QOTD: Worst Thing to Ever Happen to Your PC?

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[citation][nom]Cyberspaceavatar[/nom]The first water-cooled, very overclocked, Athlon computer I built. Cost me about $2500 to build, and one day the pump failed. CPU and GPU heated up too quickly to be caught by the overheat protection in the motherboard. Lost everything, except for ironically, the case itself.[/citation]
When you say it took the top of your finger off, you mean severed, or just badly cut?
 
I accidentally ripped out the power connector on my new 9800 pro because of a very tight molex connection. 🙁 it made me very sad.
 
While not MY computer, it was one I inheritied, and thus thought was decent.... well, learned my lesson to ALWAYS check the power supply on a machine.

Of course, I learned this AFTER it blew, shooting sparks and smoke out the back and melting the casing of the power supply. It dripped liquid metal over the videocard and motherboard components. Nothing from that system survived. Not even the hard drives.
 
While carrying a Dell tower out to my car, I missed a step, fell, and dropped the tower down 3 concrete steps and out onto the driveway.

Result? The left side panel never quite closed the way it once did, but that PC ran for another year before being put out to stud.
 
Antec 1200 and 780i FTW went to plug in the front audio port to test if it was working and was off by a set of pins when plugging the cable into the motherboard. Whole thing sparked and that was that. Then on another pc one of the capacitors exploded on my old 680i sli after replacing with an off brand psu.
 
I never had serious problems with the PC all these years. Maybe the most annoying thing was the first time i had a disruption on a RAID 0 (stripe) disk set and had to reinstall the overall thing again.
 
Because my power supply's exhaust fan grid was removed, a tiny little mouse managed to get inside. The poor thing paid with it's life for it, and that was the worst thing ever.

90 degrees Celsius CPU from failed cooling (fixed), scratching mainboard while mounting the cpu cooler (fixed), sitting on the couch exactly where a mainboard was forgotten with a video card inserted - broke the video card (not fixed).
I once destroyed a 486 mainboard by accident when an uninsulated wire powered at 12V touched it for a split of a second. Big disaster for that time.

Another QOTD would be nice "what was the greatest miracle ever happen to your machine". I'm sure many of us had these too.
Such as having an old computer, hardly managed to find a BIOS update file. The update process failed, so without knowing for sure if it would work, I put the file on a floppy, together with proper autoexec.bat and awdflas.exe. The PC started to read the floppy, proceeded to update the BIOS and rebooted just fine. It was not my PC.
 
I once poured a full glass of wine on my friends new lap top. I managed to save it in the end... more or less. It went ape-shit for a few weeks and kept writing jibberish on its own till the last of the drink oozed away. Cheers
 
I wasnt grounded when plugging in my new MP3 player to the front usb ports on my antec case so it fried my Mobo and I was so mad because the next day I was leaving on a road trip and I couldnt put my music on it.
It was a MSI 865 Intel so i got a gigabyte to take its place...Good times...
 
I was playing a game one day on my PC when I heard a loud BANG! come from inside my computer. It sounded like a gun shot. I got kind of freaked out and next thing I knew a blue screen of death came up. I shut off the computer and opened the case to find the CPU heat sink sitting at the bottom. It had somehow ripped the mounting from around the CPU off the motherboard. I'm still not sure how it did it. It sucked, nonetheless.
 
The worst thing happen to me was that the HP Pavilion dv9000 had microsoft product preinstalled when I bought it and HP refuses to take back the license that I haven't agreed on. The second worst thing was the crappy hardware used in the same laptop, whihc lead it had to get the mainboard replaced three times, two times I got someone elses used mainboard, third time I got help from HP Linux department and I got a brand new replacement mainboard.
 
Back in the 486 days i had a 300$ surge protector on my PC, but the phone was connected to the wall outlet, well lightning decided to go thru the phone line when our house was hit, i came home the next day to a burnt modem internal modem and a few other things. Thankfully home owners insurance covered it.
 
