The worst thing that every happened to one of my machines was a fried motherboard. You could hear the sizzle and popping sounds and everything. I even let the magic smoke out of one of the larger chips.

A power outage during last summer, and it lasted for two weeks. I couldn't play on my pc =(.

My best was with an old Athlon XP. I was convinced it was running too hot, and the cause HAD to be the way I installed the heatsink. On about the 4th remounting, I chiped one of the edges off the exposed die. Spent the next 6 months using an old PII 233...

jh

Whoops, scratch the above.

Back when the Tualatin core s370 P3 was released. I blew a huge chunk of change on a pair of 1.4ghz engineering samples (were NOT easy to obtain) coupled to an iwill dual socket board, 2gb of ddr2700, and a new radeon aiw, and a scsi raid array.

Cooled by custom made copper water blocks, an eheim pump and a radiator out of a civic, complete with 20" cooling fans. I had scrimped and saved for a new system for 2 years, took every penny. Clocked to 1.8 it simply screamed, far faster then any p4 system at the time, my pride and joy.

Came back home one day about a month after I put it together to find a burnt mess. One of the hoses attached to the coolant reservoir ruptured, and hosed down the power supply, burnt the system to the ground.

I've carried the moniker CrispySilicon ever since. RIP tualatins, they were amazing compared to anything else at the time.

I've accidentally reformatted my hard drive with all my stuff on it quite a few times. Each time I was able to get everything back using free software (although getting back a few hundred GB's of data took a long time). That's about the worst that's ever happened to me.

Bad caps.

My worst accident?
It was a while back, when I was mounting my e4300 cpu into my P5K mobo. What happened back then, I thought to myself "Why is it so hard to mount the cooler, and pushing the pin it in?!". Me being stupid enough, I took out the mobo, and clipped the heatsink on with force, and guess what? My Motherboard snapped in half! WTF.
I've mounted LGA 775 coolers before as well, but never as bad as that mistake.
Another time was, my power supply blew up! It was scary, especially gaming.

Harddisk went kaput...
thats the worst..especially I didn't backup my songs and movies..
like 300GB of them just gone like that
I rather my mobo or anything else in my PC burnt but not my HDD lol...

Not talking about hardware here but back in teh 90's my system was infected with a virus that stored itself on boot sectors and would load in memory whenever the disk was "accessed". It infected floppies and hard drives. The virus spread to all my friends and to my family.

Ya, so the point, the virus erased the bios settings after every boot. I got real good at setting up the virus and wasted LOTS of money on new batteries (thinking that was the cause) and eventually wasted money on buying a whole new motherboard to find out it simply happened there too! Lol, lots of time wasted... not to mention none of my friends were happy either.

Corsair 750TX sparked when plugged in or turned on, blew the fuse to my bedroom, had to reset it every time I tried to turn it on...just got back the working RMA from Corsair, which didn't turn on for 20min the other day until I hit it o.O

1. Something over 20 years ago my company bought a Unix minicomputer. It was installed and we were trying to get it configured. I was sitting at the terminal next to the machine along with the installer when he suddenly reached over and hit the power button to turn the machine off. He had seen a wiff of smoke come out of the machine. We opened the case the one big resistor in the power supply had turned into a little pile of ash. I guess this is the definition of "smoke test".

2. My computer switched to PC's, and I was there late on night upgrading a couple of machines. I had the covers off of 2 machines and was alternating working on one then the next. Somehow I got confused and pulled an expansion card out of a running 286 computer, before I realized that it was running and not the other one next to it. However it didn't have any affect on the computer.

3. We had been running a Novell server and had it installed in the back of my office under a table. One morning it was not running, and it seemed that the motherboard was bad. I knew that we had several workstations with identical motherboards so I took one apart, pulled its mobo and put that mobo into the Novell server. It would post but wouldn't boot. Looking further I noticed that the pcb on one of the big hard drives (5 1/4" full height!) looked funny- some of the little components were missing. We looked over the hard drives and original motherboard and discovered lots of scratching and gouging, and missing components. Someone had apparently disassembled the server, worked it over with a screwdriver, and put it back together. We had to build a new server and restore our data from tape. This was a small company with limited access. We never found out who did the deed, maybe a disgruntled employee. We built a locking server closet after that and the head of our production department took over babysitting of the server. We didn't have any vandalism after that but the server never ran nearly as well as when I was in charge of it.

I tried Windows Vista back once.

bad pbc made my wires melt all smokey...

When I turned 21 I had purchased a new hard drive to add some storage. So after installing I turned on my pc and found that it successfully registered. Leaving my PC laying on its side open I proceeded to party. I awoke the next morning to find my pc turned off. Confused I pressed the power button and nothing... looking around the floor was wet and I noticed an empty beer can on the floor... possibly fallen off of the edge of the desk. I guess my PC was thirsty too! Fried everything except my HD's, Happy birthday me.

