Hate it when i make dumb computer mistakes..

[mattl]

I've got an older laptop I use from time to time.  Take it with me when traveling and use it occasionally around the house - not my main computer by any means.  It's a dual boot  setup, Windows 10 and Linux Mint, I mostly use Mint, Windows is needed to watch TV from home via my Slingbox.  Anyway was in Chicago with it for a few weeks and it was acting up.  File explorer crashed the system and closing it wiped out all my icons, and the system would not shut down,

 

Had lots of problems with Windows, what else is new..., decided to try and salvage things when I got home.  Tried an in place repair with my Win 10 disk, no go.  Tried repair booting from Win 10 disk, nothing again.  Nothing valuable on the system so I reinstalled Windows 10, this wiped out my grub boot for choosing which operating system, but again no great loss.  Fresh Win 10 up and running, SAME ISSUES!  Cannot shut down the system, file manager does not work and so on.  Really frustrated as it's been a solid unit for years.  Was looking at it earlier and notice along with the C: drive and E: DVD drive I had a USB drive showing.  That puzzled me.

 

Then I remembered--- I had an SD micro card that was acting up in my phone, a 64G Samsung class 10 card I had reformatted it a few times and had issues.  I had put it in my computer to try again and simply forgot it was in the SD slot.  Pulled it and everything was operating as it should.   BAH.  So now I have to reinstall a few apps and refresh my Linux OS but I've wasted many many hours on this due to the simple mistake of not pulling an SD Micro card- that should not have impacted the system as it did - it did not bother the Mint OS only widows...

 

[kb0nes]

Well I have never don't anything dumb with a computer (Yea right!). At least you didn't smoke a hard drive and lose a ton of data...

Hopefully you aren't blaming Windows for this. Win 10 has been the most amazing Windows experience I have had yet (well at least after the Anniversary update...). It is almost up to Mac standards now, although it still looks like crap.

 

[DADoES]

 
Worst things I've done:

1)  Accidentally deleted ALL the user e-mail accounts from the server account manager when working at the ISP years ago.  Fortunately the mailbox data was intact, and I had a couple-days-fresh backup of the account structure (registry data).

2)  Got a new expen$ive VGA monitor (this was 20+ years ago) and video card.  Perusing the documentation for both, noticed that the DIP switches on the card seemingly weren't set properly, so changed them accordingly and burned out the monitor.  Got a warranty replacement from the local dealer (who was the future owner of and boss at the ISP) even though he was aware what had happened.

 

[mattl]

Phil, I sort of am blaming Windows.  It should not have responded the way it did, or gave me a warning message of some sorts.  i spent many hours on this mess.  I also blame Samsung for their crappy SD micro cards.  Doing some research I found it was not an uncommon issue with their stuff.  I am going to buy a Sandisk SD to replace it, but found I really don't need it right away, my phone has 32 g memory and I'm only using a portion of it even taking 12m pictures.

 

[panthera]

I'd list the worst mistakes I've made using computer

But this site only has a few Terabytes of data available for this particular forum. Suffice it to say, we've all been there, done that and regretted it.

Learned from it?

Yeah, well oh, look at the pretty unicorn over there.

 

I grew up in the Unix world. On my own systems it's been PC-Geos/OS/2/Linux. I like Mint, too.

 

Due to the inflexibility of my apple customers in the '90s, I had to keep the latest apple and attendant software in my office. I think that was a big part of my resistance to the siren call of the Cult of Steve - having a Macfanboi tell you your OS/2 system s not a 'creative' computer when you'd just pulled his chestnuts out of the fire after the worm in his rotten apple had just kernel-panicked his entire presentation into confetti did not sit well.