Here's my fail story:
#1 shorted a CD-Rom and half-shorted (it half-worked, so
) a mainboard while trying to turn the cable of the floppy disc, I knew it was wrong because the light of the floppy was always on and it didn't work properly. The floppy survived
, the Toshiba 16x CD-Rom and mainboard of a Pentium 90 were gone - well the mainboard was only half gone, it worked but everything was so slooooow.
Had to replace it with a cheap mb called "Bravo Bravobaby AT". Don't ask I don't know to this day what strange brand that is, but it worked and even worked later with a P166 MMX replacement for the P90.
#2 I bought a new Athlon 1200 TB with a MSI board that had a ALi chipset for hybrid SD or DDR Ram. I bought that board because I wanted to save money first using my old 2x64 MB of SD Ram I still had from the Athlon 700 TB (Slot A). The cooler, a absolutely fantastic piece called Thermaltake Mini Super Orb wedged the die of the CPU when I tried to mount it - it was injured beyond being rescued. That started my big love for that cooler.
Also the outer fan of the cooler (it was vertical blower with 2 fans) didn't work, only the inner one. Nice.
I tried to RMA the brand new Athlon and they sent it back, broken as it was, my 300 DM (about 150 Euro) for the Athlon were gone, I was a very young teen and had worked for this.
#3 Still same system. I bought a Athlon 1333 TB to replace it and it worked! Then I did something with the PC, I think I installed a drive or something and afterward wanted to start the finished PC. Nothing. It simply didn't switch on anymore. I RMA'd the board and told them to send me a MSI board with DDR and VIA 266 chipset + 2x 128 MB of DDR Ram instead. It came back, and still, no, nothing worked.
CPU was gone too. Seems I shorted both when tampering with the PC.
However this time I got a RMA replacement.
3 months were gone, I only had a measly P166 MMX for that time, then I finally finished building the PC and started playing Counter-Strike with the newly arrived DSL internet connection. That was big fun - totally worth the waiting (I switched from 56k analog with 200 pings to a ping of 40)!
#4 I had a Phenom II 940 overclocked to 3.4 GHz back in 2010. It wasn't working properly, though I didn't knew that because I didn't do stress testing with it. Just started playing WoW (I was playing fairly serious and didn't had the time
) but that game didn't really use all its 4 cores, so I didn't notice any problems. After some time BF BC2 was released and I started playing it, totally ignoring BSOD or hangups while so - just thought it's the game.
Then after just one year the GTX 260 (with 216 shaders XFX BE) failed. I warrantied it and got 180€ back from the 240 I payed initially. Yeah, for that and 100 bucks on top I bought a HD 5850. However, the 8600 GT I had for replacement a few weeks and the HD 5850, BOTH exhibited exactly the same problems - that was the moment I realized, "oh, maybe the CPU is overclocked too high!"
. I downclocked it from 3400 to 3300 (stock: 3000) and from that day everything was perfectly stable. Long story short: that overclock somehow destroyed the GPU.
That's it for now I don't want to continue it though.
I hope reading my fail story was fun.
) to sort/fill out my and dads prescriptions.