The worst was probably in '87. I ran a Netware 2.0a server (endless floppy shuffle to install!) and its 200MB HDD smoked. It looked like a resistor near the molex power connector simply fried; the stench was amazing. This happened on a Friday. I spent that entire weekend rebuilding the OS and the most critical data (yes, we had tape) on a 71MB drive, and met the first shift coming in on Monday morning at 6:00a.
 
The worst for me was my wifes cat (a male) hopped up onto my desk and sprayed the inside of my computer (the side of the case was off) and got my MB, my PSU, and my GPU. MB was an X-58 Skulltrade, the PSU was a Thermaltake toughpower 1000W, and the GPU was a 8800 GTX. Cost me 650.00 to replace the parts.
 
Worst thing ever happened to my computer happened last year. Went to a friends wood lot, and we all took a bunch of old computer hardware, set it up in the woods, and proceeded to fill it all full of lead. The best was taking the 8xCD Reader I bought for $500 when they first came out and hitting it point blank with with some double-ought:)
 
I was working on an engineering project in which i had to automatically de-ice a model bridge. I mixed up about a liter of very salty water as the de-icer, then somehow accidentally spilled it on my laptop keyboard. Thankfully I had paid for a full warranty, but they had to replace the hard drive, motherboard, keyboard... pretty much replaced everything but the case.
 
I had just finished building my new gaming rig while my wife and two year old were out of town. I ran out to get a bite to eat while windows was installing. I had the case lying on the floor on it's side with the cover off. My wife and toddler returned a day early while I was out.

I returned to find the case stuffed full with her toys. I was horrified to find that the computer was not running. Luckily for me it was just rebooting. All was fine as I carefully removed all the toys.

 
I was working on my laptop and hit the open water bottle that was too close to it. Bottle of course tips over right onto the laptop. Faster than I thought I could, i shutdown the laptop and pull the AC power and battery out. I then turn the machine upside down to "drain" the bulk of the water out. So far so good. I then prop it open on its side with a space heater blowing right on it from about 6 inches away - because that should dry it out well right? I had to get back to work after all....Well I leave that setup alone and go do something else. I come back after a reasonable amount of time and what do I find?

All of the computer worked 100% however I managed to melt about a third of the keys on the keyboard so they just sagged and formed a hard shell over the rubber nipple (remember, laptop keyboard) which was like protection KEEPING me from being able to use those keys. That was fun to explain to my boss who had to approve a new keyboard to be ordered. Kept the keys as trophies.

Also was updating BIOS on a DFI LP JR x58-t3h6 using winflash, because it was provided form DFI I figured it should be safe.... all starts well and then I get a bluescreen in the middle of the update - bricked the motherboard. I now only use ASUS boards and have come to love the EZ Flash 2 method using a usb stick.

Because of all these power supply stories I have never bought a bad one, thank god. I don't like spending money when it isn't needed, but I have always paid extra to make sure my stuff is good quality and reliable.

Priceless stories by the way guys, made my morning better.
 
oh and I forgot, after I got the DFI back with a working BIOS, I was upgrading the NB cooling - because X58 nb's run hotter than anything I had ever seen. Pretty sure I crushed the nb chip tightening the thermaltake extreme spirit II down to hard, never booted after that.....and then I convinced newegg to give me my money back (ya I did all this in 30 days) and got the Rampage II GENE instead, smooth sailing since then.
 
Not really my PC but anyways:
Back in college I had a run in with cap'n morgan, he got the best of me. I managed to crawl into my lofted bed that my desk was under. The unfortunate setup of the loft was that the desk/monitor extended further then the width of the bed. Least to say when I finally woke up in the morning the screen was flickering rapidly and the monitor was covered in "liquid".

I considered myself very lucky, I turned everything off/ cleaned the outside and let whatever was on the inside dry. To my surprise when I turned the monitor back on a day and a half later it worked fine.

Being the poor college student that I was, I decided to not drink for the next year and a half (my friends thought I was crazy) but I just couldn't afford to risk it.
 
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