Buying a Shuttle based on TR advice:
http://indeego.com/oldtechpics/whenshuttlefansdies.jpg

:)

runner up:
Buying an HP Storage Server:
http://indeego.com/oldtechpics/HPBSOD.png

Purchasing a 486DX 4 100mhz instead of the Pentium 75mhz because I did not want to get a new motherboard at the time. Then Quake 1 and C&C came out and my system was pathetically slow vs all my friends P75's

My worst tech blunder....excitedly buying an NVidia FX5600S thinking "Yeehaa now I'm really in the big time for graphics"
I couldn't wait to get home and fire it up on the aircombat game I regularly played...only to find it made zero difference compared with my very reliable and good performing GForce 440MX 64MB.
It did outperform it in noise tho....so I guess that's something.
What a piece of junk!....changed to ATI cards from then on and never bought one that didn't perform well.
First one installed was the 256MB 9600XT and I can still remember how buzzed I was at the great improvement in image quality and color it gave.

I've made a few mistakes... none really expensive, though.

I was playing some (at the time) very demanding game on a Cyrix processor (which were known to run hot). I started smelling a horrible stench, thought it was the CPU burning up, and opened the case. The fan had stopped spinning! I quickly reached in to give the fan a flick and restart it... and found out that the fan was already spinning at full speed, when it cut my finger (I think I was sleepy at the time). Then I went downstairs to get an antiseptic and gauze, and found someone was having a midnight snack of leftover enchiladas. I could swear they smelled rancid, so I took them away against protest, dumped them in the trash, and since the trash bag was new and clean, and poured ammonia on them JUST IN CASE that person tried to take them back out and eat them.

The next morning, I realized it was actually a pretty normal smell for enchiladas (it was still lingering in the kitchen...). But once I got the idea of burning CPU in my head, I could not associate that smell with food.

Back in the day, when i had a used 386, i deleted that big doublespace file on the second drive of my disk, and so pretty much reduced my 80 meg compressed windows partition to a 40 meg dos partition. I didn't realize for years afterwards what i really did there. (if you don't get it, don't worry about it)

I remember one day , when I was building on of the first 486DX2-66 in NZ , processor was over 1000$ alone , the motherboard refussed to boot up with the PSU attached to the board , but the PSU started without the motherboard plugged in ..
So I thought screw this .. I will force the Power onto the motherboard while the PSU is running .. OMG ..a LOUD bang was heard while not realizing a sizeable chunk of the CPU in the corner has flew off wizzed past my eye and rattled around the floor somewhere,
Needless to say a very expensive CPU blown up literary!!.

Another time recently I wired my 750W ThermalTake PSU with a relay and switch inside it to power my water pump (mains powered) everytime I turned on the computer .. needless to say I rushed it a bit , wired in the relay etc, and upon closing the PSU lid , I jammed the PSU fan power cord in the lid , after 6 hrs gaming , A HUGE POP and BANG , BANG was heard , total blackness and silence, appears the PSU overheated and blew the Power IC circuits up like a volcanoe!

I never had cold cathodes, but I can't be considered vindicated. I wanted them. I really, really wanted them.

I haven't put together enough computers to have made any really bad mistakes, but I remember my dad making a rather major one back in 1992. Having been born in 1987, I'm surprised I can remember anything from 1992, let alone the specifics of what happened. Anyway, he was installing more memory in our Apple II GS. Unfortunately, he had never been affected by ESD before, and therefore believed it to be a myth. He was fixing this thing on carpet, and he slid the computer a few inches in order to bring it closer to him. We heard the faint popping noises of static, and then pure silence. He sat there for several minutes with a horrified look on his face, then he wiped it off and tried booting the computer.

Of course it didn't boot. Two thousand dollar investment in the computer, and untold sums for the several kilobytes of extra memory that he was trying to put in, all down the drain.

