[adam_tj]

What your worst mistake involving a computer? This does not include "using windows" "buying from Dell" etc., etc. Juicy stories like dropping your powerbook 30 stories are encouaged!!!

[nomorewindows]

OMG! I used windows AND I bought from Dell and you don't think that's bad enough? Monster!!!!!!!

[adam_tj]

I draw images of burning Dell's in my spare time. I hate Dell and Microsoft just as much as you.

[Luca]

Boy... you know, I've never made a mistake that's actually harmed or damaged a computer in any way. I've made some poor decisions that have cost me some money (buying shit I don't need, buying shit that broke, passing up a good deal and later settling for a worse one, etc), but I've never, like, dropped and broken something.

I have yet to find out whether switching to Windows as my primary OS has been my greatest mistake or my best decision yet. When I was setting up my newly-built PC, I languished for two days trying to figure out how to get my SATA hard drive to boot properly. It was some retarded Windows problem that would have never happened on a Mac of course. On the other hand, I've had so much fun with this machine, gaming and hardware tweaking and all, where my old PowerMac would simply disappoint me. I'd say it's a wash.

When I saw the title of this thread I was all ready to chime in with "HP not buying Apple in 1976. Commodore also not buying Apple in 1976. That guy selling DOS to Microsoft for $50k sometime back in the 70s." I mean, those were pretty freakin' dumb when you look back at them. But the people who made those decisions would have had no way of knowing.

[johnq]

I was editing and testing an AppleScript in Mac OS 9 and it "ran away from me" and started to delete all the files on my desktop, which was were I kept hundreds of important recent files in a big messy pile! Worst still, I was testing "ignore application responses" (whatever it's called, I forget) so my script would go faster!

I couldn't force quit so I yanked the plug.

Thankfully, I didn't rename my Hard Drive to Aardvark or something, and since it was deleting alphabetically, it hadn't reached "Macintosh HD" yet, so I was mostly safe. I did recover and I had backed up anyway, but still, not fun to watch files wink out of existence.


Worst Faux Pax on a computer, was when I'd work overnight and take all my co-workers RAM and put it in my G4 tower. I'd put it all back next morning, no problems.

Naturally, one day I get home and get that "I forgot to do something" feeling. It's now like 7:50 PM so I freak out and get a cab and haul ass back to the office and replace the RAM.

Of course, only then do I remember it was a 3 day weekend.

[Wickers]

I was taking off the heatsink to my Linux box, the damn clip was stiff and there was very little room to work with. Next thing you know my screwdriver slipped while I was putting a lot of force behind it causing the screwdrive to plunge into my motherboard taking one of the ICs between the ZIF and memory DIMM clean off...

I had saved about $400 for a new graphics card, but that had to go into replacing both my motherboard and CPU (which had it's die crushed when getting the damn clip off...).

You can see the CPU in my desktop pic... but just to point it out:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/10...up/redone2.jpg

EDIT: Damn you Luca... hehe...

[ast3r3x]

I've shared this several times, but what's one more?

I forget what I was doing, but I needed a monitor for a PC to see if it still worked, the specs, and all that stuff...

Couldn't find a monitor, so I grabbed the monitor that came with my Performa 6115CD. I'm not sure if it was me, or somebody else, but we plugged it into the computer...maybe in the COMM port, because the Apple Monitor was the style of connector where it was 2 row, of 8 and 7 pins.

Well plug it in, turn on the computer...sizzling sound, black smoke starts pouring out of the powersupply fan pushing air out of the computer. Unplug it. Wait for some to clear from my basement...and the smell, oh man was the smell of burning plastic bad.

Open the computer, and the card the monitor was connected, was melted, and the wires on/around it had the insulation melted off...it was bad.

Oh, and the monitor still worked!

[Luca]

You used the wrong form of "its."

[Wickers]

Originally Posted by Luca You used the wrong form of "its."

( )

Edit: Fixed

[Luca]

The Master will be pleased.

[Barto]

Ruining two 7220/200s. (4400/200 was the North American designation).

I don't know how either.

[naren]

I've always regretted not keeping the free copy of 10.0 I installed on my Pismo back in 2000. No one mentioned that I needed more than 64 MB of RAM for it to run properly. Damn was that shit slow, I couldn't delete it fast enough. A year and a half of watching OS 9 loose important documents and crash for no apparent reason and I was shelling out $120 for 10.1.5. Of course 4.5 weeks later 10.2 was released and I just HAD to go and buy that too. What a sucker.

