Your technology confessions: What have you never told anyone?

[SlitheryDee]

I put the power cables in backwards on my first AT form factor motherboard (black wires outward instead of inward). When I hit the power switch I heard a crackling sound and the motherboard smoked a little. Strangely enough, when I turned the cables around and connected them correctly the pc POSTed and worked fine for years afterwards.

I blew up the PSU in my PC on my first attempt at overclocking. After which I made a thread on Anandtech claiming that I had fried my CPU. I read that thread again a year or so ago. What a blubbering idiot I was in those days...

 

[TheAdvocate]

My first real computer upgrade was a dedicated 3D graphics card in the form of a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP card. And that thing just flew; everything looked so much better, from the lighting to the crispness of the colors. Or at least that's what I would tell people while I continued playing my games in software mode because I didn't know that you had to change to OpenGL or Glide to enable 3D acceleration. Took me a few months before I finally discovered that option. Oh, so THAT'S what it does! Coooool.

I particularly like this one. Classic.

Mine isnt nearly as funny. I owed a buddy some money and offered to build him a PC to pay him back (he had been talking about buying one). He was nervous, but I talked him into an AMD K6-2 system by hyping my "l33T" build skills...

... during the build, I reverse wired his mobo (power switch, etc) connectors and one of them actually caught on fire. Mobo company replaced them for free after I confessed, but I couldn't fully get the electrical smoke stink out of that case before I finally delivered it to him. I tried to pass it off as normal from the "burn in" period. He bought it.

 

[Mark R]

1. I had just bought a very expensive new PC (486). I decided I'd take the CPU out of the socket to admire it. I put it back in 180 degrees rotated, and it caught fire and melted the motherboard. Realising my mistake, I put the CPU back in the right way round before RMAing the system. When I got the system back, the technical report was "Replaced motherboard and CPU due to CPU malfunction".

2. I needed to RMA a 7950 graphics card that had an intermittent fault, but knew that the retailer would insist on testing it before authorizing the RMA. Before I set off, I thought about this problem for a bit, and realised that the occasionally used diagnostic software MemtestCL had a bug which caused false positive errors on the 7950. When I took the card back, I brought a memory stick with the old, buggy version of memtestCL with me. The tech was about to deny my RMA, when I handed him the stick, and told him, "try this.". "Oh right. MemtestCL, I've heard of that. Haven't used it before.". "No problem, just let it run, and look for the error report at the end".

 

[Brainonska511]

I don't have much. Mainly, I just play dumb when people outside of my immediate family ask for tech help, and for the ones that know I'm fairly tech-savy, I generally play the 'I haven't really kept up with technology as I've been so busy lately" card.

 

[Demoralized]

I build myself high end gaming rigs only to sell them and start again. I always find something visual about the computer I don't like. Or I like the look of another part and build a new rig around it.
I also alternate between Intel and AMD with each new build. Next up is an Intel build.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

when I built my first rig, it was to save money. Decent systems still cost over $2k and I was a poor single dad. I built a rig for something like $500 or so that was very decent (K7S5A in the house!).

Now its just the opposite. You buy off the rack if you want cheap and you build your own if you are going to drop money.

No, as in, I've had this PC for 4 years and it'll probably be another 2 or 3 the way it's going before I'll have enough money to buy another.

 

[rudeguy]

No, as in, I've had this PC for 4 years and it'll probably be another 2 or 3 the way it's going before I'll have enough money to buy another.

Can't you sell a wallaby or something?

 

[edro]

I have ran my laptop in Safe Mode with Networking, everyday for the last 2 months.
Something is causing it to freeze up and I am too lazy to figure out what is causing it.
(it works fine in Safe Mode)

I might just buy a new laptop instead of reinstalling Windows.

 

[SlitheryDee]

I have ran my laptop in Safe Mode with Networking, everyday for the last 2 months.
Something is causing it to freeze up and I am too lazy to figure out what is causing it.
(it works fine in Safe Mode)

I might just buy a new laptop instead of reinstalling Windows.

For some reason I find this hilarious. It feels like driving a car for two months on the spare tire and then buying a new car instead of changing it.

 

[BertolomeoDiaz]

@ edro:
is it at least any outdated?

other than that,
i also hoard stuff, still have a
c64
sega mega drive
super nintendo
nintendo 64
ps2
big old kathode ray tube style TV
VHS video recorder + countless tapes
celeron D pc (pentium4 derivate)
i never use those

when i upgrade my PCs, i tend to build a "new" rig out of the "old" stuff and give that to my parents or sister/nephew, because those parts are usually still pretty competitive an definitely an upgrade for them, or upgrade what they already have
somehow i don´t want to try and sell the stuff, though i don´t have much money,
don´t want to have to trade with strangers

+ all my currently used computers

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I bought a SSD for my desktop 6 months ago and have not even opened it because I am too lazy to do a Windows re-install.

