I was sorely tempted, whilst looking at another computer forum, to tell someone if he/she is too thick to understand that an ATX motherboard will fit an ATX case, she/he is far to thick to build a new PC and not bugger it up.
Sadly they do exist, they walk among us. I have been there, its best to just bite your tongue, shrug your shoulders and walk away. On the other side of that if they aren't sure there is no harm in asking - people have to start somewhere in the hobby how else will they learn ?
Everybody has to start somewhere. You guys saved me from a deathly silent PC some years ago now. Looking back I feel dumb that I even needed to ask the question.
an uninformed person isnt thick they are only thick if they do not understand after you explain it in a way they understand Remember the only easy questions are those you know the answers to
Looking back on my first foray(s) into PC building I too did not understand so much. To even think of wanting to call someone thick because of what you consider to be a stupid question is a disgraceful attitude but have come across this sort of thing before particularly on another forum run by the magazine PC Advisor with its single and dictatorial moderator. Even now I can read threads from folk and have not got a clue what they are talking about and I still ask what can be considered stupid questions but have always been answered very politely here. So rather than make judgements how about offering simple and friendly advice?
Heh. I've had plenty of dumb moments. 1) Remember the 8800 GTX? I had two many years ago. Turns out in those days you had to manually enable SLI, with no friendly message telling you to do so. I spent most of my gaming time only using one... 2) Only two nights ago did I realise I had to enable 'enhanced mode' on my 4K TV's HDMI inputs to enable 4K HDR @60FPS. I've had it two years. I played the entire of Mass Effect Andromeda at 30FPS because I thought it was a hardware thing that couldn't be fixed. And DON'T tell me there's no difference between 30 FPS and 60FPS - the difference is night and day... 3) Loads of other stuff that I should've known better about. ....and I will go on to make stupid mistakes in the future.
Yup, asking questions is the sign of intelligence, not stupidity. You want stupid? How about me frying a £200 supermicro board because I didn't check the positioning of the mounting posts ... then doing exactly the same on the board I bought to replace it because I was rushing. That was an expensive month.
We've all done something stupid. Crushing the core on a Athlon Thunderbird CPU was my trick when fitting a CPU cooler, only did it once - how I managed to get eBuyer to accept a return I don't know, but they did, and sent a replacement.
I think my biggest 'whoops' was with a Prometeia Mach 1. My uncle was getting rid because it no longer powered on correctly, and being an inquisitive little sod he let me run off with it. I made it work again, the 12v power board was shagged - Replaced it with a 12v power source from a 10/100 24port D-Link, and bam. Okay, it didn't power on/off with the PC anymore, but it powered on. Success, right? Until dumbdumb here forgot to turn it off, and had used inadequate condensation protection. It was only an Athlon XP, but ah well. Magic smoke gone!
