 player loaded:(:{:{

[Beagle-eye]

Long time ago – working in DOS. End of a project and in the wee small hours. Being a cautious chap I decided to back up all of the source code before going home.

It was in the days of 8 inch (yes 8 inch) floppy disks but they had limited space. Obvious thing to do is to delete all of the .BAK backup copies of the source files which are created automatically by the editor.

The command is straight forward :

> DEL *.BAK

I make one tiny mistake and typed :

> DEL *,BAK

Those of you that remember DOS will know what happed next. It asked me to confirm, which I immediately did. The disk whirred and the light flashed and the following message was displayed :

> UNKNOWN COMMAND “BAK”

In that instant I knew what I had done. Having typed a comma (,) instead of a full stop (.) I had deleted weeks of work in a few short seconds. Boy was I sick :{

[Terraplaneblues]

When you refitted the case, did you leave tools inside? Or was it something to do with the case interfering with the elec trickery or components?

[green granite]

The mention of 8" floppies reminds me of a time when I:

Went into a "computer" shop in London with my technical director to buy some 8" floppies, the chap put a box on the counter and my boss said "are they hard or soft sectored?" the guy took one out, bent it double and said "soft sectored"..... we left. :ugh:

[Spinflight]

Good guesses. :ok:
I thought the Mobo was fried, maybe had an intermittent fault (lots of problems with the BIOS not saving changes, changing the BIOS battery didn't help, which I didn't chronicle in an already long post) so went out and bought some new kit. Had to wait a day for a delivery of memory so put the 'fried' mobo in an old case I have and it worked fine right off the bat on a 230W rated PSU...

The PSU in the stack I received was rated at 350W, I doubt it was pushing out more than 180. It just so happened that the power consumption was right on the edge, it would work with a stripped system but seemingly even putting some strain on the graphics card or plugging a CD rom in would tip the balance, hence the crashes...

The system was built in 2003, at which time it was top notch. Naturally the geezer (not my mate) put top of the line components into the cheapest case he could find...

Sometimes the computing Gods just have your number. :ugh:

[batninth]

SpinFlight,

Thank you, you have just reminded me of a similar set of incidents.

Eldest son was working p/t at Maplin a few years ago and bought (well Dad bought it for him) a Mobo/AMD CPU/Cooler combo. Found it needed an uprated PSU so bought a new case and it was left to me to put it all together.

Popped AMD CPU into mobo and applied thermal cream, then promptly ignored the step on the side of the heatsink which should have keyed against the CPU carrier and so ended up putting the heatsink on the wrong way around. I must add in mitigation here that in preparing for this I had read on a web site that the AMD heatsinks were hard to get on, so thought my struggles were the norm.

Of course we turned the PC on and after about 5 seconds everything went blank and the fan wouldn't spin.

Son's pals at Maplin kindly explained that the heatsink being wrong way around had left enought of a gap that the CPU fried, so I had to buy another at full price.

Funnily enough, never had that problem on PCs built since :bored:

Spinflight - you reminded me that a couple of years later the PC itself fell over while running & everything went off. I suspected the mobo so bought a new one, then swapped the CPU, and only then bought a new PSU. It was the PSU that was at fault & everything else still worked a treat.

[Jhieminga]

I once built a new system for a friend. Bought all the pieces, put them together, installed XP, only to end up with a system that seemed to reboot every few minutes. It took me a while to figure out that the new case had a reset switch which wasn't fully seated in its mounting. Because of this it was constantly half depressed and any light movement of the case (shifting it, opening the CD tray etc.) would trigger a reset. :ugh:

[Spinflight]

Son's pals at Maplin kindly explained that the heatsink being wrong way around had left enought of a gap that the CPU fried, so I had to buy another at full price.

I had the same problem on an AMD system I built a few years ago. The clasps on the heatsink / fan could only be installed one way around due to the vicinity of the PSU.

The processor didn't fry but ran at between 55 and 75C, shutting down due to overheating on intensive tasks. It took quite a bit of metalwork to seat it the right way around (modifying the clasp).

