Bad luck / studpidity kills hardware
 

Well in my time I have blown up, and fried many a machine. A number of these stories make for interesting reading, but I'll share the first time it occured, I was about 11.

My first major incident was trying to upgrade my humble 40mb HD in my 386, this HD have served my family for a few years now, but with games requiring more and more room, the humble games partion of 15mb just wasn't cutting it anymore. I had a brainwave, scoring myself a old 20mb HD from my schools computer teacher.

So I eagerly ran home, went to my PC, poped the hood, found the relevant cables and plugged them in.
What hadn't I done ?????
Thats right, I hadn't turned the damn thing off! Well I quickly realised my mistake as I heard the sound of shorting wires and witnessed a number of components on my sound card go 'pop' and acrid smoke drift off into the room. My first lesson in computer upgrades and repairs.

Power down first!
(Wasn't I in strive when my parents found out I had fried the family computer )

this sux

first mobo:
lala hs off cpu, some AS, mount it back
:wtf: my computer starts to smell (damn, you could smell it 10meters away from it!)

don't ask me how, but the northbridge (!) was fried:wtf:
it was a sy-5ehm, and I heard someone else's nb came very hot!

A friend of my came over for a lan, but when he arrived, his pc wasn't working. I opened the damned machine, to check what's wrong, and I pulled just everything out, and installed it from scratch outside the case. When I booted, everyting worked fine, for 5 sec... then I smelled something burning.

I forgot to put on the CPU heatsink :)

smoking Athlon TB 1ghz (which was the top notch atm :) )
luckily the shopkeeper just gave him a new cpu, because there were no marks on the fried cpu :D

I went to the Dipro market and bought me 2 32MB SDRAM uh things.
rushed home.
opened up PC.
inserted RAM-thingies. turned on PC....Blackness on the screen. just nothing.

it appeared that the RAM was faulty and had fried 2 of the 3 RAM Banks in my PC leaving me limited to 32 MB of RAM instead of the hoped 128... :(

well, this aint a stupidity kill or bad luck

connect new Maxtor HD, boot up system, start formatting in Windows. After 5% disk starts making weird noises, format in windows starts speeding up.. and finishes after 5seconds.. "error in formatting disk"

hmm.. disconnect drive, connect it to another system, BIOS does no longer find it and the drives makes weird noises from the start.

one Maxtor 120gb DOA
thank god for the 3 year warranty, this one went way too quickly :)

as you may know on the backside of a palomino cpu there are some tiny chips

well, when i tried to attach te dragon orb 3 i trashed one of those chips

alsow once i fried a mobo because there wass some tension one my case, reason i forgot to solder an wire from my baybus

greetz

fried a XP2000+.
a few GF4Ti4600's, a R9700Pro, a Ti4200 and one Ti500.

always badluck, except the Geforce that had a torn off ram-module :p

and they always send me a new card, don't think they test them :^D

buy new 256 ram,
plug it in,

boot

smoke everywhere,


the ram wasn't plugged in correctly ( it was dark in my room )
but I got a new one while the burningmarks were pretty visible!

from then on when I change something, I'll at least put on the light ;)

Must be something that runs in the family, JMke also burned something ... while doing a cpu change ... in the dark.

SuperOrb killed my brandnew Duron700 once :)
it was pretty dark too