Threw out a working IBM PC3270 many years ago. Then dumped a lot of stuff - 72pin SIMMs, CPUs (Pentium IIs, a Cyrix 6x86, POD, WinChip)...and more stuff I can't remember. What a dunce. 😢

More.

Blew up a 300watt PSU by overload, popped a cap and it's still on my shelf, waiting for new caps.
Gutted a Dell Dimension XPS T600r for no reason, assembled it with different parts and then gave it up and scrapped it out entirely. I sold the TNT2 Pro in it on eBay for peanuts, $10 afaik.
Tried to use an Am486DX4-100 in a board only supporting up to DX2-80. WITHOUT A HEATSINK, AND ONLY USING A CASE FAN. It didn't fry either, somehow, but it didn't post and I'm still trying to get rid of that motherboard.
Have killed like 3 hard drives from constantly re-installing Windows 98 on the W98 Gaming PC because I was messing with drivers that would make W98 unstable.

stamasd wrote:

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.

Trying to wrap my head around how that could have killed the power supply. All you did was reverse +5v and +12v; commons were in the same position.

Oh god. Reading about your fried PSU brought back a long forgotten memory. When I first built my Athlon 64, on any given try it either wouldn't boot or it'd die whilst booting Windows. I had a brand new board and CPU, but I was using the case and power supply from my old Athlon XP build. Eventually whilst trying to diagnose it, all hell broke loose, smoke started pouring out and some alarm on the motherboard was blaring at me. The floppy drive had caught fire / exploded, it seems the PSU went a bit nuts with the load and overvolted? The PSU went into the trash after that (Thermaltake Butterfly if I remember correctly) and I enjoyed poking around inside my now dead blackened floppy drive, but somehow the rest survived!

Filipped that little switch on the back of the PSU from 230v to 115v and got treated to a fireworks show.

Not sure if that killed my 486 machine (which was my first PC) as I didnt check afterwards and just threw it out - something I really regret today.

Errius wrote:

...In addition to computer bits I also lost small Lego pieces this way.

Another Lego addict? 🤣

Errius wrote:

I knocked a pile of about a dozen drives off a shelf - including rare vintage early 90s units. About a third of them died. I still haven't found a good drive storage solution, but it did prompt me to begin storing drives on the floor rather than on shelves.

I did the similar thing. Dropped a cardboard box containing six SCSI drives from a shelf to the floor. None survived. 😢

I also remember unintentionally breaking things from time to time but they were in rare cases and not much interesting. My biggest screw ups were related to getting rid of some very nice old hardware: XT, 286, 386, PII and PIII boards, 386, PII and PIII CPUs, many different ISA and VLB cards, Good quality PCI and AGP display cards, MFM and RLL controllers from Seagate and WD, MFM disks, old IDE drives of below 1GB capacity, 30 and 72 pin SIMMs, Creative infra CD Drives, 5.25 Floppy drives, better quality AT cases, Asus T5-A ATX cases....

A couple.

One is the simple "plugged a wire in backward" which fried it - "it" in this case being the near-mythical Teac dual-drive. Of course, only the 5.25" half is fried, the 3.5" half works fine.

The other was getting the OS on a laptop "just right," - period perfect everything, loaded with tons of useful period software, etc. Then as I was rebooting to ensure it all worked well, I knocked it off the desk, breaking the screen. This particular laptop - the main "selling point" of it over similar of its line was the screen, of course. (800x600 active matrix when 640x480 passive matrix was the common, the 800x600-equipped model in that line is apparently rarer than hens teeth.)

Also forgot the two 'black wires in the middle' AT power supply connector rule. 🙁

I started collecting it. 😒

Solarstorm wrote:

I started collecting it. 😒

So did you kill anything yet? 😊

Yeah, I killed a PC few years ago. I don't know, but all my life I am obsessed with everything that rotates. Maybe some mental disability, but fans, washing machines, harddrives, engines - I can watch them spinning for hours. It is better now, but when I was 6 or so, I would sit before washing machine and watch it doing full cycle. But that is not what I wanted to say. About 5 years ago (I was 15 that time) I started to be interested in computers and my best friend's dad was what I am now - PC repairman for whole neighbourhood. Once I was visiting them and he showed me big collection of broken things that he swapped for new ones. And there was a box of seized fans. He gave them to me and I started to oil them and get them running again. But in that time I had 3 PCs in my possesion and only one of them was working. And since I didn't know how to turn on PSU without motherboard, I just pulled 12V leads that I believe went into LED display on front cover, jammed thin metal pins into both ports and wrapped bare wires around these pins. It worked for maybe... 15 minutes? Then of course I crossed the pins and shorted them. Screen went blank, PSU was still running, but the board didn't POST ever since. I still got that computer, I put it far away from me because everytime I saw it I told myself I am an idiot. Maybe I could pull it out after this time and try using POST card, what it will tell me. At the end, I got lightning-struck motherboard, it was dead, but I kept it for no reason. Few months ago I tried to go through all my motherboards since I bought myself POST card and what you know! The board POSTed no problem. And I know it was dead!

not buying a matching voodoo 2 STB black magic for sli on ebay back in 2014 (only settled for one, now understand that voodoo sli is picky) and in the same auction won the voodoo 1 for £1 but threw it out 😒

This was a long time ago, but now that tech is considered retro. I've already posted this in another thread back in February....

