Who has destroyed their computer equipment before???

[iSamurai]

i switched the PSU from my family's old, old computer from 240V to 110V while on and booted and it blew up and fried everything haha! oh well we were going to throw it out anyway and no one wanted it.

yeah, my brother did that to an old IBM (1GHz at that time, quite new), and for some reason he wanted to flip the voltage switch and got confused whether South Africa used 220 or 110 volts (220 for that matter), so he set it on 110V. so the whole thing started smoking and eventually I came screaming to him that SA uses 220V... too late. We had no computer for about a year. lol. I think I'll break that thing sometimes (still sitting in the room), coz none of the hardware are salvageable; too out dated!

He picked up his keyboard, swung it like a bat and hit one of the thickly painted white concrete block walls in our dorm. Half of the keys flew off from the force and several of them pegged me hard while the rest flew out the open window.
...
The next morning we got up and found some of the missing keys on the ground outside of the dorm around one of the old trees. The keyboard was dangling from one of its limbs.

hilarious story I still remembered my high school mentor had a keyboard smacking all the rookies on their a*ses.. he eventually stopped when all the keys came off.

After many frustrating years on a Dell 8200 workstation that never worked right (EVER), I was looking into a problem for work at 3AM in my underwear when it froze on me for the last time.
...
I never got more satisfaction out of that computer than I did that day.
The next day I went and bought an iMac.

I had an HP Compaq laptop (I think V2006) and it was all right until one day it decided to not power on. It switched on later, but cuts off randomly if there's movement -- like typing too hard on the keyboard. Eventually it gave up but I took a more gentle approach: I took it apart and salvaged whatever I could... the RAM and the HD. The screen is still fine, so that's probably the reason I didn't break it. I'm still looking for a connector or something to make that screen useful again.

(see below)

 

[Mammoth]

"Never trust a computer that you can't throw out of a window"

It's nowhere near the levels people on here have achieved but I had an old PCI modem (if I remember rightly it was my first ADSL modem) for my PC and it was a PAIN. Can't remember the brand, I think my brain denies it ever happened, but it used to connect and disconnect with gleeful abandon. When I got a replacement that worked I took the offending card into the back garden and set about it with my dad's sledgehammer. That felt so GOOOOOOOOD

Otherwise I recycle all my electronics. The local council have a tip where you can take almost anything- old paint, oil, carpets, textiles, batteries, electronics, wood, old chemicals, plastics, metals- you name it. They have a HUGE 15 foot tall skip (I s'pose in the US you'd call it a dumpster) and you go up a little catwalk to put things in. There's always an array of battered old TV's, hi-fi's etc and it's quite satisfying dropping stuff in I remember when I took my old PC case there- that made a lovely loud bang! If ever the guys who work there offer to chuck stuff in for me I always say no- I enjoy dropping stuff in myself! Kind of like a plastic and aluminium wishing well!

Best. Job. Ever.

 

[scotthayes]

Destroyed quite a few in my life as a hardware engineer but the most fun was pushing one of these (data general) down a fire escape (from 3rd floor) in the mid 80s.