Stupid younger self blew up my 2003 Sony VAIO tower by downloading World of Warcraft, lol. Completely crashed my system. Regret not keeping the thing, because I got a copy of Windows XP for free the next month after, and I could've just reinstalled D:

Maybe two years ago I killed my old desktop PC (which was reserved for old Windows XP and 98SE games) by trying to force memory onto the motherboard the wrong way. I just thought the memory slot was tight...

I damaged something on the motherboard because afterwards the PC wouldn't start properly, just kept giving warning beeps.

As a teen, I literally threw my computer tower in a fit of angst. Surprisingly, it was wholly intact and didn't suffer for it. I was luckier than I had any right to be.

I have a Thermaltake Massive V20 Notebook Cooler. Whatever you'll buy, get something with big fan(s) and fan speed control. I start the fan only when I play demanding games that rise the temps above 70°C, but I never go above 85°C.

Holy shit. you made my heart skip a beat.

when I was little I did not put thermal paste on my intel pentium 2 and killed it by burning out the cpu, I was little and did not know shit about pc's but now it's different ;)

oh and burning intel cpu's smell good for some reason...

1. We had one of those really glossy "Ultra" power supplies, I can't remember why, but we took it out of the computer and sat it on top of the case, due to the glossy texture it slipped right off the case and smacked the floor breaking something loose inside. Not sure what broke, but it didn't work afterward.

2. Another incident involved removing/replacing the CPU to the motherboard, I wasn't careful and wound up bending several of the pins on the chip. (I felt like a moron for a loooong time after that happened.)

Usually when I clean my desk, I move my monitor from the desk to my bed. Before the advent of LCD monitors, I had this huge 15kg CRT monitor. On one occasion I had to move this bastard to a different room. The problem was that the height of the beds was considerably different, and that was the first time I had moved it to that room. By not paying attention I made a mistake, and I didn't realize the actual height and I dropped the monitor from about 10-15 cm. Which was enough to make it bounce and roll off the bed and land on the floor. It complete ruined the stand and bottom part of the case, though the monitor was still functional. That's how I ended up being forced to replace it with an early model LCD.

The biggest mistake I made (in terms of hardware failure) was many years ago when I bought a 300MHz Cyrix part and not only did I use the heatsink/fan from my old Pentium 166 MMX on it (instead of the proper heatsink and fan) but at one point I actually glued said heatsink/fan to the CPU. It didn't die right away but I am sure the mistakes I made with it contributed to its death.

Since then I have always used Intel CPUs along with the heatsink/fan that Intel recommends (the one that comes in the box generally) and have never made a mistake like that. (other than one minor incident I haven't had any hardware failures since then that can be attributed to a mistake I made, at least none that I can remember)

The one other incident was when I was moving across the country (Australia). Most of my stuff was being moved on the back of a truck but I wanted my desktop PC right away so I could keep writing code and playing games and stuff so I was talking the case along with most of the accessories (speakers, mouse, keyboard, cables) as checked baggage on the airplane with me. Turns out that bubble wrap isn't good enough to pack a PC tower case for shipping in the baggage compartment of an airplane (and being manhandled by baggage handlers) and I needed to buy a new case (the hardware inside was fine though)

Now I know that if I am shipping a PC tower case somehow (especially if there is the chance it will go on an airplane) I need to get something much better than bubble wrap (probably foam of some sort) to protect the PC from damage.

First of all, I'll never do that cause it's my only love and I would never hurt it.My brother once broke a controller in anger cause he was losing to me in Fifa.

Some years ago (back when Windows NT was a thing) I did some testing for an IT company and we had to remove one Beta version completely before installing the next build. This included removing entries from the Windows registry. I guess I removed the wrong entries because suddenly Windows NT couldn't boot... That's how we learned that we could fix this by re-installing Windows NT on top of itself. ;-)

First PC I had was some dodgy build my father got from an equally dodgy man.
This is back in the days of Dos and Win95 (which was also a dodgy copy).

But it did have a CD Rom, but required gentle percussive persuasion (hit it) to work. As the months went by the level of persuasion needed grew, until in frustration I punched the CD Drive into the PC. Fortunately the PC kept working buy the CD Drive was no more.

A few years later I got DVD drive. I wanted a DVD Player to watch a film I imported from the states, but they were cutting edge and players were about £150 (£250 in adjusted). But a DVD Drive was only £50. The down side was it was region locked, but it could be flashed with custom firmware. Unfortunately the firmware had a bug which occasionally span the disc at full speed, ejecting didn't slow it down first. One time the disc wobbled on ejecting, few from the drive a shattered against the wall. Wouldn't like to think the pain it would have caused had it hit me.

Heading on Holiday, got my laptop for kids to watch films on in the car. Put the laptop on the roof, got kids in and drove off. As I cornered I watched my laptop fall past my window.

Years and years ago some friend of mine in his early 20s got bored of his old pc, he destroyed (on purpose) RAM, motherboard and graphics card so his parents would have to buy him a new one. A real genius. His parents also.

I knew a guy in high school who did that with his skateboards.

I went to school with a lot of assholes who did crap like that.

I think it counts when a couple years ago when I was still with my parents, my mother told me to get off the PC and do some chore, but I didn't, so after yelling at me some, which I ignored, she jabbed the off button on the PC.
This being a relatively modern PC, it didn't go off, instead, just popped up the shutdown dialogue on screen. This caused me to burst out laughing.

My mother came back with a pair of scissors and cut the power cable.