Not my own system, but I was building (back in 2004) a server computer for my brother. High-end Athlon64, PCI-X RAID with the new SATA connectors with 4x36gb Raptors, etc. I was installing the floppy drive, and the power cable came out. I plugged it back in, then proceeded to turn on the system to "test" everything.

As soon as the power hit the floppy a massive POOOF of magic smoke blew out the front and back of the floppy drive, and the floppy power cord melted all the way back to the PSU. The damn cable was moved over one pin worth.

$3000 system almost went up in smoke. Luckily the only thing that died was the floppy drive and the cable. PSU still worked fine, sans one floppy power connector.

tayyare wrote:

Errius wrote:

...In addition to computer bits I also lost small Lego pieces this way.

Another Lego addict? 🤣

A few years ago I sold most of my childhood Lego sets, but first I cleaned all the pieces in the sink with a toothbrush. Several small pieces that went into the sink didn't come out again. 😢

dogchainx wrote:

This was a long time ago, but now that tech is considered retro. I've already posted this in another thread back in February... […]
Show full quote

This was a long time ago, but now that tech is considered retro. I've already posted this in another thread back in February....

Not my own system, but I was building (back in 2004) a server computer for my brother. High-end Athlon64, PCI-X RAID with the new SATA connectors with 4x36gb Raptors, etc. I was installing the floppy drive, and the power cable came out. I plugged it back in, then proceeded to turn on the system to "test" everything.

As soon as the power hit the floppy a massive POOOF of magic smoke blew out the front and back of the floppy drive, and the floppy power cord melted all the way back to the PSU. The damn cable was moved over one pin worth.

$3000 system almost went up in smoke. Luckily the only thing that died was the floppy drive and the cable. PSU still worked fine, sans one floppy power connector.

My dad did the same thing.

Couple things I forgot, I recently dropped a small box of graphics cards which turned out to contain a Banshee and a Voodoo 4 (still kicking myself for that 🤣, haven't tested any of the cards yet though) and very very long ago a friend of mine was overclocking his then aging AT MMX rig and I suggested to him to try and have the CPU fan run the other way around (sucking air out of the CPU heatsink instead of blowing into the heatsink) and I had him connect the CPU fan connector backwards as this way the fan itself would rotate in the opposite direction (oh man, those days...)

POOF magic smoke 🤣.
Thankfully nothing else got damaged and a simple fan replacement fixed the issue.

Tetrium wrote:

Couple things I forgot, I recently dropped a small box of graphics cards which turned out to contain a Banshee and a Voodoo 4 (still kicking myself for that 🤣, haven't tested any of the cards yet though) and very very long ago a friend of mine was overclocking his then aging AT MMX rig and I suggested to him to try and have the CPU fan run the other way around (sucking air out of the CPU heatsink instead of blowing into the heatsink) and I had him connect the CPU fan connector backwards as this way the fan itself would rotate in the opposite direction (oh man, those days...)

POOF magic smoke 🤣.
Thankfully nothing else got damaged and a simple fan replacement fixed the issue.

you flip the fan upside down tho.

Ampera wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Couple things I forgot, I recently dropped a small box of graphics cards which turned out to contain a Banshee and a Voodoo 4 (still kicking myself for that 🤣, haven't tested any of the cards yet though) and very very long ago a friend of mine was overclocking his then aging AT MMX rig and I suggested to him to try and have the CPU fan run the other way around (sucking air out of the CPU heatsink instead of blowing into the heatsink) and I had him connect the CPU fan connector backwards as this way the fan itself would rotate in the opposite direction (oh man, those days...)

POOF magic smoke 🤣.
Thankfully nothing else got damaged and a simple fan replacement fixed the issue.

you flip the fan upside down tho.

No, we left the CPU fan the way it already was, only plugged the connector in backwards.

I actually don't remember for sure who did the replugging of the fan connector, but I am very certain that this was my idea 😵

Errius wrote:

tayyare wrote:

Errius wrote:

...In addition to computer bits I also lost small Lego pieces this way.

Another Lego addict? 🤣

A few years ago I sold most of my childhood Lego sets, but first I cleaned all the pieces in the sink with a toothbrush. Several small pieces that went into the sink didn't come out again. 😢

Sorry to hear that. My childhood collection (7-8 sets and about 3000 pieces in total) still exists with all the parts intact and I added to it a little bit more (about 170.000 pieces 😊) during my adult life, so I'm still an addict. Stopped buying a few years ago though, due to financial problems. 🤣

tayyare wrote:

Sorry to hear that. My childhood collection (7-8 sets and about 3000 pieces in total) still exists with all the parts intact and I added to it a little bit more (about 170.000 pieces 😊) during my adult life, so I'm still an addict. Stopped buying a few years ago though, due to financial problems. 🤣

I prefer KNex myself, or meccano. But ultimately I preffer raw electrical engineering and device design.