What has been your most difficult technical task reguarding fixing a computer?

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BurntToast

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Jun 14, 2003
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I am just curious as to what some of you may have run into during the years when repairing others computer on the job or your own at home.

For me, The hardest problems are always the ones that never get fixed. More likely than not when some hardware arrives DOA and you first expect everything but that.

Other than that, nothing really comes to mind :?
 
I hate the ones that make reloading the operating system (windows, generally) faster than fixing the problem. I always feel like i've taken the easy way out when I have to do that. I never feel like I fixed it.

I don't get much DOA hardaware, but recently I did get a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (S2882UG3NR) with a defective onboard scsi controller. It was a $ 500 motherboard, too. Goes to show you never know what you are going to pull out of a new retail box.
 
random hardware incompataiblities. take a nice AMD 3200 system with a geforce 3. upgrade to a 9800 pro. black screens, bombs, shits all over. take the 9800 pro out and put it in another box, perfect.

no amount of bios updates, drivers, tweaking or anything would fix it. neither part on its own was busted, they just didnot get along.
 
Presario's.

oh yeah....

and E-machines

The WORST designs ever. :mad:

Step one.... Get case open.
Step 1.5.... Where's my fricken crowbar? One of them damn clips busted again.
Step 2.... Blow it out! No airflow at all in those POS' so dust just collects everywhere and anywhere....
Step 3.... Holy crap! is that a card-board fan shroud! :eek:
Step 3.5... Marvel at fire hazard
Step 4.... Find loose floppy cable that caused all sorts of hell (shouldn't be possible) after 8 hours of testing for the normal solutions.
Step 5.... Smash that god damn case with a hammer. It won't close since you busted the clips trying to open it.
Step 6.... Charge customer twice as much as normal and when he refuses throw the Compaq POS at his car.
 
Anything with a PC Chips motherboard in it. Those things used to drive me insane with the random problems they would throw out. Combined with Win98 they were a complete nightmare to use. When I had one using my K6-2 250, it would randomly freak out on me. The funniest thing was if I got pissed and kicked the case, the computer rebooted. I did that about 3 times a day after I found that out. :D

A couple of years ago I overclocked a 1GHz Duron briefly to 1.33GHz via a pencil trick(only way on a locked motherboard.) After a coupel of weeks, it started hanging, so I dropped it back to 1GHz. It would work fine at 1GHz unless you started a folding process, then it would imediately hang. I usually tossed the chip and replaced it with a 2400+ and everything went back to normal.

I had one costly mistake as well about 10-11 years ago. I was screwing with overclocking my 486, took it out of it's socket to thermal paste it, and put it back in backwards(486s were not keyed with a missing pin in a corner.) I burned that proc up. That was back when I was in high school, and the $200 I spent to get a new proc was a good chunk of change to me at the time.
 
Well, it's not "fixing" per se, but watercooling my athlon 2200 proved to be a major pain in the ass. I wound up buying a new motherboard and destroying my floppy drive in the process, and the end results are not as cool or as quiet as I'd expected.

My sister's athlon 1800 in a pc chips mobo wouldn't boot, and that took a new hd and several reinstalls of win98 until i just turned of some error checking thing in the bios that seems to have fixed it.

Putting together my first computer was kind of a pain, but it was definitely worth it in terms of saving money and learning about computers very quickly.

Trying to use linux was a pain and I will never try it again.
 
BakedON said:
Presario's.

oh yeah....

and E-machines

The WORST designs ever. :mad:

Step one.... Get case open.
Step 1.5.... Where's my fricken crowbar? One of them damn clips busted again.
Step 2.... Blow it out! No airflow at all in those POS' so dust just collects everywhere and anywhere....
Step 3.... Holy crap! is that a card-board fan shroud! :eek:
Step 3.5... Marvel at fire hazard
Step 4.... Find loose floppy cable that caused all sorts of hell (shouldn't be possible) after 8 hours of testing for the normal solutions.
Step 5.... Smash that god damn case with a hammer. It won't close since you busted the clips trying to open it.
Step 6.... Charge customer twice as much as normal and when he refuses throw the Compaq POS at his car.
Click to expand...

I'd put Toshiba's design up again emachines for the worst ever. I had no problems getting emachines cases off, but getting them back on was damn near impossible. We have a few Toshiba Equium's here where I work, and it took a hammer to get the damn thing apart. I ended up modding all 10 of them that are here: hardware and software.

