Paperclip thing should work fine - unless there's a cd jammed in it I've killed loads of stuff but the most spectacular one was me and this bloke were carrying a huge compaq server down some stairs, I was holding it by the front bezel ..which snapped and this huge thing went all the way down the stairs. I think most i.t. people have done this
I miswired a PSU when I reinstalled the connectors only the floppy headers though flipped the power switch and was rewarded with a POP! and a bit of smoke. scared the hell out of me
Well when I changed the case for the family computer idleing at 80C, when I took the heatsink off to put some AS5, the thermal pad had turned to epoxy, would not come off at all with the quite large amount of force I was using, so used a heat gun to melt the pad, all good, untill I started cleaning off the thermal pad, and whats that? A hole in the heatspreader?!? it wasn't there when I first installed it. Still works though now sitting happily at 32C idle. Other than that, well two old servers taken to with a sledgehammer, oh how those EDO RAM chips fly. And if you havn't tried it yet, dropping twelve 14"-16" monitors off a tower onto railway tracks is quite spectacular. Bit of work lugging them up there though, its only 20m.
a dvd burner, i threw it out the window when it managed to snap a very important cd of mine containing all my current work. two floors on to concrete lol!!
ah, the irony. the only thing you wired right was not only the cheapest thing to replace, but what made all the other parts go boom. to avoid this problem ive only ever used split loom for sleeving.
Sufficient time has elapsed since my last piece of destruction, so I can now let the world revel in its sheer ineptitude. I splashed out £400 (around $700) on a Sony 19" TFT (with X-Black). A spontaneous purchase, I felt somewhat guilty afterwards. Got it home, plugged it in downstairs to check for dead pixels. Couldn't find any. Took it upstairs, hooked it up, it looked great. Oh, hang on, there's a stuck pixel. It was red, so it looked awful on white backgrounds like Explorer windows. I tried massaging it. Repeatedly. Got a load of finger marks on the screen. Tried cleaning them off. The pixel remained stuck. I remained annoyed by its existence. I kept at it, though. A few days after getting the monitor, I noticed that there was a small area on the screen around 10mm in size where the protective outer coating on the screen had vanished. Whoops! All that massaging and cleaning had wrecked the screen. Darn. £400 down the drain. Calling Sony to try and get assistance wasn't much use. They said it needed replacing in its entirety but because I'd caused the damage, it wouldn't be covered by the warranty. Darn. £400 down the drain. I toyed for a while with just throwing the monitor in the trash as I was pretty upset by what had happened (and annoyed by my own cluminess) but was persuaded to stick it on Ebay to try and mitigate my losses. It sold (the auction did mention the damage to the screen, but was vague as to how it got there) for £180 which conveniently was how much my PSP cost the following weekend! (As an aside, the cheque from the Ebay seller bounced and it took three weeks for me to finally get the monitor out of my sight - it must have been jinxed.) An expensive lesson. I won't be massaging pixels again. Neither will I be buying Sony TFTs.
Well, i killed my xbox just got NFS:U2 then me and my mates had a 12hr gaming session next morning woke up went to play it it started to make a clicking noise, long story short i pulled the hdd apart the read/write arm had snapped. Oh and i have killed multiple ide cables they didnt want to come off the hdd's i was removing on work experience.
Had a few things die but not killed anything. I hd's the platters make cool frisbys Blew an 14 X 2 lcd display (hmn thouse things dont like 12 Volts up the 5 volt pin)
Hi all, i'm a newcomer here, but i saw this thread and had to post my most recent heart attack. The above example, except it was a socket939 and sounded like i tore a sheet of cardboard in half when i removed the heatsink with stuck cpu. Works great, though. As for what i've broken... Plugged a pendrive and iPod into my frontside USB and blew out my mobo. My brand new MSI Neo2Platinum, that is... that wasn't fun. Many years ago, i was diagnosing a bad psu and (GENIUS!) plugged the hdd into one psu while the mobo it was connected to was attached to a different psu. I remember smoke and suprise. This was before my parents trusted my ability to work on computers. Needless to say, i wasn't allowed to work on our 486 anymore. Replaced the HDD on my grandfather's laptop and didn't secure it properly. I can hear either the platters or the arms bouncing around in it now. And ... fixed? I had a cheap PSU blow and take my TI 4400 with it. I gave it to a friend, who insisted on paying for it. To disuade him from paying, i licked the component side. Two days later he told me it worked fine. I hadn't been able to get any computer with it to boot in weeks. magic tongue? Franco
in total I have killed three amd athlon xp motherboards (300$ canadian) a 1ghz athlon (50$) but with all that gone i still have a pentium 2 motherboard that has had capacitors and other stuff fall of and i just soldered them right back on and it still worked. I seem to kill all the new stuff i get not the old stuff go figure?
just had a athlon xp motherboard die on me. Also snapped the front usb board on my case in half trying to get the front off yestoday ;/
alright, didnt kill it but its the first time I've ever heard the overheating alarm from a p4... replaced the thermal compound and forgot to plug the HSF back in... got aobut 10 minutes into jedi academy when it stopped dead and beeping...
i wanted to see what would happen if you switched the red 110V/230V switch on the back of the PSU whislt the PC was running I SH*T myself i wasnt expecting a bang type of affair. I dropped a panel PC and broke the LCD screen, case, the HDD fell out and i buggtered the CD rom tray. I was taking out a processor in one of my old PC's and a mate came up behind me and went BOO really really loud, my finger slipped and i broke off a couple of Capacitors of the Mobo thats all i can think of
The most embarrasing piece (and really the only piece) of hardware that I broke was my barely 2 month old geforce 4200 (back when it was a pretty sweet card, got a decent OC on it too). I just got a sunbeam UV led set, the ones that came in the little plastic box, and I was installing it with the computer on. My reasoning was that it's just a plastic box, what harm can it do. Well apparently it was a plastic box PLATED with real metal. Soo, when I placed it on my video card, many sparks ensued, followed by a reboot and a screen filled with ugly green and red bands. I never ever did anything with my computer on afterwards, and I didn't assume anything wasn't metal either. PS: I took a voltmeter to it later and it was indeed conductive, not sure why they would do that though
Working on my mobo while it was outside of the case on a table (fiddling with the attached parts). May I note the table was on carpet...dog walked by, I petted it, reached over on the mobo and felt a little pain on my finger when I zapped my mobo...
Whilst attempting to remove the two pin connector in a Seasonic 400W Tornado , I managed to break one of the pins Now running the fan off a fanmate 2.
