Idiot

Got a neighbour's laptop as he wanted Windows reinstalling. There was no recovery partition, no floppy drive, no CD-ROM drive. To top it all off, it had a 1.8" hard drive which didn't fit in ANY of my existing hardware, so I had to get an adapter off eBay... but I digress.

Process involved putting the laptop HD into my desktop, and installing MS-DOS. Then copy the I386 folder from the XP CD onto the laptop HD and finally, boot the laptop and install XP.

It all went well in the end except I'm going to appear on the next episode of Britains Dumbest PC Repair People.

I put the lappy HD into my desktop and powered up. Immediately I noticed I hadn't plugged the power supply back into the CD-ROM drive. No problem I thought, its not got to the POST screen yet, so I'll just stick it in...

Anyway... there's this almighty crack, and a lot of sparks about an inch from my hand, then silence. PC had shut down and wouldn't switch on.

Disconnected it from the mains and waited for 5 mins til my hair stopped smoldering, then thankfully it started up, and by some miracle it all still works. Only with the gift of hindsight do I realise that plugging a molex connector in with the power on is a proper stupid thing to do.

Moral of the story: don't be a spanner. switch it off first!

Indeed :)

Been there, done that.
One memorable moment in particular was when I replaced an internal fuse on an old CB radio unit. Nothing exciting there except, like you, I forgot to power off. I got quite a sharp buzz off the thing

1 .. 9 .. 1 .. 9 .. I still copy(!)

First rule of driving on the roads in Britain as I've see many a ar*e hole cut me up and almost wear my car as a mascot.


Yes that does happen when you try and plug something in thats not designed to be "hot swappable".

Moral of the story: Lick your fingers before putting them into a plug socket to make sure it's turned off.

LOL

I think my most embarrasing moment was when i was fixing an old XT/AT years ago (the ones with the mains power switch @front) I tried everything, took the PSU apart to check the fuse ,tried hotwiring the switch with a bit of wire, everything i could think of including the plug's internal fuse and tried another cable. Then the guy i was fixing it for then kindly told me that the 4-gang extention lead (the pc was plugged into) was itself unplugged & that the monitor (that was happily on) was plugged in to wall!

In my embarrassed flapping about afterwards, i plugged it in, made a joke about it and then went to remove the wrap-around bare "hotwire" promptly frying myself in the process. :)

Moral of that, check the powersource OF the powersource before the "problem" itself & respect 240 volts :P

Several years ago I had a 1970s bass amp head running two separate bass bins. I went to pull the patch leads out of the back of the cab, not realising it was still on. My entire arm tensed up and I couldn't leave go of it for a good 5 or 6 seconds (I'm told - it felt like about 20 minutes).

Yep, me and electricity have never really got along.

only had one memorable pc oopsie (save for loss of blood due to sharp edges on cases)

on pc motherboard design our 'shop' used had a fixing screw under where the cpu would be (486 or pentium i forget) it jarred in transit thanks to our split the atom courier service

pc turns on screw is rattling around under cpu ... pop

Best one that I have seen so far was when a mate thought he would have a go at building his own PC without any help from me (I did offer). Then asked me to have a look to see why it wasn't working.

I said (trying not to sound sarcastic) " Well all the wires are in correctly, all peripherals installed correctly as well .... hmmm ( scratches chin thoughtfully) Ah! here's the problem a k*ob-head has screwed the motherboard directly to the chassis and not use the spacing mounts. Looks like you need a new mother-board with all the trimmings."

Let's say I installed his replacement mother-board :).

Moral of that: Read the manuals and goto college to get a NVQ Level 3 in how to use a screw driver.

@D4NM4N: I finally found away so BlitzMax will work correctly on a 64bit version of Ubuntu

A few years ago I unplugged my guitar amp, unscrewed the back, and reached inside.
And promptly got thrown across the room.
Coz guitar amp transformers carry their charge for a long... time.

Sounds like a man who switched the electric off in his house,
because he was about to drill a hole near some live cables,and
forgot about it.He wen't back later found he's drill not working,so he took he's drill to bits.

Thats Brains.:)

A few months ago, we had a ungodly storm (80+ MPH winds w/ hail thunder and everything) and something happened to the power polls... moments later we hear a series of explosions (transformers) and a large power serge hit the house. All the fuses in the fuse box blew up, so nothing in the house got zapped. But the neighbors weren't as lucky(they have a older electric box, no fuses) After the boom we went over to their house to see their TV, radio, and other electronics sparking! Needless to say, both of their computers were fried.

I remember back in 1999-2000 when I had a Pentium Machine. Not sure which one it was but like an idiot I went and switched the little voltage switch on the PSU while the PC was on and the whole thing got fried. Smoke everywhere... :)

I remember it took me 9 months to save for a new PC because i didn't have a clue about PC's them days after coming from the Amiga 1200. That's when I got my Escom PC from Woodgreeen. 2 months later they went bankrupt. :)

I remember having a Commodore 286 PC jeez those were the days.

