Joined
·
6,574 Posts
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?
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?
