Tell Us Your PC/Technology Confessions

[Zedeck]

This was obviously inspired by the similarly titled thread for gaming, but 95% of the responses to that thread aren't confessions, but rather just lists of facts, so I'll first say this here before I get started.

Do not respond just listing random facts half related to you and PCs. Make it something related to your lack of knowledge at the time versus your knowledge now, i.e., an embarrassment you're confessing. I don't want to hear from anyone how "they don't have any" either (either you're too scared to say them, want to show off, and/or if you really and truly don't, don't even say anything because it's a waste of a response), so if any of the Moderators would be so kind as to try and help reduce the off topic clutter by removing posts that don't comply with this (of course commenting on others' posts even if you have none is fine though), I'd really appreciate it. I just want to hear about some embarrassments and don't want the thread to turn into a pointless list like the other did.

That being said, let's get to it! What were your biggest embarrassments? Many of us got where we are not by boring long and perfect study, but by messing things up, making huge embarrassments for ourselves, and/or even by destroying hardware! Let's hear of those motherboards frying yet again!

Here's a few of mine.

1. I once thought that, while broadband was faster than dial-up in actual throughput and speed, and especially for downloading and gaming and such, that the latter was only negligibly slower for normal and typical web browsing. Now that I think about it, back then, that was perhaps true to a small degree for all but the heaviest sites at the time, but my overrating misunderstanding came from the fact that many dial up ISPs (referring to Net Zero Hi-Speed in my example) shaved the quality off of photos for faster downloading, and I also once read about how browsers store the files in a cache for faster retrieving but thought I had read that was what Net Zero did to make it a little faster.

2. Before I had ever actually learned about the parts of a PC in depth, when I first took a look inside one, I, for whatever reasons, assumed the PSU was the hard disk (don't ask why). Later, when I took an old Coppermine Celeron PC apart, my buddy took a small thing I had set out and picked it up, and said something about how it was heavy, and he asked me what it was, and when I shrugged it off and said I didn't know, he said maybe it was a hard drive, and when I said it wasn't, he read the label saying it was a "WD Caviar Enhanced IDE Hard Drive".

3. This isn't really something I look back on as an embarrassment like I do the first two (well, first really, the second isn't that embarrassing), but I once fried a motherboard and/or PSU. It was a AT (not ATX), baby AT form factor, to be specific, and I plugged the two power connectors in the opposite spots of where they should, and it fried it. There's an old saying something along the lines of "Yellow and Yellow and you're an okay fellow, but Red and Red and you're Dead", and it refers to the two wires in the middle. You can match them up to either have the two Yellow in the middle, or the two Red in the middle, and I did it wrong the second time around (I correctly disassembled it and reassembled it the first time). Maybe another embarrassment would be admitting I would still like that motherboard back?

I'll add to this as I think of more, but those two come to mind.

What about the rest of you?

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"Without forgiveness, life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation."
"Judge people not of their mistakes, but on how they handle those mistakes."

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[ChrisRay]

I used to think broadband users made people on dial up connections lag in MMORPGs

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[makotech222]

i once thought the power supply was the power strip, so when my new graphics card was taking up too much power, i thought i could move the plug to a different power strip and get more power. lolol long time ago

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There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.

[|-xA-|]

I still get confused about the front usb/audio/led wires for some motherboards...then again almost no one my age even knows what a hard drive looks like

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[Hard core Rikki]

I just want to hear about some embarrassments

Right this instant, sir.


When I was very young (back when windows 3.11 was around), I performed system maintainance operations out of interest that I did not fully know about other than their known benefit. Once I performed a dblspace disk compression, which took a very long time to finish on a 486dx, and afterwards noticed an additonal drive in the file manager, which i wiped.

Needless to specify windows needed a reinstall, and the single occurence had me grow very early interested in learning about the specifics of functioning of hardware and software to a sin, pushing games aside as the main computing use.

The moral: random commands shoudnt be performed by those without the background, and knowing better is always the answer.

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Originally Posted by jonc2006

This dimension cannot survive without me, but fear not for i have come back with vengeance and no fool shall escape my wrath.

