Pentium with L1 AND L2 disabled ~ 386DX. Any slower and you need throttle.exe which works quite well.

Sometimes though the video card is the issue. A slow CPU and a fast video card can still cause issues for many games. Plugging in an old ISA video card can help.

Having said that, really old Games are easiest played via DOSBox...

Not my fault but exploding capacitors are quite a shock.

Besides thrown mice, I had a habit of throwing ball mice back in the day, I've only ever really smoked 1 component, which was a Sound Blaster AWE 32 w/ daughter board. Although I don't think the daughter board was attached at the time. Anyways after watching it smoke I re-examined the machine reseated some cards and that card worked for another couple years till I later replaced it. Never really sure what caused it to smoke in the first place.

I learned a lesson that day though : Don't drink and fix computers.

Exploding caps on my dual PIII 1ghz Abit VP6 back in 2003, three caps blew...I had the case open so it was like a small firework coming out of the case 😀

Circa 6 months ago I fried a creative livedrive II with a live 4-pin molex connector touching it's circuit board 😜

Talking personal accidents caused by hardware I had to sew 5 stitches on my left forefinger and slipping inside a brand new Antec minitower back in 2007 when I was building a new Athlon rig 😜 cut off some nerves and I still haven't got 100% feel in that finger.
Was quite embarrasing to explain to my collegues next day at work why I had a big bandage on my left forefinger! 😊

Funny you mentioned the A7V333 having keyboard problems, I had one and the PS/2 keyboard port died on it. I had to use a USB keyboard. However I was using Linux for some reason at the time and I couldn't get the USB keyboard to work with it.

I ended up upgrading to an Abit NF7 because I was unhappy with the A7V333. I can't remember what the issues were but I remember thinking that I was sick of dealing with its little problems and I haven't bought a VIA chipset board since.

Prior to that I had an ECS K7S5A and THAT was a real lemon of a board. Some people seemed to go alright with it but it seemed for every person who praised it there was 2 more who had no end of problems. It was a real lucky dip with that board. I bought it thinking that I'd take my chances and I ended up with a lemon 🙁 I haven't bought a 'Shit in Silicon' chipset board since either 🤣

I plugged the molex connector on a HDD backwards, seems I'm not the only one who achieved that feat 😁 At those times I didn't even know how all this worked, and plus the connector had the tips smoothed (don't know why), so it can go either way. So I took a chance and said 'hmm, I think this is the correct way' and plugged it. When I switched on the PC, smoke started coming out of the WD Caviar 1.2GB HDD. It was the main HDD on those times... all was lost...

Around those times also, I had to brought home a HDD from a friend from school. I carefully wrapped my school sweater around it in the school, so it didn't get any shocks in the travel to my home. All was good until I reached home and grabbed the sweater from my backpack. Seems I pulled it wrong because it started to unfold (the HDD in the center) and finally the HDD was free and plummeted to the floor. Beign positive I still thinked it would work, until I plugged it in the PC, switched it on, and the HDD wasn't even recognized, all the sounds it made was 'clack, clack, clack' ones... I never paid my friend that HDD, I remember I told him it was like that when I tried to use it..........

The PSU molex cable magically finding it's way to the USB headers on the mobo also happened to me... But the mobo survived, the PSU automatically shutted itself down, and I didn't undertood what was happening (I tried and tried to turn the mobo back on, and it didn't even spin the fans), until I saw the molex perfectly connected to the USB headers... 😖

One of the later ones I remember is trying to hold the soldering iron, not by the grip... that hurt, a lot.
I got another minor burnings during the learning period of using the soldering iron, but nothing like that grabing it mistakingly with the naked hands.

unmei220 wrote:

I got another minor burnings during the learning period of using the soldering iron, but nothing like that grabing it mistakingly with the naked hands.

Man I did something similar...

The iron fell from the table and my reflex was to grab it 😵

All good though, I didn't even get it looked at 🤣

I have also absent-mindedly grabbed the business end of a soldering iron, but only once after such a painful lesson! 😁

I haven't really had any big computer accidents caused by me, other than software related stuff I did as a kid.

Here's a somewhat interesting story though. I had a 500GB external hard drive that I kept on a shelf next to my computer and ran 24/7. For some reason, air just didn't flow there (even though it had half a foot of clearance on all sides) so after about a year it ended up overheating. I ripped the case open and found that the USB board had partially melted. It definitely smelled interesting when combined with the plastic casing it was bonding to. Awesome!

Interestingly, the bare IDE drive from inside still works fine and I managed to retrieve all of my data. However it won't actually work on most boards because they stop if they detect the drive has a SMART error. The drive gives an error because it basically overheated, but there's really nothing wrong with it. So I use it in my Dell Dimension 8250, which lets me bypass the error. I've used it for about two years in there without a problem, and that system runs pretty much 24/7.

ah soldering iron burns, don't think I've ever grabbed onto it though usually I just remember brushing the round bit before the tip with my hand and going ARGH!!

turning off L1 and L2 and then using cpuint1 seem to work ok, and theres no fun in using dosbox though it appears now if I make it really really slow it does work, but dosbox is no fun.