We replaced it with a 386, which promptly blew a power supply (And caught fire). That wasn't related to anything we did to it, thankfully. I remember attributing the damage to a virus, which would have seemed logical to any five year old at the time. The store replaced it for free, and that 386 survived until 2001. It was handed down to my grandparents, and then it was handed down again to my uncle and aunt, It's still sitting in their garage somewhere. I should see if I can retrieve it. :D

Does anybody else think it sad that my earliest memories are of me shopping for computers with my dad at Montgomery Wards?

I had a Celeron 433 system back in 2000 (actually I still have it) and decided after a year of buying it to try overclocking for the first time ever. My motherboard would allow a FSB of 66MHz, 75MHz, 83MHz, 100MHz, or 133MHz. I was able to successfully use the 75MHz FSB setting and the system ran fine. I then decided to get brave and try 100MHz. The system would turn on but not POST. Then I tried 83MHz and it started up no problem, even without increasing the voltage. This is cool, I thought. I ran it for a while like this, and then discovered much to my horror a little later on that a number of files I'd used (including documents and MP3's) had got corrupted. Needless to say, I went back to the 66MHz FSB setting. Doing stuff like this nowadays with modern motherboards probably would not have the same effect, but overclocking was different in those days.

i <3 my flashy setup, thank you =D

Funny that this comes up at this moment. I just built a $2500 pc for this guy to do solid works. I decided to use RAID 5, thinking it would be fast and almost data loss proof.
First off i've never used RAID 5 before, not a good idea when selling expensive computers.
One week passes and one hdd goes out, so the PC goes into degraded mode, he calls me up, and says. "i better not lose any data."
I order a new drive. Install it and boot into windows.
Windows takes for ever to boot into, And a message says rebuilding. 45 minutes go by, and i start to get impatient. I reboot the computer. same thing happens again. I proceed to update the the raid drivers in windows - thinking they are not working correctly. BAD idea. Computer crashes, wont boot into windows.
I take the computer home, end up reinstalling windows and do a data recovery. Recovery split all the files into different chunks and renames them.recovered 1/3 of the data.
What i learned.
Dont install raid drivers during recovery mode.
Wait for raid to rebuild no matter how long it takes.
It is very agonizing telling customers that you f'd up all their data.

'Advised' a non-tech guy that it was fine to pull the fake P2 out of the second slot of a dual Slot-1 motherboard.. only to remember right as he was pulling it out that it wasn't just a cardboard placeholder, but electrically necessary for the system. and... dead.

Also had a PS die on my system. Hooked it up to my buddy's system to test it. I was right, the PS was bad... and it fried my friend's motherboard completely. Whoops! sorry bud!

Haaaa... I have my share. Some worst than others. The worst one is: *drum-roll*

I was in a server room after spending a week setting it up. Light bulb goes out. So, I get the step-ladder to replace it and, of course, the stupid thing tipped over onto all the switches and wires. Tore them all to hell! Spent another week replacing them with some colorful words from the owner in between...

Trying to speed up my parent's PC without asking their permission and got chewed out for files that were missing...

Bought a first dual processor (not dual-core, but 2 processors) from ASUS cuz I wanted to prove that a PC was faster than a Mac at boot-up. Spent 1500 bucks on the board and Xeon processors to only have it last 6 months! It was fast and played Warcraft 3 beautifully, but short lived... But it still beat the Mac!! Yay! Sorry, Mac fan-boys... I guess the expression is correct: "Whoever lives the fastest, burns out the fastest."

Spend 1600 bucks on 16 MB of ram for the 386. And you betcha, I still have them!!

Ahh, the good old days... Guess when you get older, you get wiser and make less mistakes?? I hope not, but...

1) inserting a large capacitance tantalum capacitor the wrong way in my first IMSAI computer --> exploded - much like a bomb; hit in the face and nearly took out an eye and embedded itself in the plaster ceiling overhead. Please understand those were the days you actually soldered your own circuit boards.

2) Dropped a paper clip accidentally onto a server's motherboard --> subsequent flash and ... silence (excepting nearby users).

