The Avoid killing your Hardware Thread

[HalfAHertz]

I've spilled coke/beer/coffee over my laptop keyboard on numerous occasions. Luckily it's still working.

 

[Fourstaff]

Oh I have another story. I used to own this HP laptop with 8400GS (you can almost guess what happened). So, one day after trolling about TPU, I decided to run Heaven on it, it BSOD and started artifacting like crazy. Needless to say, it (or at least the 8400GS) died of overheating. Went online to check, and found out that it is one of the lemon batches (Damn Nvidia + HP) but not covered by extended warranty. Lesson learned: Don't trust HP engineers to come out with something robust and don't trust Nvidia products to be of any quality. Lesson not learned: Stressing your laptop graphics is a big no-no (I ran the Heaven using this lappy and got 400+ score, I was soo happy).

 

[hat]

I've spilled coke/beer/coffee over my laptop keyboard on numerous occasions. Luckily it's still working.

I've killed a few desktop keyboards that way. I even spilled soda on my AthlonII2800 tower... good thing it spilled on the side of the case that didn't have the vent. I'm much more careful now, heh.

(you can almost guess what happened).

Lesson learned: Don't trust HP engineers to come out with something robust and don't trust Nvidia products to be of any quality. Lesson not learned: Stressing your laptop graphics is a big no-no (I ran the Heaven using this lappy and got 400+ score, I was soo happy).

:shadedshu how about just not stressing laptop components

 

[Fourstaff]

:shadedshu how about just not stressing laptop components

What is this "stress" you are rambling about? I merely ran a test, clocks and voltage are at stock, and I have not tempered with auto shutdown due to overheating. In other words, its HP's engineers are at fault for not safeguarding against failures

 

[Darcmeister]

i remember trying to upgrade an old amd cpu and was trying to pry the heatsink clip off the mobo with a screwdriver and ......slipped ! Left a nice deep line in my mobo ! i was so horrified that i tried to pretend it had'nt happened and performed the upgrade anyway hoping that it might still
work . ha yeah of course it would ! cost me £275 for a new mobo bundle deal.
Lesson learned- if its a tight clip get someone else to wreck it for ya !

 

[travva]

the best one i know of is an am2 build my father and i did for a friend. we had not installed any amd cpus for quite a long time and were getting very frustrated trying to get the freaking heatsink to mount properly on the cpu socket. my dad, who is very impatient, like me, decided to use some elbow grease and make sure it was going on there. well, he did it. he got it mounted. we checked it and it was very snug. everything seemed great. we hooked up the fp connectors and fired it up. well, i didn't know it at the time but we literally "fired it up". i let her boot up, without checking temps (DOH!) and proceeded to install vista. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, then all of a sudden a faint aroma came over us.

In a panic we looked inside the case to discover the cpu had turned into mt. st. helens. We figured out pretty quickyl that we had about 3 issues happening. The first one was that the cpu was mounted with the plastic still covering the heatsink contact... which really shouldn't be possible but if you use enough force you can fit anything into place i guess hahaha. second, i don't know if we did this or not but, the cpu fan wire was frayed on the heatsink, so the fan was spinning but probably only about 100 rpm. this one is the best part though, the board we hooked this up to had been manually set to overclock another cpu and well, this one wasn't up to snuff. the end result was the cpu was toast, literally. the board was ok once we replaced the cpu and figured out the error we made. we still give each other crap about it to this day. funny thing is my dad is an electrical engineer and has several federal liscenses etc etc, so he knows a good bit about electronics, just not amd heatsinks apparently!

