classics 🤣
Of course I've done the AT m/b power connector thing, with the exception that this was when AT m/bs were not retro. Was working as a tech back then so it wasn't because of ignorance, but after assembling like a dozen PCs I plugged one pair or connectors the other way around. Cleaned the black marks and returned it as DOA to the supplier though 😎

dondiego wrote:

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

the PC I used to flash it (Dell Dimension 4600) refuses to POST with the card installed now

Of course but you could boot with a pci card and use nvflash to flash the geforce.

I've used a secondary PCI video card (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000) for guiding through the BIOS flashing process without having to risk losing a signal while the nVidia card flashed. Even with the Diamond video card intact, the machine refused to boot with the Mac flashed nVidia Geforce4 MX440 video card installed (it still boots with the Diamond video card installed by itself, so I'm pretty sure I didn't mistakenly flash the wrong card. Besides, would nvflash even BIOS flash an S3 video card? 🤣 ). Just for kicks I installed the ATI Rage 128 Pro card from the PowerMac G4 into the Dell Dimension to see what would happen, it powers on normally (the fan on the card spins) but it doesn't detect a video card due to BIOS differences.

I just thought of another piece of retro hardware that I killed in the past: Sometime in the year 2011, I bought a Gateway Solo 1450 laptop at a thrift store, I took it apart constantly to the point where it didn't want to be put back together anymore in the end (some screw holes got stripped). I didn't have an AC adapter for it so I tried to power it up with some generic 12V AC adapters, it turned on for a few seconds then shut itself off. Then when I finally found a working AC adapter (an HP one with compatible specs), it wouldn't power on, but I noticed a spark when I unplugged the charger. I guess I somehow managed to kill that laptop by using too many inadequate AC adapters.

My Abit KT7A/AMD Athlon XP 2000+ PC burned itself out in November 2011 after almost 10 years of continuous use. Powered it up one morning, went to make breakfast, then came back 15 minutes later to find the PC off, a cloud of wispy white smoke, and the unmistakable smell of barbecued electronics. Motherboard, CPU, PSU, memory, case fans, and all expansion cards were goners; floppy, ZIP100 drive, DVD-ROM/DVD-RW, and all 4 hard drives survived. Removed everything, kept the working parts and case, and chucked the rest to the recycle center (I can't repair dead hardware (can't solder worth a damn) and don't have a need to keep it around unless it has historic significance).

I have a PCChips M571 socket 7 motherboard that I used for testing old hardware. A few months ago, I was using it to test a power supply and was probing the voltages on an ISA slot. Everything was fine, but a loud sound in my house startled me, the probe slipped and it shorted something in the slot: bzzzzzt!

To my surprise, the motherboard kept working! However, after turning it off it never worked again 😒 . At the very least the BIOS chip died, so I replaced it with a new one but I still can't get it to post, so it looks like other components were also fried in the process.

It's not a big loss, but it would be nice to revive it, so if someone can provide troubleshooting steps for detecting blown components I could give it a try!

Might be the ISA slots, the clock crystal, resistors, caps, and so on.

My victim - ASUS P4V8X-X motherboard. I did a bit of overclocking with P4 1.8A s478 cpu. It ran on 10% OC all the time, but when I started to play with the settings, it sometimes did not start even if speed was reverted to 10% OC. First thought - PSU. So I pulled 800W from working PC, 80plus bronze - same thing. Since the board is like >12 yo, thought it need re-capping. Bingo! Few caps have too high ESR, and voltage leak was too high on them. All caps were desoldered, I got some spares, mounted them and off we go. 5 seconds and POOOOOF! 😲 , a cap lid shot my forehead 😁 - but I got a safety glasses 😎 . On most board I got white half on the circle cap symbol on a PCB was a '-', the other empty was '+' - but not on this ASUS board - it was reversed. Some voltage regulator was also damaged by the way. I found some other board and ordered it (5$ +shipping) - the availability of socket 478 motherboards is still high and they are cheap so no point in ordering voltage regulators that would be money equivalent of a whole board. One lesson from this story - never trust your belief that manufacturer uses standard marking on their boards - always check twice. 😊

Not so retro, a LGA1155 motherboard about 4 years ago. I was reconfiguring my main desktop, removing the Sandy Bridge CPU and motherboard and installing instead an Athlon FX and its motherboard. All went well until I started packing up the removed parts for storage/future reuse. I did a dumb mistake and installed the socket protector upside down. About 1/4 of the socket pins were bent. I did my best to unbend them under a magnifier, but after a while I gave up in frustration. I still have the motherboard and CPU and hope to bring them back to usefulness at some point when I have several days to keep straightening the pins. There's probably about 100 of them left to fix.

I blew out a Pentium MMX motherboard, still in its case in my closet. I’ve also blown out a Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D card. (lol RDRAM)

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

dondiego wrote:

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

the PC I used to flash it (Dell Dimension 4600) refuses to POST with the card installed now

Of course but you could boot with a pci card and use nvflash to flash the geforce.