3) flames coming out of a generic powersupply --> flames 5 to 10 cm in length; the computer continued to work until the plug was hurriedly pulled; a terrible burned bakelite odor descended upon the land.

4) Breaking off a SATA socket on one of my relatively new 150GB Western Digital Raptor --> trying to install Radeon 4870x2 video card; had to 'hard wire' and solder a (cut-off end) SATA cable directly to the miniscule wire stubs that remained. It's working fine.

I bought a Matrox Parhelia when they first came out. Well, work bought me one. I also went through the more fans the better phase, and the cold cathode phase. Now I'm in the 'does it work and is it quiet' phase. I generally don't bother overclocking anymore even.

I did once blindly plug in a floppy drive, which some of you may know, if you're 1 pin off, will essentially melt the power wires and start a fire in your case.

I've had not 1, but 2 Asus motherboards burst into flames. I can't be held responsible for that though as it was 2 completely different machines, on different power circuits, with different power supplies. The one happened while someone was using it at work. The second was my own work PC. If I had not come in 10-15 early that day we could easily have lost the building.

I had killed three Socket A CPUs (T-bird 1.4Ghz, Palomino 1800 and Morgan 1.3Ghz) from improper HSF installation. The first two were from trying to properly install an Alpha PAL8045 HSF. It was not exactly easy to correctly place the heatsink on the die and earlier Athlons had no thermal protection. It just took a few seconds of "naked" run-up time to cook a chip.

I had killed an ABIT KG7-RAID (AMD 760 FTW) from trying to use a Barton 2800+. Odd, that it POST once and never ran again. I had already tried flashing the BIOS and removing the battery for a few hours.

A few mice died from my general abuse. My most recent victim was a G5. It just so happen that it died today. Back on my flaky MX518. :(

A long time ago, I had killed a 8-port 10Mbps Ethernet hub from dropping it. It was not exactly cheap in those days.

Well i guess my biggest one where i felt like just a moron later was after i had just gotten done building anew computer for a friend. LGA775 was brand new as was PCI-e as wella s SLI at the time. So i convinced him to buy a new SLI compatible mobo saying how SLI was gonna be awesome and how down the line you could just add another cheap card which would be the same as your current one (as obviously the current gen card will get cheaper as newer models are released). So all the parts come and he tries assembling some of it; but is struggling none the less. He invites me to come over to help build the system. I spend hours routing cables to maximize airflow and all the little details we love to pay attention to. After all my hours of hard work we go to boot to get the system to started so we can install windows.

No matter what i did i could not get it to install, then boot off of windows. I tried everything i could think of. In the end i blamed the gigabyte board as being the culprit. The next day he had another nerdy friend come over and fix the problem in 5 minutes. Turned out to be a jumper on the hard drive. After telling me the issue i was like "why didnt i think of that?!?". I had determined that a combination of lack of sleep and working on the physical build of that computer for 3+ hours strait more the likely contributed to my lack of logical reasoning to resolve the simple issue. And it would not be the last time that my exhaustion and lack of "just give up till tomorrow after a good night sleep" would be the ultimate culprit of a problem.

The dumb part. He is still using that same GeForce 7800 in a single card config and we have both pretty much agreed that a fast single card is the way to go in terms of price / performance. Kinda sucks he wasted that money on the SLI capable mobo (upon what i recommended) looking back. Especially since idk if you could even find a 2nd GeForce 7800 if you wanted to (other than a used one) for a SLI config.

Sigh ... 20/20 hind sight.....

I'll have to go with... trying to do some overclocking on my Pentium MMX 233 box. The 233 is multiplier top locked, annoyingly, so I went for FSB... but the i430TX really didn't care for the higher FSB.

Nor did the nVidia TNT2 M64 that I had in the thing. Especially not the TNT2.

