Computer Building Blunders

This thread is for all the computer builders out there, for all those who refuse to bow down to the Man (aka-Dell, Gateway, HP, Acer, etc)-and make a few mistakes along the way.

Okay, so I was a senior in high school, roughly a year ago, and I decided that I'm gonna fight the Man-build my own fancy new computer computer, my way. So I ordered my parts from Newegg, they arrive in a timely fashion-in good working order as well. I put all together-took my all day-and after a few false starts, everything roared to life. Things were fine-for about a year.

Turned out that 1 GB is not enough to run BioShock smoothly-all the time. Next, my case was a noisy one-not good, if you have a roommate. And the coup de grace, my motherboard was a MSI-piece-of-shit whose SATA ports just barely were attached to the board.

Prior, I ordered another gigabyte and a quieter case-the mother board was an incidental expense. So, I went to a small computer store-staff there barely spoke English, all seemed to hail from various regions of Asia, and I bought a better motherboard-came with a higher price tag. That's when I realized-I spent more than I had, and didn't have enough in my Savings to pay back the overdraft loan!

I was terrified, it took a lot to tell my dad when he came to drop off things a couple days after that. He was clearly disappointed with me, but appreciated my honesty, and promised to help remedy the situation. It was a learning experience; hit home that I need to be much more careful.

That wasn't the end-in the process of transplanting my hardware from the old case to the new one, I damaged one of the RAM chips-this means I'm back to 1GB. I was furious at my carelessness, but took comfort that the particular RAM stick I needed to replace was very cheap now-just a little above $41.00 To make matters worse, I spent 8 hours just doing this-gah, my early leave from college wasted! Should've been studying-might still have that extra gig.

The last blunder of note is that the biggest contributor of noise wasn't the fans in the old case, but rather the stock CPU fan. Not a biggy, compared to the others.

I made this thread so fellow computer builders can come together and talk about our royal screw-ups.