I remember when I did work experience for SEEBOARD (now EDF energy) I was told by an electrician never to touch the inside of a microwave because some components hold 10,000 volts and can keep the change for weeks. Rest assured ive never tested this theory although I have been shocked by a power switch inside a pc I was fixing.

Hotplugging a hard drive also happened to me a few years ago, I was repairing 4 computers at a time, all side by side and lost track of which were powered on/off and unplugged a hard drive on one that was still powered on. No damages done, scared the crap out of me.

The only sparks I ever managed to get out of my PC was when I mis-wired the front header USB port in my old computer. (Who decided to implement multiple wiring 'standards', I'll ask you?!)

Everything was OK until I plugged in a mouse to test it, which caused sparks to shoot across the motherboard near the USB header, and a smell of burning plastic.

Luckily everything else was still working (PC, motherboard, even the mouse)

I ended up just leaving the front USB ports disconnected altogether.

Hmm, always been too respectful of electricity, no war stories for me. I was a kid once and decided that the lights for the toy train track were not bright enough and plugged the two wires into the power points to see how much brighter it would go.

Grats to my parents who were thoughtful enough to install a circuit breaker in the house. When I flipped the switch, the little bulb exploded and that was it. I did have it sitting in a waste paper bin basketty thing so I suppose any unluckier and I could have started a fire, but yeh.

Not electricity related, but the dumbest thing I've ever done (again, a kid about 4-5 years) was go out to the vegie patch early in the morning when all the bees were buzzing about. They all left me alone, but I was able to grab one and curled my fingers around it. After uncurling, I could see the bee looked a bit out of it, much less energetic than before and there was this strange black thing sticking out of my thumb. I pulled it out; there was no puncture, no pain - must have a thick skinned thumb. Another lucky escape...

Blood and computer related. The first computer I built I could not get working. Spent a lot of time trying to figure out which part was causing the trouble, so pulled everything out and put everything in one piece at a time until the computer stopped turning on again. During the process, I cut my thumb (maybe not that thick skinned after all) on the soundcard (damn Creative) and bled all over the motherboard before I realised it... Cleaned everything up, waited for it to dry... eventually I had everything plugged back in to their original slots and the computer ran fine. All it required was some blood, it seems...

Conversely, I have resued the same tower case for my second and third computers. Second computer did not require blood to start, but it did bite me hard (old network card with nasty edges) while I was unplugging everything in preparation for the move to computer mk 3... I guess computer mk ii is bad breaker upperer.

*yawn*

Ouch, sounds painful :/

Only stupid thing i've done is try to fix the office computer in work when it broke. Someone spilled coffee on the keyboard, and it switched off. So we tried another keyboard, and it was broken (tried it on another pc)

So i plugs the coffee split one on, whilst assuring people it's perfectly ok to do so... What a fool. For some reason a puff of smoke came out the back and it refused to switch on at all... :oS It is the computer that processes the orders too. opps!

LOL! hahaha,

I have a similar story.

I was at a mates house the other night, their PC wouldnt turn on. I checked the fusebox, fine.

so i switched the cables.

Upon pluggin the cable in, BANG! Nearly blew my hand off!

turns out the PSU switch had been popped to 115. it was a miracle it wasnt already broken!

Anyway, went to sell the scap bits of the pc to Computer Exchange when the guy behind the counter decided to tell my customer, "he should have checked the switch first you know- this is his fault..."

Grrrr.

Luckily she knew it wasn't mine. Besides, I saved 3 weeks of her work off the hard drive.

checking the psu for 110/240 switch the first thing you do?
ffs i dont know WHY we have dual psu's in the first place
yes you could say that it saves em the hastle of having one container going to the wrong continent by having the wrong psu in it
but the average bloke isnt going to register the switch on the back letalone know if its right or not

mind you this shop bought pc cased me a bit of a head scratch resulting in me returning it for a swap
flicked the back of the pc on nothing happend
tried another psu lead
ziltch
tried a few more options and gave up getting a taxi back to sainsburys (yes the supermarket) iir i was worse for wears from the night before so didnt register till i unboxed the replacement that the big set of circles i mistook for decoration actually had the on button in the middle my thumb hit it and it clicked and kept on clicking each time i pressed it
soh
cost me £15 in taxi money in all due to my hangover or morning pint or two ... moral dont pc build or owt like that under the influence

mind you i found i had 2 serial codes for my dvd playback (one fell out of the first pc box) so im not too fussed

worst thing I ever did...at work im a system admin for an ISP and we get customer computers in for repair. Buddy and I were screwing around and I threating to throw a stapler at him..well he didnt think I would and when I did he ducked and said stapler went through a customers 23 inch laptop lcd screen.

Moral of the story unless you've got an extra $400-500 laying around dont throw heavy objects at your friends. Luckily we had insurance and it covered a "dropped laptop"

You sneaky lier!

AKA "insurance fraud"...

Why? He "dropped" (something on) "the laptop" :)