The case had clearly only been tested with Intel architecture Mobos... :}

[ShyTorque]

Was on night shift and got a phone call from my 9 yr old son who told me he had a big problem with the home PC, (not uncommon in those days with Windows 3.1).

I was busy (briefing for a flight), and wasn't really listening to the details and asked him to press Clear-Alt-Delete and ring back if it didn't cure the problem.

He said he would. One minute later he called back "No, it's not fixed!" said he.
I said to switch it off at the wall and back on again and ring back if that didn't cure it.

Another minute, he rang again. "No", says he - "It's worse, there's still smoke coming out of the back, now I can see flames!"

:}:eek: "Fetch your mother!" said I........
:O

[BombayDuck]

Mobo died. Got new one with fancy new dual core processor and latest swanky DDR2 RAM to go in it. Came home and found that my older power supply unit didnt support the motherboard, the connection to the motherboard had four pins less than required.

Went back to the shop (15 minute drive), bought new power supply. Came home and casually looked at old power supply to find a separate four pin connector that could be tagged along to the rest...

Quietly went back and returned the shiny new unit. Nice folks that they are, they took it back. It helps to have had bought stuff worth > 100,000 Rupees from them till then, and since then I have matched that amount and then some.

-----

On a softer note, While trying to limit the range of variable x to ±10, I coded:

If x < -10, x = -10
If x > 10, x = 103.

This led to almost disastrous results and if it hadn't been for the quick thinking of a colleague (in reverting to manual mode) I'd have set my project back by months... and I was only trying to change limits from ±13!

[frostbite]

Having been on dialup for decades and broadband for just a week, I have already been caught out twice (in a nice way) downloading small 4-5mB programs.

I have been so used to such taking around 20 minutes to download that I have clicked on the download button and got irritated waiting for it to start, only to discover that it has already completed.

[Saab Dastard]

frostbite,

Welcome to the 21st C! :)

Believe me it won't be long before you want MORE and FASTER!

SD

[makintw]

Maybe thread should be renamed "computers making grown men cry!"

Bought a new Western Digital HDD a month ago as the old 80Gig was running out of space.

This morning after an OS update/restart I heard the HDD clicks of death.

:mad::mad: :uhoh::uhoh: :{:{

[tallsandwich]

Getting a new nice new quantum fireball in '98, pulling a brand new disk power cable out of its plastic wrapper (from RS Components) and powering up system only to find that the connector on one end of the power lead had been incorrectly wired, and nice puff of smoke from said disk.

I suppose I could have got my money back from RS for the 23p power lead....

[ariel]

This thread is great, I haven't had such a laugh in ages.

Please keep them coming!

[eticket]

Time: Mid-late 80's.

Location: Large Conference / Lecture Room

Subject: World Launch of a multi-national's first e-commerce venture etc. (Not that it was known as such at the time.)

Me: Sitting behind screen pushing buttons to put onto the screen the output of different video / slide projector sources at the appropriate moment.

Rehearsal: Very Very Boss says "and now it's the moment we have all been waiting for", (lighting do their stuff and dramatic music etc. plays), and he pulls off a fancy cloth to reveal a computer on a table beside him. I push a button and up on screen comes the computer's VGA/SVGA output and a Junior Boss carries on with the demonstration. Simple.

Later the same day: Very Very Boss says "and now it's the moment we have all been waiting for", (lighting do their stuff and dramatic music etc. plays), and he pulls off the fancy cloth to reveal the computer on the table beside him. I push the button and up on screen comes absolutely nothing! Zippo, Nadda, Black!

Me: Pushing the button again whilst muttering **** **** ****. Give up pushing and start checking the connections whilst thinking about the inevitable no tea no biscuits meeting to follow.

Audience: Laughing and tittering. Not a good sign.

Very Very Boss Man: Leaves the stage, (running the last bit), and starts saying some not very complimentary things to and about me. I was still muttering ****, ****, **** whilst head down in the cables.

Junior Boss: approaches the computer on stage and simultaneously 500 or so people have their first introduction to the PC power-saver function.