1. Start the fun by knocking the feet off with a hammer. These big, cheap plastic feet took an extra 2" on each side
2. Open the side, hammering the cheap, useless plasic shroud over the stupidly large heatsink on the P2-266.
3. After that, unscrew the PSU and unplug the 3" ATX connector to the board(I bet that savings of .00005 cents per connector on the wire was really worth it!)
4. Pull the front cover off, it was a huge PITA thanks to clips being in places where you need a newborns fingers to unclip them.
5. Hammer the top plastic piece off, then use a exacto to cut off about half the tabs, redundantacy city.
6. Rip hard drive case out and trash, they placed it strategically in an area to block the 80mm intake fan's airflow through the case.
7. Put the case back together, then start on bios hacking. Toshiba never released another bios for the board, but Intel did. I had to use a hex editor to trick the Toshiba into thinking the Intel bios was a Toshiba bios. After that was done, it supported higher speed processors.

OEM designs always amaze me with the stupidity that's inside of them. Their use of shrouds to use one less fan and blocking airflow all over the case never ceases to amaze me.
 
The most difficult task is trying to decypher what the owner tells you is wrong.
 
Getting my HP printer, HP scanner, HP computer, and HP DVD writer all to work together, at the same time. Tossed the DVD writer into a folding box, beat the printer to death with a hammer and gave the scanner to the Crisis Center, tossed the POS motherboard into a folding box.

The printer was old and wouldn't pull paper through sometimes, any more, then I was checking the cable and knocked it off the stand. didn't work at all after that, so I vented on it, rather heavily. :D

New printer/scanner/copier/fax machine, and built a new box to do work and quit messing with stuff.

Then switched to Linux and once i got every thing working again, will not mess with it caus I still don't know how I did it.... :D

 
Removing 14 instances of the Snow White virus....without a windows 98 disc, and no working net connection.
 
sandmanx said:
I'd put Toshiba's design up again emachines for the worst ever.
Click to expand...
Gonna reach way back here. Anyone remeber the cases of the old Acer towers? The one with the front door and crappy plastic lever that you had to pull while yanking on the cover? Came off with an almighty squeal?

And here's hoping that it goes back without problems 'cause if it misaligns with the lock tab, buddy, that case isn't coming off without some serious screwdriver time.

Throw in the mix there the Acer "Dolphin" sound hardware. The Toshiba "multimedia box" with the CD drive in it that connected via proprietary cable. Oh yeah. Good luck finding drivers as it MIGHT not be on the restore cd's.

Packard Bell sound card / modem combinations... sometimes easier than others. Sometimes it was easier to get the customer to buy new ones.

Dell, HP, and Emachine, proprietary power supplies. Either not normal sized or not oriented normally, or both.

Cloning a restored HD to a larger sized HD and watching XP fail to boot because of hardware / security issues.

Completely off-the-wall random hardware / software problems that the customer can describe fully and you can't duplicate, or if you can duplicate, unable to find the cause.

Having to explain to customers that "no, insect infestation voids your warranty... sorry."

Two more that qualify as more stupid, but were hard: cramming a PCI sound card into a slot while the PC was on thus blowing out the mobo, RAM, sound card, CPU, and modem; infecting 25+ customer machines with the Antiexe virus 'cause someone had forgotten to write protect the virus scanner floppy.
 
we (my brother and i) had this one guy who had some problems with wireless... we spent 3 hours debugging stuff and still couldn't make it work, but we had to go home. then he didn't respond to us anymore... dunno why. but that was a punk to work with...

deciphering what the owner wants can be a challenge sometimes... it's funny when there's really nothing wrong. i prefer the owners who are somewhat literate. that means enough to know what's wrong, and enough to know that they don't know enough to fix it.

and just to nitpick here, but... with no airflow, how's the dust get in? nothing to move dust in=no dust. i'd say the problem is not lack of airflow (well, that is an issue, but not the main one) but more a lack of filters. and owners with compressed air.

i've had a couple of problems with my own systems that were a bitch to fix, too... (heh... like "fixing" a dog) especially when i had the only athlon/ddr system in the house. no way to test components there... which is not good when stuff isn't working. viruses, especiall recent ones... some of those virus writers could be making a lot of money in the computer business if they weren't out to piss people off (piss in cornflakes, etc.) some of them probably do. they just get on my nerves... especially when they get in my systems.

enough ranting, anyways...

i dislike OEM systems too, but there's no denying that dells can be pretty damn clean looking inside when they're new.
 
Windows: Dealing with Norton products. No, seriously. Their documentation sucks, period. I did some work for a guy who had just upgraded his NIS to 2005. Then it wouldn't come up enabled, it was always disabled for some reason. Look at norton's KB. Check google. No luck. I re-installed NIS THREE TIMES before telling him it was time to move to windows 2000 anyways. There's always a solution. ;)

Most technical difficulty I ever had getting a Linux system working: when I was building fold-server's client, I couldn't for the life of me get sshd working, so you could remotely log in. It turns out that you have to create a character /dev entry called "ptmx" with (5,2) major,minor numbers. Just in case anyone else hits that. strace is your friend.

