We had one of the sockets on one of those fail. Never figured a real reason for it, just one day all the sudden with the computer on there was a big snap, the cooler fell off and the CPU cooked itself. Was well outside any kind of warranty but it was certainly a unique failure.

At the beige box retailer I worked for, about a decade ago, we got a couple of the local high school's computers in for repairs. They told us the systems just wouldn't boot, and they "smelled funny."

Took the case off, and behold! The Intel fan had seized, melted, and caught fire. It wasn't a particularly old system so I'm not sure how the thermal protection didn't kick in, but that had happened on two near-identical systems. No saving those boards.

For a couple of years, 2007-2009, I kept encountering budget-build AMD boxes with cooked thermal compund. The first time a client brought in a comouter with the heatsink rolling around loose on the bottom of the case, I thought it was rough treatment, customer error. But then two more, Dell instead of eMachines or Compaq... weird.

That's not surprising. Towards the end of the Mhz Wars the heatsinks had become pretty ungainly but they were still using the flimsy spring clip instead of the more modern 4 post or gantry type systems used today (sorry I'm sure they have proper names but damned if I know what they are).

I had a solid copper heatsink that was easily 5lbs for my Athlon XP system. I held onto it for the longest time after I got rid of the system because I knew the metal was easily worth $20.

Oh, great memories. Those were absolutely terrifying, but luckily I never broke one and only had one instance of a friend breaking one. The absolute worst was when I (being a more experienced PC builder) was helping a friend with his first build, and the friend insists that I install the cooler.

I destroyed my 600MHz Pentium III while fiddling with the cooler. A corner of the chip broke off.

I used the same motherboard and bought an adapter which allowed an upgrade to a 1,3GHz PIII Tualatin. It had a proper headspreader so the installation was a breeze in comparison.

The horror ensued on my next upgrade to an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ which again had the die exposed, but thankfully I never managed to destroy it.

My spouse does the same thing. "Why don't you choose" == I get blamed if it's not the better choice.

Or worse, taking it off.