Hmm, nope. It actually broke, got stuck, caused the drive to produce an uncertain sound and I had to hammer in a real paper clip (when I could finally get hold of one) to pulverize them pasta bits and get the bloody thing to cooperate.

Eventually the drive was spared, but boy was that stupid or what 🤣

saturn wrote:

It sure is. I had a few quantum 3d cards he wanted. He asked me for them and I told him no. He tossed out some big numbers. Afte […]
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alexanrs wrote:

That's... kindda sad.

It sure is. I had a few quantum 3d cards he wanted. He asked me for them and I told him no. He tossed out some big numbers. After witch he tried to insult me. A few days later he stating asking me agin but with a different account like it never happen. He did that a few time befor giving up.
Funny thing was, I sold the cards to someone else for a much lower price then told him about it. Then told him to tell his other accounts that I sold the card for me. He had to be mad.
And his pm's. So much broken English. I know I'm bad. But damm his English was bad.

Yeah....
Probably the reason I will never have a Voodoo 5 6000....
There were websites that presented his "works".
I think they are to blame, too.

People, these cards are something special!
They are for real fans!

Accidentally touched a solder joint on the inside of the case power button on an old falling apart AT case when it was turned on. That gave me a healthy respect for electricity 😀

Used a vacuum once to clean out a fan on a really nice nVidia card.
Needless to say, the fan was never quite the same after that! 🤣

I've had a few "delete *.*, oops!" moments before.

I fried an Athlon XP by running it without the heat sink for one second. Poof of smoke, and thar she blows!

A friend asked me to fix his laptop once. I opened it up and there was the processor (a later-model P4, iirc) inserted 90 degrees off from how it should have been. Of course, where the missing pin hole was the pin was bent up; it was lucky to survive. But it worked when I put it back together properly 🤣

I once used canned air to blow out my case. You know when you tilt the can and spray in too long of bursts and the can gets really cold and starts blowing out liquid instead of air? That happened when I was spraying my graphics card. After that, the video card was dead. I've never used canned air to blow out the inside of a case again. I only use a real air compressor now with an air dryer.

edit: just remembered this one. I went over to a friend's house to help them with their first PC build. They had gotten most of the parts installed and I was just helping with the hard drive and OS install. On first boot I went into the BIOS and noticed the CPU was over 60C. So I shut it down and looked at the heatsink. It was a modern i5 and what they'd done is line up the Intel heatsink with the mounting holes, then push down very softly. They were concerned with motherboard flex so didn't want to put too much muscle into it. So the heatsink was barely touching the CPU. After properly mounting it we went back into the BIOS and they were amazed at the difference in temps. It had gone from ~60C to the high 30s. 😀

Then later when I was helping connect the ethernet cable, I noticed they had bent down the IO shield grounding tab so it was blocking the ethernet port. 😀 Had to remove the motherboard and properly align the IO shield, reassemble and all was well. All in all, though, not bad for a first time assembling a PC!

clueless1 wrote:

I once used canned air to blow out my case. You know when you tilt the can and spray in too long of bursts and the can gets really cold and starts blowing out liquid instead of air? That happened when I was spraying my graphics card. After that, the video card was dead. I've never used canned air to blow out the inside of a case again. I only use a real air compressor now with an air dryer.

I have been using canned air for years, and yes, once in a while it comes out liquid and gets onto some electronics. But that's a very fast drying liquid. I never had any problems after that. Unless you were spraying while the system was on...

dr_st wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

I once used canned air to blow out my case. You know when you tilt the can and spray in too long of bursts and the can gets really cold and starts blowing out liquid instead of air? That happened when I was spraying my graphics card. After that, the video card was dead. I've never used canned air to blow out the inside of a case again. I only use a real air compressor now with an air dryer.

I have been using canned air for years, and yes, once in a while it comes out liquid and gets onto some electronics. But that's a very fast drying liquid. I never had any problems after that. Unless you were spraying while the system was on...

Nope! System was off. I was actually in the backyard to keep the dust out of the house. I wasn't sure if it was the liquidness, the coldness, or some combination--or maybe just coincidence! But I've avoided canned air ever since.