So, I noticed it was getting QUITE hot... so I grabbed a spare 40mm fan I had, and tried zip-tying it to the card, removing the wires from the fan's connector, and inserting them into the card. (It had a fan header, but the fan I had had a different connector than any header I had available to me.)

Where I went wrong was... I did this with the system powered on.

And, the card I had, the fan connector was immediately above the PCI slot.

A spark jumped the gap while I was connecting it, and jumped straight into the PCI slot. I think the CPU ended up getting the worst of it.

Don't forget to put the stand-off screws on the case before the MB.
The MB really likes them. Fried circuit smell always makes me nervous now.

I recently broke off the sata data connector for one my my HDD's when I was fiddling around in my case, was quite frusterating and I remember reading about people complaining about how frail the connector was. Luckily nothing vital on there, just my completel collection of myth busters and stuff like that which I can easily replace.
A few months ago I was cleaning out my GF's case and I tried to take of the HSF to clean it up and take off the shitty thermal pad and when I got the HSF off it took the CPU with it, a 2.8C, bending a bunch of bins. Luckily it was obviously cheap to fix (though the same money could have bought a much better cpu but then I would need to buy her a new mobo).

I'm sure I'm not alone in this here, but... I am often tech support for everyone in my extended family, their friends, my friends, etc. Now, fortunately for me, the closest members of my extended family are about 400 miles away (and so too, I hope, are their friends :D), and most of my friends are tech saavy enough to hold their own on their computers (or, out of pride, refuse to consult another geek for help).

Anyways. I have a pretty good method to my madness for fixing up computers. Back then, my method included downloading and installing AVG free, CCleaner, Windows Defender, Firefox and BootVis, and I'd also check their Windows Updates and download and install any that they needed (like Silverlight, High Priority updates, and any hardware driver updates).

So one day during my family's annual outing to Byron, Illinois to my aunt and uncle's awesome home for Thanksgiving (I believe this was 2006)... I was patching up my Uncle Steve's home computer. Not a spectacle of technology, it's a plain beige box on which he and his family members would do their surfing, e-mailing, and schoolwork on. Needless to say, despite it's meager specifications, it was tasked with some fairly important duties, and after years of use it was also loaded with some fairly important data.

I was basically done with my entire method, but I had one step left (which I was particularly excited about on such a slow machine): Bootvis. For those not in the know, Bootvis was a program released by Microsoft for use on Windows XP to reduce it's overall boot time. Bootvis, when run, will shut down your computer, boot it back up, and scan for slowdowns during the boot process. It looks at how long it takes to load each driver, how long each startup process takes to fully start, etc. From that data, it then decides how best to optimize the order of startup and it "improves" your boot time.

Obviously, having a program muck around with the boot sector is potentially dangerous... and Bootvis, a Microsoft-authored program, was not infrequently susceptible to causing bluescreens on reboot, after running the optimization process (not the scanning process).

Well, sure enough. I'm watching this PIII miserably attempt to start Windows XP before my thanksgiving vacation ends, and I'm greeted with a CRT full of BSOD. All I can say at this point is... thank god some Microsoft programmer for "Last known good configuration." Needless to say, I stopped using Bootvis after that.

Fried my dad's 17" CRT monitor years ago by telling Windows to display 1600x1200 on it, and it wasn't designed to go up that high. Heard this clicking sound and the light went from green to yellow, and it never came back on.

I recently put together a beautiful SkullTrail system in a Lian-Li case with a built-in SATA backplane. The backplane had 3 different sections, each with a seperate power connector from the power supply. I put three drives in section A, and 1 drive in section B. When I booted, only three drives were detected. I triple checked all the connections, reseated drives, etc. for about 30 minutes. No luck.

Finally I put the 3 drives from backplane section A, into section B, and the 1 from section B into A. Reboot - NO DRIVES AT ALL.

Swap them back... NO DRIVES AT ALL.

The Lian-Li case had the power cord for section B of the backplane wired backwards... I burned out all 4 drives.

In a BIG plug to NewEgg, they replaced all 4 drives for free, even after I told them truth about how they got destroyed.

