my very first self-build when I was like 15 or something, AMD CPU installed but upon trying to squeeze the cooler onto it the clips on the boards plastic seating broke (its still insane how much force this needs) and my father tried to fix it with fixating the cooler using copper wire but ofc the pressure was not enough so upon boot the CPU just burned immediately.
I was devastated but got both parts replaced and learned a pricey lesson that day.
In my early teens, I was cobbling together a machine to do some stuff with my phone line. Voicemail, some info read over the phone by TTS, that sort of thing, along with serving some files. The power supplies were too small for that many fans and drives. So in my genius, I decided Iād just run two! I wired them together. Small problemā¦ the paint on electrical tape I was trying was not only flammable, it was conductive. Perfect qualities for an insulator. My room was in the basement, and my mom and sister were upstairs in the living room. I booted this abomination and it immediately caught fire! I fired an extinguisher at it, but I didnāt yet know how to properly use one, and the base of the fire was inside the machine. I come running up the stairs, carrying a flaming computer, screaming āOPEN THE BACK DOOR!!!ā. I threw this thing in the snow.
The best partā¦ I rebuilt this thing, properly this time, but still using the modified case with itās horrid spray paint job, and the now melted face. I used it, along with the monitor with the housing that had melted in this fire, for many years. ā¦and it indeed handled voicemail, and read off whatever it was I got it to read from an option in my voicemail menu, and announced caller ID from speakers.
I broke a CRT. It did that ābreathingā thing and I tried to offset it by dicking around with settings in the service menu. There was an option in there that the service manual warned canāt be set above a certain point without bricking the unit. I messed with it a little, saw it wasnāt really doing anything, and tried to set it back to the default valueā¦ except, I overshot. As fate would have it, if youāre already at zero and try to go lower, itāll loop back around to the highest value. Kimochi warui.