Nineteen years ago I salvaged a Dell Dimension Pentium 120 tower from my college's IT department. It had a Matrox Millenium II PCI graphics card, 3COM Etherlink II PCI NIC, a full 128 MB of RAM and 512 KB of cache. I even spent some money to upgrade it with a PowerLeap adapter for a Pentium 233 MMX. I then foolishly ran SETI@home on it 24/7. Most likely long-term use of SETI@home burned-out the CPU. The hardware started acting up and the PC kept on freezing. Since it was just my "secondary" PC at the time, I wrote it off and junked the whole thing. Ah, the foolishness of youth...

Unlikely to burn out a CPU like that.

Just random part failure. Just as likely to happen during 24/7 being turned on unloaded, or even just sometimes sitting on the shelf.

ruthan wrote:

Vynix wrote:

I nearly killed my SHUTTLE HOT-555A... A floppy molex connector landed right and square on the IDE header, thankfully I hadn't turned the power on!

I wonder if exist some plastic/rubber caps/terminator for Molex connectors? It would be nice.. we have them for lots of things, but i never saw them for molex, maybe i someone have some Chinese fried, he can make living from that..

I have see them on unused molex connectors on P4 era Dell PSU's.

ODwilly wrote:

ruthan wrote:

Vynix wrote:

I nearly killed my SHUTTLE HOT-555A... A floppy molex connector landed right and square on the IDE header, thankfully I hadn't turned the power on!

I wonder if exist some plastic/rubber caps/terminator for Molex connectors? It would be nice.. we have them for lots of things, but i never saw them for molex, maybe i someone have some Chinese fried, he can make living from that..

I have see them on unused molex connectors on P4 era Dell PSU's.

I should have saved those rubber covers that were from my dead dell dimension 4400, they would've been useful.

Serial kill this week: inserted an ata133 ide pci controller card (with no bracket!) the wrong way in a pci slot on an Asus P5A mainboard I use for testing: no fireworks, just some strange clicks from the psu... took me a while to figure out what was wrong and why it didn't post..ofcourse, trying again and again 😵

Psu and ata133 are dead now, fortunately the motherboard lives. I'm stupid.

Lesson learned? Probably not.

This is why I hate PCI cards that have 2 spots that have gaps in between.

galland101 wrote:

Since it was just my "secondary" PC at the time, I wrote it off and junked the whole thing. Ah, the foolishness of youth...

Oh the foolishness of youth indeed....
I will never forget the time I junked our old Comapq Presario 433 when I was in my late teens; there was nothing wrong with it, I just though its worthless and just cullterring up closet space...longing for it actually brought me to retro computing in the first place!

We should establish a thread on "HW I regret thworing away years ago"...

assasincz wrote:

Oh the foolishness of youth indeed.... I will never forget the time I junked our old Comapq Presario 433 when I was in my late t […]
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galland101 wrote:

Since it was just my "secondary" PC at the time, I wrote it off and junked the whole thing. Ah, the foolishness of youth...

Oh the foolishness of youth indeed....
I will never forget the time I junked our old Comapq Presario 433 when I was in my late teens; there was nothing wrong with it, I just though its worthless and just cullterring up closet space...longing for it actually brought me to retro computing in the first place!

We should establish a thread on "HW I regret thworing away years ago"...

Already been established - Things you regret giving or throwing away?

I don't know how I did it but while trying to remove a GF3 Ti200 to test a Rage Fury MAXX, I killed it - it artifacted madly after re-installing it.

As for the Rage Fury MAXX, it also turned out to be a dud, so I decided to bake it in the oven. 5 minutes at 195C, and as soon as I took it out half the chips n the card fell off.

All this happened on one weekend. Well done me, two for two.

