SpectriaForce wrote:

#rantalert 😊

I have destroyed a lot of (potentially good) hardware over the years. Most notably several years ago I threw away a working Osborne I portable CP/M computer and a potentially good Acorn RiscPC. Why? Nobody offered me any decent amount of money for them and I needed the space. For some reason people sometimes keep on waiting and waiting and don't even make an offer. The reality is that I can't offer (large) stuff for € 10 or 20, because it's too much work and usually also frustration for too little money, so then I rather offer the item in a lot of e-waste or it goes straight to the dumpster. A couple of weeks ago I offered some old IBM PS/2 hardware cheap. I got questions like 'does it work?', 'is it complete?' and 'I want to come collect this next week'. I am tired of such folks who think that they can have their cake and eat it too. If I offer something cheap, then take it as is, collect it quickly and don't piss me off. The dumpster is frustration free I can tell. There are even folks out there who are outright rude and leave negative feedback on a local market place website if they don't get what they think that they 'deserve'. On a positive note: the IBM PS/2 hardware was saved by someone who acted the same day 😎

I see a lot of nice stuff over there but too bad it's always +2h drive for me 🙁

When i was 5 or 6 years old(1998,1999) my dad gave me a fully functioning a vlb board and a intel 486 dx2 to play around and i dropped the cpu on the floor and it cracked, i remember being a a little bit sad back in the day, but today when i think about it i'm a little bit extra sad.
Around 2008 i ditched a fully working zip drive with 5 zip disks.
in 2018 idk if probably made worse an Compaq LTE 5000 that i bought for parts(mostly because it had a docking station that need some attention) and i was trying to identify the problem, but between probing, the multimeter probe kind of shorted out some components, well the board was already dead, but i guess what i did didn't helped, and probably made it worse.

Hmm, over the years I've killed quite a bit of hardware. The worst/stupidest I remember was when I killed a really nice Slot1 board, an AOpen MX64. How? Somehow while installing RAM I managed to jam the +12V line for the CPU cooler in the DIMM slot under the DIMM without noticing it, so feeding 12V into a memory interface designed for 3.3V. The magic smoke got released :'(

^^That reminds me of two of my (somewhat related) worst deeds from the old days. My first PC was a Russian XT clone, a monstruously big Iskra 1030.11, cooled by two mains-powered fans that sounded a bit like a vacuum cleaner/small jet engine. After deciding enough is enough, I devised some contraptions to make them run much slower (capacitors/resistors in series). In the following months, the decreased airflow killed that piece of history bit by bit, and I was dumb enough to scrap most of its innards when it passed away for good.

But some of its legacy continued, as - after extensive modifications - I used its old case and PSU for my upgrade, which was a 286. The Russian PSU's connectors were completely proprietary, so to adapt it to a standard AT board I ended up using twelve separate crimp receptacles (terminals), each labeled +5, +12, GND and so on. After using it for a few months I decided to "clean" it (in fact I liked so much to tinker with electronics that I used the cleaning as an excuse), and putting it together again I managed to swap two of the leads, +12v instead of +5, then tried in vain to power up the computer, multiple times. At each turn on, 12V were injected in the 5V rail, and the PSU protection was so bad that it acted only after a second or so each time. I was wondering why the Power and Turbo leds were so damn bright during that second 😀

Surprisingly, most of the parts survived this - I lost two of the 256K SIMMs, the VGA card, Acer Accufeel keyboard that I was very proud about, and the motherboard remained mostly functional but wouldn't recognize any keyboard (KBC chip probably gone, but at the time I didn't knew that it could be replaced, so I tossed it 🙁 )

I was working on a self-built Core 2 Duo HTPC that had started showing issues with the onboard SATA controller after about 2 years. But I was working on the HTPC in-situ and had the power cable for an external Blu-Ray drive hanging loose to the side. I nudged the PC slightly whilst testing something with the PC switched on and the power cable for the external drive fell in and touched the motherboard. Immediate power off & dead motherboard. Nothing looked burnt or damaged in any way, but the motherboard was dead nonetheless.

Oh well, I suspected it was failing anyway so no big loss. I bought a replacement motherboard 2nd hand, similar chipset to avoid an OS reinstall etc, and the PC is still running great today and is my main 4K HTPC setup.

Duron 650, Athlon T-Bird 950 ( I think ), S3 Savage 4, Geforce 2 400, Geforce 3 Ti 200 ( that one really hurt 🙁 ), all died glorious deaths in the quest for more FPS and 3DMarks when I was younger ( and more stupid ) . After that I figured it's more cost efective ( and less emotional pain ) to save up for high performance components.

Ooh boy, confession time.

First one I remember was a Zenix mouse on my dad's 386. I worked for about half an hour to scrape all the accumulated grime off the mouse rollers, only to discover that at least part of what I had removed was a grippy rubber coating. I started to wonder what was taking so long about halfway through cleaning, and confirmed my growing suspicion after I finished when the tracking was worse than when I started. Oops.