 

[blkhogan]

My eight year old, who has the brain of a baby mosquito sometimes, decided he was going to bring a glass of water into the computer room. Now the rules of the room are simple 1- NO DRINKS or food 2- Dont touch anything but the mouse and kb. 3- Dont touch anything but the mouse and kb.
Well long story short.... He spilled the glass on my table that housed my crunchers at the time, causing water to work its way into one of the psu's. Well the psu turned into a 4th of July fireworks show for about 5 seconds. I heard it clear form the other side of the house. I came running in to find a room full of factory smoke. Everyone knows once you let the factory smoke out its almost impossible to get back in.
What did I learn from this? Keep monsters out of the room with the expensive stuff in it. Now the room has a dead bolt and key to get in. Kids. Can't send them back and cant by law sell them on the black market for pc components.

 

[dr emulator (madmax)]

hm i think if this thread doesn't get put in gn i'll sift through the best ones and put them on the first page
anyway thanks for the replies they made me chuckle i'll try and think of some daft stuff i've done (hopefully without dropping myself in it)

 

[D007]

I've spilled coke/beer/coffee over my laptop keyboard on numerous occasions. Luckily it's still working.

Lucky you, I could look at my pc the wrong way and it will stop working..

Oh I saw a funny once once my brother did.
He tried to run two 8800 gts 320's in sli on a 500 W PSU.
It lasted for like a month or something then one day I was hanging out and bam, the thing like literally blew up lol..
Sparks went flying out if it, smoke came pouring out, it was done..
I told him it wasn't going to last..lol

 

[overclocking101]

lets see here goes:
1: when watercooling make sure you have a strong and reliable pump this problem killed 2 different setups of mine 1: gigabyte Ga P35 DS3R northbrige fried due to pump death, 2: killed a masi P35 neo 2 fr and E6850 due to the TEC overheating from pump failure.

2: Quads dont mix well with the EVGA 680i, or the Biostar Tpower I45, my Q6600 (long ago) killed both those boards

3: Dont pump 1.9V through an E8500 even under DICE

4: if you go subzero make sure to insulate well.

5: Plugginf high powered TEC's into your psu molex kills the psu and melts the moles plugs

6: if you run metal blade fans use fan guards (metal blades dont break )

7: a good sturdy psu is the most important part of a setup (cheaping out on the psu can and will kill everything)

8: if you have the system running dont unscrew things because they may drop onto your mobo/gpu and short them out and kill them.

9: dont take a psu apart while plugged in

10: dont check resistance while powered on

11: dont solder while powered on.

all these things I have done at one point or another in the past 5 years, mostly at the begining of my pc adventures. but it's safe to say I learned what I know the hard way

 

[freaksavior]

I unplugged my flash drive with my homework on it and now the 1gb is 8mb. joy joy

I can't figure it out how to format it now back to the 1gb.

 

[Steevo]

Forgot to plug my fan in on my thermaltake volcano cooler for my prescott overclocked. The system made it to the windows sign in screen, it froze. I touched the cooler and had burn marks on my hand, but it survived.

Put 1 stick of ram in a cramped case backwards once, let out the magic smoke. Killed all four sticks and the motherboard.

Didn't do it again. ran a X300 without a heatsink, it just started artifacting, and you could feel the heat from the core about a inch away. Shortly superglued a heatsink fan on from my last POS MSI boards NF4 ultra chipset. Still works.

 

[ste2425]

oh ive just remembered this one haha, speaking of the spilling things on rigs my aunty had a very old win98 rig (i was only little) and her poodle decided to go for a pee on it, more over inside it, dont no why she would have had it open anyway it still ran a charm

 

[MohawkAngel]

Touched a cpu to se if it was working...thumb on cpu to feel the heat. Realised thta the old intel cpu wasnt producing heat. Unless i realsed i just washed my hands and the humidity on my thumb made me not feel the heat.. result after the water boiled.... burning pork odour, skin left on the cpu when i removed my thumb and blowed cpu

 

[dr emulator (madmax)]

I unplugged my flash drive with my homework on it and now the 1gb is 8mb. joy joy

I can't figure it out how to format it now back to the 1gb.

