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Stupid things you've done to your computer

ZiprHead

ZiprHead

Loony Running The Asylum
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Don't be a dick.
A couple years ago, I had a problem on my laptop. Whenever I'd open a text box or field, I would get the u character continuously scrolling across the screen. I'd tried a couple times to lift the u key with a flat object with no luck.

So I take the laptop to the basement workbench, pop the keycap off, clean everything off, put it back together, test it, and it's working great.

I take it back upstairs and again I'm getting the u key bounce.

So again I repeat the workbench procedure above and again it's working fine.

Go upstairs again and again get the u key bounce. WTF?

Then I realized I have a wireless keyboard and mouse combo attached but I'm only using the mouse. Sure enough, I had placed something on the keyboard across the room that was pressing on the u key.

AAaarrgh! :picardfacepalm:

Yours?
 
I knocked a 20 oz. Diet Pepsi across my laptop. It stopped working. When I took it to my IT admin it will still dripping. Eventually it aired out and was working again. I've since read that I was lucky it was a *diet* drink because the sugar in a regular drink would have left lasting damage but the diet drink was mostly water so it just had to evaporate for my laptop to return to reasonable performance.
 
I somehow managed to fuck up some settings, so when my computer started up, it wouldn't go to the normal boot screen, and it seemed to be in a loop. Had to get a new hard drive. *shrug*
 
I dismantled my keyboard, washed the top panel (containing the keys) in detergent and dried in with a hair drier. The high heat warped the plastic and most of the keys stopped moving properly. To make matters worse, it was a $200 gaming keyboard.
 
I have had so many computers over the years that I have done many more stupid things than I can remember. Back in the stone age of computing, we used theses things called floppy disks, which were unshielded magnetic media. I had a C64 with an optional 5.25" floppy drive. One day a friend and I were sitting at the computer, talking about something on the screen, and I had a floppy disk in hand, which I used to point to the screen, actually touching the CRT with a corner of the floppy. The static electricity from the CRT screen erased the floppy disk, or at least enough of it to make the data on it inaccessible. Lesson learned, one would think. Years later, I had a stack of 3.5" floppies that I placed on a conveniently located home stereo speaker cabinet that was laying on it's side. The magnet on the massive speaker inside was close enough to the disks that it erased the entire stack of floppies.
 
My toddler once pressed a bunch of random keys and inverted the colors on my screen! It took a google search to find out the obscure combination of keys to undo it.
 
bigfield said:
I dismantled my keyboard, washed the top panel (containing the keys) in detergent and dried in with a hair drier. The high heat warped the plastic and most of the keys stopped moving properly. To make matters worse, it was a $200 gaming keyboard.
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Ouch!
 
DBT said:
Stupid things? I accepted Microsoft's offer of a free windows 10 'upgrade'
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I feel your pain.

Really.

I threw away a netbook I really loved and replaced it with a laptop that is comparatively big and clunky because I didn't know about that thing where you hold down the start button for 10 seconds to get a more comprehensive reboot than usual.
 
That's half my business, trying to get data off of failing hard drives because people didn't bother to back up.
 
Yeah, if it won't spin or move the heads, there's not much you can do.

I've got two 1T drives in an NAS RAID storage unit on my home network for backups on all the computers in the house.
 
ZiprHead said:
Yeah, if it won't spin or move the heads, there's not much you can do.

I've got two 1T drives in an NAS RAID storage unit on my home network for backups on all the computers in the house.
Click to expand...

Not without some serious smelling salts and a heater. :D Or a cleanroom, at least.

PSA: Amazon cloud drive, unlimited storage for $59.99 a year, is a great deal. I've backed up my entire NAS, encrypted, to their servers, with scheduled daily syncs. Worth it IMO, especially if you have a serious data hoarding problem (like I do!).

As for stupid things I've done to computers, the list is long and embarrassing and includes incidents of both physical destruction and data loss. :(
 
My stupidest thing, not done TO a computer, but a computer was in the room:

I bought a second-hand computer, and discovered to my dismay it didn't have a parallel port to hook up my printer. (Pre-USB days.)

So I researched online and found a serial-to-parallel adapter, cost me about forty bucks, almost as much as the PC cost.

While plugging it in, I finally saw the parallel port staring me right in the face.
 
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