Then, my first 486SX had the floppy drives in reverse order from my dad's 386. His 5.25" was A:, mine was B:. I wanted to try OS/2, which needed to boot from 5.25" disks, so I tried to swap the drives. I had no idea what I was doing, and only succeeded in preventing either drive from working. Finally got the 5.25" back online, but the 3.5" never did work again. Still not sure if I actually killed it somehow or just never got the jumpers back on right. Ended up tossing it and buying a new one.

I killed a Cyrix 5x86 motherboard by doing dumb things with the power supply. I had a spare car audio amp and tried to power it with my computer's PSU from a spare Molex. The amp could output more power than the PSU could, and it shut down the PC soooo many times from tripping the OCP. Eventually the VRs near the CPU were so mistreated that I could easily contract heat-shrink tubing with them. That PC was not at all stable.

I've tripped circuit breakers by mixing up the AT power switch leads more than once.

In the 2000s, when it was a legal requirement to have blue lights on everything PC related, I disassembled an Enermax PSU with clear fans so I could add the missing LEDs. That went fairly well until a friend of mine (who was modding something of his as well) bumped the half-assembled PSU while it was powered on, knocking some part of the fan assembly into the PSU and causing it to shut down. That killed the LED and the fan, so in an attempt to salvage the mess, I tacked the fan directly to the 12V rail. It worked for a couple months and then decided it didn't want to be a PSU anymore. I can't blame it.

I recently killed a NOS Teac combo floppy drive. The 3.5" had some issues reading disks, so I tried fiddling with the heads and only made it worse. (I don't think I'll ever bother trying that again. Chances of success are low.) The 5.25" still worked, so I tried removing the 3.5" to replace it with a spare mini drive. That did not go well. The replacement didn't use the same ribbon pinout or something - never worked. So I tried to desolder all the 3.5" stuff so I could just use it as a 5.25" drive, and managed to accidentally melt its connector for the drive head ribbon. At that point, I threw in the towel. I don't deserve to have nice things. 😉

The one that I'm most disappointed by was a recent motherboard disposal. I had one of those VIA Epia 1GHz mini-ITX boards in my Linux router, and it had been running like a champ for yeeeaaars. Eventually the caps dried out and started bulging, and so one day it crashed and failed to reboot. Rather than doing the rational thing and replacing the caps, I figured ... eh... it's done its service... and tossed it out in favor of a replacement Supermicro Atom board. That was about a year ago. I look back now and wonder... what was I thinking??

Oh boy another one, probably the one I'm still kicking myself very hard...

I had a Indigo iMac G3 (aka of all G3s this one was the bottom of the barrel, mine had a nasty gash in the screen, that I worsened when trying to make it less obvious, the Maxell bomb was long disarmed. (=no PRAM battery))

You guessed it, gravity decided to kill it. My desk crumbled under its weight (why? No idea)..

And my G3 fell to its death: the tube somehow managed to shatter (the neckboard was rattling with the tube's electron gun elements hanging on it!)

And ironically, I just scored a Lime G3 slot loader.. Hope it'll not meet the same fate.

Edit: another one, my friend's Amstrad CPC 6128, those were notorious for faulty floppy drives.. Well in this one, it was me and my friends' stupidity that ended up killing the floppy drive, kept hitting R because that ol' clonker refused to boot a floppy.

Killed a Seagate ST-157a 42Mb IDE HDD one time by hooking up the wrong cable to the drive led header. There was a wire coming from the power supply that looked identical to the case HDD LED wire, and I got them confused. Turned it on, and poof! It toasted the drive, and the FDD/HDD controller. Shame, I liked that drive. It was a stepper motor actuated drive, so it was very reliable.

I was testing an older AMD Athlon setup. took the cooler off to see what CPU was underneath. the cooler was a pain to reattach so i just set it on top of the CPU - the heatsink was still in contact, but the old thermal paste was now compromised and there was no pressure holding it down.

bear in mind i forgot this was the CPU that didn't have thermal throttling, with the exposed glass die. i turn it on for just 3 seconds to verify it works, and then turn it off. and then a smell came from the CPU area. both CPU and motherboard dead. 🙁

Well, the eMachines T3116 motherboard (FIC K8M-800M) I was trying to run in my Windows 98SE machine won't boot to anything, except for the BIOS. I have removed every add-in card, except for my GeForce4 Ti4400 AGP card and it still won't boot. Don't know if the board is actually dead or if it's not a good PSU (300W ATX installed). I checked the board and the caps are good, the RAM slots are clean, the CPU works, and every other thing checks out. Might've shorted the board a bit, however, I have my working Socket 370 board (one SD-RAM slot works of the 3, but, that's no big deal) and Socket 423 board that uses RD-RAM that works, except it doesn't like having 5 storage devices plugged in with the PSU that it came with. My other Socket 754 board (PCChips) works without issues.

I forgot the one that would give me the highest score...

I was at a LAN party with some friends -- we all worked together at a computer store. This was during that "everything has to have blue LEDs" phase. Lots of overclocking, cold cathodes, water cooling... enthusiast stuff. There was also lots of alcohol.

