During the transition from AT to ATX, the power switch on the front of my PC broke. Having recently helped put together an ATX machine for a friend, I felt confident that the power switch on mine would be the low power ATX variety, so I broke out my swiss army knife, levered off the front of the rocker switch, engaged the scissor functionality on the swiss army, lifted my feet off the ground for safeties sake, and shorted 2 of the 4 points inside the switch. Unfortunately my case was an AT and I shorted the wrong points, so there were fireworks! Fortunately my father's house was quite new and had a safety switch installed.

I still have that swiss army knife; the chard, melted ends of the scissors are testament to the stupidity of teenage boys.

I plugged a cheap ATX power supply into my only good Slot 1 motherboard. BACKWARDS.

Well, when I was a dumb kid, I had a glitch that corrupted the file system (FAT) on one of my drives, which caused a directory inside \TEMP to point back at the root. Instead of fixing it, I decided to delete it, which of course deleted everything on the drive. 😜

My joystick had some problems (I recall) so I took the joystick apart, so the wires and any possible PCB were just dangling along happily on the table. It was of course connected to the PC which was turned on so the joystick circuitry was powered (I recall I was debugging it with multimeter). Well, everything went well, but at some point later some accident happened, I think I was moving some other stuff on the table, maybe a dangling wire or metal-cased joystick potentiometer came into contact with PCB or other wires, short circuiting the +5V and GND in the joystick. That short circuit current heated a wide PCB track on my multi-IO card and blew it like a fuse, so I had to replace it. Fortunately, nothing else broke than the multi-IO card. The joystick could have been connected to a sound card you know, it was a 386DX/25 but I don't recall if I already had a GUS classic in it.

This taught me a lesson not to leave things lying around dangerously, it could have been someone else in the house that could have made the short circuit.

I don't recall frying anything else related to computers. My friend had a PSU with one of those extra 2-pin 5V connectors that could power for example a front panel LED display. He accidentally assumed while doing some dust cleaning that it had fallen off the motherboard and connected it to some free jumper pins, with spectacular smoke effects.

I had some freeware games/demos downloaded from a BBS and despite I said no, a friend ran a BBS ad executable included with them on my computer which tried to swipe the hard drive.

This taught me a lesson not to let anyone touch my precious things 😀

A friend came for a visit with his notebook and external parallel-port ZIP-drive. He accidentally connected the notebook's power supply to the ZIP-drive which fried it. (Same or similar connector, wrong voltage.)

Didn't we already have a thread like this one on VOGONS before?

Anyway, once at work I was building an Athlon XP rig (Palomino core IIRC) and I installed all the major components like memory modules, CPU, graphics card etc.

I switched the bugger on...and the monitor stayed black?

But what was that smell? It became a chemical stench seconds later when I knew it was the CPU that was getting fried 😮
Switched it off and of course I wanted to know what the problem was.
Well, after a short inspection apparently the problem was that I had forgotten to use any TIM (I had installed the HSF directly onto the CPU with nothing in between). The funny thing was that the print on the Athlon XP was burned onto the heat sink, but mirrored 🤣

Another incident, but at home with my own stuff this time.

I was testing hard drives with my Super 7 SiS 530 board (only one I had, but this one was ready to go and the other motherboards required me to piece them together which would consume more of my "precious" time) and the-very-last hard drive made the board refuse to post...and it never posted afterwards, turned out the hard drive destroyed the board 🙁
The strange thing was that the drive looked and felt perfectly fine when looking at it.

Some time later, my mother had a problem with her computer (a semi-brand new Pentium 4 something) and asked me if I could fix it (mostly because I did it for free), for some reason I decided to try her motherboard out with one of my old hard drives after which her board never posted again...I had attached the same bad hard drive to her computer that destroyed my only SiS 530 boards one or two years earlier...
Afterwards I decided it would be good practice to label hardware.

One time, I accidentally killed a Pentium 4 IBM NetVista motherboard by washing it. It was very dirty, with the whole board being covered in dust, but it did work properly before. I guess the board didn't dry off totally, and, while it did power on afterwards, it was pretty much dead, with no video output or any sign of life beyond simply powering on. At least it was a free dump find, and, since I had about a billion other Pentium 4 systems at the time, it probably would've been parted out anyways. This was a few years ago.