[runawayprisoner]

I first got a GeForce 2 card when I was 9... and I thought that it was inferior to a Voodoo 3. Now that I try to remember it, I think I was asking my dad to get it because a game called Metal Fatigue didn't run so well on a VIA integrated GPU...

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[Smooth Criminal]

Well here are they

1.I still get confused on which side of the cable to put in(in IDE cables i always get the direction wrong the first time :P)

2.I always got confused in a pci and an agp slot until sometime back

__________________

and if I don't care , do I still get to suck your scrotum? please say yes xp

^^posted bysonic

[X20A_Strike]

1. Back when i was using norton commander and a 5.86 in dos, i wanted to decompress some games to play and i accidentally deleted all of them.
2. When i first had '98 i didn't uninstall a single program/game, i would delete them.
3. I wanted to improve my PC performance for Gothic and i went in bios and began changing stuff randomly there, PC wouldn't start i thought i broken it.

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[Phil]

when I was 8 I thought that you could put a virus on a computer by configuring the bios to never turn the power on. Oh the memories!

__________________

There are only 10 types of people in the world who understand binary, the ones that do and the ones that don't.

[Lenox]

my first computer was a macintosh centris 650 don't remember de year but i had my playstation and i wanted to play my psx cd's on the mac but i thinked that y could re-burn the cd! y when y placed one in it starde doing strange noises and i was so scared that my megaman X4 cd would be ruined -.-

[StriderVM]

Hmm... Let me think for a bit.

- Before I was terribly confused on why a GeForce 4MX wasn't that much faster than the GeForce 2MX..... And why wasn't there a GeForce 3MX.....

- That combining a Voodoo 3 (PCI) with a GeForce 4MX (AGP) was the fastest available video hardware in 2002. =)

- That AMD was so poor it cannot distribute Athlon's in the Philippines. Guess what Intel's just cheating, before the Athlon came about in our country, K6 processors were everywhere because they were cheaper than Intel processors.

- And I also believed the rumors that Athlon's put out so much heat that it can burn and kill motherboards. (Turns out just some idiots putting K6 heatsinks into Athlon mobos.)

- The Ghz myth. I just realized it's false when I noticed my friend's Pentium 3 1Ghz system was going my faster than the P4 1.6Ghz systems I'm maintaining on the computer shop I was working on.

__________________
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[Lex_Light]

Before I had this computer, I had another computer, an IBM one.
I managed to get to Windows 3.1 in that computer.

__________________
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1,81 GHz), 1,25 GB of RAM, nVidia GeForce MX/MX 400. (Yes, it's an old computer).
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18 November 2009, at 19:59 : Nevar forget.

Originally Posted by sergitox29

check if your mother is compatible with 45nm processors

[Squall-Leonhart]

I've used Dos, windows 3.1, 95b, 95c, 98FE, 98SE, Windows ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Xenix, OS8, OSX.

My hardware has ranged from a 30mhz 386, 233mhz 686, jumped from that to a duron 800, which i burnt out, which was then replaced by a 950, which was then replaced by a 1100. i recently killed an athlon 2000, and now im on an i7

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[Lex_Light]

I didn't killed my Athlon XP 2200+.
6 years (or it was 7?) of one of the best proccesors ever.

Spoiler:

I want a dual core proccesor, and a better graphics card...

__________________
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1,81 GHz), 1,25 GB of RAM, nVidia GeForce MX/MX 400. (Yes, it's an old computer).
Sorry for my english, I'm Spanish.
Please, read the rules of Emuforums before posting. Thanks.
Page to download ROMs and ISOs for free.
18 November 2009, at 19:59 : Nevar forget.

Originally Posted by sergitox29

check if your mother is compatible with 45nm processors

[gamefreak94]

- I didn't know the difference between FSB and CPU clock speed.

- I thought an ATI HD2400 Pro was about as strong as a GeForce 8500GT.

__________________

[Zedeck]

Originally Posted by StriderVM

- Before I was terribly confused on why a GeForce 4MX wasn't that much faster than the GeForce 2MX..... And why wasn't there a GeForce 3MX.....