[Luca]

Originally Posted by Barto Ruining two 7220/200s. (4400/200 was the North American designation). I don't know how either.

At least you didn't ruin any GOOD computers. From what I've heard, the 4400/7220 was a real POS. Never used one myself but I do remember that they came in a really ugly metal case with an unconventional location for the floppy drive, and they used different RAM from most computers at the time so RAM upgrades were expensive.

Come to think of it, my brother's and my adventures in modding did end up wrecking one Apple ADB mouse and keyboard, and we did make a Mac SE pretty damn ugly (a few layers of paint there).

[Kickaha]

Fiddled with the partition map on an 8600 years ago in the Rhapsody beta days. Mucked it up. Kinda bad since it had my research on it.

No worries, I had not one but two backups. Reformat away!

Pop the Zip disk in... *click click click* Damn.

Hook up SCSI Sun workstation disk (built like a tank). All is good.

Copy over a bunch of stuff, realize I have to hand-check everything, it's 10pm, I haven't had dinner, and I'm exhausted. I stop the copy of my dissertation research in *mid-drag*, and go home.

Came back to the head bouncing off the platter. A professional recovery service said it was utterly and completely dead.

Lost 18 months of work that way. Oopsie.

[BlueRabbit]

This isn't really a mistake, but back in the days of System 7, when Shutdown was still an app, I put it in the Startup Items folder for April Fool's day. It was pretty fun until my brother figured out how to start up with extensions off.

[alcimedes]

i had a wallstreet that work had provided me with.

for some reason (massive amounts of alcohol) when i got home i decided i could spin it in the air and catch it.

go figure, eventually i missed, it fell from about 8' right onto the corner.

the cover for the irda port flew off, and it made a god awful crunching sound. at this point i was feeling a lot more sober than i had been.

i picked my baby up and at least the LCD wasn't cracked. pushed the power button and held my breath. probably the longest 5 seconds in my life.

sure enough, it booted and everything was fine. go figure. those bastards were built like tanks. i glued the irda cover back on, and it still worked. i loved that computer.

[Gargoyle]

Using a chipstick wrapped with wire to bridge the 1A fuse in my old C64. At the time it worked great... but looking back, I could have easily burnt the house down!!!

[Moogs]

Originally Posted by adam_tj What your worst mistake involving a computer? This does not include "using windows" "buying from Dell"

How about: "I spent over two grand on a Gateway about ten years ago"?


Seriously, I would say my biggest mistake was plunking down 4 grand on a souped up version of the PM 8500. Worst Mac I ever owned. Glitchy, impossible to upgrade because of its crappy industrial design (on the inside), and really expensive, even though I had a college kid buy it for me from my alma mater.

Other big mistakes include forgetting to back up specific, nested folders of important data before reformatting a drive to install a new system. For example, I forgot all of my MP3s in the "Music folder". Lost a shitload of files, many of which I ripped from my own CDs but meant I'd have to spend hours re-doing the rip jobs. Also lost some other important documents.

Placed a 12" Powerbook on the floor of my passenger seat so it wouldn't fall off if I had to break hard. Unfortunately I did not forsee that I should've also placed my half full 16 oz water bottle on the floor, because when I did happen to break hard out of necessity, the bottle flung itself off the seat smacked into the case and put a nice big dent in it, crunching the side down enough to prevent the CD inside from being ejected. Never did like those friggin' AL powerbook chassis with their puss-ified plastic edging.

[scratt]

This is not so much a mistake as a wierd case of Murphy's Law that I am wondering if the rest of you have....

I am a backup freak.... I have never (franticaly touching head area - i.e. wood) actually lost an important project beacuse of corruption, file loss, drive failure etc..

As a by prouct of this 100% success rate at any one time I am fighting to keep my over 1 Terrabytes of storage on 8 hard drives less than 75% full on average.

This is because I make copies of stuff that I am working on from one drive to another... Then a bit later I will archive those and then make another backup... But just in case I will not delete the old backup.. You never know!

Then I will backup all that to another drive and think, well I'll just keep the most recent backup on this drive and perhaps a quick swap backup on my current drive in case I make a really dumb change and want to completely reset the project without delving into a backup...

You get the picture!

Every now and then I will do some housework.

