Computer stupidities

[pentium]

Re: Computer stupidities

Let me think.
out old packard bell was acting up one night and for some rerason needed it's bios reset. I pulled the chip out and let it sit for a minute. I then proceeded to reinstall the chip THE WRONG WAY and was rewarded with the destruction of the chip.

I have repeatedly incorrectly plugged in at sockets. All times i ahve been licky for the power supply cuts out almost immediatly.

Last year I bought a scsi tower with a massive two bay 1gb drive and a smaller internal drive. I powered up the smaller drive and noticed a glow from under the drive. "no green light?" It seems a resistor bit the dust and started glowing until it burned out.

My old mac se hard drive wouldn't spin up one day. I discovered these drives had sticky heads. I then proceeded to rotate the interrupt servo, ignoring the "DO NOT ROTATE" sticker. It now keeps my newspapers from blowing away.

Finally, I was doing cleaning of my IBM thinkpad 380 XD and was ready to boot it up again. I got the errors 161 and 163. These mean battery dead and clock not set. I spent $15 in a new battery and got the same result. I then replaced the main battery $98 and STILL got the same result (destroying the origional battery in the process, making return of the new battery impossible).
THEN I tried replacing the motherboard $55 and STILL had the same problem.
Frusterated, I went over everything again.

This is when I became unglued

It seems pushing enter at the error screen takes you to a code page. Instead of pushing enter, all I had to do was enter my bios password and boom, the clock set screen appeared. After setting the clock i reset the laptop and the errors went away. From now on I don't look at the laptop's service manual. It was the thing that said I needed all these parts replaced in the first place.

[arneson]

Re: Computer stupidities

Just today I'm finishing up a project. Got a nice big radar installed, mounted, wired.
Got down from roof, fired it up, nice scan, good picture, but I noticed that I couldn't see very well. I'd lost my glasses. Realized that they were in the radar antenna. Doh.

[mutant]

Re: Computer stupidities

I really enjoyed reading the mistakes of you guys. Makes me feel normal now

Well a friend of mine (I swear it wasn't me) wanted to upgrade his ram. So I talk him thru what he needs to do. He buys his replacement ram and pulls out his old stick of ram... His pc shut down. Permanently. I never told him he needed to shut his system down. He didn't blame me and he quickly realized what he'd done. Only his motherboard died and I installed a new one for him that he bought.

Ok, now heres what I've done. I noticed my motherboard was loose on one corner. So what did I do? I use a phillips screw driver to tighten it up. The pc was powered on. Next thing I smelled smoke. The pc locked up and my SoundBlaster Live burnt a trace. Took me a long time to discover that because it was so small. I repaired it by soldering a wire in place. Still works too Lesson learned - Turn off power before you go sticking metal objects near motherboards.

And yea I've sheared off my share of surface mounted chips too

[ionothanus]

Re: Computer stupidities

My friend and I were at his house once, with his laptop, using his wireless network. We were trying some fancy device bridging between wi-fi and wired devices, and it wasn't working. (He is notorious for things that should work not working.) So, we went about disabling this and re-installing that for about an hour, getting increasingly frustrated, when he has the realization that he can't remember if the password ends with a ! or a 1. He changed it, and it instantly worked. We laughed about that one for a while...

My brother had a friend who, while working with sound, encountered several out-of-memory errors and decided to re-insert the stick of RAM that had been removed by someone else because it was defective. While the system was on. He soon found himself with a new computer, courtesy of his own wallet. We all got a good laugh out of that.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Computer stupidities

On the inserting RAM while comp is running topic...

I was helping to upgrade a couple hundred comps with more RAM for the goverment... You know, okay "next"

Well, came to one comp and no lights or fans running, I plugged the stick in and heard the monitor activate, uh oh I though, the PC came right to the desktop, turned out it was in standby mode (i.e. all fans except PSU fan was off)

I selected shutdown and it gracefully shutdown, pressed the start and all RAM was found, that was one lucky me

[tiresias]

Re: Computer stupidities

for the government...

Well, then it really wouldn't have been a problem had the machine in question died - it's not like it would have been used for anything important anyway.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Computer stupidities

Well, then it really wouldn't have been a problem had the machine in question died - it's not like it would have been used for anything important anyway.

LOL, that gave me the days laugh; because it is so damn true!!!

[Tom41]

Re: Computer stupidities

Just remembered this at work - one time a PC just shut off for no reason. I came to the machine, pressed Power, pressed a few keys on the keyboard, nothing. All sorts of power and motherboard problems ran through my mind... then as I took the mains lead out of the PSU, I noticed something. The isolator switch on the PSU had been knocked to the 0 position.

Plugged mains back in, turned isolator switch to 1, pressed Power... bingo! PC working again! Sometimes even I fail to check for the simplest things...

Also, yesterday I had to replace some faulty RAM on my Windows server. After determining that it was indeed the RAM that was faulty, I swapped it out with some spare SIMMs I had. Put the server back together, reconnected and powered on - no POST. Eventually I saw that one of the AT power connectors to the motherboard (it's an old-style PC server) had been knocked loose by all my RAM swapping. Pushed it in, now works fine

[kc8adu]

Re: Computer stupidities

my favorite is the time a bunch of game monitors came in with bad crt's.
i have a game that uses these common monitors with the elo or microtouch interface.
i remounted the touch screen on one to a new crt and did the setup and touch calibration.
looked fine so i left it run while i recapped a mobo for a customer.
heard the unmistakeable sounds of the top bananna taking a spin and paying off.
thought oh shit i dont have the touch screen mounted right and its acting up.
happened several more times and as i went to go out to the warehouse and shut it off i spotted one of the shop cats on the game swatting the screen.she figured out which spot made things spin and would swat randomly at the screen.went back out with the camera set to video but she got camera shy.