Many hours into the evening, the host is tired and more than a little partied-out, so he hits the sack. Poor guy left his computer on, though -- a heavily overclocked Athlon XP, which consumes a fair bit of energy. The rest of us finish our game and start wrapping up to go home, and myself and another well-meaning guy, we look at our host's computer, and back at each other... "Should we turn that off for him?" "Yeah, that would probably be nice." So I wander over, hit Start -> Shut Down. Windows XP closing theme.... computer shuts off and that corner of the room is now much darker. We all go home.

The next day, my friend calls. "Hey, did you turn off my computer?" "Yeah, buddy, I gotcha." "Dude... oh man... you really shouldn't have done that..." "Huh? Why?" "My Peltier cooler is on an external power supply, and all the fans turn off with the computer." "Um... OK..?" "The cooler's hot side got so hot it melted the tubing on my water block, blackened my motherboard, killed the CPU..." "Uuhhhhhh..... whut? Seriously?? Have you never heard of a relay?" "Yeah, so I'm gonna need like $400 for a new motherboard and CPU."

Reasons why I don't overclock my computer or use water cooling. One of my friends had a water cooling setup on his XP rig and it stopped working during the LAN party a long time ago.

I did for a while, but managing a water cooling system is a pain, CPU fans have gotten larger and quieter, and a 10% gain in performance just isn't an overwhelming improvement - especially for the cost and trouble. Haven't bothered since I upgraded to a Core 2.

I had fans everywhere when I built my own system in 2008 and it's been like that for every machine since the 1990's when my dad built computers. I only have 3 fans in some of my systems: CPU heatsink, GPU heatsink, and PSU; my main desktop has 6 fans: 2 in the rear, 1 on the side, CPU heatsink, GPU heatsink, and PSU. I used to have a lot of them, but, most of my systems run at 35-45C max, which is nice, and I would change the thermal compound every year when I do the system cleaning and I haven't had dust enter any of my systems in a long time after I covered the excess add-in card slots with slot covers I collected over the years.

I needed to boot from a floppy disk on a NeXT computer in order to begin the installation from a CD. I didn't have the right floppy drive available so I tried the Teac SCSI floptical drive I had in my SGI Indigo. It's a rare option.
Even though I observed polarity, the SCSI cable must of been installed backwards, resulting in the SCSI to floppy bridge board cratering at least three IC's and killing the floptical drive in the process. I've never found another one....

I have a 1gb Seagate Medalist IDE drive that was the OEM disk from a Packard Bell machine I still own. Really nice, fast and quiet for the time. There's an embedded key for the Master CD so restoring the drive is pretty painless.
I had it fall BEHIND a table and hit the floor. Still spins up and spindle sounds healthy but the heads just click back and fourth now...

I had a PCI Ageia PhysX card whose fan one day silently seized and roasted the card. I only found out when I tried to run Mirrors Edge with PhysX enabled and started getting really weird errors

I had an NEC chipset PCI USB card with onboard SATA controller that one day went thermalnuclear when a USB connector was plugged in backwards.
Windows said that there was a power surge on one of the ports. You don't say? 🤣

Killed a Radeon 9600 while I was diagnosing a no POST issue on my Athlon XP machine a while ago. How I did it was quite embarrassing, I forgot to turn the PSU's input off 😵 . While pulling the card out I accidentally hit the power button and the system turned on. Needless to say the GPU pretty much fried instantly. Luckily the motherboard survived and it still works. It ended up working out better for me anyway, I picked up a 9600 that was fully compatible with my ECS motherboard not long ago.

So remember kids, unplug the power before you pull things out 😀

I remember killing two Compaq SMART 2E EISA Raid controllers by not completely seating them in the EISA slots, an external HDD by using the wrong power supply (same plug but different), at least one Duron CPU by not completely attaching the heatsink (not sure if the other one was already dead before), a 386 CPU by inserting it the wrong way to the socket and of course some tantal electrolytics just by applying power. A Proliant 800 just stopped working while powerred on. Mainboard, memory and or CPUs fried, but probably it was suicide and not my fault.
eisapc

I painfully learned about ESD significance when I was curious about the insides of the Texas Instruments SR-50A that I acquired in the early 1980s. (The 1975 SR-50A was already vintage by then)
I opened it and disassembled it, and was a bit disappointed - only two chips.
After reassembly the calculator at first glance appeared to still work, but I very soon noticed that some calculation functions now produced incorrect results and others did not finish, leaving temporary values in the registers (easily visible using the x-y key).

And I learnt about the importance of not producing shorts between pins when taking measurements by accidentally shorting 4116 pin 7 and 8 (+12 supply) on my self-designed Apple II DRAM memory expansion card. That shot the whole bank of 4116 which I shortly ago bought very cheap for 130 Deutsche Marks... (back then 1 DM was about $1.20)

I just killed a 50x CD-ROM drive while trying to repair it... It often took 3 tries to open, the belt was changed the mechanism was lubricated, no dice. And worse it made a loud grinding noise and it turned out that it gave up the ghost (some gears had broken teeth)

I smashed it to bits out of frustration.. I'm starting to think that my old Pentium 133 tower hates me.

And before you ask it was a crappy no name cd drive that was already dying..