My six year old little brother once flipped the 230V/110V AC switch in the back of our PC and the thing blew up with a bang. It was in the shop for a week, but only the PSU needed to be replaced. I see a couple other similar experiences here. Those switches really should come sealed with tape and a warning label in higher voltage regions.

The other classic gem of ignorance happened as me and my buddy tried to get NHL 94 running on his dad's 386. It played great once we had freed up enough hard drive space with a "del *.*" in the root of the C drive. No trouble at all until the next day.

firage wrote:

flipped the 230V/110V AC switch in the back of our PC and the thing blew up with a bang.

Haha yep that's classic,myself was careless enough to not making sure it's in a right position and turned pc on,also few friends had same fails 🤣

Today I sell a motherboard+cpu+memory lot. I've tested it extensively, so I know it works. Some hours later, the buyer calls me telling that he can't make it start and I try to help him troubleshoot the motherboard via phone (fortunately I have experience in that area) and after some comprobations he tells me "Ups, I put the PCIe 6 pin connector in the 4 pin power". It's an easy mistake, but I thought that you cant't plug one in the other 😕 and he's fortunate that the motherboard don't go up in smoke 🤣 .

This happened to me not a long time ago (taken from another thread)

Tetrium wrote:

In another thread Phil and I were talking about V3-1000 and Velocity and I remembered I once saw some Voodoo 3 without it's heat […]
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In another thread Phil and I were talking about V3-1000 and Velocity and I remembered I once saw some Voodoo 3 without it's heatsink in a thrift store, so I went up the attic and browsed through boxes of unrelated stuff (mostly just untested parts put together) and yup! Apparently I bought it! 😁
So I decided to bring all the other graphics card related stuff along downstairs but I accidentally dropped a box with just 2 graphics cards in them, the cards had fallen out, put those back in the box and went to the living room.

Turned out the 2 cards in the box were 2 AGP cards...a Banshee and *gasp* a Voodoo 4 doh!
I dropped a Voodoo 4, wtf am I doing! 😵

I'm usually careful when toying around with PCs, though there is this occasional brainfart moment when you're like "ok, done. oh wait-- wtf?". It just happens to me a lot. Thankfully, I recall no hardware having been harmed during these moments 😜 I really miss my CUV4X board which I was about to use in a Voodoo2 SLI build (went for 440BX instead). I had a cool black ATX case which wasn't mine, but as far as I know, had been through two dead P4 s478 mobos. Silly me, when I first got it, I thought "look what a nasty PSU can do". Well, nope! Turns out that the case was bent in a not-so-visible place, too bent not to touch the back of the motherboard. RIP CUV4X 🙁 thank god the SL52R survived!

I still occasionally get overconfident (and thus careless) with screwdrivers--whether it's screwing down motherboards or clipping on or off a heatsink. Thankfully, none of my slips have ever damaged anything, but it makes my stomach drop every time it happens.

Back in 2008 when I was 10, (and yes my vintage computer enthusiasm really goes that far back,) I had a PowerBook G3 Pismo that my dad had bought off eBay, that I played with all the time. I was a curious kid who was always asking questions and taking things apart to figure out how they work, so naturally I found dad's Philips screwdriver (which they had to hide due to these occurences) and dug into the Powerbook.

I unscrewed every screw I could find, and in the process I took off the CPU heatsink, and threw it away because I didn't know what it was. Kid logic. I plugged it in to the outlet then and while I was at school, the PowerBook started smoking and our house's smoke alarm went off. Immediately it was unplugged and hidden away, when I asked my dad what happened he told me he threw the laptop away because it caught on fire. I found it a few years later sitting deep in one of our closets, I salvaged everything I could from it (keyboard, RAM, hard drive, battery and DVD drive) and threw the rest away.

And then there was the time, the same year I think, I wiped the hard drive on the family computer attempting to install Ubuntu Linux. I have enough stories of stupid things I did as a kid to fill an entire book.

PeterLI wrote:

Drop my 486DX-33 from my desk and killing my 105AT IDE HDD in the process.

