🤣

Sometimes while browsing some forums theres a thread about "stuped mistakes when messing with hardware". Those are always a good read!

Btw, do we have such a thread on Vogons? There used to be one on vintage-computing.com I think.

I once wanted a cpu fan to blow the other way around so I thought "Hey, why try removing all the screws and all that? I can simply -plug it in backwards!-". Heh, I thought it was a good idea but it was over real quick with a puff of smoke. Luckily it was my friends's computer (didn't have my own rig back then) and the cpu had survived.

I don't think we do.

I remember plugging some RAM in backwards in a friend's computer on accident around 1999-2000, and when powered up it blew a voltage regulator right off of the motherboard. We found pieces of the voltage regulator's plastic housing halfway across the room.

In the mid-1990s my father (a retired electrical engineer who has since passed away) was hooking up the power switch for our new 486DX4-120's case (this was in the pre-ATX days when power switches had more than 2 wires and didn't come with a cable pre-attached) while I looked on. He got it wrong the first time and tripped the circuit breaker. A teenager at the time, I jokingly made a loud "BZZZT!" sound while he was attempting to re-wire it, and he jumped several inches in terror. I honestly didn't expect to get him that good since it wasn't even plugged into the outlet at that point 😜

I also had a case where the PC Speaker cable shorted with something somehow and the insulation melted right up the cable. I don't think we used a speaker in that computer for a while (don't remember if it was the 486DX4 or my PII-450).

I just did a search on Vogons for: power sparks bang. Hehe, one of mine:

Sparks just came out of my PSU

retro games 100 wrote:

I just did a search on Vogons for: power sparks bang. Hehe, one of mine:

Sparks just came out of my PSU

So did you get a replacement?

Btw, I once was testing hardware, swapping motherboards and cpu's out all the time. At some point I was gonna test a Palomino 1700 and hit the switch. Nothing...but what a weird smell! I shut it down and the whole room started smelling badly!
After I took out the cpu I noticed I'd forgotten to apply thermal paste. Could see the printing of the die on the heatsink in mirror 🤣.

Maybe some mod should start a thread and move the relevant posts there?
We're getting quite off topic here, but it would be a shame to loose these last posts I think.

I can split them out, but what should the thread title be?

Tetrium wrote:

>> Sparks just came out of my PSU
So did you get a replacement?

I didn't, because those PSUs new are too expensive.

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, I once was testing hardware, swapping motherboards and cpu's out all the time. At some point I was gonna test a Palomino 1700 and hit the switch. Nothing...but what a weird smell! I shut it down and the whole room started smelling badly!
After I took out the cpu I noticed I'd forgotten to apply thermal paste. Could see the printing of the die on the heatsink in mirror 🤣.

Hehe. I've smoked a few Athlon XPs. You're right - it stinks!

Tetrium wrote:

Maybe some mod should start a thread and move the relevant posts there?
We're getting quite off topic here, but it would be a shame to loose these last posts I think.

+

HunterZ wrote:

I can split them out, but what should the thread title be?

Um.....how about "Hardware accidents"?

Okay, split it out 😀

In the old times, I remember that a friend of mine gave me a 120MB Seagate HDD, which didn't work at all. He said it was ok, but was never recognized by my pc. So I thought to try to connect the power cable in the opposite way. Of course it couldn't fit, because of the molex connector's shape, made to prevent the wrong fitting, but I mannaged to connect the 12v cable where the 5v one should go. And then, the top of one of the chips that are under the disk just broke, and was thrown with very high speed towards the other corner of the room. Thanks god, nobody was there, as he could have been injured for sure... And some months ago I've been testing some CPUs and a board that posted just once and then refused to do so ever after. I tried the 233MHz pentium mmx, and then I inserted a simple 75MHz, but I forgot to change the jumpers, and turned it on with 66MHz FSB set to 3,5x instead of 50MHz x 1,5. First I realised what I've done wrong by the smell of the cpu burning for about 3-4" before I turned it off. But the funny thing is, that after all this the cpu still works.... Later I took my multimeter, and tried to measure the voltage on an ISA slot. And by touching two specific connectors with the tips, I saw smoke coming out of the chipset, and that smell appeared a couple of seconds later.. Then I was sure the patient had died, and the autopsy's over 😀

Not exactly hardware hardware, but the cover for my 5162.

