I plugged an ATX powersupply backwards into a Gigabyte Slot 1 board. That went well! Couldnt get it to run stable after that, any OS I would throw onto it would corrupt within a week.

ODwilly wrote:

I plugged an ATX powersupply backwards into a Gigabyte Slot 1 board. That went well! Couldnt get it to run stable after that, any OS I would throw onto it would corrupt within a week.

Did it just not have the key pins in it? That seems hard to do.

Working professionally, met with a client who kept talking about having a "new" phone. Said his phone didn't have all the stuff his old phone did and he wanted it all on there. I knew he had a backup in iTunes because I did one previously for him some months back and told him to periodically hook his phone up to the PC so it would automatically back up everything.
So since this is a "new" phone, I hook it up and tell iTunes to restore the last data backup. The backup was from 1 year ago, without me even checking the date. As it turns out, his "new" phone wasn't new. He'd had the damned thing for 6 months, so I just wiped out everything he had, all texts, e-mails, etc. from his business. He was livid. I was mortified.
Note to self: NEVER do anything to someone else's shit unless you back it up first. Learned a very important lesson that day. Didn't get fired over it though, strangely enough.

Many years ago, tried to mod a friend's PS2 so he could play copies and region-free games. I wasn't so handy with a soldering iron, so I undid the mod when it didn't work. A few years later after he used that PS2 heavily with Final Fantasy 11, it died on him and he accused me of causing it with that "botched mod" so I gave him my big PS2 so he could move his HDD and Modem over and reinstall FF11 again and keep playing. I went and got a slim PS2 (that I still have today and still works - DVD playback occasionally stutters from how often I used it as my DVD player over the years) after joining the military.
Lesson learned: either practice and get good with soldering or don't offer to mod someone else's shit.

Other life lessons learned over the years:

- Nobody else you know gives a shit about Star Trek and they think you're a huge f***in' nerd for ever bringing it up...ever. Just don't talk about it to anyone...ever.
- You will meet tons of guitar players and rock music enthusiasts. NONE of them will live near you...EVER.
- Nobody ever cares about you as a person. They only care about what you can do for them. So either get used to being alone forever or develop a skill that other people will want. And learn to drink alcohol. You can fake being someone's friend if you get drunk together.

Ampera wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

I plugged an ATX powersupply backwards into a Gigabyte Slot 1 board. That went well! Couldnt get it to run stable after that, any OS I would throw onto it would corrupt within a week.

Did it just not have the key pins in it? That seems hard to do.

The PSU was one of those free, feather light jobs. Not keyed and it slid right in. Didnt clamp down because the clip was on the wrong side, but it seemed secure. Turned it on and the fans would spin, then turn off. Took a closer look and went "oh crap"

ODwilly wrote:

Ampera wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

I plugged an ATX powersupply backwards into a Gigabyte Slot 1 board. That went well! Couldnt get it to run stable after that, any OS I would throw onto it would corrupt within a week.

Did it just not have the key pins in it? That seems hard to do.

The PSU was one of those free, feather light jobs. Not keyed and it slid right in. Didnt clamp down because the clip was on the wrong side, but it seemed secure. Turned it on and the fans would spin, then turn off. Took a closer look and went "oh crap"

eeeyea I took a look at the ATX pinout, you don't want that the wrong way round.

When I first getting interested in computers me and a buddy of mine voluteered to fix someones. I had 486 which had been in my family a long time which I had learned a lot on and I just put some money together to build my own Pentium 2 based machine. I don't remember what was wrong the the one I was fixing only that it was purely an operating system issue. I had to open it and take a look. I ended up shorting it out somehow and couldn't get it to post. I didn't have a ton of parts back then to test by process of elimination if the problem was the board or the CPU so I ended up putting my own brand new pentium 2 board in the machine (it was an AT style Soyo board don't remmber the specific number) into the other guys machine and told him what I did but that I replaced the parts I broke. Sucks too because all the guy had as a K6 system. (Not even K6-2). I ended up getting a K6-2 and a Super 7 motherboard for myself which lasted me until got another slot1 system.

Chucking a perfectly working 21 year old Amstrad PCW 8512 together with a nice collection of programs and documentation into the trash back in 2007.

Of course, finding one nowadays in the same condition for a decent price is pretty much impossible.

I don't know about worst but I wrenched off the chip from a cirrus 5446 graphics card trying to get the heatsink off.

Broke 2 pins of a 1.4GHz Tualatin P3 trying to mod it (solder stuck to the wrong pin). I still have the chip and I'm sure there's something I could solder on as a replacement pin, if the mood ever struck me.

Broke a P2 233 trying to take the cartridge apart to replace the TIM (those things are a bloody nightmare) fortunately they seem to be dime a dozen, so I got another and this time didn't bother trying to take it apart !

When I was a kid we had a P2 400 that got struck by lightning (via the modem I believe) and partially melted. The man at the computer shop couldn't believe it when we brought it in.