Well, at least ruining a video card that was already broken isn't much of a loss. Definitely worth a shot.

got good story...my first soundcard was media vision PAS16, later donated PC to a school when i was a kid

i wanted it back for many years, but here is fucking impossible to get because all soundcards are soundblaster or clones.

two months ago i found seller with card in box, with all accessories, manual,midi cables, floppys. I was about to pay like 120dollars for it.
so i told seller ok ill buy it but we test it first.

seller connects the PAS16 to ISA slot, powers on and, BANG! , smoke, one tantalum capacitor blown. he powers on again and the mediavision black chip starts to give smoke and burn.

paid him 10 dollars for the box and manuals and floppys. poor card.

Cga.8086 wrote:

got good story...my first soundcard was media vision PAS16, later donated PC to a school when i was a kid […]
Show full quote

got good story...my first soundcard was media vision PAS16, later donated PC to a school when i was a kid

i wanted it back for many years, but here is fucking impossible to get because all soundcards are soundblaster or clones.

two months ago i found seller with card in box, with all accessories, manual,midi cables, floppys. I was about to pay like 120dollars for it.
so i told seller ok ill buy it but we test it first.

seller connects the PAS16 to ISA slot, powers on and, BANG! , smoke, one tantalum capacitor blown. he powers on again and the mediavision black chip starts to give smoke and burn.

paid him 10 dollars for the box and manuals and floppys. poor card.

Any idea why it happened?

I got a good one.

Back in my youth, I had picked up a Gateway 2000 for $5 at a yard sale. It was complete, monitor and peripherals included.
I played with it for about 3 days before I realized a floppy drive wasn't working.
So I opened up the case and got inside of the floppy drive.
The board had somehow cracked pretty badly, and young (8 or 9 years old) me didn't understand how electricity worked.
I wrapped the board in tin foil thinking that would fix it.
I confidently plugged everything back in and powered it on.
BANG! FIZZZ! POP! Sparks! Smoke!

That machine never powered on again after that.

Around that same time, I killed a Sega Master System by using the wrong power adapter.
I was thinking I had the right one but the loud pop told me otherwise.

Fast forward years later and I mixed up the PSU connectors in a 386, nothing major happened but the PSU must not have liked my repeated attempts to power it up, cause it crapped the bed not long after I figured out the problem was my own idiot mistake and put things the right way around.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

A few days ago, I killed an nVidia Geforce4 MX440 video card by attempting to flash a Mac ROM onto it. Long story short it turned out not to be compatible (the monitor received no signal when I powered up the PowerMac G4 with the flashed nVidia card installed) and now it needs its ROM reflashed, the only problem is I can't reflash it on a PC (the PC I used to flash it (Dell Dimension 4600) refuses to POST with the card installed now) so I'll have to either use an EEPROM programmer or salvage a BIOS chip from a defective Geforce4 MX440 (assuming I'll ever find a defective one). I have another identical MX440 video card that still works so it's not like I lost anything.

Is the following feasible: after the PC POSTs with a PCI video card but before the OS boots, plug the AGP card? Intuitively it's a bad idea because AGP is not plug and play and also because the BIOS does resource allocation. But if it works without frying the card or motherboard, then you can reflash the BIOS.

probably better to set primary video card to PCI in the bios, rather than hotplugging an AGP card ... bad things can happen, like burnt tracks.

Nothing fancy i just used IDE to USB adapter and needed to power HDD i have some plug to molex adapter, i pluged it to plug and after to disc, but i was slow and plugged only some pins for short time.. HDD smell badly and died.. or next time i will plug molex first, plug later.. but regardless i wanted to try it by this way willingly.
Half of cigar's pack damage, nobody cares.

- Killed a Powerbook G3 Pismo by removing the heatsink (I was 9 years old and thought it was an RF shield)
- Killed a WD800 IDE drive by plugging in the molex the wrong way (part of the plastic around the female end was cracked)

That's all I can really think of. I'm generally pretty careful with my stuff. Closest brush to death I had recently was accidentally dropping a Voodoo 3 3000 several feet on hard basement concrete (yikes), but it was tested a week later and seemed to work 100%, no capacitors missing or anything either.