Now...I never ever throw away old projects.. ( I have actually managed to bring myself to archive some stuff THAT IS NOT VERY IMPORTANT onto DVDs. I don't trust disc media for long term storage really.) He He. I even have some stuff from Sega which has worked it's way onto my G5 from an old Powerbook 170, through a 540c, to an old style optical RW disk (The 100MB ones) and then someway I cannot remember onto my 17" and finally the archive 250GB on my G5! This stuff is over 15 years old! I think it takes up a quantum-nibble on one of those drives.

I also have a project I did for a friend that has been published, sold, copyrighted and sold on again by them... which I kept in case they ever had a catastrophic failiure on their system!! I still won't get rid of it because I know there are a couple of concepts I might want to go look at! Duh!!

So.. I digress... Every now and then I will get close to 80% on some drives and think... OK.. Need to clean house.

I suppose my files are more kind of living baggage I take with me and I just keep needing to move to a bigger house...

Now I am anal about backups! But I am crap at keeping notes on backups!
So I never really know where anything is... Sometimes I find stuff I though I had lost..

You can tell I am just so excited about Tiger!! It's going to solve all my headaches!
I will know where everything is at the touch of a button...

Sorry... I digress again....

So I do some house keeping and agonize about throwing away some 50 gazillion MB file that has been sat gathering dust on my harddrive for years and as I click delete, or move it to the trash I think to myself (every time without fail)... "You haven't toucched that for years... but I bet next week you are going to find a need for it".

Oh, how I giggle to myself. How ludicrous!

But hey ho.. A week later I'll be working through something and think "Hmm.. Now I had that 'bit or bob'... Hmmm Where was it...."

"Doh!"

This happens several times a year.. No probably once a month....

Anyone else know what I am talking about?
Or should I just seek help?

[Ebby]

Originally Posted by \/\/ickes I was taking off the heatsink to my Linux box, the damn clip was stiff and there was very little room to work with. Next thing you know my screwdriver slipped while I was putting a lot of force behind it causing the screwdrive to plunge into my motherboard taking one of the ICs between the ZIF and memory DIMM clean off...

Oh Man! I did that too. Except it was a friend's brand-spanking-new gaming system. Fortunately, no chips popped off, but I did scrape some insulation off the motherboard. Best of all, it still works and he doesn't know.

Oh yea, and I somehow shorted out one of the sensors in my G5. Burning wire & the works. I did a little surgery and removed the sensor and everything works better than it did.

Oh, and finally. I needed to fix a seriously messed up hard drive. After a simple backup of all the important files, I reformatted. Disk repair soon became a very distant second priority over data recovery, since I reformatted the wrong drive in drive setup. I ended up loosing the data on both drives.

[Gargoyle]

Originally Posted by scratt [snip]...[Snip]...[Snip]

You know you can get the "rsync" and "cp" commands to do that automatically? I have written a script that automatically backs up our companies main filestore every day. So I for any one day I can view a full list of files as they were on that day, You could do this every 15 mins if you want.

"So what!?!" I hear you say. Well the clever bit is that thanks to the magic of linux, even though all the daily backup dirs look full, only the changed files actually take up space!

(*DISCLAIMER* I know this to be true for Linux versions of the commands, not sure about OSX / Darwin versions)

[scratt]

Originally Posted by Gargoyle You know you can get the "rsync" and "cp" commands to do that automatically? I have written a script that automatically backs up our companies main filestore every day. So I for any one day I can view a full list of files as they were on that day, You could do this every 15 mins if you want. "So what!?!" I hear you say. Well the clever bit is that thanks to the magic of linux, even though all the daily backup dirs look full, only the changed files actually take up space! (*DISCLAIMER* I know this to be true for Linux versions of the commands, not sure about OSX / Darwin versions)

Now that's the stuff about Unix that is just so damn cool..
I really must get my Unix head on and learn more..
Of course I would have to individually check each folder and perhaps even each file the first couple of times to make sure they really had been backed up...

And then there would be getting a backup back...

But I think Unix is about the only system in existence I would trust to do that and get it right...

Anyway I feel the urge to go wash my hands and pick up rubbish around the house... Oh the cobwebs... And then I must shut the windows to keep the dust out... Then wash my hands again.. Then check all my backups and make sure they are all still where I left them an hour ago....

