This thread is for not just any tech fail, but personal tech fails that you have experience with. Since no one is perfect it shouldn’t be hard to tell your stories!
I have a few that I can think off the top of my head.
When I was assembling a pc for my brother I to neglected the cpu. I didn’t even put it in the socket and had the heatsink mounted (wraith stealth) and had it in the case and attempted to troubleshoot no post screen. After like half an hour I saw that the cpu was still in its box.
On one of my first builds ever I mixed up the 8 pin cpu plugs and fried the motherboard.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade I was modding my xbox with the power plugged in and got zapped by the psu getting pushed back like 6 feet in my chair.
When ripping a tv show, I cracked the disk, so I ordered a replacement copy of the entire season and somehow that same exact disk didn’t work. So the third copy of the season was the charm.
I was updating my Galaxy Ace a long time ago through the PC and while updating it looked like everything was done but I was wrong and decided to unplug the phone. Had to flash it manually to bring it back to life.
Another time I was connecting the antenna TV to my ATI Radeon 9200, which had a TV tuner, and a huge spark came out of the antenna cable frying the GPU and making my hand numb for 10 minutes.
Also it happened that a couple very strong neodimium magnets I had bounced on the table and got stuck near the floppy drive in the same computer.
i had an bios update write error when flashing a AGP nvidia ~5700 XT
i had to blind flash it to bring it back online by pretty much adding all kinds of extra syntax by try and error.
i bend a ton of pins on a 3700x while removing the awful stock cooler. for what ever reason the paste was like adhesive i bend them back using a tiny screwdriver while holding the cooler not the CPU which took many hours broke 2 pins in the process. the CPU is still working. i needed both hands to remove the CPU from the stock cooler. i guess i used up all the luck i had in this life with this one.
When I was young, I was told to clean the PC and I turned it off (“It is now safe to turn off your computer” era). As I was wiping clean the tower, I found a recessed switch behind and switched it. Nothing happened. Switched it several times more until I realized I forgot what the original setting was. I thought nah, what could possibly go wrong? So I powered on the PC and watched in horror as I see fumes emit from behind me PC. That day, I learned about 110V and 220V.
Biggest fail that i have had as a building a pc, is that i forgot to switch the PSUs powerswitch on, also on one day i was building a gaming pc at work, i took ryzen 7 3700x out of the packaging and literally it jumped in my hands, i was very scared rest of the build and luckily it posted and the CPU went to the socket just fine, but man i was so scared that i have bend pins of a 300-400€uro CPU that isn’t mine.
Absolutely every time I build a PC I always break the latch that keeps the GPU in the PCIe slot.
Back in the day my first AM2 motherboard had broken latch, them I moved to FM2 motherboard where I also broke the latch…
Now I have an AM4 motherboard and I broke the latch the very first day because I mounted the GPU before the AIO and I had to remove the GPU to be able to deal easier with the cooler.
So that’s my thing. I can’t build a PC without breaking the latch of the PCIe slot…
I have had that happen. I was trying to take a gpu out with a nh d15 and the gpu being in the top slot. I couldn’t fit my finger between the cpu cooler and the gpu. So I used a screw drive and bam it broke.
I had a game boy advance SP, and I broke the charger adapter. In all my 8 year old self wisdom, I had the brilliant idea to cut the adapter off and replace it with a normal male plug. Any guesses what happened next? Don’t bother, I sent 220 volts into that gba, and it never worked again
On a Hyper T2 I installed it with the plastic thingy still on the bottom.
On my daughter build you know all those screws that hold stuff in place that always seem to get lost…but hey it’s a desktop it doesn’t move.
Dau goes to college
280 miles on Pennsylvania roads
“Oh yea I should checked it out before she left”
The spinning rust survived, the SSD did not
Overclocking an AM3 board “Hey I wounder what would happen if I just choose the 50% easy OC option?”
Luckily the CMOS clear jumper brought her back to life
Once I let an overclocked R7 1700X transcode my whole vid-library from h.264 to h.265 24/7.
After day 9 I returned from work and my pc was off. I thought it was odd, but I switched the psu on and off and tried to power on my pc and was welcomed with a freaky lighting show, magic smoke and a scary me trying to rip the plug off the wall.
Luckily enough I got a replacement mainboard, even an upgrade from X370 to X470.
I build an electric Skateboard. Main components are Battery, ESC (electronic speed controll, converts DC to 3phase AC for Motors).
I build it in a button side mounted baking dish. With external charging port and completely sealed with silicone.
The ESC came lose and traveled under the charging port and one of the phase came in contact. Setting the mosfet on reverse 42V Voltage. Magic Smoke happend and funny enough the included speaker on the ESC screamed. It was the first time I witnessed death…
I sealed the whole thing so good it took minutes to disassemble. By this point all hope was lost
Soldered in LDO backwards a few times.
Sometimes it does not blow up anything, stuff just stops working.
Smetimes one chip lets the magic smoke out.
This one time however one of the shift registers went “pop” and then a handful of LEDs flew of like rockets. I never found all the plastic domes again.
Cleaned my computer (as one does) and took out the GPU and RAM for that.
After cleaning, I only had half the RAM show up. So I went to BIOS to make sure it was not a windows quirk. Nope, only 8 Gigs of 16. Powered down the machine, opened the case and as I layed it on its side, the second RAM-stick slid of the top of the machine and fell in front of me like “Looking for me?”
Had a bundle of 3 network cables, plugged in three plugs into one switch and 3 plugs into the other switch (LACP). But only one of the ports went up.
Checked the ports were not shut down in config, they weren’t.
I concluded two of the cables were faulty. As I replaced the run, I noticed that two of the cables made a U-turn in the middle…
Decades ago, I was prototyping a single-board computer which used a 7805 linear regulator. I connected it the unregulated power supply. I turned it on. Nothing happened. I started to lean over to get a closer look at the board and the 7805 exploded! A piece of it narrowly missed my head and ricocheted off the ceiling. It turned out I’d connected the power backwards. (I keep meaning to take a photo of the remains of the 7805 but can’t find it, though I’m sure I wouldn’t throw it away.)
Also decades ago, I was building another computer from chips up, in a shared lab. I was running it off a lab power supply with the knob set to 5 volts. One day I came in and turned it on. Nothing. Then I noticed with horror that the power supply was set to 12 volts! Amazingly, I only had to replace the clock generator chip to get it working again. (It was a pity about that chip. When I took it out of the socket, I noticed that it had ‘FS SAMPLE’ printed on the bottom!)
I set up a simple NAS (BananaPi with SSD, nothing fancy, completly silent) a while ago (>110 days). After setting up the network connection by connecting screen and keyboard locally, I took to SSH and webGUI.
As one does, I ran sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade , which threw some errors, past me never thought anything of it.
Jump to present:
Well… I just spent another few hours trying to troubleshoot a network problem. During which I tried to ping www.google.com which threw “error: unkown host”.
So network hickup aside, why do I get unknown host?
Checks pinging a local IP, works.
Pinging IP or address from my computer, also works.
Another 30 minutes of trying various things including two reboots.
Turns out past me never configured a DNS on the darn thing.
In case you are wondering, the command I did not run was echo "nameserver 1.1.1.1" | sudo tee /etc/resolv.conf
