Stupid little things...

[Dream Aura Knight]

When putting a new computer together, how often do you find yourself doing stupid little things?

What I mean is, you find yourself coming across an error of your own accord.

For instance: I built a computer recently and the onboard lan wasn't working so I went out and bought an ethernet card to remedy the problem. About a few months later, I ended up going through the BIOS for my motherboard only to realize I never enabled the onboard lan to begin with.

Then recently, I had gotten an ATI video card for my mother board with nVidia technology with Vista installed. An indicator of why the above was a bad idea stems with ATI, nVidia and Vista. So I get an nVidia card that has SLI capabilities and in turn, get a new motherboard with SLI enabled and donated my old motherboard to my dad.

Upon installing all the new goodies for my motherboard, I left the motherboard CD inside the CD Drive and it was booting a RAID utility tool from the CD by default regardless of what I tell my computer to boot first. So I go up and down the BIOS seeing if I enabled RAID some how or even incorrectly installed my Hard Drives. This stupid RAID utility was preventing Vista from booting so after about 5 hours of going through the net looking for answers that all resulted in reformatting, I decided to do just that. While I was grabbing the Vista CD, I realized that the motherboard CD was still in the CD Drive and I was like.. "... #*(^%@!!"

Turns out that as soon as I pulled the CD out, everything was fine.

It's stupid things like the above that makes me wanna shoot myself sometimes.

[focuz]

In fact I did a stupid today. I was changing a simple fan for a compaq rack server. I had to unplug the fiber optic cables as they were to short for the server to slide all the way out. Well me never messing with fiber before switched the two cables and it took me about 20 min to figure out why the server wasn't able to connect to the internet. OPPPS.

[Bryce W]

Once went to fix a clients computer that had issues with its CDROM. It turns out that the computers onboard IDE plugs were physically damaged. I told them that its either a new motherboard (more expensive) or I can pop a PCI IDE Controller in there for cheap. They took the cheap PCI IDE Controller option, so I opened up the case, swapped the existing CDRom IDE plugs into the PCI IDE controller and booted the system.

I went to install the drivers for the controller, put the CD in the CDRom and for some reason the CD wouldn't work. I tested the driver CD in my own laptop and it worked fine, checked for dust and scratches and cleaned it a little bit, put it back into the clients PC and it still wouldn't read.

Then it hit me, the CDRoms arent going to work unless the IDE Controller that is controlling them has drivers... and the drivers are on a CD.... doh!

[Dream Aura Knight]

Good times guys, Good times.

4 GB of RAM on a 32-bit Vista with virtual memory heaps from the Video Card counting towards the RAM total. Out of range memory pointers? Yay!

[gunslinger]

I've done too many stupid things to nail it down to just one. Nuked a few hundred gigs of data by mistake once before my morning coffee. Try that and then see how the rest of your day goes.

[Bryce W]

I once had a computer I was working on for some small software issue (cant remember what exactly) and after I changed a few things the computer wouldn't start up, wouldst even reach POST. I opened up the case, checked that the RAM, CPU, Video card and other cables were seated properly and still had no luck.

At this point I was freaking out, how could I explain that their computer no longer boots after I touched it trying to fix a small software issue?

Turns out when I hit the reset button earlier it became stuck in an IN position. As soon as I hit the power button, it'd boot for a half second, restart and repeat.

I popped out the stuck button with a paper clip and everything was fine again.... There were a few moments there where I was sweating bullets though.