Not mine but I remember my brother somehow deltree'd the entire C:\ on our 386, I believe prompted the purchase of our first Pentium as a replacement

Accidentally installed a 486 CPU backwards. Needless to say, the smell of burning immediately told me something was wrong the next time I tried to turn it on. 😵

Fortunately, the only casualty was the voltage regulator on the motherboard, which was a simple five-minute soldering job to replace by swapping it with one from another identical-but-dead motherboard. The rest of the board and the CPU itself survived blissfully unaffected by my little goof. 🤣

torindkflt wrote:

Accidentally installed a 486 CPU backwards. Needless to say, the smell of burning immediately told me something was wrong the next time I tried to turn it on. 😵

Fortunately, the only casualty was the voltage regulator on the motherboard, which was a simple five-minute soldering job to replace by swapping it with one from another identical-but-dead motherboard. The rest of the board and the CPU itself survived blissfully unaffected by my little goof. 🤣

I am never too careful when installing CPUs.

I've been tinkering with retro computers for one year now, built several Soc7, 486 and even a Soc8 machine. Luckily, there's been only one time when I killed a computer part, but that time was pretty embarassing.

Once I got a heavily damaged case with a working AT PSU. I thought I'm going to remove the PSU and use it as a standalone test bench. It was all going nice until I got a 386-40 motherboard and accidentally placed it on top of the actual PSU. You might imagine how this story goes: as soon as I turned the motherboard on, it shorted out, produced a little smoke and died, presumably taking the PSU with it (didn't use it since).

Oh, there was also a time when I tried to clean a CRT screen using nail polish remover and accidentally washed away some of the labels and a bit of plastic coating.

jheronimus wrote:

I've been tinkering with retro computers for one year now, built several Soc7, 486 and even a Soc8 machine. Luckily, there's been only one time when I killed a computer part, but that time was pretty embarassing.

Once I got a heavily damaged case with a working AT PSU. I thought I'm going to remove the PSU and use it as a standalone test bench. It was all going nice until I got a 386-40 motherboard and accidentally placed it on top of the actual PSU. You might imagine how this story goes: as soon as I turned the motherboard on, it shorted out, produced a little smoke and died, presumably taking the PSU with it (didn't use it since).

Oh, there was also a time when I tried to clean a CRT screen using nail polish remover and accidentally washed away some of the labels and a bit of plastic coating.

Unless it's plastic your trying to get rid of, do not use Acetone. It's too agressive. I suggest 91% (Higher is better) Isopropynol/Isopropyl Alcohol. It has debated effects on cleaning electronics, and some claim it leaves a conductive residue, but I have not encountered this to a point where it becomes a problem. And either way, it won't dissolve ABS or PE, which is a cut above Acetone.

Definately Isopropyl Alcohol / Isopropanol, I've been using 99% for years. It's cheap and lasts a long time, and will clean just about anything. I've used it to clean up motherboards after soldering etc. with no issues. Be careful using it on any coloured surfaces as it may take the colour off with it.

Lately I received a KT600 board and opening the generic box cutting the tape I cut also lot of agp mobo traces cause the back of the mobo was very close right behind the tape. It works but I just can't use this motherboard anymore thinking how stupid I've been.

Ahh, the screw-ups 😁

Lets see here...dropping a glass of wine into a working CRT, killing a motherboard by not having removed the CLEAR CMOS jumper (smoke and that was it), installing an Athlon XP without any TIM (some more smoke), cycling with a CRT I had found for 15 km on my steering wheel only to find out it was broken (lots of smoke, turning my room into a health hazard and had to vent for hours), tossing several 386 and 486 boards because I thought I would never want them (included a 386/486 combo board, but I did keep all the cache chips and jumpers), dropping a known working harddrive from the stairs (it had no parachute and it died), accidentally killing my only SiS530 board by testing a defective harddrive and forgetting to label it, some time later I used that same harddrive to destroy the motherboard of my mothers' then new but already troublesome PB (I never told her the truth ehh 😊 ).

I probably forgot some stuff, maybe next year I'll do a part 2 🤣!

When I was 9 or 10 I set a BIOS password on my dad's Dell Dimension D300. I forgot what it was immediately. He had to call Dell and they told him to remove the CMOS battery for a bit.

I didn't even get in trouble 🤣

I once many years ago plugged a power connector upside-down into an IDE drive. In my defense the connector was pretty worn and it slid in without much pressure needed. When I turned the power on, both the HDD and the PSU lost their magic smoke and died.

I now consider it a fair price for a valuable lesson, as since then I have always very closely inspected visually all connectors before plugging them in, and have not had such incidents since.

Not exactly a screwup, but I was trying to test a 540MB Conner hard drive I got off ebay, and as soon as I turned the PC on, the hard drive smoked and died. It doesn't spin up now, and the way the HDD looks I'm not sure it's worth repairing.

I also tossed a few beige boxes, one desktop and the other a tower, a few years ago, before I collected PCs, without even looking at the parts in them. Looking back, I would've kept them and I'm kicking myself to this day 🤣