For a number of years, my family had an old 286 gifted by my uncle. In 1997, we bought a second-hand Socket 7 machine, but since we didn't know a lot about PCs back then, we got a really bad deal.

The machine was advertised as Pentium 133 but turned out to be an AMD K5 PR-133. The video card was some horrible old thing that didn't even have native Win95 drivers (the driver disk was for Win3.1) and was really slow. The hard drive for some bizarre reason was a horribly slow 2.5-inch HDD with an adapter. Of course, one day I killed the HDD by plugging it in the wrong way.

It also came with a junky no-name 14-inch CRT that supported 75Hz max at 640x480. 800x600 and higher were strictly 60 Hz. When I got a new GPU (S3 Trio) I actually killed the monitor by experimenting with various video modes. When I selected something like 1024x768 at 75 Hz, the monitor made an unhealthy sound and turned off. It never turned on again.

This PC also was very unstable. It crashed a lot. One day I was trying to find the cause of the crashes by removing the components one by one and somehow managed to pull the wires out of the CPU fan. I didn't know that it was possible to replace only the fan and bought a new cooler assembly with fan and heatsink. The new cooler came with a fresh thermal paste and the PC actually ran rock-solid after installing the new cooler. So I accidentally fixed my PC by breaking it first 😀

Forgot to post this, but, back in 2010, the original 10GB Seagate HDD in my Original Xbox 1.6 and the PSU both stopped working on the same day. I replaced the PSU in late 2010, but I didn't replace the HDD until January 2013 as I needed an EEPROM reader adapter to connect it to my computer and make an eeprom file for the Xbox HD Maker CD that I made. After getting the Xbox HD Maker CD created and connecting an old 80GB HDD I had as a spare, I was able to make the HDD and it started to work once again.

Sadly, every game save I had was lost as the old HDD smoked to death when I connected it to my main PC so I had to do the games all over again. I softmodded my Original Xbox 1.6 so I can archive my games onto the HDD in case they start to rot and in case the games are hard to find and I'm going to clone the 80GB HDD to a 480GB SSD later on (need to unlock the SSD since I made a new drive for it for testing purposes).

Several computers:

*Zenith Supersport 286- I tried to fix this one, but I got over-ambitious and screwed up the screen, as it was one of those ZEBRA-connector types. The rest of the computer was broken from sitting in a box that I didn't take very good care of.
*Zenith Supersport 386SX- I shorted the pins on a power supply with Arctic Silver. Totally fried the voltage regulator.
I couldn't figure out why the system would not display other VGA modes properly, like those used in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom I/II, or the Windows 95 boot-up screen. I tried to add some jumpers to the motherboard to see if it would make it work, but the solder would not suck out when heated, but I used the wrong-size drill to make the clearing holes through the vias. I used the motherboard later as a test bed for my IC heat-gun desoldering. I took the power supply from one and the motherboard from the other to repair the system. Still works today, although I can't use Doom or Windows 95 on it.
*Toshiba T6400SXC- This one was terrible, and already on its way out, but I managed to salvage several components from it, including the screen and hard drive.
*Sager FMA7500- This one was starting to crumble, but it was my second foray into retro-computing, and I LOVED the compact size. I messed up the first screen, but later was able to use another screen afterwards without the screen casing. I wasn't able to use the motherboard for anything else.

Several components:
One Joystick in 2010, I think.
Two Rare Memory Modules (1 MB and 2 MB) for the Zenith Supersport 386SX, although for some reason I doubt they were in working condition. I salvaged the memory chips on the off-chance I could use them in the future.
An Okidata ML192-Plus Dot-Matrix Printer, because I had no idea there was a memory battery soldered in. I lost traces, and was unable to bring it back to full condition. The parts themselves are still available, if anyone wants them.
A Gateway 2000 Keyboard, because I broke two keys off of it, so I took it apart for parts. They're still available, if wanted.
A Conner 121MB Hard Drive- This one was on its way out, though. It worked well for the Zenith Supersport 386SX.