I've used a secondary PCI video card (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000) for guiding through the BIOS flashing process without having to risk losing a signal while the nVidia card flashed. Even with the Diamond video card intact, the machine refused to boot with the Mac flashed nVidia Geforce4 MX440 video card installed (it still boots with the Diamond video card installed by itself, so I'm pretty sure I didn't mistakenly flash the wrong card. Besides, would nvflash even BIOS flash an S3 video card? 🤣 ). Just for kicks I installed the ATI Rage 128 Pro card from the PowerMac G4 into the Dell Dimension to see what would happen, it powers on normally (the fan on the card spins) but it doesn't detect a video card due to BIOS differences.

If you have a FX5200 you don't mind sacrificing, flashrom can flash a MX440 BIOS on it and then you could swap the 8 pin BIOS chips between them, although at this point this would be still useless given MX440 is the next most common GPU to FX5200.

I accidentally just killed a network card. I was installing a soundcard and somehow, i guess, caused the network card to squirt out of the slot to some degree. Booted and saw smoke. The pins for the network card, 3 near the back, had melted. Thank god it wasnt the SB Pro 2 i was installing. I've got piles of old network cards.

I suspect it was something I did rather than component failure, but managed to smoke (literally) the logic board on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB IDE drive containing a load of important retro / archive files. Fortunately I've quite a few of these drives from the same batch sitting empty, so a quick board swap and I was back in business. Whew!!

Geforce 6600 GT PCI-E, original fan was too noisy even for testing, tried one replacement too noisy too, so it tried some passive heatsink from 6200.. i did not play or use card in system and boot with other, later i want to boot with this one and found lots of artefacts even on boot screen.

Later i found out that there were some transparent stands on cooler, which apparently keep cooler too high or. heatsink wasnt good enough even for card in 2D, i dunno if such card have different clocks for 2d and 3D.. Other mistake was check card temperature by heatsink touch it was quite cold, because of bad contacts chip.

I managed to kill a Unisys 286 when I tried to LL format the rll hard drive, why it went poof during the start of the process I will never know but even a new psu and video wouldn’t get a post

Here's what I remember killing in no particular order:
I stupidly blew up a Hitachi UltraStar 15k rpm hdd 🙁 it would not turn on so foutu pour foutu, I opened it up..

Then I killed TWO PCs, every time the mobo fired up but never posted.. I have no idea how I killed them..

I also killed a cheapass SD card reader by plugging the usb header backwards (in my defense it was one of those thin USB header connectors)

One day, I also badly mangled a CRT (on purpose as this pice of shit, (because of all CRTs this one was so shitty that the case bent if you pushed it hard enough) didn't want to sync properly, and if course sometimes it would shutdown itself) by dropping it, the colors were messed up 🤣

Vynix wrote:

...the colors were messed up 🤣

In the early 1980s I had found a early Goldstar color TV. It had such a shitty tube, so I didn't bother to repair and sell it (I did that for making $$ when at school), instead made an experiment: dropping it hard, turning it on, and looking how the picture changed while the mask bent and came more and more loose. It was fun 😀

I have never really managed to kill stuff, from wrong installation. Though I killed a CT-2760, by playing Full Throttle in Dos. I guess the card just gave up due to old age. Back in 1995, then I killed an Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro this exact way. It just gave up. Else I can not really recall killing hardware. I guess this is just what happens, when stuff gets old or have bad caps or something like that.

Wednesday I electrocuted myself and killed a 2007 iMac power supply and apparently killed the SATA function on the mobo.

After unplugging it and replugging it 50 times, I remembered suddenly that you only have to forget *once*.

Luckily it was the computer that died and not me.

Killed a 2gb ram module just getting it out of that damned janky slot, broke off a cap on the edge.

Kind of a nightmare job, now that I think about it. Had to take the LCD back out of that system about 12 times because of badly biased/caught/unplugged cables and such.

Mostly I don't kill hardware, nasty week. More often I get iffy hardware and fix it up.

Back in... 1997 I think I wanted to install an extra harddisk in my PC but didn't have enough molex connectors left so I made a splitter cable myself.
However, on one end I mixed up the 5V and 12V and, of course, I connected that end to my existing harddisk (without backups). Needless to say I saw a bit of smoke, immediately turned off the computer, and found out I had to start all over again....

It really felt like I died a little inside.

#rantalert 😊

I have destroyed a lot of (potentially good) hardware over the years. Most notably several years ago I threw away a working Osborne I portable CP/M computer and a potentially good Acorn RiscPC. Why? Nobody offered me any decent amount of money for them and I needed the space. For some reason people sometimes keep on waiting and waiting and don't even make an offer. The reality is that I can't offer (large) stuff for € 10 or 20, because it's too much work and usually also frustration for too little money, so then I rather offer the item in a lot of e-waste or it goes straight to the dumpster. A couple of weeks ago I offered some old IBM PS/2 hardware cheap. I got questions like 'does it work?', 'is it complete?' and 'I want to come collect this next week'. I am tired of such folks who think that they can have their cake and eat it too. If I offer something cheap, then take it as is, collect it quickly and don't piss me off. The dumpster is frustration free I can tell. There are even folks out there who are outright rude and leave negative feedback on a local market place website if they don't get what they think that they 'deserve'. On a positive note: the IBM PS/2 hardware was saved by someone who acted the same day 😎

I've tossed out plenty of good working hardware