So, what was the switch supposed to do? Did you activate the self-destruct sequence?

And I think I fried a CPU like that too, many years ago, on my first attempt to assemble a PC on my own.

Let me see, in no order this time:

- I got frustrated by something and this was while I was building a pc. I shoved my screwdriver "a little" too hard against the screw to tightened the mamaboard in the cabinet, and managed to scratch it totally.

- My first computer I crashed by spamming the F's on the keyboard. The os just refused to boot and I needed help with the bat and sys files to make it boot again.

- Fried my computer by flipping the 110v/220v switch on purpose and turned the computer on.

- Managed to make the computer go in loop until the cpu got fried (this was back in the Socket A(?) days with standing cpu sockets.). Those cpus got really hot.

- Wrote a seemingly harmless search script and it turned out to be a "delete the root kind of script". Must have been too much sugar or too little coffee or something that day... Actually twice, once on Win and once on Linux. Honestly, also as a prank in the schools computer lab. :-D

- I was moving to my new place and this was in the middle of the winter. Thick ice with a tiny cover of snow. Yep, got tackled hard and the computer went in pieces.

- At one point I was living in an apartment in 8. floor. I had relatively short time to catch the train, and carried my laptop instead of putting it in my bag, and ran down the stairs. Somewhere along the down trip I got one ankle behind the other, flew a bit and facepalmed really hard, with my laptop between me and the concrete.

Or faulty usb sockets, as I managed to brick on a Android pad.

I always took care of my PCs so i haven't accidentally damaged one, even though i may have caused a quicker death of a GPU; it was past its service life anyway, plus i had it OC for a long time so i could run GTA: San Andreas; eventually i got various artifacts when it was under stress, tried to slow it down a bit but that didn't do much and it eventually failed.

Speaking of software damage, there was a period when i used to format my HDD and reinstall Windows XP on a bi-weekly basis because i was intentionally messing with various stuff. Learned quite a bit while doing that.

BUT, the most spectacular damage i ever did, it wasn't on a PC but a console; can't remember which one (SNES maybe?) as it happened ~25 years ago but i was really (REALLY!!) curious what this 110v/220v switch on the AC converter did. Well, i flipped it to 110v and i couldn't have asked for a better smoke show along with a loud "BANG!". After the main fuse was replaced and the lights returned, i saw the bitter truth: the converter had a new hole on it, big like the one pvt Hudson spat into in Hadley's Hope. I can't remember if the console survived though...

So that's what we call it these days? ;-)

In my teens I built a PC with horrible air flow, and hundreds of hours of Morrowind melted/cracked a chip on my graphics card, which triggered a power surge when i turned it on the next day that fried most of the other components.

And even worse, being a stupid kid I didn't really even investigate what happened, and sold said graphics card to my cousin wtihout checking it if it still worked.

Thankfully it didn't fry his PC too, but we did smell it burning. I took the heat sink off the card and chip was just warped as all hell with a massive crack straight through it. Too bad everyone didn't have a camera in their pocket back then, it was something to see.

The first time I tried to install a CPuU (a 1.2Ghz Athlon) I wound up bending a whole bunch of the pins. Very carefully bent them all back, put it in, held my breath.... it worked and I used that computer for almost a decade. It never quit on me.

About 25 years ago, I stopped our MS-DOS 4.x PC from booting when I curiously tried adding a DEVICE=IO.SYS line to CONFIG.SYS since every other DOS component with a .SYS extension (except CONFIG.SYS, of course) did something interesting under those circumstances.

As the option to step through the boot process wasn't added until MS-DOS 5.0, I was very lucky I managed to dig up a ready-made boot floppy to revert the change.

Around the same time, I also cut off the front and back covers and part of the index to our copy of PC Magazine DOS Power Tools because I thought I'd seen evidence of a potential bookworm infestation. (My age was measured in single digits at the time. I've since bought the second edition of the book, updated for MS-DOS 5.0, for use with my retro PC.)

About 20 years ago, I bricked one of a stack of retired 25MHz 486es because I didn't notice that a molex connector had fallen onto a row of jumper pins on the motherboard.

About 15 years ago, I was doing toss-and-catch tricks with a little 1.5" by 1.5" ceramic tile and flubbed the grab, firing it at my 17" flat-tube CRT monitor and putting a 1-2mm scratch in the glass.

Maybe 10 years ago, I didn't think to seal an Atari 520STFM in plastic before storing it in the garage. I had a lot of rust to clean off the RF shield and D-Sub connector shells when I brough it back inside a few years ago. (I still have some dot-matrix printers that need a thorough de-gunking from that.)

Maybe a year ago, I lost my balance slightly and wound up breaking the hinge on front door to my Antec P182 case. Luckily, I was able to get some acetone, solvent-weld the hinge-pin back together, and pop it back into place.

Cool thanks I'll definitely go for something like that and I'm glad to hear that thermaltake is in that market. It's my go-to-brand for my pc's power supply.
Perhaps :) But I think that switch sets the input voltage so the power unit probably ended up receiving a greater voltage than it was expecting after I flipped the switch causing something to explode. Perhaps a capacitor.

Stupidly de-fragged an SSD because I didn't check first. Boy, was I mortified having to explain THAT to the Geek Squad!

Yeah some of those old CRTs were really bulky. I had a massive 17'' crt which was an absolute pain to get to LAN parties. Years later a friend of mine decided, for some inexplicable reason, to purchase a 2nd hand 19'' crt. A beast of a thing. I think he just put in his room on the floor and left it there, never moving it. I think I should ask him next time what the deal with that monitor was and what he ended up doing with it.
Sound familiar :)
Lol, seems to be a common occurrence. I'm guessing a lot of power supplies have met their end like that. Curiosity kills the power supply it seems :P

Ouch :P I wouldn't have known whether to laugh, cry or use several favorite expletives in quick succession. I did the same thing once, but luckily only with one of those crappy UV filter things that you place over a crt monitor. Surprisingly it stayed put the whole time.

Did you think you're the only genius in here? XD

Many years ago I was helping a friend upgrade his computer. He had ordered a bunch of parts on-line and they had finally all arrived. As I was opening the packaging and taking inventory he was prepping the computer. Suddenly I hear a string of colorful exclamations behind me and I turn to see him banging on the key board and there were errors on the screen I had never seen in my life. He's going into panic mode because he just spent all his money on upgrade parts and doesn't have funds for a new PC. I sit down and start tying to troubleshoot what could have possibly gone wrong, but I'm at a total loss. I turn to tell him something and I see a hard drive in his hand, but I didn't remember him ordering a second hard drive. I asked him where that hard drive came from and he told me it was the same hard drive from his computer. He had pulled the hard drive out with the PC still on.

4 Years ago, I was in a very stressful position in my life and the slightest thing would throw me into a rage. One time I was playing a multiplayer game and kept getting my arse handed to me. I smashed my fist onto my laptop and knocked the hard drive out of it's seating area. The hard drive was crewed but I had data on it I couldn't recover. I also smashed my desk in two (yes, it was a cheap desk) at the same time. Fortunately, it was only the hard drive I needed to replace.

The moral of my story is don't play games if you are stressed, especially competitive ones.

...or just game on a desktop PC and ensure that anything expensive is out of reach when you're sitting at the keyboard.