[willawake]

Re: Computer stupidities

heres a good one. happened quite a few years ago. i was testing scanning software in the office at the end of the day. I decided to try paperport. when i installed it i specified for the data directory the "working directory" on the server where at that time we kept all the monthly documents until an automated program put them into alphabetical directories at the end of the month (we use a better system currently).

Anyway paperport turned out to be crap so i uninstalled it. The uninistaller turned out to be crap also because without prompting it deleted all files on the server working directory also!!!!!

That evening i learnt the beauty of norton undelete.....everything was recovered

[arneson]

Re: Computer stupidities

deleted all files on the server working directory

I'll have nightmares about this story.

Here's a laugh,
For a couple years I've been carrying this wallet, use it every day, never thought much of it, till I came home from job and it was missing!
Laundry, couch, yard, car, getting frantic now, no where!
Figured it's got to be on the yacht I worked on, so next day searched yacht.
Happened to look down in bilge, something floating next to pump, eureka,
It's the wallet, all wet and nasty but money and all.
Here's the funny part, I looked at wallet and for first time realized,,
It was totally camoflaug, actually made of camoflaug material, I'd had it for years.
My missing wallet story, ha.

[Tom41]

Re: Computer stupidities

Sorry to bump the old topic, but I wanted to add a couple more from me:

I once was maintaining my web server through console, and had just finished converting all the GIF images to PNG. Since I didn't need the GIFs any more, I went to console and typed rm *.gif (delete all GIF files). Unfortunately, I didn't let go of the Shift key in time and the command became rm *>gif. That means 'remove all files in current directory and log output to a file called GIF'. Needless to say, I had to restore from a backup!

Here's another one - at work, I created a cut down version of one of the reporting programs (written in VB), so it could just be run automatically as a scheduled task. Even though I made a copy of all the project files to modify, I found that after saving it had overwritten the original VB form file! What's more, that particular file had NEVER been backed up on the tape system! Which idiot set that up?
I had to 'hack' the binary to get the form file out of it again, and recreate the original program from scratch

Again at work, I accidentally deleted someone else's My Documents folder instead of my own, since I had Windows Explorer in 'list' mode. The mouse pointer must have been one pixel over the line, so I just clicked the other folder, pressed Delete and said Yes (automatically). Thank goodness for tape backups!

[Hooliator]

Re: Computer stupidities

After rebuilding a system, I turned it on and nothing happened. So I opened it up and unplugged everything, put all back together and still nothing. So I did it all again and was getting very irritated. A friend of mine stopped over just then and noticed my frustration, and asked me if I plugged it in to the wall and I said "of course I did!" but the empty wall socket told a different story. I spent about an hour trying to figure that one out.

[arneson]

Re: Computer stupidities

I know what you mean,Hool.
I've noticed my computers don't work when the lights are out,
in fact, the lights are out in the whole neighborhood. Duh.

[Shroomie]

Re: Computer stupidities

A while back, June or July, I went down the street to a neighbor's house, we were screwing around with a couple old PCs, trying to get a working AT system together out of junk. Well, we moved the PSU from one case to another and I'd forgotten how the wires connected to the switch. I dragged out another computer, figuring they'd all be wired up the same way.

A tripped circuit breaker proved me wrong.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Computer stupidities

Hehe, story from a friend, he is an electrician

Was troubleshooting a guys comp, it would not power up. Took it apart looking for +5vsb etc, nothing, took the PSU apart, no 230v AC...

Measured the cable from the wall, no power, the strands inside it had gotten damaged

Pretty funny story hearing from an electrician :P

[arneson]

Re: Computer stupidities

My computers are all ok at the moment but heres a power cord story.
Last weekend one of those fast moving thunder storms hits, actually two or three of them on Friday and SAturday.
I have a fairly large gauge extension cord running from the garage outside to charge up the little boat.
Whak, Bang, the circuit breakers pop and we smell smoke from a direct strike.
I had closed the garage door to keep the storm out, forgot the cord, It was completely vaporised right where it came in the house.
Of course everything in the little jetboat is also vaporised, that's a bummer, The row of glass fuses have no more glass, they exploded.
"I hate the smell of Ozone in the afternoon".

[pentium]

Re: Computer stupidities

I am currently experiencing troubleshoting hell.
I decided to completely dismantle a Silicon Graphics Personal iris 4D/20 before I booted the system. Now I don't know if the boot problems were caused by me or it they were present before I received the unit. To make matters worse, no one had booted the system in six years because it had been in storage.

It's a great system.....Right now it also makes a good paperweight.

[arneson]

Re: Computer stupidities

Take a close look at the memory battery.
Look for signs of acid leakage and see if it still has three volts in it.

[byteexp]

Re: Computer stupidities

here's mine...blew up a friends psu...didnt notice that the voltage selector was set to 110v - our standard wall outlet rating is 220v

when i was a kid, i plugged an led direct to the wall outlet...the result as a blinding flashband temporarily blindin me for about 10 seconds.