Weekend Open Forum: Your biggest tech failures

This is pretty stupid.

I "hot swapped" a 4pin floppy style power cable into an internal SoundBlaster audigy frontplate. With the power on. And I didn't line up the pins correctly either. There was a burning sensation at the tip of my finger and then all the psu cables started to burn. I pulled the plug and luckily the only damage was to the psu.

Smoking power cables are scary

i have a system failure quite often on my xp backup/reserve machine also the main motherboard power cables are quite short and there is 1 case fan for intake but none for extraction please help!!!!

You story has indeed touched my heart. With that said, sadly this is the "news" forum. And while I'm sure that this is news to you personally, it lacks a certain broader appeal.

Tell ya what, why don't you start a thread in the, "General Hardware" forum, and somebody will likely be along to help you.

I'll give you a hint though, in most one fan cases, the one fan is usually set as an exhaust fan. Or, "extract", if you prefer.

I must say I've been real lucky with computer components and PCs in general, I work on carpet all the time, sometimes on my bed, do my own wiring, work with components outside of the case. And to this day I've only lost a motherboard, twice. The first time I swear wasn't my fault, turned my PC on one day and "POP". RMA'ed it, new board freshly installed, two days later I trip on a USB wire yanking it out of the side of my case shorting the motherboard, so back to RMA it. Other than that I got hit by the Seagate firmware bug that bricks the drive in a bsy state, Seagate would have replaced it but that would have been 750GB of data lost so after some searching found out there was a way to fix it, ordered the $10 part online wired it in to the com port of the drive and cleared and bsy state and flashed the firmware, drive still works to this date. Also a 250GB Maxtor went clicky on me, didn't lose anything and now have a paper weight. Other than that, no major tech failures, my current X58 board is having trouble posting all of a sudden though, probably my overclock starting to give way.

Unlike most of these stories, mine actually has to do with me purposely trying to destroy some tech.

We had this really old-*** server at work, probably from the mid-90s. It had 7 HDDs that needed to be wiped. Problem was, I couldn't get it to boot at all, even off of floppy (you boot into the disk wipe program).

So anyways, I needed to get the hard drives wiped, but there was no way I was going to do it the easy way. So my boss suggested I try drilling holes through the disks.

One thing nobody ever tells you is that your average 3.5" HDD could probably easily block a small-caliber bullet. I first tried going in from the metal side, but it was slow going. So I tried the silicon side. Well, it turns out that the silicon side of a HDD is actually more resilient to drills than the metal side.

An hour later, I had 2 broken drill bits and one HDD done. For the second, I just said "screw it", took the entire HDD apart, ripped out the disks and the rare earth magnets, and used the magnets to degauss the drives.

The rest of the drives were sent to surplus (which has a large degaussing machine specifically for this purpose) with the giant server, because it would've taken me a week to do them all myself.


Another short amusing story is when my dad bought a RadioShack power cord for some computer speakers that were missing one. I looked at the specs on the speakers, and then looked at the cord, and told him that the amperage on the adapter was too high, and he was going to fry the speakers. He told me it'd be fine.

So I stood there and let him turn them on. Sure enough, less than a minute later the speakers were on fire, with smoke coming out. Needless to say, we didn't need the AC adapter anymore, and returned it.

That is indeed amusing. I would like to mention that an adapter having "too much amperage", unlikely. For example, if you have a device that runs on 12V DC, you could connect it to a car battery, and run it successfully, without damage. This is despite that fact that the car battery is capable of delivering perhaps up to a 1000 amps.

The only real exception to this I've personally encountered is with photographic electronic flash guns. If they are connected to a very high capacity battery, the current inrush from the capacitors being charged too rapidly can cause overheating. Bear in mind that the caps can be totally discharged, after the flash has been fired at full power.

Just some points to ponder.

Hence harddrive hunters opting for heavier weaponry...
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2009/03/21/50_bmg_api_vs_18_hard_drives

I think I'd opt for a kinder, gentler, more efficient method of euthanizing the drive, an oxy-acetylene torch with a burning head

I choose to use my dead HDD as 'paper weight' until I got bored and tried to use it as frisbee aiming for the garbage bin; which sound not so exciting enough when compared to DBZ's and Captain's solutions; oh well I still have one of my dead DP35DP motherboards; I wonder what will be the most fun way to dipose it off.

Indeed it does! Unfortunately, you most likely won't be able to buy those armor piercing rounds again, until well after the royal wedding.

I destroyed three Socket 478 motherboards and two (likely no-name brand) PSUs, under the mistaken assumption that the power cable at the back could be plugged in and out without switching off the power at the wall socket.

Then came university, and enlightenment. And a fair bit of rage (Heh.) at being so...uncouth.

Damn good for you, because for some it doesn't come until they have no teeth in their mouth

By the way there is a 'little' power on/off button available on the PSUs, although I am not really sure whether 'no name' brands have that.

Lightning strike 1:
Fried modem, router, and both Ethernet via power adapters. about $400

Lightning strike 2: Thermaltake 750W cable management $220 it cost me.

2 brand new asus 4870s + wireless PCI card due to a faulty P5Q Deluxe.
Both replaced by the motherboard supplier but I am sure i saw him just put the faulty one back on sale lol.

Lightning strike 3: Thermaltake 875W cable management again about $250.

D**khead who wired my place, priceless.

Had an old Pentium 3 pc way back when that had a similar power supply failure. It made a loud popping noise and shot a flame out the back of the pc. Luckily the power supply was the only component that died

My video card NVidia GeForce 780GTX gave out a smoke and died after 1.5 year of utterly regular use.

I bought a device made by Apple

I broke my Iphone 3G glass 3 times. And broke the lcd trying to replace it. And the speaker.

AVG crashed my hard drive with an update. Win 7 64bit blue screen error, drive now unbootable.

So it's pretty much a given you're not Chinese?