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So, what have you fried?

B

Big Blues

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 14, 2007
Messages
73
I'm curious what computers/parts people have managed to fry out of their own fault?

The only thing that I can think of off the top of my head was a 286 board back in oh 1995 or so, maybe 1994. I was changing video cards, and when I turned the system back on - nothing. Power supply fan fired up, and that was it. Then I spotted the loose screw on the motherboard. I never heard/saw it drop.

Off the top of my head, that's the only thing that I remember frying. When I was younger, I know there were many times that it was due to forgiving hardware that it lived (i.e. putting a cable on backwards). Ah to be young and impatient again :).

Oh I remember making an Ethernet hub smoke once in '97. I found what I thought was the right power adapter because it had the matching DIN connector with weird pin-out. Turns out another device in the box had the same style power connector. The hub survived its smoking though ;).

Joel
 
Blew up an outlet by shorting it, inflamed a diode on my receiver by wiring it backwards, PSU smoked after about 8 years of constant use, & therefore 8 years worth of accumulated dust.
 
I can only think of two things I am directly linked to frying.
The first, is a floppy drive, from an old AT&T 6300. On the side of the drive, in the case, on older models, there is a ground connector for the floppies. Well I was rehooking the thing up, and somehow the cable had a slice on it. Well, I dunno how I did it, but I managed to touch that to the unshielded part of an active wire, and it did the opposite of what the grounder was supposed to do. It totally fried and made my floppies smoke, destroy my disks, and ooze some nasty black goo.
The second was a TV. I bought a junker black and white TV at a quarter store(they still exist!) and of course it didn't work. Well, it kinda did, but then it went POP! So I cracked the case open. There were two disconnected wires, and I was gonna connect them to the board. Long story short, I connected them backwards. Totally fried the thing, it it started puffing gray smoke from the back and the front panels. Fifteen minutes later, It was rolling down my mountainside.

--Ryan
 
many, MANY things due to tinkering and .... retardation?

My saddest frying was of a nice 500watt sterio amplifier (the stackable componant system kind) I bought the entire unit at a garage sale for like $20 bucks, everything work except the amp, i cracked it open (I was like 16 at the time) and noticed a strange spot on one of the boards that looked like it was missing something. Oddly enough there was an identicle board next to it, im guess each board was for each of the sterio channels. So I looked at the "good" board and wrote the part number of the capacitor down, drove to the electronic parts store, purchased the part for $0.75 and drove home... laziness - stupidity gort the better of me and I just kind of plugged it in (aka didnt solder or otherwise affix) the holes and turned it on to see if it would work. Well it did, worked great, I couldnt beleive it! Awsome thump thump. Then the vibration of the aforementioned thump thump caused the cap to loosen from the holes and drop down on to the main circuit board... puff puff spark spark, the amp was dead.

The funniest think I ever fried was last year repairing a machine (where I work now) machine came in with no post, turned out either the CPU or mainboard had died. Swapped in a test proc and it posted.. while chatting with a coworker, I accidentally ran my electric screwdriver bit across the board while I was running memtest. Anyway a few seconds later the boss walked by and asked what I found, Im like yea, looks like both the proc and the motherboard were bad, Im going to have to replace both ;)
 
Most dramatic: Years ago I set a full cup of coffee on top of a color TV, sloshing a little out of the cup and into the set. It burst into flames almost instantly. What fun, unplugging and carrying a flaming 25" TV outside!

Most recent: Last week, baby grabbed a glass of beer and dumped it. When cleaning up, I failed to notice that some of it landed on/in my Toshiba 3500 tablet. Few days ago I tried to fire it up and no workee. Opened it up and cleaned all the dried-up beer, still no joy.

--T
 
A noisy client that would poke his finger in his computer when I was working on it, asking what this was and what that did, and, once, he got too close to the "hot" case on a horizontal output (the constant current kind) transistor on the video board (must have been the Tandy II/12/16 series) and it knocked him on his ass. I said "THAT knocks people on their ass"
 
Just fried a 1.2 MB 5.25" drive last week.

Fried a Pentium Extreme Edition 855 AND a motherboard a few months ago. (Apparently the motherboard *DIDN'T* support that processor.)

Those are the only ones in the past year.
 
I recently fried a full-height IBM floppy disk drive. I went back to my parents place for a weekend and managed to repair the drive, carefully carried it all the way up to London (2 hours on a train, 15 minutes tube then 15 minutes walk), then plugged in to my XT. Lots of smoke and a strange smell - I had connected the power backwards :(

These drives are like gold dust over here, finding a working one is even more so!

Luckily I had another drive with a damaged head I could swap the boards over from! It's working now, so a happy ending :)
 
I got a Compucolor II in the mail last week and, to date, have only been able to smoke components on it.

The first to go was a cap on the main board. Went off like a firecracker even though it was coming up with a variac. After that a cap on the analog board started blowing smoke and after that one of the resistors started glowing like a lightbulb.

I've had to set it aside for now (too much smell, not enough progress) but I hope to get it going soonish. . . :)
 
Let's see.. in 1997 I accidentally connected a LED to a +12V fan connector on a Pentium MMX board, which killed the board. It was rather disastrous, as the computer was used in daily producton.

I have plugged in at least one old, unknown IBM SCSI hard disk that only emitted smoke, but I don't think it was my fault.

I have once swiped down a Mac PowerBook from a table using my left arm, but it is not quite the same thing as frying it. It became quite unusable anyway, with a smashed screen.

I may have caused a little more havoc, but those were the three items from top of my head. With older, vintage equipment, most items either are dead when I find them or die from me for no obvious reason after a while of operation.
 
ok

Pentium 233MMX, pushed it to 300mhz it ran then it stopped

AMD K6-2 450 Ran it at 600 for a few months then one day it just died

AMD Duron 1.1 Ran it @ 1.6 for awhile (few hours) and it died with sparks


Riva TNT2 Pro pushed the ram to hard and it died

Geforce 2 MX400 Ran it to hard also, it just went

Geforce FX5200 Ran it @ Ultra speeds then the mem went nuts

Geforce 6800GT ran it with a modded bios with tighter timings and it died


Ive also killed 2 socket 462 boards, one 370, 2 slot 1, and about 20 socket 7. Ive also killed more ram than i can count.
 
Perhaps you should avoid overclocking, or at least review your cooling options when you do so, if that makes any difference?

Oh yeah. I have in recent years killed at least 2-3 floppy drive mechanisms from CBM 8250LP style drives, when I swapped them around and connected them to a controller board that has some error which zaps drives. Very stupid to do after the first drive stopped working, but I couldn't determine which item killed what.
 
carlsson said:
Perhaps you should avoid overclocking, or at least review your cooling options when you do so, if that makes any difference?

Oh yeah. I have in recent years killed at least 2-3 floppy drive mechanisms from CBM 8250LP style drives, when I swapped them around and connected them to a controller board that has some error which zaps drives. Very stupid to do after the first drive stopped working, but I couldn't determine which item killed what.
Click to expand...

lol i shall never stop the Overclocking maddness
 
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