I wanted an Amiga, but I worked with what I was given, a 386. I still have term papers I did from high school.

Yeah, the old machines were built and weighed like a tank, that's what made them great. And the keyboard I had looked like a friggin' battleship. You could plunk down those keys with authority, and if anyone gave you shit, you could easily club them with it.

I've got a disk drive with all the oldschool Amiga stuff, sometimes I load an emulator for them and pretend like it's still 1990 XD

*LOL* I held on to some relic cases which would now be considered a weapon. and those AT keyboards, now those were heavy duty. I remember typing and a id was messing with me and I picked it up, whacked him in the head and continued typing and not one damaged key.*L*
I got the nickname keyboard killer.

Kinda the opposite of "worst thing you broke", but once a friend of mine was having me build him a computer (probably around 2001, 2002) and he bought the processor from some crazy cheap Korean site. When it came it had a bent pin, but it was in the far corner, so I was like "I got this!" and grabbed a pair of pliers and tried to get it back into place. It wasn't pretty, but somehow it worked.

Same friend, a few years later called me up and was like "dude, what do you know about (first gen) MS ergo keyboards" and I was like not much why? He proceeded to tell me he took it apart, like COMPLETELY apart to clean it out, and couldn't get this ribbon to line back up so nothing worked. I just told him it was toast, and not to be so stupid next time. Like I'm going to fix that shit.

My mates brother once had a desktop that ran off a 250watt power supply, I'm not 100% sure what went wrong with it but I called round one day and the fuse had blown in it so they got a piece of tin foil and stuck it in the fuses place.

I have to admit it worked great for about 24 hours then it went bang big time the force was that much the fan at the back of it flew off and was half stuck in the wall.

*L*

good thing no one got hurt.

The first time I did a clean install of Windows for someone other than myself was for my boss. I believe it was NT4 at the time. Didn't have enough network space to back up more than just the C: partition, but I thought that was good enough....just format C: and reinstall. Somehow managed to wipe the partition table and format the whole drive.

*LOL* I've done that before.

Exploding power supply reminded me of another story. A buddy of mine got a 52x CD drive from his dad's work back when that was like BLEEDING EDGE technology, well, it turns out that for some reason the drive would spin up really fast and then freak out sometimes, and the only way to get it to stop was to open the drive and let the CD go flying across the room like some sort of blade launcher.

Never did figure out what the deal with that was, but it was definitely worth a laugh or 2, until it exploded his Diablo 2 CD.

I still have my XT in a closet. Now the XT keyboard was a killer. The case is a desktop where the top flips open (hinged at the back). Great to work on. It's an 088 (8MHz/12MHz (w/ Turbo)) with 1MB of RAM. Paradise video card and Adlib Gold soundcard. I should get that thing out and see if she'll start up. I believe it's DOS 5.0 with Direct Access menu app. The late 80's were great.

During all the years of building computers I've never had any bad moves. I messed with shit all the time (that's how I learned), but I always had a backup plan or put careful thought into my actions.