"I'll move it in a few minutes" Should never be said if you want to see something again.
Someone else will get impatient and "move" it for you, never to be seen again.

Also, +1 for AT power switches.
"Hey! Let's bring 110v to a flimsy plastic switch at the front of the case!"
"Also we can make sure that there are tons of ways to get it wrong, GENIUS!"

I also had a case where the PC Speaker cable shorted with something somehow and the insulation melted right up the cable. I don't think we used a speaker in that computer for a while (don't remember if it was the 486DX4 or my PII-450).

Yes I've done this too, those little wires have a suprising amount of smoke in them 🤣

Also, +1 for AT power switches.
"Hey! Let's bring 110v to a flimsy plastic switch at the front of the case!"
"Also we can make sure that there are tons of ways to get it wrong, GENIUS!"

I've been bitten by one of these before, although I didn't realise it was mains voltage at the time. Luckily I was wearing rubber thongs or it might have ended badly. Here in Australia we have 240VAC mains power too 😳

I don't think I've done anything too bad. I cracked the edge of the CPU core on an Athlon Thunderbird putting a heatsink on - one of those Thermaltake Orbs that were popular back in the day - although the processor still worked afterwards, until it was upgraded about a year later.
I also owned a Palomino and a Barton Athlon XP after that and although I removed/replaced the heatsink a few times on each I never cracked their cores.
I'm happy that new CPU's have metal heatspreaders on them now 😀

Also, one time in a classroom I started up an old PC and one of the caps in the power supply decided to go BANG. I hadn't done anything to the PC besides pressing the power button but everyone was looking at me because it sounded like a gunshot 😜

I once left some cheap powered speakers on overnight and when I got up next day, they had melted their cases - they stood there sagging forlornly and smelling of burnt plastic. The same model was still on sale years later at maplins...

Also recall fumbling aroung trying to fit a molex onto a cd-writer... was a bit stiff so I gave it a shove. Was the wrong way round of course...pfff.

And then there was deliberately buying a quantum bigfoot [despite the rave reviews], only to hear a component on it crackle and see it go up in a long wisp of smoke one day. Had been on for hours too.

Buying a motherboard at a car boot sale and wondering why it didn't work with some chipped old athlons from ebay...

Replacing caps on an se/30 only to find half of them fell off within a few weeks. I blame the soldering iron.... the Mac still worked though, despite the fact it hadn't before my hatchet job. Washing the old gunk off in the sink was the key...

Filing down the holes on some PC ram to make it fit an Apple motherboard.... luckily someone told me this was not a good idea before I had finished...

Forgetting to check the voltages on a socket 7 board and instantly destroying a k6/2.

Overloading a 110w psu to the point where it blew. Then doing the same thing again with a replacement one... hey it's got three slots on that riser card, what can be the matter? And what's that smell?

Turning test boards on with a screwdriver, slipping and...well I remember sparks on the ram and then nothing much happened after that

I have a M.B.L.W.I.P. degree when it comes to the IDE pins on the CD-ROM drives. MBLWIP = Major Bad Luck With Ide Pins. I have passed with flying colours, looking back at all the IDE drives, with broken pins. Somehow, I'm not happy, though, since these are some of my favourite 4X and 6X CD-ROM drives.

I fried a Sempron processor by keeping the power button ON for a few seconds while I was doing a test without fan/heatsink. It was replaced by a faster processor, though. 😁

Learnt the lesson early on that you never work on screws with the PC on. Was doing something while my PC was on. Screw dropped onto the HDD. HDD was no more...

However the computer shop sent it in and I got a new one 🤣

Also did the Molex thing the wrong way round. Amazed it would even fit...

Was traumatized during an internship in an IT service department. I had to test to be replaced work PCs and one of the monitors decided to blow up on me. Massive amounts of smoke and made sure I would crap my pants whenever a CRT would make a funny noise 🙁

Switched to LCDs very early because of this 🤣

putting AT power connectors the wrong way cause the computer wasn't working one way so I tried the other way, the psu didn't work after that but nothing else bad happened, this was quite a while ago my AT PSU murdering days are over.