It depends on what GeForce 4 MX you're talking about. If I remember right, the MX420 is in GeForce 2 performance land, the MX440 is pretty much faster than any GeForce 2 there is, including the Ultra, and the MX460 was stronger still, but weaker than the Radeon 8500 and Ti4200, both of which were just a tad bit more expensive, but offered DirectX 8 and alot more performance. Still, the whole GeForce 4 MX series should had been done differently and had been called the GeForce 2 MX 2, since that's all it was. It was a GeForce 2 chip. Technically, the same could be argued about the GeForce 4 over the GeForce 3 too, just not to the same degree.

Originally Posted by StriderVM

- The Ghz myth. I just realized it's false when I noticed my friend's Pentium 3 1Ghz system was going my faster than the P4 1.6Ghz systems I'm maintaining on the computer shop I was working on.

Yeah, the original 800MHz Pentium III my Dimension 4100 had seemed alot snappier than the "holy crap 1493MHz!" (1.5GHz) Pentium 4 in my parent's Dimension 4300 of the time, although it was still technically faster by the numbers, even if not by alot. Then again, the earlier Pentium 4s were notorious for being slow A) if they were paired with SDRAM, and B) if they were Williamettes, and that one qualified for both (as did the vast majority of the hugely popular 1.5GHz variant used in many OEMs, it's pretty much the model that made the Pentium 4 popular and killed the Pentium III since the huge price of RDRAM was no longer an issue).

__________________

"Without forgiveness, life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation."
"Judge people not of their mistakes, but on how they handle those mistakes."

Core 2 Duo E8600 @4.0GHz - ASUS Maximus Formula (Rampage Formula BIOS 0701) - 8GB (4x 2GB) Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800
MSI nVidia GeForce 8800GT 512MB - 4x Western Digital Caviar 6400AAKS (2,560GB total) - PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610
IBM P275 21" CRT (1600x1200) - Logitech Z-2300 2.1 Sound System - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

[KrossX]

When I was a wee-little human worm (6 years old or so), and got the first computer on the house (386)... The tech guy said there was a key that could destroy the computer! Then my sisters thought it was the ESC key. Of course, out of mere curiosity, I pushed that key countless of times... but there was never a "Booom". T_T

Months laters, the same Tech guy came to the house to put some games for us. With some fancy things going on the screen he said that he was "creating" the games. For long I thought he was a "game creator" but later learned he was just copying and extracting. =_=" ( those games disappeared misteriously when certain someone tried to learn how they were created... >_< )

This is not about computer itself, but kinda related...
When I was 8 or so, I was with a friend in school talking about the "HIMEM" (Config.sys) and a teacher overheard the conversation.... we were taken to the school director to be scolded and lectured. Years passed until I understood why... >_<

__________________

[Lex_Light]

I got infected by one of these worms which shuts up your computer after 60 seconds (and pops up a message saying that).
My first antivirus was "Panda Antivirus" (One of the worst antivirus ever). xD

__________________
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1,81 GHz), 1,25 GB of RAM, nVidia GeForce MX/MX 400. (Yes, it's an old computer).
Sorry for my english, I'm Spanish.
Please, read the rules of Emuforums before posting. Thanks.
Page to download ROMs and ISOs for free.
18 November 2009, at 19:59 : Nevar forget.

Originally Posted by sergitox29

check if your mother is compatible with 45nm processors

[jonc2006]

i kept getting this "no signal" message on one of my first builds when i tried starting it up and i thought it was a problem with the monitor, so i went out and bought another one for like $200 and after seeing the same message show up with the new one, i just opened my system up and found that i had not pushed my video card in all the way.

unfortunately since i opened the box to the new monitor and threw away the packaging i was not able to get my damn money back.

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[nanaya]

I'm total noobs on hardware department before building my first pc myself.
I got myself tricked on buying a celeron when I was on high school. Single mindedly demanding "Pentium 4" build to a technician, ignoring every other parts and totally fell for the dxdiag screen where he alter the clock frequency, what I think 2.8Hz P4 was actually 1.4GHz celeron on cpu-z, and only realized it when i admitted to college X(