Yup after an hour and a half of sitting under it's cloth unused the computer had decided to go to sleep.

[Bushfiva]

Had a drive fail in a RAID array. For those that may not know, it's lots of drives pretending, typically, to be one drive. If one drive fails, there's enough error correction data spread across the other drives to rebuild the data onto a new drive. This unit was 10 drives, of which 2 were "hot spares": 8 drives for the data, 2 ready to take over automagically if one of the 8 failed.

Anyway, this was when RAID arrays were still quite a novel idea. It's a big animal. So a drive failed. No problem, one of the hot spares took over and the array started rebuilding itself. When I had a moment after the array was rebuilt, I pulled the dead drive and inserted what would now be the new hot spare. Took the old drive away and subjected it to the company's destruction policy, which involved a hammer.

Checked the RAID array sometime later, and it's reporting a dead drive, but no worries, a hot spare's taken over. Hmmm. Pulled the dead drive, inserted the new drive, took the old drive away and destroyed it, ordered a new drive by overnight courier.

Checked the RAID array sometime later, and it's reporting a dead drive, but no worries, a hot spare's taken over... A longer Hmmmmmmmmm this time. After the rebuild, pulled the dead drive, inserted the new drive, and watched this time. After about a minute, RAID reports failure, but no worries, a hot spare's taken over.

So, I checked the pulled drive: it's fine (this actually took a day or so since noone knew how to test a drive from a RAID array without risking the data on it). Then we shut down the RAID array, and over the next two days checked for dust, cleaned the filters, looked for signs of overheating, unseated chips (some were still socketed at this time), loose connectors, strained wires, pulled the power supplies (two of everything: this thing was supposed to work no matter what) and did a load check, tested earth paths, power cords, had the powerco check the wall outlets for power quality, scoped the network cabling for floating wires and everything else we could think of.

The RAID failure lights were wired up wrong.

[Dan Winterland]

Bit of a clean up. Came across a file called autoexec.bat - nah, don't need that!

[Parapunter]

Rebuilding windows for a new media centre. HD one has o/s & a few apps on it. HD 2 has about 1000 albums, all my photos, movies, vids, the whole nine yards. Both HD's identical models. Can you guess??


Exactly, went & formatted the wrong one.:{:{:{:{ Three years squirelling of media carked in about forty minutes flat. That was a good one. One now worships at the temple of backup.

[Saab Dastard]

Both HD's identical models - went & formatted the wrong one

I highly recommend small adhesive labels (small circles in different colours) or even tippex to provide distinguishing features.

I learnt this, not from computers, but when going to reinstall the h/t leads to a 5-litre V8 engine after removing them all at once to replace the spark plugs. Believe me, you don't want the cylinders in a £7,000 engine firing in the wrong order!

SD

[frostbite]

All my Tippex ends up on the screen to correct speeling mitsakes.








hat, coat etc.

[Parapunter]

Well, when I had to do it again, I unplugged the media drive to foreclose on my own stupidity. Hang on, that's a smart thing to do & therefore doesn't belong on this thread...

[PPRuNe Dispatcher]

Back in the days when hard disks were 14" in diameter, held about 3Mb of extremely vital data and were in a cartridge... the wonderful RK05.

http://www.pdp8.net/rk05/rk05.shtml

There was a headcrash on one of our two drives. We called the engineer. We wern't worried as we had two backups, each on another RK05 cartridge.

The engineer removed the cartridge from the drive, and took one of the backup cartridges and put it in the drive. The damaged head promptly destroyed that disk. So now we were down to one backup. :uhoh:

The engineer took the drive apart, replaced the damaged head, and tested the drive using his own (blank) disk cartridge. The drive was now working perfectly!

He was aware that he'd ****ed up by destroying one of our two backups, so he offered to let us have his disk cartridge as a replacement. We agreed. He then very kindly recreated a second backup for us... at least, he thought he did. Instead, he copied the blank drive over the last remaining backup. :(

I still have the original platter from the first cartridge - it's placed next to a system at work as a permanent reminder of how fragile data is....