Turn the voltage to 115 on an AT PSU in the EU: frying a MOBO and PCBs in the process.

Both in the early 1990s.

Turn the voltage to 240 on at AT PSU in the US..........same result..

At work we have an industrial machine powered by an HP Pentium 4 consumer PC. It has one of those long thin power supplies that run from front to back of one side of the case. The PSU died one day, so ordered a replacement on ebay. After it arrived, I connected everything, tested it on the workbench, then took it out to connect to the machine. On power on I heard a loud pop and said uh oh. Turns out the power going into the PC from the industrial machine is 240. The previous PSU was switched to 220 and I never bothered to check because other of the same type of industrial machine in our facility are wired 120. So I had to order another one off ebay and wait 3 more days. No, the machine wasn't down the whole time--I jury-rigged a standard (self-switching) PSU temporarily to keep production going.

My very first screwup was when I was in 2nd grade I was trying to free up hard drive space on my 170MB hard drive on my 486SX33. I was going too quickly and suddenly realized I was deleteing the Windows (version 3.1) directory. I figured out how to reinstall it before my parents found out. Keep in mind I was only like 8. (although these days 10 year olds are getting bug bountys so I guess it's not that big of a deal in retrospect but at the time I was proud of myself)

my next screwup was I killed a floppy drive with a screw driver while trying to flush one of the metal pieces off of a floppy disk that had gotten lodged in it.

Fast forward to where I got my first job and earned my own money so I could build my first PC. I built a Pentium 2 266 with 32MB of Ram. I told a friend of my parents that I could fix their PC which was a K6-300 I think. I was working with it on shag carpet and killed the motherboard. I felt so bad I put my NEW Pentium2 and board in his case and got him back up and running. I ended up buying a Super Socket 7 board and getting a K6-2. Don't ask me why I didnt just get him a new board and keep my P2. I was panicing at the time.

Rhuwyn wrote:

My very first screwup was when I was in 2nd grade I was trying to free up hard drive space on my 170MB hard drive on my 486SX33. I was going too quickly and suddenly realized I was deleteing the Windows (version 3.1) directory. I figured out how to reinstall it before my parents found out. Keep in mind I was only like 8.

I already told of myself accidentally deleting most of my C:\ via a corrupted recursive directory link, but your story reminded me of something similar Somebody brought my parents Word 6 on floppies, and installed it into the default directory of C:\WINWORD. But I wanted all the applications on the D:\ partition, so I just moved the directory. Of course it did not work, because as you know Office program installations modify Windows settings in many ways, and somehow the original install locations was tied to it, so it refused to launch from the new directory on D:\. Worse, when I moved it back, it still didn't work because somehow something got corrupted. Back then I did not know enough to deal with this corruption, and since I did not have the installation floppies to undo the damage, my parents did find out, and were not happy. I think that where I got the habit of keeping copies of installation floppies on my hard drive. 😀

Rhuwyn wrote:

Fast forward to where I got my first job and earned my own money so I could build my first PC. I built a Pentium 2 266 with 32MB of Ram. I told a friend of my parents that I could fix their PC which was a K6-300 I think. I was working with it on shag carpet and killed the motherboard. I felt so bad I put my NEW Pentium2 and board in his case and got him back up and running. I ended up buying a Super Socket 7 board and getting a K6-2. Don't ask me why I didnt just get him a new board and keep my P2. I was panicing at the time.

Were you trying to hide the fact that you damaged something, or did he know that already? In any case, it's commendable that you put his needs ahead of yours and did whatever you could do to minimize his downtime. I wish most repair technicians were like this. 🤣

ElementalChaos wrote:

I took off the CPU heatsink, and threw it away because I didn't know what it was. Kid logic. I plugged it in to the outlet then and while I was at school, the PowerBook started smoking and our house's smoke alarm went off.

That's actually a great practical joke. Get an old laptop, give it to a friend under the guise of retro gaming, sit back and wait.

I tried hot flashing a QFP with 1) no extractor tool and 2) no checking of the operating voltage.

I then had two boards on the repair pile.