Dumb computer mistakes.

[Agathon]

Apart from thinking upgrading to Windows 95 was a good idea, I've never managed to do anything really dumb on a computer.

Any stories of extreme stupidity? You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder, or changed his monitor settings so that all he had was a blank screen (I know someone who did this with his new laptop).

Here's one: my friend and I shared an office and a computer back when we first started as philosophy tutors. My friend wasn't computer illiterate but some things were a bit new to him, like email (this was 96).

He wrote an impassioned letter to the student newspaper on some topic which I can't remember. Saving it as a Word document he attempted to attach it to an email. After about 5 minutes he said to me, "this is taking a long time". Well it would - he'd sent his entire copy of Word to them, thus tying up their slow computer for ages. Needless to say they weren't pleased and threatened to publish an account of his incompetence for the whole university to read.

[Hydey]

My son formatted C drive once.

[Whaleboy]

Go to DOS promt

"format C:"

Good way of getting rid of windows bugs!

The most stupid thing I did (intentionally) was try to install windowsXP on my old 486 33Mhz!!!

[JohnT]

I was once working in our corporations database folder for a particular application (in DOS, so this was a while ago) and I, being Mr. Speedy as usual, somehow typed in del *.dbf

[loinburger]

I've never done anything too stupid (i.e. nothing that I couldn't fix myself), but one time my dad managed to change the access settings on his work computer so that nobody could log onto it, including himself. The IT people weren't so much pissed off as they were dumbfounded -- "Why would you do something like that? Why? You must have thought that you had a good reason, but for the life of us we can't conceive of what it might have been..."

[reds4ever]

I spent an hour DLing drivers, patches etc. trying to intstall a new a soundcard and speakers without realizing the later must be plugged in before the former will produce any effect!

[St Leo]

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

[KrazyHorse]

You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder

Do a search on CG for "config.sys". The thread will be from about 4 months ago, IIRC.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Frogger

You know, like the guy who trashed his system folder

Do a search on CG for "config.sys". The thread will be from about 4 months ago, IIRC.

The Godel-man returns, as if from the dead. LTNS.

[Agathon]

Actually here's a good comedy sketch. I really like the 12 o'clock flasher thing.

http://asp.cis.pitt.edu/mov/internethelpdesk.mov

[Asher]

One of my classmates dropped his iBook. The plastic broke pretty damn quickly, and they charged him $1000 to repair it.

That's pretty dumb.

[Asher]

On my school CS account, I was in BASH but needed to do a typescript (and hence needed to ditch the ANSI colored prompt), so I typed EXIT.

So my screen was replaced with a little:

zone44a>

prompt (zone44a is the computer). For whatever reason, the default prompt doesn't show your current directory (*nix usability at its finest).

I forgot that when you exit bash, it sends you back to your home directory.

So I need to delete a bunch of subdirectories, when I thought I was in some small one way deep inside my home.

So naturally, I type:

rm -rf *

Then it takes a while for the prompt to come back. "That's weird," I think to myself, "It must be lagging..."

Then it comes back.

My stomach sinks, I type:

zone44a> pwd
/home/ug/milfordd

And I had just toasted my entire directory for my CompSci account at school (major ****up).

Fortunately my school backs up everything nightly, and keeps each night's data for 3 months. So I went up to the office and got them to restore my directory to the previous night...

[monolith94]

Partitioning my drive was a pretty dumb mistake...

[Agathon]

Nice site St Leo. I really liked this clown.

A friend just got his new Aptiva/Win98 system and bought a bunch of software to go along with it. He installed everything, then complained that when he started his computer up, the screen was so cluttered he was having a hard time finding his desktop. I talked him through the process of making his desktop a more simple place by turning off fancy wallpaper, toolbars, and so on. He rebooted and said it was just as bad as it ever was. Sighing, I took a quick trip over to look at it.

Somewhat to my amazement, I discovered that every time the computer booted up, a half dozen or so program groups opened up on the desktop, and all sorts of programs were spilling their menu contents onto the screen. After some poking around, I discovered that he had installed everything -- everything -- into his StartUp folder.

I asked him why he installed all his programs in there. He said, "Well, I wanted to be sure they'd start up when I needed them, so...."

[Imran Siddiqui]

Why, what happened?