Friend of mine was playing Overwatch. He raged, swatted his mouse and unfortunately, he caught the mouse on curve of the right hand side. The mouse got air and flew in a graceful arc right into his Asus PG278Q. Resulted in a cracked screen and a 800NZD repair bill. He ended up buying a XB270hu lol
What are your 'ahh fuck that's going to be expensive' tech stories?
A long time ago I didn't know that RAM had to be matched. I bought a RAM upgrade for $100 and just stuck it in any open slot right next to my old RAM. = Dead Motherboard. I go back to CompUSA and spend $200 on a new motherboard. When I rebuild my PC, I can't get it to turn on so I bring it to be repaired at CompUSA. They charge me $500 to change one pin on the motherboard front panel header.
$800 for 2GB of RAM.
None of my expensive fuck ups are tech related. I spilt beer on a laptop once, then spilt tequila on the replacement, but it was okay, just had a sticky control key.
I opened up my old P35W (a $1200 laptop) one day and it was just... dead.
That hurt.
I fried mainboards now and then and had some PSUs die but no major fuckups that ended up costing more than 200€ to fix.
Wait so what exactly do you mean by paired? As in timings? I wouldn't have thought incorrectly installing ram could brick a mobo?
Out on a work site once I forgot to bring my anti-static strap to ground myself while handling RAM modules for work station upgrades, and I zapped one of the modules like a noob
On my first time opening a PC (my laptop) to put an ssd in, I did it all on the carpet and it fried the laptop lol
Not really expensive but my manager a few years ago asked me to order some more RJ45 boots. When I asked how many he said 10. So I ordered 10... packs... of two colours.
So, we had around 180 spares.
Mine is camera tech related... and a little embarrassing.....
you want to hear?
you sure?
okay then....
I was carrying my camera lenses in a side shoulder carryall collecting eggs from the chickens in the garden and I ended up having to carefully put them in my camera bag as there were too many to hold...
Long story short a month later i picked up the bag (as it was a spare bag/lenses I didn't use much) and suddenly released where the horrid smell in my house was coming from... all the eggs had cracked because i had forgotten them... and yeah picking up a £450 lens and dropping it in the bin was the hardest thing I had ever done...
I fried a media card reader once because I connected it to the motherboard incorrectly, luckily those aren't expensive.
Working on my PC with a heavy head cold, don't do it. It may be worse than being drunk.
Removing a graphics card trying to release the the PCI slot tab. I managed to stab the motherboard with a screwdriver flicking off one of the small surface mount components. I killed my motherboard, I discovered that the graphics card was dead anyhow. So all in all an expensive week.
$2400 Macbook Pro.. that's the most expensive thing that I broke / broke on me.
Boss + HP ZBook 17 G2 + Coffee
You know what comes next...
By performance per dollar, he bet you. But speaking only price, you win. Congrats.
I've been fairly lucky.
My worst one is I bought a used Dell old Workstation laptop (Had a Quadro roughly the equivalent of a old Nvidia GT 8800) cost me $120 or so from Ebay. The GPU ended up dying after 1 month due to playing Dark Souls 2 on it, and I couldn't get my money back.
This was a few years ago.
As a student that hurt. XD
Tried to de-lid a 3770k. Nicked the PCB with my knife. RIP.
AT my new job I accidently started the daily backup 20 minutes early in the AS400, which would've cost the DC thousands of dollars worth of time due the massive shipping delay it would've caused.
Luckily, my mentor saw what I had done and paused the backup job in time so it didn't severely fuck up the system.
But it shut down the batch query process that the websever used to update a web display of status info and we got a lot of people calling in about that.
Although once the appropriate time to do the backup was finished, everything worked like normal.
That was a fun day.
TLDR: almost cost the Distribution Center I worked at thousands of dollars.
Nothing too bad, but I did have to build 7 desktops for a start up company. Was pulling some late hours, had a major brain fart and screwed down one of the motherboards without standoffs... (don't ask why). Ended up frying the motherboard which was not fun, because it came out of my pocket when I had to explain what happened.
Man, I must 've been lucky, cause a few years ago, I mismatched a bunch of different DDR2 RAM sticks together and all I got was lousy performance. It was something like 2GB 2GB 1GB 1GB.
I am lucky as well. My worst tek f-up was dropping a brand new tablet straight out of the box handing it as a gift to my father.