Even longer back: I blew up the controller board of a 6.4GB Samsung HDD that came out of a trash-found Pentium II system that I no longer have by shorting it against the open case. Believe it or not, I still have that drive, and the damage that wound up happening to it:

But what was that smell? It became a chemical stench seconds later when I knew it was the CPU that was getting fried 😮
Switched it off and of course I wanted to know what the problem was.
Well, after a short inspection apparently the problem was that I had forgotten to use any TIM (I had installed the HSF directly onto the CPU with nothing in between). The funny thing was that the print on the Athlon XP was burned onto the heat sink, but mirrored

I am really surprised it got hot enough to fry just by leaving the paste off. I guess the heatsink and/or CPU had a poor surface? I have run my Athlon 64 X2 with a heatsink just laying on it and no paste to speak off. Of course it ran warm but didn't fry.

The only really dumb thing I can think of right now is accidentally spilling liquid on a hard drive circuitboard while it was on. There was smoke...

The first time would have been when I hit my main hard drive when it was running. I'm sure I had a good reason at the time but it was unvisited a dumb thing to have done a millisecond later. Plague of bad sectors. I actually paid to have the data recovered from that one (I think it was 2000).

A few years later the Pentium 4 had just come out but I was still running a PIII at home so I was curious. I was diagnosing a fault with a machine at work and had the case open. I had removed the heatsink and fan but failed to appreciate it's importance (my Coppermine was passively cooled). Powered up the machine and it ran for about a second before dying. I touched the CPU, burnt my finger, and realised I'd cooked my first CPU. Told my boss the computer was knackered, ordered a replacement.

I sold my NES for 50DM when i was 13ish and the dumbest thing ever, i threw away the Boxes from the games i bought. 😒

I had a Seagate ST157A once (my first ever HDD, 40MB). Look at the picture below. Can you see the etched warning "DO NOT APPLY PRESSURE TO TOP COVER"?

Well.. Scratching noise and catastrophic failure.

My girlfriend made fun of me for a long time: "Did you applied the pressure directly on the print, or somewhere else on the cover?.."

I had a lot of stupid accidents with computers, morst recent one is killing an Asus p3b-f. For years when testing i powered up atx boards by simply shorting the power-on pins with a screwdriver. This time i was to fast and hit the wrong pins. I will always remember it's last word: POOF!

Also killed a brand new 160 euro socket A board years ago with a small screwdriver when trying to pust the cpu clamp down with it. I knew it was way to small for the job but did it anyway. It made a huge scratch on the board and i never saw it alive.

Probably the most stupid thing was trying to resurrect a dying Geforce 8800gtx by doing the oven trick. This worked before for other cards so i was very confident that i could use this card again.
I put it in the oven during a comercial break while watching a tv show. Totally forgot the card..... in my oven were a lot of loose parts after that, it was a VERY dirty battlefield in there.
I will remember that smell for the rest of my life 🤣 🤣 🤣

There were a couple of times i thought ''i shouldn't do this'', but did it anyway.... i still do 🤣

Drop my 486DX-33 from my desk and killing my 105AT IDE HDD in the process.

Turn the voltage to 115 on an AT PSU in the EU: frying a MOBO and PCBs in the process.

Both in the early 1990s.

I've had my fair share of electronics mistakes, some salvageable, some fatal. Putting DIP ICs backwards and smoking them? Plenty of times. Overheating boards causing trace delamination? More times than I can count. Installing the wrong replacement part, using an incorrect power adapter, or confusing seemingly identical connectors with wildly different voltages, causing a fatal overvoltage/overcurrent condition? Been there, done that.

As for computer specific stuff:

• Anything that can be plugged backwards I've probably done it at least once, with the exception of Socket 3 CPUs (knocks on wood). AT power connectors, non-keyed IDE/floppy cables, port brackets, you name it. I've wired AT power switches in "instant dead short across the mains" configuration too.
• Killed a hard drive by setting it on top of the bare metal case, blowing up the PCB.
• Scratched several CDs/DVDs by moving the computer around while the disc was spinning, or by putting more than one disc in on tray loading drives.
• Damaged RAM sticks by ESD.
• Made my own cables with glaring errors like having all the connections mirrored.
• Made an AT PSU blow up spectacularly by turning it on without a load.
• Replaced the PSU and mobo on a non-working PC only to find out it wasn't plugged in at the wall (!)
• Tried to clean the heads on a Sony 3.5" auto-ejecting FDD from a Mac Plus, lifted the top head a bit too much, the spring fatigued, ruining it.
• Melted a bunch of keys on a laptop keyboard by going over them with a hair dryer a bit too near (trying to dry it out).
• Cleaned a laptop keyboard with a barely moist paper towel, killed it instantly. I hate laptop keyboards now.
• When moving a friend's Performa 6100 I plugged the 110V-only monitor into our 220V mains. It ran for a while and suddenly shut off, I then realized what I had done. I kept my mouth shut and quietly fixed it the next day.