 

[Maximilian]

Ive probably mentioned this before but I spent hours trying to install windows 95 in my younger days. The manual said something like "type X: \something\install.exe at the command prompt where X is the letter of your CD rom drive".

So I spent hours typing X: \ and it never worked :$ Eventually a brainwave hit me and I tried all the letters in the alphabet A B C etc because I remembered seeing C: \ elsewhere and this X: \ was new to me and it worked when I got to D : \

I also blew up an antec truepower 430 because it was set to 115v and not the UK's 230v, got such a fright when I plugged it in. In all fairness I don't think it should have been a switchable one they sent, it didn't have that red switch in the picture and the replacement didn't have one either!

 

[Ns1]

It took me 30 minutes to install Office365 on windows 8.1

first time ever using windows 8.1 =X

 

[NetWareHead]

I still use Microsoft Bob

 

[maddogchen]

I only buy from Frys electronics to see if the part I bought online is dead. Cheaper to buy online and not pay CA sales tax. Although it tripped me up once when the part I bought from frys to test was also bad! Don't remember how I figured that out...

I'm not completely bad. At least I don't return the broken part to frys and keep the good one.

 

[Kaido]

For some reason I find this hilarious. It feels like driving a car for two months on the spare tire and then buying a new car instead of changing it.

I actually laughed out loud at your description

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Can't you sell a wallaby or something?

Wallabies are probably illegal here for all I know.

 

[lakedude]

During the AGP to PCIe transition I bought not one, but 2 non-native video cards because I got it backward.

MY first ever PC was a Dell that was not nearly worth what I paid. I knew nothing about tech at that time and just bought the most expensive stuff I could find.

Just recently had a storage drive go out and lost tons of data in spite of the fact that I have a wonderful 6 disk ZFS backup server. The server was not hooked up after the move so no backup...

I tend to only learn enough to make something work. This is especially true with software. If any one OS will not do what I want, I will switch to another in a heartbeat. As a result I know less than if I'd stuck with just one. As a result I NEED several OSes because I can't make just one do everything I need...

EDIT some more:

I once thought "Open Box" was a brand and bought an Open Box computer that was completely garbage. When I called to complain the rep's English was not great. He kept saying "What do you expect, you bought open box!"

I learned about subnets by playing with an in use network...

 

[Rage187]

I broke my nose playing a NES game. I died and threw myself back on the bed and my knee came up and broke my nose.

I've paid money for extra moves on candy crush.

 

[Bird222]

I don't really understand how itunes sync works and don't really care to learn since only family members (not me) have iphones or ipods.

 

[Zorander]

I once flipped a psu input voltage switch while it was plugged in and on. Curiosity on what would happen got the better of me.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I once flipped a psu input voltage switch while it was plugged in and on. Curiosity on what would happen got the better of me.

Did it do anything bad? I'm assuming going from 120v setting to 240v setting? All the voltages would be halved so the system would probably just lock up. Did it actually kill it?

Once a coworker did the opposite. Went to plug a PC into a server rack PDU, did not realize that PDU was 240v, but the switch was set to 120. It killed the system. POOF! Just like that. :biggrin:

 

[Zorander]

Did it do anything bad? I'm assuming going from 120v setting to 240v setting? All the voltages would be halved so the system would probably just lock up. Did it actually kill it?

Once a coworker did the opposite. Went to plug a PC into a server rack PDU, did not realize that PDU was 240v, but the switch was set to 120. It killed the system. POOF! Just like that. :biggrin:

It was actually a switch from 240V to 120V. It was a long time ago before I learnt to build my own PC. IIRC only the PSU died. The motherboard might have been fried too but the rest (thankfully) survived.

 

[Bateluer]

I once threw away an iMac because it gave me a sad face. Never went back to Mac.

Man, I can't wait until you see the new BSODs and error messages in Windows 8.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I'm completely clueless with electronics outside of my own computer. Twice I've been asked to take photos of a group, once handed a digital camera and another time an iPhone or something, and both times I had to ask for instructions. In the former case, one person asked "...have you never seen a camera before?" in a disappointed tone, and I was like "I think my mom owns one of these things", lol.