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Noobish computer mistakes


Robert

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Have you managed to blow up your computer through a stupid mistake?

 

I did it just once and hopefully never again.

 

There was this ancient Kaypro II business computer running CP/M and

with a Z80 processor and a whopping 64k of ram, 2 x 5 1/4" floppies and no hard drive.

 

It worked fine - except that sometimes the floppies would suddenly stop reading, the disks

would just spin endlessly. After about 2 years of this, I decided to see if I could fix it.

 

The cause was quite simple - the plugs where the floppy drives got their power had loose

pins and sometimes the connection would be lost. Ok, so I cleaned and tightened up the

pins, and did a really nice job. Put it all together, turned it on - and some smoke escaped

from a couple of chips. Oh noes! One of the plugs had been plugged back in but out of position

by one pin!

 

Well, most of the chips are ordinary common ones, can't be too hard to fix. And I was

right - only 2 chips were killed. Unfortunately, one of them was the Z80SIO chip which

drives the keyboard. This chip was completely unavailable even back then.

 

Oh well, scrap one Kaypro.

 

Now tell us your embarrasing computer blunders!

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My first computer, I was low on hard drive space (only 10 gig hard drive) so I went looking for things to delete.

Big mistake. Never delete NTUSER.DAT. It is quite important. Also, never click on a strange file with the extension .scr, .exe, or .zlq. Such as "Pam ANDErson NAKED.scr"

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ive had a computer stop reading a hard drive after installing a cd drive. It would boot up to the XP start screen and then all of the user accounts would read "Cannot find Drive"...what a sad month that i couldnt even log onto the computer. Then, one this was fixed, my speakers made a really loud popping sound because the cound card refuised to accept the new drivers for it and killed the speakers...

 

The list goes on for miles...just ask disoblige...he has seen the worst problems over the past decade from me...

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NTUSER.DAT is the "Current User" part of the registry, deleting it will blow away your settings, and windows will make a new, default one. At least it's not a fatal error.

 

Unlike some noob at work, he thought he would do a cleanup of his laptop's C drive, and deleted "ntldr" which is in the root. Unknown to him, that file is required when booting! No surprise to receive a panicky phone call at the helpdesk!

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I have a few.

 

One was an Aim message saying "Check out this photo of me". I knew it was a virus and such, but I clicked it anyways and downloaded and ran it for no reason at all. Next thing I know, I'm sending this virus Link to everyone in my buddy list and I'm trying to say not to open it. Took me a good 2 hours just to clean it out. (Sorry fatal)

 

Another was Installing the wrong video drivers for the family computer. I couldn't get it to run and finally somehow got it to go in safe mode, and with a system restore point, I was able to make it so I didn't install the video drivers in the first place.

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well i beleive it ornot during my first computer repair job which was at one of my class's girl she was reallycute while taking to her i didnt notice that i spilled coke all over her motherboard :devilboy: too bad i had to buy a new motherboard for her

 

 

incident 2: i touched a super hot cpu while taking to my friends got second degreee burns on my palm it was painfull

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