I owned more than one Cyrix powered reactors...eh, systems. Well, at least it kept the spare room warm through the dark, winter months.

I once updated the service pack on an NT 4.0 server to the latest one, taking down the whole server in the process. Spent the rest of the day redeploying it. Fun times and quick lessons.

I just remembered a good confession that would have been perfect to add to the post: I have OCD about reinstalling my operating systems. I'd say that my Macbook got formatted about once a month for the first year that I owned it, just due to all of the applications I kept installing and removing, and all the tinkering I did with the OS. I was always fearful of garbage being left behind by all of the changes to the system. I've slowed down a bit, but I still find myself reinstalling Mac OS X about once every three months. In fact, I did it again last night. Thankfully .Mac/MobileMe makes it easy to sync my data, and now that I'm accustomed to the OS I have a generally small list of staple applications to reinstall. The whole process takes me about an hour anymore.

With Vista, it's more of a 6 month cycle on my primary desktop, since I have less applications changing on it. I realize that still might sound pretty frequent, considering I have friends that have used the same installation of XP for about 5 years. The nice thing about my Vista machine is that the only applications I've got on there are games, most of which are on Steam. Once I'm done reinstalling the OS and drivers, I just fire up Steam and let it run overnight, downloading all of my games to the system.

Buddies ask why I reinstall my operating systems so often, but the process has become so painless and second nature to me, I don't even really think of it as a big ordeal anymore. I guess if you spend ages configuring your UI and extra programs, then it's a much more monumental task.

I didn't listen to my mum.

For weeks she's been saying (every now and then, at random) that she can smell burnt plastic in my room. I discredited the claims because I couldn't feel a hint of it (but it might've been because I'm here more). One happy day, I started smelling lots of burnt plastic as well. "To hell with burnt plastic", said I. Shortly thereafter, my 550 W Super Flower supply gave in and died silently while I was gaming, but not before it blew the fuse of our house (which is interesting, since a similar brand-quality 400 W could hold my PC overclocked too without getting hot). Of course, being the fortuituous supply that it was, nothing's been damaged in my computer and the warranty replacement from Super Flower has been powering the box fine ever since.

Fun times, it was so hot I could barely touch it at that moment. I'd have put it between 70 and 80 degrees maybe, and it made my computer case hot too.

i feel like a dope for paying way too much for some things back in my beginner days simple because I had never heard of services like pricewatch and newegg wasn't a common name yet...

I had never sat in front of a computer before.

So I signed up for a beginners pc class/lab at my area Community College. Something called DOS. lol

Went to the first day of lab and found several students busily typing away. I sat down at the desk but couldn't figure out how to turn the thing on. No button anywhere! I looked under the table and saw a power strip with several cables attached and a little orange illuminated rocker switch. "Oh, that must be it." Of course I turned off 5 computers that were attached to that power strip. Those poor kids had been typing for over an hour.

The screams of agony still haunt me today.

I jumped from a Radeon 7500 64MB to an 8600GTS 256MB. Then to my 4870. Now that is a graphic jump.

Ug, I still shudder when I think about holding on to that 7500 for so long. (dang Xbox)

When Prescott first came out for S478, we were testing a Shuttle SB75G2 system that was guaranteed-super-duper-really-we-promise to be Prescott compatible.

At stock speed (3.2GHz), the PSU temperature was 82'C, CPU temp was 75'C. At 3.36GHz, PSU/CPU temps hit 86'C/78'C respectively. Finally, at 3.57GHz, the CPU hit 83'C, the PSU hit 94'C, hissed, popped, and [italicgnited.[/italic]. Keep in mind, that was from a CPU that hadn't been voltage-bumped, and was only running 10% faster than stock.

That was exciting. ;)

Then there was the time I was mounting an Athlon XP with stand-offs on the heatsink, forgot to remove the standoffs on the chip, and managed to flash-fry the CPU and motherboard. Good times.