I was pulling a p3 out of a socket370 board because something didn't work or I think I was trying another p3 anyway I somehow managed to break the socket which is why I really don't like socket 370, don't like socket 7 much either.
Actually that only part of it I think, I've disliked socket 370 cause of using a screwdriver to get the clip off and kindof missing and screwdriver getting in contact with the board, the board still worked so it was ok. I still have at least one socket 370 cooler with blood on it though, those things are vicious.

I soft of broke an EDO RAM slot though I still managed to get the ram in and it worked fine, that was another screwdriver contact board incident that I didn't like board still works though phew. This is why I don't like SIMMs and much prefer DIMMs

I remember someone gave me a socket 370 celeron I think which probably didn't work anyway but I don't know and the pins were a bit bent so I sat and tried to bend them back with a screwdriver unfortunately I managed to snap off one of the pins. I was unable to solder it back on since that was too hard since you couldn't put solder on the pin and then put it back in place cause it cooled down.

On a socket 7 board I was playing with the BIOS had a password so I went to take out the battery to reset it but it was one of those battery holders which has like a leaver which you pull up and I broke the leaver which makes me afraid of ever putting a battery in the PCChips board I got recently that has one of those sockets.

I've had the screwdriver turn on killing the board thing as well with my horrible Acer V80M board which had bad caps but I remember was seeing a spark and it never worked again. I think I may have done the same thing to a Soltek board with bad caps as well but I didn't investigate too much since I don't care about boards with bad caps.

On the thought of bending IDE pins, is there a magical method of pulling out floppy IDE cables without bending the pins since most floppy drives don't have plastic around the IDE connector to prevent this happening.

Woah this was alot longer then I expected, I was sure I'd had very few accidents.

I once had a build with an Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino on an ASUS A7V333 (R.I.P., I still miss that board) and as the harddrive had died, I decided it was time for a cpu upgrade.
Since the cpu was a mobile I figured I'd better use the manual jumper thingy.
Since my board was in the attic I wrote down the correct jumpers from the digital manual on a piece of paper and went up, set the jumpers and switched it on. Nothing...so I remove all cables and found out I had the jumpers correct in a way...except that all jumpers that needed to be in the 2-3 position I had -removed-!
So I jumper it correctly...thank god it still boots! But gah...keyboard port was broken!
Tried USB and got into the BIOS iirc...but I couldn't move the cursor there since the default setting for the USB legacy thingy was disabled -_-

Well, I got tired of messing with it, trying to make it work that I put the board away for a while.

Fast forward a couple months I read on the net a tip (might come in handy for you guys also).
If you put a PS/2 keyboard into an USB adapter, it should work.
So I get the board out of storage, with the keyboard in the adapter thinking "YES, finally I will conquer this problem ha ha!!1".
I flipped the switch...and a puff of smoke rose from near the bios chip!

Removed all cabling...apparently I had forgotten I had set a jumper for CLEAR_CMOS *doh!*

And it never worked since...stuped jumpers, 🤣!

🤣 awergh we should give you a restraining order against Retro hardware 😀

awwwwwwwwwww, I'm sure I'm not as bad as I sound hahahha, besides the broken battery socket and cpu socket weren't mine so all good right? they were being junked anyway or close enough, why I didn't grab more junk I don't know I always seem to regret things like that, like missed hardware and software oppotunities oh well I guess that was because my thoughts at the time were a P4 1.7ghz would be good instead of another pentium board would be nice. I did wonder if I was allergic to computers for a little while when I couldn't seem to get over 10 but thats long since gone, not sure what its upto at the moment slightly over 20 I think.

Hmm I do miss the 386SX we used to have slowdown utilities just aren't the same well thats what I think. The freeware game tanx It still doesn't work quite as well on my slowed down Pentium, luckily I had the sourcecode so I could get rid of the divide by zero error. I've only been able to play it on two systems without problem a 386SX not sure what clock speed, and a slow 486 also not sure what clock speed.