Techno-Stupidity

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Well, it’s official – I’m a moron.

I recently used (for the first time) my dvd burner. I had to format the disc, and once I did, my computer decided to reboot for no reason. As it turns out, there was a problem with Sonic Solution’s DLA file, which resulted in rebooting every time the dvd drive started up. Fortunately, I found a DLA patch which solved the problem.

At the same time as the reboot problem, I found I had no sound, which I figured was part of the same problem. Well, the patch didn’t fix it, nor could I find anything helpful on the web. After a couple of hours of futility, I resorted to that most useless of features – Microsoft’s troubleshooter.

It asked a few questions, to which I rolled my eyes and said “no, that didn’t help”. Then I got to a question which asked me to check the volume control on my speakers. Scoffing, I did that anyway, only to find – yes – that the knob was turned fully counter-clockwise. Sheepishly, I turned it a bit to the right, and – voila! – sound.

Now, I’m not sure if it was me or my wife who turned the sound off, but I just had to laugh (and cry) at my stupidity. I'm reminded of a tech support story I read a long time ago:

Customer: My screen just went blank
Tech support: Did you check your power cable connections?
Customer: I tried, but it’s too dark.
Tech support: Well, turn the lights on.
Customer: I would, but I can’t because of the power outage in our neighborhood.



So, anyone else have a head-slapping moment they care to admit to?

 

The sound thing happened to me years ago. I installed the sound drivers after a fresh Windows reinstall, spent a few minutes trying to figure out why there was no sound, and then noticed the speakers weren't even turned on

I've had other memorable moments, but none because of my stupidity. The latest was a year ago, when I put up the system I'm using. Just as I was trying to get the heat sink stuck to the CPU, I realised this was impossible to do - one of the motherboard capacitors was not-so-cleverly in the way. Took me a LONG time to get the heat sink in without blowing the capacitor away, and I was so certain I'd killed my CPU (I was wrong, thankfully)

 

I spent six hours over several diferent days trying to get my wirleless card to work in my laptop, and I simply could not get the thing to work. It said it was installed and working correctly, but I could not get on-line with it. Come to find out, it was my wireless router was not working, and I had no wireless at my house.

 

Same thing with the sound, but this wasn't the because it was off; I use headphones (to not disturb others watching tv), so I plug in, but there were no sound, checked connection, was ok; checked sound properties, was ok; connected monitor speakers to try, was ok, they worked fine; so obiously were my headphones; changed them, connected, no sound...
A third headphone set, no sound; so then I tried in the Zen player, they worked there... Went back to connect them to th PC, didn't work.
Enough I said. The computer has 2 front jacks, one pink and one green, the pink is for microphone, and the other is for the headphones.
Well, after about an hour of trying this and that, I realised that I was connecting them to the pink one...

 

I recently bought a harddrive enclosure.
After struggling to get the damn thing to work (i hadnt set the jumpers right) i finally figured it out. thing was, during the process i had unscrewed the HDD from the enclosure... and forgotten to unplug the damn thing. Sure enough, there i was with a screwdriver and once the screw touched the HDD circutry, ZAP! power arched and my year old 80gb HDD started on fire.... Now that was a sad moment indeed...

 

I've done some pretty stupid things over the years. Right after I got my laptop, I went on a "Windows Cleaning" spree. A few hours later, my laptop decided to just turn off. Not knowing what happened, I tried pressing the power button to turn it back on. It got me past the POST screen, and then shut off again. I pressed it again, but this time nothing happened...but I noticed that a red LED on the front was lit. So I checked my power connection. I unplugged it from the back of the laptop, and plugged it back in. Still no luck. So I swapped out the battery with my spare. This time I got Windows to boot...but within a few minutes or so, it shut down again.
I followed the cord from the back of the laptop and found that the cord that plugs in to the power brick had been pulled loose. During my cleaning spree, I had disabled advanced power management, and power alerts...

Yeah...I felt pretty dumb.