Stupid things you've done to your PC.

[Nimbus]

I once put a pop-tart in my Floppy disk drive (this was what, 7 years ago?).

Ugh. Must have been, what? 12 years ago I think. Tried this with a pokemon card. Broke the damn floppy drive.

I also did some pretty stupid things back when I started building PCs. I swapped my motherboard from one case to another. On carpet! Fried the bloody BIOS!

 

[OneHP]

Corrupted the bios chip on my old mobo by trying to overclock, the overclock failed and I had to turn of the PC whilst it was in some bios critical state, not good.

In relation to the water cooling horror story: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/618067/make_ur_pc_faster_oil_cooled_pc/

 

[prefectimo]

I wanted to if there was a problem with the switch on the back of the PSU. It was a school computer, in hardware class so it was expendable, and without looking at it I reached around the back a flicked it. The switch changes the current from 240v to whatever the mains voltages is in America. It blew up and made this awesome band and flash. The teacher didn't care he just said grab another PSU from the cupboard and that was it.

This is a story that happened to my friend. He had never had any experience with a new-ish computer and wanted to try his hand at overclocking. I think he just used some simple tool and raised the load with fixing the voltage settings. After a few minutes his new family PC turned off and started stinking. He had burnt out both the motherboard and PSU at the same time. He has never tried to overclock since.

 

[hefajstos2]

Well once when I was 18 I built a rig with some spare parts I had lying and all I had was this monolith of a case and no proper fans other then for the cpu (I belive a pentium M- which may have come from my laptop that I just wrecked) bought a MoBo drilled into the case for the pegs and airways, tucked the wiring along the case so there would be a clear line of site to the componets. There was still the problem with the lack of fans so I took oscillating fan removed the the fan cage and cut into the plastic housing to did alittle work on the wiring put a secound psu. It was done the great work of my life. I turn it on it works. I say to myself "this Is AWSOME!". I overclock it and she purrs like she wants more, so I try to restart and it gave me a flash and thats it. I try to figure out whats wrong, turns out the fan I installed created enough static to torch everything in the case. I proceeded to scream at the top my lungs, My parents rush to my room thinking I was dying at the hands of a mad man, instead the found me dying on the inside. Live and Learn I Guess(I wish it didn't burn into my wallet though).

 

[johnman]

I bled on the motherboard after cuttung myself on the back plate. good job i decided to finsh building it in the morning so it had a chnace to dry.
I also managed to installed anti-virus 2009 onto my computer. I knew i was happening but i failed ot stop it in time, DOH!

 

[Count_de_Monet]

One of the keys on my old HP laptop stopped working so I pulled the thing out and tried to fiddle with it to get it to work. After cleaning it, popping the errant key back into its correct place and putting the keyboard back in I reached up to get a book and dropped it on the keyboard... It popped 5 keys out (one of those happened to be the one that was newly repaired) and rendered my keyboard completely useless. That was a fun few days doing homework on the awful school PC's. I also never stored heavy books above my computer desk again...

 

[wordsmith]

I've watched people replacing RAM before... "What do you mean 'earthing'?"

Also, I've seen someone take a hacksaw to the pins of a graphics card because it didn't fit. Lets just say it didn't work any better afterwards.

 

[Shadow Law]

I had a horrible computer at my house and the day before we got our new one i was working on it and it frooze on me and gave me the blue screen of death. Needless to say that was the last straw as i began to kick it over and stomp on it. Strange thing is it worked a little better after i pluged it back in. That will teach him to turn blue ever again.

 

[Knighty-boy]

Overclocked the Proccessor of my bros laptop to the point of it blowing up with its own tiny mushroom cloud.

i sed he spilt milk on it

 

[Ancalagon]

I once attached the power cable the wrong way round to my brand new 486 motherboard, frying it instantly. Nowadays they put little clips on the cables so you can't do that. Good idea.

Now the command I found was, get this, a compression command. Away I went and BAAM: I had way more HDD space and my drive was compressed (I didn't realize, at the time, the problems it would cause)!

I remember when I compressed my drive, it was amazing! I had a whopping 65Mb monster, but even so, once DOS and Windows was installed, plus a few necessary utilities, you could only fit five or so games on it at a time. Bought DR-DOS, used Superstor that came with it, and I had twice the space. Hard Drives were really expensive then, so it was great. Sorry it didn't work out for you, though.

 

[Useful Dave]

I didn't poke the airduster into the GPU fan when cleaning out the interior of the PC.

It overheated and died, bam there goes an 8800 GTS barely a year old.