Years ago, I was trying to play a game on my Pentium 60 (new at the time), which seemed to run really slowly.

I just put it down to bad programming, and kept trying to play. However, I hadn't noticed that the PC wasn't running in Turbo mode.

It seems that at some point, I'd pressed the Turbo button (remember those? :-)) for some reason, and simply forgot about it!

Oh, I've just remembered an annoying issue that bugged me for more than a year.

My computer started to suffer slowdowns every 5-10 mins, expecially noticeable with YT videos and when playing 3d games, even offline.

I tried everything to fix it and I often thought that it was my graphic card fault until... I discovered that it was caused by Spybot and its huge hosts file! O_o

I wanted to keep that useful program, so I found that disabling a service could fix the slowdown caused by it anyway.

So I finally fixed it, but it took me soo long to understand the cause!

Yeah, pretty much this :) The best part is he kept saying "monitor with high frequency is SOOOO good, no way I'm going back to lame 60 Hz". Imagine his embarrassment when I showed him that he had been using 60 Hz all this time :D

Years ago, I was playing around with redesigning the mouse pointer. I deleted the pointer, but before I actually redesigned it back on the screen, I clicked "OK".
It took me bloody ages to carefully move my non-existent mouse pointer back into the design window menu, and then into the design window itself, and then to make a pointer so that I could finally see what I was doing. All with a mortal fear that I was going to click somewhere else that would further muck up the settings - just because I absent-mindedly clicked "OK".

That is not a pitfall of gaming. It is a consumer ignorance issue; the DOWNFALL of society. People buy something and have no idea how it works and just figure if it turns on it is good to go. Just like they buy all their products; with no idea how they are produced and what the process to make it does to the environement/planet or any other implications of anything in the way they live their lives. Be deliberate with all of your choices and behaviors. *KNOW* before doing. It's not actually that hard we just live in a culture where doing so is actually DISCOURAGED. Be a cog in the machine with no consciousness other than to be aware of how your cog-ness is slowing down the machine and how to "operate" better to help the machine run faster (so the people at the top can make the $$$$$$$$.)
You could have navigated all of that with the keyboard.

I've done this with a Pentium 1 I acquired for free (instead of being thrown away), the CPU along with the cooler literally popped out of their places and the socket was literally ruined. This was back when I was 14 and just starting getting in the PC repair biz. Never touching that switch again. :D

I'm glad that I never encountered such a crazy switch O_o
Or if I did on the 486, it must have had some scary notice on it.

I think the most naive thing I did was taking a malfunctioning computer to a "computer service shop" since I got back a non-working computer (which thinking about it now, may have been a good thing because I swore to never again in my life or the next ones to take a computer to a service but rather learnt myself how to do everything when it comes to computers..........and most electronic devices ;P)

I once eliminated the reader of my IT...absolutely erasing the reproduction of my PC's audio...took me 2 years before I got around to installing it with less shitty internet.

Okay I'll bite - all these "power saving" settings nightmares have me paranoid.

I'm on a Win 7 64 bit desktop. I've (most likely, I think?) NEVER looked at my "power savings" settings. Is there a possibility I've been throttling back my hardware without ever knowing it?

I consider myself computer somewhat savvy - where would I look to check this? What should I be aware of in my power savings settings? Do I have to jump into my BIOS to alter this?

In other words - can I get a few cheap performance bumps with a mouse click or two, due to my own stupidity thus far? Please? In this case I'd much rather be ignorant than that much closer to needing a hardware upgrade LOL!

If you never touched anything after installing the OS and it´s a desktop then, it´s probably set with the standard option to take a balanced approach to your hardware, it would throttle up or down as required.
To see what is yours set to you should go to the control panel, then power options, where you can choose balanced, high performance or power saving.
If you have a wifi adapter you should check also its options, since they are usually set with power saving behaviour.
Apart from the OS you could check also your motherboard bios, since power saving technologies vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and you usually turn them on or off in there. When in doubt, read the motherboard manual.

As a kid, I was playing around with a Timex Sinclair and added the 16K RAM expansion while the unit was on, thereby destroying the expansion unit. It was ok, though, because the person who owned it never used it anyway because of computerphobia.

why did they own a spectrum then if they had computerphobia ?

Back in 2003 I was so frustrated trying to fix my Blaster/Lovesan-infected WinXP machine I decided to format c:\ and start over with a fresh install. Near the end of the windows install process (which could take around 30 minutes) the computer showed clear signs of having been infected AGAIN. Amazed and incredibly frustrated at the same time at how the fresh windows installation was corrupted before I had even gotten far enough to properly start it up for the first time, I noticed the TP cable was still plugged in to the ADSL modem. I didn't even know the computer had internet access while still in the install process! FUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

A couple of years earlier, I paid dearly for my ignorance as well. The C:\ partition was NTFS while D:\ was FAT32. I had prepared all day to format c:\ by moving everything worthwhile or irreplacable to d:\.

Turns out the d:\ partition got wiped clean or at least corrupted in the process, certainly because of the differing file systems. I freaked out for about ten minutes before accepting the loss. Still, I lost a years worth of MIDI tracks I had composed. It would take years before I found any joy in composing again after that.

Haha! Good question. I think they won it via raffle or sweepstakes. I can't remember, but I remember being amused at when they asked for it back as they never were going to use it. And they didn't.

Btw, it wasn't the spectrum, it was some black one like the 1000 or z81 that didn't have keys--just some pressure-sensitive crap. It was the worst. I remember that it took me ages to get the tape player to record data, but when I removed it from the cords to use it like a regular tape player, it would never again be able to read all the stored programs.