Your biggest hardware muck up

[Superpatsy]

Dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. Bought a replacement screen, replaced the broken one, picked the laptop up, dropped it again, broke the screen...

The guys I play basketball with never passed me the ball for a few days

 

[Threepwood]

Have never had a problem...

But I did learn at a very young age not to mess around as when I was 7 years old I tried to get a car radio working by pushing some of the wires into a home electric socket.

:S it went bang, and I got a right telling off for it!

 

[ShivP]

Dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. Bought a replacement screen, replaced the broken one, picked the laptop up, dropped it again, broke the screen...

The guys I play basketball with never passed me the ball for a few days

....lolololol

Found this one the funniest, I mean saddest one in the thread so far

 

[iB CoMpL3XiTy]

Fried a GTX570 by putting 1.2V through it, did mange to get it to 1Ghz for 10 minutes though...

 

[[HB]Rugrat]

My first major blunder was years ago when I was trying to fit a heatsink / fan. I don't even remember what CPU it was but the hs/f had to be levered into place on one side after fixing the other side onto its mount (might have been a gigabyte rocket something or other?). Anyhoo as I was applying pressure with a screwdriver, it slipped and I ended up gouging a deep score into the motherboard, taking out half a dozen caps in the process.

Second - and most painful - was even longer ago. In the days of CRT monitors I had a 17" sony trinitron screen which was my pride and joy. I was getting up from my desk one day, carrying a big mug of hot chocolate and idly chatting with the missus as the bottom of the mug caught the top edge of the monitor. The mug tipped and it's contents spilled along the top of the monitor and disappeared into the grille at the back. There was much fizzing, popping and the smell of burning before my wife dived for the plug (I was hopping around screaming uselessly). She got the hair dryer on it several times over the next few days and when I dared turn it back on, it worked fine - though there was a faint smell of chocolate for quite a while when it warmed up

 

[biuro74]

Biggest fail ?

I'm doing workarouds, fixes etc, and there was a time & need to buy Playstation 3. So I've bought it - purely for one game that my wife beloved from first sight after watching a trailer (Last Of Us). It was "phat" revision (oldest one) and started to turn off - probably because of temps. Well known issue. So I've decided to change a thermal grease - not only between chips and radiators, but between graphic chip and its lidding - so de-lidding was necessary. All the descriptions was easy-busy-peace-of-cake (I always check custom commentaries to find out eventual weak sides)... and how it ended up for me:

BTW, maybe I should contact Sony as memory chips (Elpida ?) should've been covered with lifetime warranty

 

[nails666]

Worst I've done was when building this Phenom II system I put the cpu on the socket just to check alignment without opening the clamp on the socket but them somehow forgot that it was just resting on it and put the heatsink on. Funnily enough it wouldn't work but luckily when I took it apart it hadn't actually damaged any of the pins on the cpu.
One a friend of mine did years back was with a brand new Athlon. Built his system, pressed the power button and it started to powerup but then beeped and shutdown. Rather than check what the beeping meant he just kept hammering the power button to force it on, shortly followed by a pop and puff of smoke as the chip overheated and died due to the heatsink not being properly attached

 

[AMG]

Shorted my Power Supply out on my case.

One of the molex pins was not in securely and yeah it shorted and somehow messed the power supply up..It made a hell of a noise after that..It was an OCZ powersupply lol. It appeared to have damaged my CPU too

Next, was almost boiling out my watercooling, as my pump lost power..It was on a fan controller that was powerful enough, ironically I read this on these very fourms the night before the channel died I caught it early and saved the machine through.

This one was not me . While at collage some students on my IT course didn't know what the red switch on the power supplys did...So they changed it...and blew up a few machines Next day IT came around gluing all the switches

 

[rids57]

When living in Texas I took defensive measures against an approaching storm and they have good ones out there. I turned everything off and pulled the plug. Sadly I didn't pull the modem cable from the wall and the telephone pole outside the house took a direct hit. The modem was in a cupboard luckily, because that exploded into tiny burning fragments and lots of smoke, though my computer didn't fair too well either. There was a large, smoking hole in the motherboard where the traces connected to the LAN socket and it had taken out the graphics card (brand new top of the line AMD birthday present), all of the memory, the sound card and three out of four hard drives.

 

[altrewin]

Broke the PCI-E release lever on my current motherboard, still not sure if I'll be able to get my 6850 out of there when I upgrade!

 

[Worthy]

I was tidying the cables in a new build, leaning over the case with one of those metal watch repair screwdrivers in my mouth. Stupidly whilst the PC was on as I was listening to music to make the cable-tidying more bearable. Sneezed, screwdriver fell out of my mouth, shorted something and fried the mobo.

 

[fiveub]

Whilst working at OcUK for many years, I have seen many fails. But it happens to all of us right?

From someone using a glue gun, to make sure his SLI 580 GTXs were not going to come out of the PCI-E slot? And wondered why his PC was not working. - This is when the 580s were the top of the range cards back then...

Someone raging at me in the shop, saying that we have not fixed his PC because his PC doesn't even turn on anymore. Interrupting about 6 people waiting in a queue before him in anger, he plugged his PC in the shop to show me. I went around the shop counter to flick the PSU switch. He walked out quiet as a mouse after that and apologised.

And of course we sometimes get silly questions, like which way does the air flow on a fan.

I am sure I can list so many, but they are my favourite 3 that come to the top of my head.

 

[DoneADougalOnSofa]

Broke the PCI-E release lever on my current motherboard, still not sure if I'll be able to get my 6850 out of there when I upgrade!

You should be able to- it's the lever itself that holds the card in. Unscrew the backplate and it should slide straight out...


Don't quote me on that, though!

 

[Midlife Crisis]

Glue gun a graphics card in place that's class Ha!, I once got an old Acer lappy of the bay next to nothing, fitted a new hard drive and a replacement lid as one of the hinges was cracked. I had no wireless at the time so inevitably as you all can guess I tripped over the attached lan cable sending the 17 inch lappy flying off a table, I still worked but the lid was completely detached from the rest of it. The old lid and a tube of epoxy resin later it was back in action, I wish I had a photo of that old lappy, that glue went everywhere.

 

[DoneADougalOnSofa]

Almost had one with my current Corsair 540 case- put the HDDs in, clicked them into place in the bottom of the case. Turned on, no spin-up from either drive.

After rechecking every connection and drawing a blank, I really thought I had a big problem.
I fiddled with the drive caddies, when one of them slid in a few more millimetres with a clunk. They worked after that...

 

[Schizo]

Never done anything....im a good boy

 

[smsmasters]

Accidently bending socket 775 pins by placing the socket plastic cover under the metal socket cover and trying to close it with the lever.

 

[Midlife Crisis]

I want to hear of a massive water cooling calamity, come on someone must have.

 

[BattFink]

Closest I've had was when i put my watercooling loop together, filled & bled the system etc..

Checked everything was in place & fired up the system.. all the fans then spun up to maximum and CPU was idling around 80 odd degrees Turned out the PSU lead to the pump hadn't been completely clicked in and the pump wasn't running.

Clicked it on whilst the PC was running, was amazed to see the temperature drop from 80 to 19 degrees within a couple of seconds.

For a WC fail though this usually makes me cringe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LjqCoVbZ_g

 

[ubersonic]

And of course we sometimes get silly questions, like which way does the air flow on a fan.

I swear to god about 2/3 to 3/4 of the Arctic Freezer 64/7/etc fans I have seen user installed have been blowing air away from the rear fan instead of towards it