At Canada Computers in Toronto, circa 2009.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Good grief, that’s a fun one to see! How did the conversation go with the customer if you remember?
Now I wonder what catastrophic damage my Noctua D15 would do. An unstoppable force cooler would hit my big ass GPU immovable object. That collision would trigger a big bang ray traced singularity localised entirely within my PC case.
I think they were a clueless computer user so I just told them what the problem was and how we fixed it went over their head. But we laughed good with my colleague. Falling coolers were common on Intel boards at the time when the retention brackets used to be hooked with push-pins. Note this is the factory installed bracket on the board that's fallen. 😄 It's not a poorly installed cooler. This is prior to the user-installed push-pin design that came with the Core processors on the LGA sockets.
What were they running, windows 95?
Lol, unlikely. Either XP or 7. Don't recall exactly.
Nah it was 98 or ME. That thing is pre XP. It looks like a socket 423. They were the only boards that had a plastic locking lever that I can remember.
Pretty sure it's a P4 on a 478. 423 is significantly larger and the cooler retenrion clip goes directly on the socket. This socket has no retention protrusions. Instead there's a plastic bracket that the cooler is attached to, but the plastic bracket itself has fallen off the board. You can see it on the cooler itself in the other photo. 😄
So 2001 to 2004 or 5 or so.