When I turned 21 I had purchased a new hard drive to add some storage. So after installing I turned on my pc and found that it successfully registered. Leaving my PC laying on its side open I proceeded to party. I awoke the next morning to find my pc turned off. Confused I pressed the power button and nothing... looking around the floor was wet and I noticed an empty beer can on the floor... possibly fallen off of the edge of the desk. I guess my PC was thirsty too! Fried everything except my HD's, Happy birthday me.

I once had a power supply blow up on me while playing F.E.A.R. for the first time. It made a loud bang sound and sparks violently shot out of the back of it. I jumped out of my chair and was scared like hell. I was worried that it may be on fire and if it damaged any other hardware. Thankfully the Power supply contained the blast and there wasn't a fire and amazingly all my other hardware still worked.

I never played F.E.A.R. again...

I was fixing my 486DLC at work and the MB standoffs didn't. The ensuing short not only destroyed everything but the power strip breaker failed too. This triggered a main junction breaker. The entire computer room blacked out: Two Unisys, One Sperry, One CDC mainframes,an HP mini and the AC;only a solitary beeping that I never did locate rang out in the darkness. Fortunately, it was lunch time and I was the only one working at the time. With great skill and urgency I managed to get all the machines up and running before everyone returned. No one ever found out. Good times.

ya i had a power supply go out on me; A generic included with a case. I saw and heard the pop and spark, and then smelled the aftermath. Luckily it didn't take anything out with it. I have never used a pos power supply after that

I managed to corrode the pins off an Athlon 64 processor due to condensation thanks to the seal failing on a phase change cooling head. There's nothing quite like seeing the pins fall off your $$$ CPU in front of your eyes, trust me.

Format the HD thinking that the backup is safe in the D: or other drive while in reality the data is not safe, or partially not safe.
I think the most valuable part of the PC is the data on the hard drive since it is not possible to replace it like any hardware part.

One more thing, I had a power supply blow up on me.
I knew it will soon since the fan was making noises and not fast enough.
It happened while i was playing MGS:Substance.
Sorry for the double post. :3

Oh yes! I was playing BF2 and I kept hearing this incessant whining from some persons home over their mic. I got so frustrated with it I just powered the machine off with the power button. Well after that it would not power back on )-: I had to order a new PSU and it turned out the whining was my friends wife crying...guess I deserved that )-:

i cut myself on the rear IO panel when i was putting my PC together and had to go get stitches from the hospital. Didn't think those were dangerous

My first external harddrive i ever bought a WD 320GB i think, died just before the warranty was about to expire. Sent it in they replaced it with a 500GB drive that had USB,Firewire and SATA. The bad news it was made for sale in Panama. A real cheap drive it died a couple days ago after being slow to access add or move files now i get a flashing of the white bar indicator light. I have all my files in triplicate in most cases except for OS (back-up discs, yes) and software programs, so i did not lose anything beyond the drive itself. I do have a broken stud on my Syncmaster 225bw that accepts DVI cables male locking screws. I need a small extractor to try to get it out to replace it.

I've had one of the ICs on a hard drive light up in flames. It was really bright too. Nothing smells worse than a burnt computer part.

I used to work for the silly black and orange people. One day we had a customer try to return an BFG 6800 GT OC (at the time the fastest card the big blue and yellow store sold)... he had an AGP motherboard, but it was PCI-e... well since it didn't fit his AGP slot, he had taken tin snips, cut off a bit of the wafer with the PCI-e pins, and jammed it in his AGP slot... after we showed the card to everyone behind the counter, and got our good laughs, we told him there was no way he could return it and he was out his $400 bucks, he couldn't understand how tin snips violated our return policy and made a scene...

Installing Vista or XP

When I first got a Gigabyte GA-965-DQ6, which I still run, I paired it with a Tuniq Tower 120. Unfortunately Gigabyte put some ridiculous piece of copper coated aluminum to act as a PCB-sink right under the CPU socket, and it connected to the Northbridge. Figuring the northbridge / MCH was glued to the heatpipe, I removed this PCB-sink. After a little while, I kept getting memory errors and blue screens, other lockups.

Figured it was shitty RAM, after all it failed memory tests. So I replaced the RAM, which in early 2007 was still spendy. No luck... so I RMA'd the board after putting the PCB-sink back on (and never testing it like this). When I went to remove the Tuniq backplate I scratched the crap out of the traces going to the CPU, killing the board. Luckily the PCB-sink covered this up!

To finish the story, I figured out it was the northbridge overheating before the RMA arrived. So I knew I had to simply cut off the side preventing the backplate from fitting with a hacksaw, and allow the two screws holding the northbridge heatsink in place to still function. Worked out well. Didn't have a need for 4GB at the time, so I built an HTPC with the old but good RAM.

It got old and slow. It showed signs of old age so I had to put it down.