What is the stupidest thing you ever did to your amiga?

[koaftder]

The other day i was cleaning my appartment, and i moved a few things out onto the porch to free up some space in the living room. I set my amiga 1000 on the railing ( i live on the 2nd floor ) and the wind blew it over the edge, so it fell 2 stories and landed on concrete.

The case was definately destroyed, and there were several fractures on the motherboard, one of which pretty much went down the entire length of the pcb.

Over the course of a few days, i managed to repair all the traces on the pcb. Several ic sockets were destroyed, so i had to solder the dip chips right in, probably better that way anyway, wont be having any socket oxidation issues in the near future.

The amiga 1000 did manage to survive, but the floppy drive inside of it didnt, but i have a few spares, so no worries.

[that_punk_guy]

Sold it.

[Kronos]

Bought it  :insane:  :juggler:  :furious:

[Ilwrath]

So, let me get this straight.  Your Amiga fell two stories, landed on concrete, destroyed the case, destroyed the floppy drive, cracked the motherboard, and damaged chip sockets....  And you REPAIRED IT?  damn, that's dedication.

I never did anything too stupid to an Amiga.  

I destroyed some data once by being in a hurry.  I was swapping SCSI drives around, and didn't realize I hadn't properly terminated the chain.  The backup I had made was corrupt.  I didn't realize the termination error or test my backup before reformatting the master, though.  d'oh!

I blew a CIA chip on my old A500 by hot swapping a parallel port digitizer.  Simple enough to fix, though.  Ended up costing me like $10 for a new CIA.  As lessons go, it was a cheap one.

That's about it, really.  I've been pretty fortunate through the years.

[-BobW-]

I dumped an entire 16oz soda into the vent holes of my running A1200.  IT SURVIVED!

The soda ran across the top of the floppy drive and then pooled on the bottom of the case.  Had to take it apart and give it a good cleaning before I could use it again. :-o

[HopperJF]

Selling my A600 was the worst decision i've ever made.
I miss it dearly.

[TheMagicM]

Didnt backup my A3000 about 2 times..lost it all..3rd time, I started backing up my system.  

[Holley]

I dropped a load of lemonade into a C64 (cleaned up fine ;-)), and wedged my C128 into an overstuffed wooden box under the bed - which was fine until my other half jumped into bed, it broke off 6 keys :-(

It's easy to make a silly mistake if you're in a hurry or tired, but at least you made the effort to put it right!


Not so much stupid as bizarre was when my Sister fell on my Vic20 when it was sat on the living room carpet, the case was cracked so me and a friend rebuilt it into a case made of (glued together) lego, where it lasted for the next 10 years until I found a nice one to replace it ...

[Abou27]

Nothing so extreme!  Sounds stupid but very easy to do things like that!  Glad you managed to repair.

I always used to hotswap mouse and 2nd joystick and also printer/scanner etc.  Always got away with it.  Bet I wouldn't now, though!

[Darrin]

OK, I think I can win this one hands down...

I was stationed in Belize, Central America for 12 months back in 1990 and took my trusty old A2000 with me.  It was hot, humid and there was no air conditioning.  This was not the best environment for an expensive computer system to be running in.

After many months of faultless operation, the A2000 started blowing its PSU fuse at irregular intervals - sometimes once per week, sometimes twice a day.  As a result, I kept a stash of spare fuses in my desk draw and simply replaced the blown one when necessary.

One day, I was busy writing a rather important letter using Final Writer when the fuse blew.  I checked my draw and found that I had no spare fuses.  Being in a rush, rather than do the sensible thing and run over to the electronics section and grab a handfull more, I decided to bodge the repair and jam a paperclip across the contacts on the fuse holder...

I switched on, the Amiga came to life, Workbench loaded and I was about to launch Final Writer when a huge flashes of sparks, flames and smoke poured out of the back of the Amiga.  Needless to say, the PSU had actually caught fire and I classed my A2000 as "BER" (Beyond Economic Repair).

As a result of this "bodge" I then had to order a new A1500 from the UK and transfer my surviving components from the A2000 to the A1500.  To this day, I have NEVER used a paperclip as a fuse again :-)

Oh, and I finished the letter using a good, old manual typewriter...

Did I win?

[sdesros]

I managed to go through several Amiga models without much of a problem.

However...

I had bought a brand new A1200 (this was when they first came out).  It was too much of a pain to get a real 2.5'' HD at the time so I opted for a 3.5'' external HD box.  It included a special cable that connected to the A1200's internal 2.5'' IDE hearder.  So everything went fine and dandy.  There were a few times when I reorganized my room and moved the A1200, A2000 around.  Then, one faithful move, I plugged the cable in backwards.  This wouldn't be a BIG deal with most IDE connectors, except that this special cable had power running on some of the pins...

So I plug everything in and "poof" the A1200 refused to boot up anymore.  Luckily all I ended up doing was frying my HD.       Unfortuantly, a "cartoonist" friend of mine was working on a picture with deluxe paint on my system and it got lost.

[danamania]

I poured a full mug of coffee across my A1200 while it was on. Oops. It flooded the whole thing, and I ripped the power cable out of the back as soon as I realised what I'd done. After a pretty intense clean out it did work fine...

...but only for a week. After that, one of the serial chips cooked itself & bubbled up inside. ook. Whatever caused that killed the whole machine, it wouldn't boot. I replaced the chip with one from a broken A1200 motherboard I had spare, but still no go - it was utterly dead.

dana

[adz]

that_punk_guy wrote:
Sold it.

I'd like to second that...

[monkian_2k]

My A1200 took a flying lesson when I was trying to figure out my IDE interface and CD-Rom. Having to leave for work any minute I was rushing (bad idea) and balanced my amiga on the edge of the desk, still holding the cable attached to my Amiga I turned to reach for the CD-Rom or PSU and yanked it off the desk. :-o
Yikes. I lost the top quarter of my harddisk; it would just freeze up when trying to access the last gig.
Luckily the rest of my hardware survived and I think I've mentally blocked out the other falls my Amiga has taken.

Oh and blowing up something by swapping cables round when it's turned on will never happen to me!!!  :-D

[Doobrey]

A couple of things spring to mind.

 1. Years ago, I hacked my A1200 into a PC tower case,but the floppy cable was too short to reach the floppy drive.
I was desparate to get it running that night, and need the floppy to format the HD..
 I didn`t have any spare IDC cable laying around to make one, all I could find was a reel of speaker cable.
 So, I set about doing a "cut and shut" on the original floppy cable, and used 17 pieces of speaker cable to extend it..
 Then it came to extending the floppy power ( no idea why I didn`t use the AT PSU..) and hacked some more speaker cable onto the floppy power connector on the A1200.
 Turned it on, all was working well, but the floppy seemed a little slow. Then I noticed the lovely smell of burning plastic
 I looked inside the case, and the floppy power cable was on fire :-o
 Luckily the whole setup survived.

2. The same crispy A1200, powered up sat on desk..
 I needed to grab a disk from a shelf high up above the desk, so being the impatient idiot I am, I stood on the desk to reach it...that`s when I learnt how fragile chipboard desks can be !
 The A1200 hit the floor with a thump, then I heard the HD reset and Workbench came back up on the monitor. I really thought that the HD would have suffered some damage from the fall,but it`s still working 7 years on :-D