[kretara]

Quite a while ago I bought (on impulse) a Compaq P120 with a 1GB HD and 16MB RAM for $2700.00
After I got home I was like what the F*%# did I do that for.

On the same computer I tried to delete IE. I lost a lot of important work that way.

I've had 2 SQL accidents.
I typed in the wrong syntax and put mySQL into an infinite loop AND the SQL statement was being called in a while script that decided to go infinite also. This brought down my companies web server.

After putting in about 75 hours a week for 4 weeks I was 12 hours away from launching my part of a web app. right on deadline. As I was fixing a misspelling in someones last name something fell off my monitor stand and hit my keyboard at the same time as I was hitting the return key to run the SQL update. Instead of updating 1 record it changed 16,000 records. My boss and I spent 8 hours recovering the data.

[Crusader]

Well the worst thing to happen to my PB was having a nail clipper fall off the top of my desk and hit the open PB. It dented the aluminum case right beneath the power button, and to this day I get mad when I see it.

The worst happened when I was an intern for the Board of Ed in my county. Our current project was to clean, reformat, and install all the required software on these 6 month old white-box PC's donated from the wonderful NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission). We would recondition the PC, give it a final wipedown, and put it on a pallet with 24 of it's friends to go out to schools around the county.

Well I had just loaded the last PC onto a pallet, and I was waiting for my partner to grab the shrink wrap machine. Unbeknownst to me, the pallet jack, which was holding the pallet 2 or so inches off the ground, had a compressor leak, causing it to sink over time. As I stood there, the pallet slowly lowered itself onto my foot, and by the time I noticed that my foot was pinned down, it was too late. By the time my partner was able to get back and pump the pallet back up, my big toe was crushed two others were broken.

And to this day I hate PC's

[Mass Appeal]

Originally Posted by Crusader As I stood there, the pallet slowly lowered itself onto my foot, and by the time I noticed that my foot was pinned down, it was too late. By the time my partner was able to get back and pump the pallet back up, my big toe was crushed two others were broken. And to this day I hate PC's

That sounds painful. Just curious but did you lose your big toe?

[stoo]

Early morning on thesis handin day I lost 80% of my thesis.

I was making some final touches to the layout of my thesis and the text editor crashed. The editor then tries to autosave, while going down in flames. It only manages to write the first 20% of the file.
I fix it from the backups, then backup what I think is the complete thesis everywhere I can think of, including both of my computer science dept. accounts. I render the LaTeX file (it's a markup language) to Postscript and discover than the back 80% is missing. Not a nice feeling.When I finally accept that it's irrecoverable from my current position, the time is about 2:30am. All I have is a hard copy of the current draft.
However, there is a lab compter with a draft on it that I haven't overwritten. The lab opens at 8am, thesis handin is midday. A morning of typing and layout, an incident with an empty printer, a broken binding machine and a short run to the teaching office later and it's back to the way it was 12 hours ago. Handed in with 15 minutes to go, went home and slept for four hours, in clothes I'd been wearing for 30.

Moral of the story: backup several versions. (Ironically, I had a CVS respository to do this for the project's code, but didn't include any of the actual thesis writeup in it).

Oh absolutely. I have my entire research in CVS, from code to LaTeX files to PDFs of papers I reference.

[Kickaha]

Oh absolutely. I have my entire research in CVS, from code to LaTeX files to PDFs of papers I reference.

Edit: Heh. Yeah, I throw *EVERYTHING* into CVS. You never know...

[bassplayinMacFiend]

I used an X-Acto knife to remove a 486 SX-25 from a motherboard in a botched upgrade attempt. Turns out the 486/DX2-66 upgrade chip was bad anyway. I had to buy a new mobo but the 486/DX2 was replaced for free.

[NeverFade]

I restarted my computer under the Jaguar CD ( at the time ) , and was attempting to 'clean the slate' and start fresh with my machine. I had archived my files to the other drive, and started to install on the main CPU. This took a long time to do, and then when I restarted I noticed no differnce on my computer, everything was the same!?

BUT my external drive, where all my files had been archived to was gone!!!

The moral of the story: ALWAYS make sure you know what drive you are installing on!

[Ed Rooney]

I once wasted my CIO's hard drive with Partition Magic.

I also deleted everything from my fathers hard drive using norton commander back in the 80's.

I don't recall ever screwing myself over.

I reckon for every feckup I've done I rescued 10 machines from the great beyond.