that reminds me of my sony camera's memory stick
(which was faulty only a few months after buying it £90 or about 139.63 US$ for a 128mb stick )
anyway cut a long story short it had been loosing pictures,
card reader said it was corrupted so after formating it a few times using fat (which is what it was when i bought it ) i decided to format it using ntfs :shadedshu well after doing that it wouldn't format again, and wouldn't even let me put anything on it or take anything of it either, it said it only had 5mb so like my fans it was an expensive lesson i learnt
(i really should have taken it back to the shop instead of dismantling in )

btw have you tried rma'ing it ? it might be repairable,
although i hope you haven't any pron on it (now that would be embarrassing )

 

[jaydeee]

broken motherboard/processor for me!
so what happened? overclocking!... may be? LOL
yes it is heheheh

 

[kyle2020]

I had a thermaltake bigwater system back in the day, but the block was quite badly scratched. Didnt want to get my hands dirty lapping, so I got a new block, identical like. plumbed everything in, fired up, got into windows and managed to double click CSS . . . boom, blue screen.

Suffice to say I was questioning what the hell had happened. Opened my side panel and the block had warped down south as if it were treacle - turns out the pump wire had come loose in all the transition and the block had took the brunt of the heat. Being an acrylic top and having 1.55V to tame with a raging 4Ghz Q6600, it just went bleh.

swapped the block, replaced everything and it all ran fine, despite it having the heat try to kill it.

Killed a few fans in my time with my fingers, and had a few cuts as backlash too. Once decided to replace my HSF (swapped from an S1283 to my Dark Knight) and rushed to get everything back up and running - had to remove my mobo and what not. Got everything plugged back in, stood my case up and to my horror my motherboard fell forwardonto my desk, almost snapping my 260 off at the PCI-E slot in the process. Forgot to screw the motherboard on to the standoffs like an idiot

Thats my story

 

[Thrackan]

Hmm, my top two stupid things were:

Hotwiring a PSU while the 12V plug on my X58 mobo was still plugged in: flying capacitors around the room, and quite the pungent smell that took a while to clear. Result: dead motherboard, €200,- down.

Trying to remove RAM heatsinks: The heatsink came off eventually, it just took the RAM chips with it. The RAM stick still booted though, it just couldn't be used anymore

Can't remember anything else atm except killing some keyboards with spilling drinks.

 

[dr emulator (madmax)]

that kind of reminds me of when i had my cpu cooler changed at a shop for a better one
only to find out latter that they must have damaged my cpu which i sold along with my old motherboard to sir_real for about £5
who then used the mother board in his mums pc and sold the cpu on ebay
and the guy he sold it to said it was dead , but there again he could have been ripping sir_real off
moral of this story is get the shop keeper to change things and not the hired help
ye ye i should of done it myself but them snap on coolers scare me

another bit of advice would be to always check hardware
ye i know most of you will laugh at this, but some time ago i bought a sata lg 20x dvd writer,
gets it home and i put it away
why didn't i test it ey?
well i have already got 3 dvd writers (pata) which all work ok, one of which is yes you've guessed it an lg,
so i had no thoughts of it not working, plus it was meant to be for the new build,
so i left it in the box
anyways plugs it in after 12 months or more of having it in a box and guess what it doesn't work
so i thought it must be because of my old ancient motherboard being only sata1

so today we went into town and got a lg bdrom writer rewriter drive, and it works out of the box
so yes don't leave things untested folks as things don't always work out of the box, as they shouldcry:

 

[dr emulator (madmax)]

well a quick update on the above,
apparently my dvd writer wasn't caputed after all,
it seems it was just that i'd got it plugged into the wrong sata port

well i still don't understand why it does't work on channel 1 and does on channel 0,
but knowing sata nothing surprises me now

strange thing is my harddrives all work perfectly whichever channel i plug them in

 

[SK-1]

I tried to tighten a mb mounting screw, while the power was on. Poof. Bye Bye 680i