The closest thing to actually ruining hardware is thinking that you might have. Today, I have had two rather unpleasent close calls. First off, I was building my Math Teacher's new Shuttle PC. Upon opening the box and the start of pulling out the green styrofoamish stuff the Athlon 64s are packaged in, the little plastic bag fell out-popped open-and landed on the desk. This resulted in some bent pins. Fixing those is not a fun task. Fortunately, it went in after some pin tweaking. Unfortunately, I do not know yet if it still works... You never know, but it theoretically should. The most worrisome case was what happened with my PC at home. My little brother had a glass of water on the desk my personal computer is next to. After some altercation with my OTHER little brother, the glass of water got knocked down-on TOP of my computer! Even more worrisome, right on the top is a fan. Of course, it all went right in. After a quick shutoff, cursing at my little brother for being stupid, and around panic, I dismantled the system, and let it dry for three hours. Fortunately, she lives! What close calls have you had?
Hi, My close calls are; I wasclaning my H/S, so i removed it, and took it for a bath, and once i cleaned and dried it, i took it over to the pc, and while movingit into place, a drop of water fell onto the board! . So after panicing, and drying, it worked! Also, the close slip on the board when removing old style HS, and trying to get the old HS off the 9700 pro i had.
Knocking a pint of Dr.Pepper into the side of my monitor, it made some whirring noises for a while. But seemed fine. Didn't keep it that long to find out though! Also spilt various drinks into/onto the keyboard. Still seems to work, though a few keys are sticky!
Knocked a pint of water over the top of my pc, and then did the same thing about 20mins later, I was drunk Luckily it stayed dry inside though
Was building up a P4 system and forgot to put the HSF on... a lot of smoke but miraculously it worked without fault.
I was working on an animation project. I had a hammer on my desk left from something else. I had to give it to my roomate to hide, and I never found it. now I keep my hammer in my locked car in a toolcase. *(no computer parts were harmed as a result of this event.... thank god)
not mine but a mate's... had his 950 Athlon (About 5 years ago... ) and it was on but making some noise.... so he stuck a screw driver into it... man i never saw him move so quick when he realised he could fry his PC! Or the win98SE CD that exploded..... man i needed a change on boxer shorts when that thing went bang!!
<stupidity>I was zip tieing all my wires up and i couldnt get this one zip tie on. I reach inside with both hands and try and fit it, I wasnt paying much attention to anything but the zip tie. after about 5 minutes i got it and went to tighten it more. Its then that i realize i was resting my hands on my x300 (cant afford anything better atm). I freaked out, until i tested it and it worked ! </stupidity> -Fry
I was tidying some cables around back my case, and stuck my hand on the top of the little divider (looking from the opposite-mobo side of an ATX case), and realized I was setting my hand right on the mobo...It still worked. Drooled on my Audigy 2 ZS once....Don't ask....It still worked too.
iv drooled on stuff before, some close calls was when a cd exlpoded in my mums comp and a shard nickd mme above the right eye. have spilt beer on my motherbaord. forgot to plug the fan in on my jet7 once, was playin CS 1.6 for like 8 hours before i realised that my room temp was like 45C stuck my finger in a volcano 9 aswell
I fasioned an intake out of two extra drive bays with a dremel, and when i turned the computer on i realized i screwed the fan on backwards So i just undid the nuts at the end of the screws, and flipped the fan around (while the computer was still on). When i was putting the last nut back on, my hand slipped, and went right into the blades of the fan. Luckily i only had a little cut on my finger, and the fan was ok.
my close calls: when i was cleanin my case i unplugged everyhting. when i was done i plugged all the stuff back in( or so i thought) and booted up. after i got back from dinner my moniter program thing started goin crazy. it turns out that my p4 was at 99c and thats the max for my program thing so it mightev been higher. it was at 99c for about and hour. dam near had a heart atack when i found out what was goin on
tons here. almost miswired an atx plug, shorted out my psu a few times, lopped off fingertips in fans etc.
-accidentally plugged both the molex and sata power connecters into my sata hdd which it states on the label in bold writing NOT to do.. it booted to windows fine, then i noticed and quickly shut it off and corrected the problem.. still works . -had a ccfl inverter making a high pitched squeeling noise.. at first i thought it was a toroid in my psu vibrating - since i had just worked on my psu. After further investegation i found a quite nicely toasted melty inverter.. lucky i had been listening out for something, since i wouldn't have heard it over my fans
Drilling through a pci plate for a connector while talking on aim and went right through the plate into my hand. Didn't got deep but enough where there was quite a bit of blood dripping down my hand.
I run my system with my motherboard and such laying on a piece of cardboard, open to the world. Well I have a chaintech board with the little otes like thing over the mosfets, it has a gold colored metal shroud around the heatsinks. I had recently been working on the tiny fan to limit the voltage to it, as it whines horribly, and when I touched the metal shielding i got the biggest static shock I have ever had, scared the crap outta me knowing that i was that close to frying something on my motherboard. Hmm what else, O got a scare when I was cleaning some thermal paste off my friends processor and I got some of it on the pins. I spent like 30 minutes trying to get it all off the pins so i wouldnt short it :O. Hmm....Oh. Our gateway, I was tinkering with the inside, plugging in fans and such while it was still on, and the pci plate of the mx440 inside of it wasnt screwed in. I had the monitor unplugged and when i went to plug it back in the card came partly out of the agp socket Thankfully it still worked!!
I was working with my computer about 1 month ago, and at that point, I had a UV CCFL on the side. I was messing around with something and shorted out the mobo, so the computer turned totally off, but obviously the switch didn't. I turned off the switch for a few minutes, and then turned it back on. As soon as I did, the computer powered up, and white smoke started billowing out of my case. No one has EVER seen my hands move that fast, they went right to the switch in back and I hit that little black piece of plastic. The smoke stopped coming, but stupidly I picked up the inverter (the piece had actually started on fire), and it burned my hand. The actual scare was not the mobo shorting, but the fact that the inverter was directly underneath my HDDs when it began burning! Fortunately, both HDDs were fine, but man, I thought I was gonna crap my pants.
Mine: About a year ago, I couldn't afford another case for my P3 server so it ran on top of a piece of cardboard. I was trying to plug in a audio cable and accidently pulled the sound card right out of the PCI slot. The speaker on the mobo made one long beep and then the PC ran normally. I immediatly shut it down. I was worried shitless that I had friend my Tualatin. I once almost stuck my finger into a running Tornado fan when I first got one. I was testing out. I powered it while it was sitting on my desk and it started to push itself around. Oh, I thought it was funny as hell till I grabbed it without thinking. Gave me one hell of a nick in the heel of my hand. Would have been my thumb if it hadn't fallen over when I was picking it up. After that, I made it a rule to never power it without a fan grill in place. There was another time when I was testing sticks of SD ram and damn near tried to pull one out will the computer was still on. Caught myself at the last second.
I pulled the molex out of my 120gb hdd which is right in front of my 9600xt. The molex was so hard to pull out, when I finally got it free my hand flew back and knocked a capacitor off my 9600xt, still works flawlessly to this day.
