I have an old laptop Pentium MMX 233Mhz based... I reinstalled the OS and put it away. Then a few months later I powered it on and while booting Win98 the Hard drive died 😢

It just happened today. My GA-5SMM died this morning. PSU fan spins, hard drive spins, but no CPU fan spin, no video, no nothing. Can't believe it. Can't find any visual damage. Swapped everything and everything works except the motherboard. 😵

Slot A Thunderbirds

My Audigy 2 just started increasing DPC latency and causing hardware interrupts one day. It was working just fine a year ago, but when I took it out of its anti-static bag for testing recently, I noticed that 10% of the CPU was being eaten by hardware interrupts and deferred procedure calls. Didn't matter if it was in an Intel, nVidia, or VIA chipsetted system, and older drivers certainly didn't help it. Audio output was fine though.

Oh well. I wound up just tossing it.

A while ago, I trashpicked an IBM Thinkpad 365X P100 laptop. About a week or two later, the original 810MB Toshiba HDD spontaneously died. I actually had to buy an external CD-ROM drive just so I could reinstall Win 95 on that thing (that laptop does not have a CD drive built in, and no, I didn't have a floppy copy of Win 95 and I still don't), and another hard drive (side note: I ordered a 1.3GB, but I got another 810MB. At least this one worked, so I just went with it).

Several hard drives, most recently a WD 40gb IDE that I was using to install WinXP. After the install completed and just after the final reboot, the hard drive decided it had enough and simply quit spinning. Utter frustration ensued 😖

An ESS 1868 sound card died inside my Socket 7 build. It had been working for about 2 years without any problems, then I stored the PC away for a few weeks. When I took it out again, the PC started OK but the sound card wouldn't work. I took it out and went to visit a family friend that had a 486 desktop; it refused to work. He told me that it was "brain dead" and should just toss it. After doing some more research on Google I ended up doing just that. Too bad.

An ATI Rage 128 Pro died quietly while in storage. When I tried to use it again, all I got was the 3-beep salute. Went straight to the recycle bin 😵

Other dead PC parts: floppy drives, CD/DVD-ROM drives, power supplies, and of course case and CPU cooler fans (plenty of them). Never had a CPU or memory sticks die on me though - intentional or not.

agp voodoo 3 3000. Got it for free, tested it, stored it it an anti-static bag alone on a shelf and went to install it in a p3 3 months later. Scrambled lettering that appears to be from bad ram. Also a 63?gb sata wd raptor drive that decided that it wouldnt even power o any more. Although it had like 60k power on hours. . .so it did deserve it's rest.

My rare "HP edition" Barton Athlon XP 3200+ 2333 MHz (14*166).

It suddenly died when I restarted the system, it was running at 2600 MHz @~1.75V at the time. I guess some sort of voltage spike killed it. I have plenty of other Bartons but no other that can run at 2500+ MHz stable with stock voltage and simple air cooling.

hard drives, always secondhand ones
a few cd/dvd drives, always secondhand ones
some old ram

a sapphire am2+ board bought new
some sticks of desktop ddr2 bought new

an arctic freezer fan, but it started working once i replaced it
an amd stock am2+ hsf
a thermaltake case fan

a gf6600, a 6800gt, and a 7950gx2 [bad solder]
a jetway socket a board [bad caps]
an elite socket am2+ bought new
a few cheap psus [the free-with-a-case type]

lazibayer wrote:

It just happened today. My GA-5SMM died this morning. PSU fan spins, hard drive spins, but no CPU fan spin, no video, no nothing. Can't believe it. Can't find any visual damage. Swapped everything and everything works except the motherboard. 😵

That's really sad. I own the Compaq version of that board and it has the best ever onboard midi I've ever heard on a vintage board. I highly recommend listening to the "Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness" soundtrack on it. "Dreaming next to Erana's staff" is the best sounding tune with that midi synth.

HDDs, FDDs, MOBOs, diskettes, LEDs, DVDs and CPU fans come to mind.

One day I was working on my power mac g5 when a power outage hit my office. The power came back later but never did the mac. I think its PSU is dead.
Another day I rebooted my computer for updates and it couldn‘t find the boot drive. That was how my SSD died.

Lots of HDDs. Seagates tend to fair better for me. I have some 631MB drive leftover from a lot buy at a university auction back in 2000 and they're still going.

I have the touch of death for laptops. Everytime I get my hands on a neat older laptop, it's done within a week. I had a great IBM thinkpad 386 with grayscale screen that I toted around for pen & paper RPGs that died trying to charge the battery.

I have an unmarked P4 board (PC Chips) that has recently given up the ghost due to bad caps. I fished it out of storage recently to fiddle with it and received the strong smell of battery acid from the antistatic bag.

I will add to JayCeeBee's sentiment that I've never had a CPU go out either. I've overclocked a few, but even those (the one's I still have anyway) are still working fine. All but two of them have been Intel.

MSI K7 mainboard died within a year of purchase, the replacement still works. Other than that I might have two HDD's die on me in the past 20 years. I think static electricity is not to be feared as much as people think. My friend worked as a network admin for years and did all the repairs wearing a knitted shirt. I've personally never taken any precautions (except turning off the machine) while tinkering with a PC. 😀

I've had so many things die on me ...
HDD from all brands, some slot 1 motherboards, one slot A motherboard, several geforces, countless playstations (ok, 2 PS1 and 1 PS3 and 1 PS2), etc ...

Way too many Maxtor HDDs. And a single Deskstar.

My friend's X-fi titanium-something PCIe failed in a peculiar way last month. It still works, but if he turns the volume up too high, it locks up after a minute and emits a high-pitched BEEEEP through all speakers at maximum volume.

I remember WAAAAAAY back in my early teens that I had a Cyrix MII 333 in a MoBo where the graphics chip eventually gave out...
Also a bunch of HDs... surprisingly two from identical i5 Dell Inspirons that were bought together (by my dad and a friend of his), whereas the HDD in my old'n'beaten Acer never gave me any trouble.

Personally, I've had all these die spontaneously:
Floppy drives, several hard drives, CD/DVD drives, RAM, various fans, an FX 5900 Ultra, CRT monitors and televisions.

Two years ago, my brother had a complete system failure. We tested all the parts and found almost everything to be bad: motherboard, CPU, some of the RAM, PSU, a fan, and video card. I can only speculate that it took a hit from a surge or lightning strike or something. It was pretty odd.

I have a few parts that were working before and now suddenly seems to be dead.

A-Trend Voodoo2 12MB
Guillemot Banshee PCI
Athlon 1,4GHz Thunderbird
Athlon XP 2100+ Palomino
Asus A7V133 (not sure)
ECS K7S6A