And I thought I was bad. 🤣

Just kidding, we all make mistakes, some just happened to be more interesting then others.

For me the biggest mistake I every made and still make to this day is buying parts without verification that they're compatible with etchother. Just the other day I bought a second 9800gt for sli koolnisd only to find my motherboard can't use anything newer then gf7xxx in sli. 😒

There was also the time I dropped a live psu with the cover off. It landed on my foot. A cut plus a nice shock, it made my day!

Losing a vital spring down the drain after spending all night cleaning a keyboard, key by key.

I wish there was a faster way to clean a keyboard.

Just recently, I was parting an old system I was given. It had a Western Digital 30GB hdd that I was pretty excited about. I tested it, no bad sectors. So as I'm sliding the hdd into an anti-static bag (oh, the irony), one of the corners of the bag pinches closed, and instead of sliding into the bag, the drive drops to the floor. Yes, I was even *standing up* while doing this, to maximize the drop distance.

Unfortunately, the drive did not survive the fall.

clueless1 wrote:

Just recently, I was parting an old system I was given. It had a Western Digital 30GB hdd that I was pretty excited about. I tested it, no bad sectors. So as I'm sliding the hdd into an anti-static bag (oh, the irony), one of the corners of the bag pinches closed, and instead of sliding into the bag, the drive drops to the floor. Yes, I was even *standing up* while doing this, to maximize the drop distance.

Unfortunately, the drive did not survive the fall.

I did the same thing with a 40gb Seagate drive. It fell 6 feet, the corner hit the concrete floor. It checked out fine and I ended up putting 2k on it for a temp file server project.

I'm usually careful, however not long ago I got a FIC VT-501 socket 7 motherboard for USD 2 at a garage sale. It had a Pentium-133, 32 MB of RAM and was working perfectly. Only, the fan attached to the heatsink was rattling horribly, so I decided to replace it and picked up a socket 7 cooler from my stash.

The new cooler had a horribly tight retention clip, which also was quite sharp. I stupidly pushed as hard as I could to lock the clip in place and it scratched heavily the motherboard near the socket. Looks like one or more traces were cut since all that motherboard does now is "beep-beep-beep-beep-beep", and I can't get to the damaged section to try and fix it as it is under the little tab of the socket. 😒

Another one: a couple of years ago, I was cleaning my K8N-SLI motherboard. When I was going to remove the heatsink the thermal paste had dried up and it didn't budge. I pulled a bit too hard and the heatsink came right off... along with the CPU. I was surprised how easily the CPU came off with the lever down, and the pins were bent in all possible directions. Luckily the motherboard survived without a hitch. 😊

TheMobRules wrote:

I'm usually careful, however not long ago I got a FIC VT-501 socket 7 motherboard for USD 2 at a garage sale. It had a Pentium-133, 32 MB of RAM and was working perfectly. Only, the fan attached to the heatsink was rattling horribly, so I decided to replace it and picked up a socket 7 cooler from my stash.

The new cooler had a horribly tight retention clip, which also was quite sharp. I stupidly pushed as hard as I could to lock the clip in place and it scratched heavily the motherboard near the socket. Looks like one or more traces were cut since all that motherboard does now is "beep-beep-beep-beep-beep", and I can't get to the damaged section to try and fix it as it is under the little tab of the socket. 😒

Another one: a couple of years ago, I was cleaning my K8N-SLI motherboard. When I was going to remove the heatsink the thermal paste had dried up and it didn't budge. I pulled a bit too hard and the heatsink came right off... along with the CPU. I was surprised how easily the CPU came off with the lever down, and the pins were bent in all possible directions. Luckily the motherboard survived without a hitch. 😊

Retention arms just keep the CPU in one place, they are by no means secure in their sockets.

I once dropped a 250GB Laptop drive from my computer to my desk. Even with the glass platter it still runs fine to this day.

