Other Scariest thing thats happened with you and hardware?

My all time fave brown trouser moment was about 6 years ago when I rushed to upgrade my pc ready for a LAN party that night. New CPU, RAM, Gfx and PSU. All the parts present and correct, what could go wrong??

Nothing!! Went together a treat, pressed the power button, booted into windows straight away, started installing the new driver and then it hung.... and then it smelt like burning..... and then i remembered I didn't connect the cpu cooler fan back to the fan controller....

Yeah, I didn't make it to the LAN party..... Bing: 1 AMD: 0

 

Samsung F1 or F3 got a little warm, que clicking sound and smoke pouring out of it, plugged the plug quick, tried it again and it just clicks and won't let the comp boot, keep meaning to try it again, but it has stuff I want on it and I don't want it to be dead ;(

 

Had smoke coming out of the PSU.

 

I drilled a hole through a GTX 480 before it launched.

Then I fled the country.

 

Generic PSU went bang a few years ago (before I learned!) with an unpleasant burning smell. Thankfully it didn't take anything else with it.

 

haha, flea to the country where they make them defiantly the last place they've look for you!

 

Ok, can any one top that!

The best I can do is testing a PSU with it switched on and bridged two wires that really didn't need bridging. The tester was blown out of my hand and disappeared out of the window. That was about 3 months ago and to this day I've still not found it.

 

That has got to be the best one so far.

I found out the hard way that over-tightening jubilee clips will cause them to leak coolant all over your MB and soundcard. The soundcard still worked the MB didn't.

 

We demand details!


My scariest thing was one morning when turning on after plugging into the docking station my Dell Latitude D830 and definitely seeing a spark. No action after that. It was dead. Not even one LED would light up when I pressed the power button. I undocked, took the battery out with shaking hands, as it was my one and only computer at the time (with not backed up work documents on it) and it had cost waaay too much. Smelled it's back side and not discerning any bad smells, thought to myself "crap, it didn't even go out with a big bang and a scar to prove it. it will remain just like this, a brand-new-looking laptop, but a brick otherwise. couldn't it have gone boom and have a hole in it, or at least an exploded board/panel?" Anyway, after reading up on how to boot into diagnostics mode, I managed to make it light up, which was a big relief. I'm typing on the same machine right now. Battery's not working though. Not sure if it's the circuitry that charges it that's blown, or the battery itself, but one thing's for sure: these business-class laptops surely were made sturdy!

 

The worse moment for me was just finished building my AMD x2 rig and needed a floppy drive for the SATA drivers. Run into town and pick a second hand one up for about £2. Connect it up and turn it on, bad smell of burning and the sight of flames through the case window. Took my nice new psu, SATA hardrive, motherboard and dvd drive with it. The processor was the only thing that survived. Explaining that one to the missus wasn't easy. It appears that there was a short on the power connection on the floppy drive.

 

haha reminds me of when the NAS drive died, the girlfriend went mental and when the drive came back from seagates data recovery centre, she went mental and bought f**k loads of blank DVD's and demanded backups!

 

i have had a few bad moments like when i first finished my first pc i turned it on and it worked, then i looked at the back of the PSU and i saw a little switch it read 230v i then set it so it said 115v and i turned the pc on there was big spark and a loud noise which made me jump back a metre

and then there was that time i was testing a second hand motherboard which i had just bought for £100 and put some £50 water blocks on it, and i decided to turn it on using the pen method where you just touched the power header and it turns on( i read about it in the custompc mag ). but i did it with a chunky screw driver and accidentally touched 2 headers which made some sparks fly and short the motherboard. this really pissed me off as it had taken me about 2 hours to fit all those water blocks really neatly so there where no chinks in any of the hoses and then zap it all down the drain!!! and my grand parents Christmas money!!!

and keep in mind that i have only been building pc's for 3 or 4 years, what next is in store for me

 

Did that with a Dell PSU for a SFF machine, which was shipped set to 115V... Gits...

 

Accidentally miss typed a number in whilst overclocking my friends pc, that was the end of his e8400...

 

Years ago now, i got a brand new mobo and decided to update the bios before i even installed the OS.

Flashing with the old Floppy method, anyway the flash failed and it totally bricked the mobo before i even had a chance to use it

 

Brand new Gigabyte EX58-UD5 mobo.....applied the thermal paste and started installing the cooler,

Couldn't fit the cooler so took off and took out cpu,

Noticed some paste on the edge of the cpu socket so wiped off with some tissue,

Ripped out about 17 pins

 

When I was at college the kids worked out they could do this to the machines... *facepalm*

 

I guess the worst thing I've had happen to me was when I dropped my 9650 and bent a few pins ( I bent them back, it still works. ) or when my brother was helping me coax a Scythe cooler onto the clips on the mobo socket with a screwdriver.
He slipped, the mobo was stabbed to death.

 

I managed to brick a brand new x38 mobo when a bios flash went wrong, cant even remember why i wanted to flash it, also when i was putting together a new build i droped a hard drive from about 3ft onto the motherboard and graphics card, lucky for it all worked fine

 

When i built my first system and didn't really know what i was doing with overclocking so i maxed everything and pop it turned of with no power to it at all lol all i had to do was reset the jumpers
But i had only had it 1 week lol thought i had broken my 800 quid build lol