The only really dumb thing I can remember now was a time (not long ago) I was changing HDDs at my dad's job. His old hdd was giving SMART warnings and slowing the system down randomly. Thing is, my dad made the backup (as I told him to), then kept working on the damned PC. Sure thing, after I formatted the HDD, installed Windows and restored the backup, my dad needed files he was working on after he made the backup (and they were importante files too - they were about the payments of everyone else there). Somewhat annoyed me decided then to reinstall the old HDD as a secondary HDD on the PC so he could copy those files back. The case was crappy and crammed, so guess who knocked an SMD inductor coil off the HDD's PCB? Yup, me, yay! Luckly, one other PC was using an HDD of the exact same model (some Samsung 500GB SATA HDD), but it was the main disk of another computer (in a makeshift server - I told my dad a bunch of times to get actual server hardware, but no... he uses regular desktop machines for that)... But we had another 500GB HDD as a spare, from a different brand. So I had to first clone the working Samsung HDD into the spare one, get the machine running with that, then exchange the controller board board, then get my dad to copy the files out of the failing HDD, then switch the PCBs back and then that Samsung HDD became a spare one.

133MHz wrote:

[*]Anything that can be plugged backwards I've probably done it at least once, with the exception of Socket 3 CPUs (knocks on wood). AT power connectors, non-keyed IDE/floppy cables, port brackets, you name it. I've wired AT power switches in "instant dead short across the mains" configuration too.

I hate how AT power connectors are not hard keyed. AT power switch across the mains? That must have been fun

[*]Made my own cables with glaring errors like having all the connections mirrored.

I do this all the time

[*]Made an AT PSU blow up spectacularly by turning it on without a load.

I find this hard to believe. The PSU might have been questionable to start with.

[*]Replaced the PSU and mobo on a non-working PC only to find out it wasn't plugged in at the wall (!)

🤣

[*]When moving a friend's Performa 6100 I plugged the 110V-only monitor into our 220V mains. It ran for a while and suddenly shut off, I then realized what I had done. I kept my mouth shut and quietly fixed it the next
day.

I am surprised it didn't POP instantly.

Before my retro builds, the last build I did was a Shuttle XPC around 2002. I went OEM with a Gateway desktop in 2006 and then an HP desktop-replacement in 2011, which I'm still using. All of this is to say that I don't have much experience with SATA ports, which still seem like new technology to me.

I found a nice Gigabyte / AMD Phenom system at a thrift this summer that I turned into a fast XP machine. Well, only about a month ago, I needed to switch out the hard drive for some reason, and I yanked on the SATA cable in the same way that I would an IDE cable (I guess I was used to it with all my retro builds). I forgot that there is a metal catch on the connector that needs to be depressed. I yanked the motherboard's connector right off the board. Luckily, there are four other SATA ports, and the drive works just fine plugged into another one.

boxpressed wrote:

I forgot that there is a metal catch on the connector that needs to be depressed. I yanked the motherboard's connector right off the board. Luckily, there are four other SATA ports, and the drive works just fine plugged into another one.

I've had some crappy boards (e.g., Gigabyte G41M-ES2L) where these connectors can easily be yanked off with very little force applied. Usually they can be reattached and continue working just fine. Unless you pulled really hard, it's really just a testimony to the crappiness of the board. 😀

While studying, I used to work at the university as a lab assistant & anykey/tech support guy. Our department received a huge sum of money for new PCs. We were asked to look at the specs, but could not influence the desicion.

I think, these were the days when Sandy Bridge just appeared on the market. The thing is, all the PCs were equiped with onboard video, and we did not know that new CPUs had it integrated. Nowadays it's a very common thing and nothing to worry about, but back then we knew well only S775 and S478 hardware. I have bad experience with onboard video on S775: on some boards it can not be disabled and even when it is, it still consumes power.

So there I stood with the list of specs:

Core i5-2xxx
Some Elitgroup motherboard
Zotac Geforce GTX560
... and a 300W power supply.

I went to my superior immediately claiming that:
1) This spec contains onboard video, which we do not need and which will cause a lot of trouble
2) The PSU is not enough to power such a PC
3) Given the above, I estimated most of them to fail by 2014.

I raised a huge panic, which quickly extended to the head of department (when you have only P4 hardware in both classes, any new hardware is very valueable!). The next day the panic reached the head of IT department, who broke the news that the systems were already shipped. However, he had to provide evidence, so the other day he came to us with lots of printing material convincing that onboard video is now a common thing and that I was paranoid about power supply and it was within spec.

What we received later was an OEM InWin system with a separate boxed GTX560. I don't know if my estimate was wrong in the end, I quit the year after this happened and never looked back. Looking at GTX560 specs though, I see "minimum 450W power supply", so I might have been right all the way.