Oh, and what about my 150-170 USD 486 build? it works fine today, but I had mounted the motherboard into the case and for some reason I couldn't get it to test the memory. 3 days later I take the board out to find that there was a standoff I hadn't removed, and a standoff I COULDN'T remove, so a bit of electric tape later, the machine works flawlessly.

turtlesedge wrote:

Losing a vital spring down the drain after spending all night cleaning a keyboard, key by key.

I wish there was a faster way to clean a keyboard.

Haha, I feel your pain. This is why you always put down one of those drain filters before doing something like this.

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

ODwilly wrote:

I did the same thing with a 40gb Seagate drive. It fell 6 feet, the corner hit the concrete floor. It checked out fine and I ended up putting 2k on it for a temp file server project.

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'm another of those people who naively threw out lots of h/w in the past. Among the things I tossed was my slot 1 CPU collection; I recall I had a 300, 333, 350 (in SECC and SECC2), 450 (w/ NOS cooler), and PIII 500, along with the P2B-F that was the backbone of my family's second PC. 😵

While benchmarking several CPUs one after another I fired up the system and no boot. Realized I hadn't put the hs/fan back on. RIP K6-3 400. 🙁

not very retro but: forgot to attach auxiliary power cable on my athlon/barton mobo; ran till it died - psu, mobo, cpu - partially stuff went even black; also: detached hard disk that was still powered :>

mrau wrote:

not very retro but: forgot to attach auxiliary power cable on my athlon/barton mobo; ran till it died - psu, mobo, cpu - partially stuff went even black; also: detached hard disk that was still powered :>

Hah, I remember me just going, "Oh I just need to swap a quick SATA drive out".

Well I pulled the SATA cable out, and it was fine, hotswap is built into every SATA controller

Then I pulled the power out.

Molex power.

Which is NOT hot swapable.

I saw a few sparks, the PSU turned off, but everything was 100% fine, it was just a bit of a shock *Badum tss*

Not all that retro, but I was reassembling a laptop and didn't realize the screws were different lengths. When I finished, I turned the laptop over, lifted the lid, and there was this screw sticking up out of the palmrest.

Killed my Duron and motherboard in two separate incidents. Had both for only 3 or 4 months; bought them as a Christmas present to myself in 2005. First I accidentally barbecued my Applebred 1.8GHz Duron chip using thermal pads I acquired from a Playstation 2. Not long after I severed a trace on the backside of my ABIT KW7 board after the flat-blade screwdriver I was using slipped. I don't remember why I was using the screwdriver.

Blew up a 286 I was given for free many year ago. I had plugged the AT PSU cables in backwards; red to red (it was dark). A quick POW and a light show with some magic smoke indicated the board was undoubtedly toast.

Removing parts from a board so I could clean them and rebuild it for fun. Left it plugged in. Slipped, hit the power switch while a PCI card was half way inserted. Multiple caps exploded as well as a few other shorts and some traces melted. The board was, obviously, entirely fucked. It was a perfect board too- 440BX, 4 slots of SDRAM available, ISA/PCI/AGP.

I once damaged a very important computer at the place I worked. Some sort of encryption machine. The thing had been assembled by spooks and was running some exotic government-issue encryption hardware/software. Poking around inside it I broke the heat sink. Fortunately it was a standard Pentium 4 motherboard so I quickly ran out to the local hardware store and got a replacement.

why in gods name were you poking at that

The heatsink/fan was caked with dirt, I was trying to clean it, and whoops.

I didn't do it! Nobody saw me do it! You can't prove anything!

Well lets see.... I
Melted my overclocked Athlon xp to the motherboard cause the heatsink was way to tight and broke the clips
I fried my IBM aptivia amd k6 trying to overclock then shorted the board
Try plugging in a generic power supply into a dell that's proprietary, threw a fuse in the house also screwed the board
Threw out 2 of my voodoo cards
Threw out 2 packard bell legends 486 and a very nice ss7 DFI motherboard

Oh yes those Dells were evil. The amount of grief they must have caused. You'd think they would at least change the shape of the plug/connector.

Errius wrote:

Oh yes those Dells were evil. The amount of grief they must have caused. You'd think they would at least change the shape of the plug/connector.

Glad I have a Dell supply.