My first own PC that I used for gaming had some FX 5200 AGP card - bleh. It let me play games, but not to the level I wanted. Not having learned much about computers yet and how to read into the hardware, I picked up what I thought was a massive upgrade....FX 5500 (you know, larger number means better! Yeah me, got a new GPU!). I installed it, installed the driver for it, load up the leaked Doom 3 demo I had and no performance difference. I tried out some other games, no change and I honestly think some of them ran a little worse than before. Anyway.....live and learn.
I keep the FX 5500 for a little bit and finally decide to upgrade my awesome AGP graphic capable system to something with some proper umph. I found the 7800 GS had just come out so I picked one up. Would have worked great if I actually knew what kind of PSU I had in that computer because all my system did was beep at me when I tried to power it on. I spent about 30 minutes dinking around with the computer, disconnecting and reconnecting all the cables and reseating the GPU....nothing worked. In my great wisdom I finally read upon the box that the 7800 GS says it required 400W to work. I work the PSU out of the case and find that it's 300W - PSU isn't enough to properly power the system. Thankfully just down the road from my work was a PC repair shop. I stopped in there and picked up a 450W PSU, got home, installed it and everything worked!
Here you think I would have finally learned to make sure I read the boxes of computer related stuff before buying so I could make sure I could run whatever it was I bought.....but no, I let one more reading failure get me again a short time later. It was the only game that I pre-ordered on any system and back when buying PC games from GameStop was still an "in thing" to do. I pre-ordered Advent Rising (which I think is an awesome game still) for my computer. I was so excited when it came in that I raced home to install it. I insert the disc into the CD-ROM and the disc isn't being detected....WTF? Pull the disc out, make sure it doesn't have any damage on it and gently wiped it off, put the disc back in, but still it won't be detected! Son of a......okay, I guess I pack the game back up and see about returning it. As I put the game disc and manual back into the box I notice on the box, in the lower left corner it clearly marked with:
Stupid me! My computer only has a CD-ROM. All my other games prior to this one game are on CDs. This was my first game that came on a DVD. I ended up picking up an exterior DVD-ROM drive from CompUSA the next day on my lunch break.
Okay, not really bonehead mistakes that broke anything, but I think they're kind of funny. I now make sure I read carefully the requirements of any game/software/hardware when it comes to going into my systems.