My series of casualties...
- Killed my Tandy 1000 SX by having to repeatedly reseat the Programmable Interrupt Timer (PIT, 8253), because from the factory Tandy got one pin bent and the air-gap that developed from aging made it unreliable. I then reseated the chip so much the pin broke off after I resolderd it on twice, so I used a jumper wire, then the wire broke off, leaving me with no choice but to scrap....it was my first computer.
- 1988 Dell 325SX Died because I failed to see the battery rot on the motherboard, the battery acid had leaked and it ate up ALL of the traces for the keyboard controller by setting them alight when it turned it on the first time.
- Killed at least 2 US Robotics 56K V90/V92 Faxmodems by leaving them plugged in during a thunderstorm. I remember being pissed because the third modem I bought was basically a USB Winmodem that only worked on Windows, and I had to use a proxy server for all my vintage and linux machines on Dialup until I moved and got broadband.
- I have a history of laptops getting destroyed by cats knocking them off my lap. Twinhead Slimnote 486C, Zenith SuperSport 286, AT&T Safari 3151. Not sure why those were so delicate when I now have 4 NEC Versa with cases that are made out of gray dried cookie dough that seem to be able to handle being treated like a modern laptop owned by an international executive.
- Cats got one desktop as well - ironically it was a CAT Computers 486 with a ASUS GX4 motherboard in it, that was the computer that came before my current 486 DX4-100 desktop system that I have now.
- Fried a memory module in the GEM 386 DX-20 Pentium III box by dropping a bolt from the AT-to-ATX modded case on the RAM by accident while trying to re-align some parts. $75 down the drain, had to go buy another one at Best Buy the next day for the same price, they looked at me funny.
- Destroyed a Northgate OmniKey 102 by having to resolder the spacebar keyswitch so many times. The solder pads had fallen right off, and it was starting to get electronically cantankerous by that point, not working half the time, so I scrapped it.
- I've been through three MicroSpeed PC-TRAC tracballs, my favorites, but unfortunatley they seem to reach a point where the mouse driver no longer detects them properly due to a severed wire inside the cable.
- Killed an Am486 DX4-100 CPU due to some faulty jumper settings I Found online for the 486-PVT motherboard. It worked at first, and my god did it work, it must have been running at 4x clock or something because it was faster than any 486 I'd ever used - I mean it went RIPPING into Windows For Workgroups 3.11 like it was booting bare DOS Without a Config.sys or Autoexec.bat - just rows of boot text running down the screen so fast I thought Morpheus himself was going to pop out of my closet! It then made it into Program Manager where I Started to load programs, and then it Hung and would no longer post. If only I could find adequate enough cooling for that - I would run it like that......holy crap. Were talking a 486 here that probably was punching in the Pentium 120 class at least. I don't know how the heck the VLB Bus was keeping up so well but it was - no problem.