Hardware: Maybe it's just me, but I've never had problems opening/closing cases. Except the new dells, and once you see how it works it's easy. The first time I had to open one, though, it was like being a monkey with a TI-83. You'd think they'd put labels like "pull here" on it, but no.... The biggest hardware problem I've had was a customer whose machine (a dell, surprise surprise) shocked me whenever I touched the back of it. I'm not talking 12v, more like 120ac. I told him to buy a new machine and left. After staying 40 minutes so I'd feel justified charging him a whole hour :p
 
I'm about to replace some fat capacitors on my wife's old motherboard. From what I read it won't be easy. If I can do it, it will mean 1GHz more for F@H research.
 
Sparky said:
The most difficult task is trying to decypher what the owner tells you is wrong.
Click to expand...

QFT. Then to complicate things they are usually a mac. Never tell anyone you are a Mac tech. A lot of people hate mac's but they are posers wanting to be cool, I hate them for personal reasons.
 
A close second. Flaky firmware on managed switches. PITA!
 
Installing XP on a Compaq laptop with no floppy, no working lan, no cdrom, just usb port + 256mb usb dongle :eek:

it may be easy but i went the [H]ard way :(
 
1) PC chips - I got a cheap mobo/cpu combo at frys because It was on sale and i was itching to build a new folder. So I get home and there is no Mobo docs/ or discs. I spent hours online trying to find a LAN driver for the mobo.. no luck. Thank god for Linux.

2) Anything HP ( 99% of brandnamed computers) . - come from the factory Bloated with tons crap installed. We got a wholesale lot of Pentium 4s ( 50 boxes ) 5 ran for a day then crashed. and they all needed to be re-formated / re-installed. Had to do each one buy hand .

3) Via chip sets- nuff said
 
Three computers at my work had their proprietory sized power supplys go out, and I had a few normal psus laying around in a closet. I ended up having to replace 2 fans on the psu from the closet, and then I had to mod all the cases to fit the psus in. That took way to long. Atleast I got paid for all of it.

MN Scout
 
DR_K13 said:
2) Anything HP ( 99% of brandnamed computers) . - come from the factory Bloated with tons crap installed. We got a wholesale lot of Pentium 4s ( 50 boxes ) 5 ran for a day then crashed. and they all needed to be re-formated / re-installed. Had to do each one buy hand.
Click to expand...

I thought it was standard practice to format a brand new OEM PC the day you got it???



Keep on Folding!!

 
arkamw said:
Gonna reach way back here. Anyone remeber the cases of the old Acer towers? The one with the front door and crappy plastic lever that you had to pull while yanking on the cover? Came off with an almighty squeal?

And here's hoping that it goes back without problems 'cause if it misaligns with the lock tab, buddy, that case isn't coming off without some serious screwdriver time.

Throw in the mix there the Acer "Dolphin" sound hardware. The Toshiba "multimedia box" with the CD drive in it that connected via proprietary cable. Oh yeah. Good luck finding drivers as it MIGHT not be on the restore cd's.

Packard Bell sound card / modem combinations... sometimes easier than others. Sometimes it was easier to get the customer to buy new ones.

Dell, HP, and Emachine, proprietary power supplies. Either not normal sized or not oriented normally, or both.

Cloning a restored HD to a larger sized HD and watching XP fail to boot because of hardware / security issues.

Completely off-the-wall random hardware / software problems that the customer can describe fully and you can't duplicate, or if you can duplicate, unable to find the cause.

Having to explain to customers that "no, insect infestation voids your warranty... sorry."

Two more that qualify as more stupid, but were hard: cramming a PCI sound card into a slot while the PC was on thus blowing out the mobo, RAM, sound card, CPU, and modem; infecting 25+ customer machines with the Antiexe virus 'cause someone had forgotten to write protect the virus scanner floppy.
Click to expand...



The family business still uses a system with that case for invoicing. Custom wrote OS and that computer ran them 5 grand at the time. All proprietary.
 
OSUguy98 said:
I thought it was standard practice to format a brand new OEM PC the day you got it???



Keep on Folding!!

Click to expand...



Did that with a dell last week. Dell thought it would be fun not to include any drivers. (Including NIC drivers) So after formating a floppy and copying the drivers onto it the dell won't read the floppy. :( So, I burnt it to a CD and was happy. Then dell decided to save 15 cents be not adding a spot for a second harddrive. :) So some velcro solved that. Then came the fun with a barcode label printer from 1996.........



Far from the most difficult but, I was in a bad mood.
 
Brand spanking new OEM computers, purchased the weekend prior. "I plugged it in, and it worked fine, but now it locks up." It's under warranty, call the maunfacturer."I just don't understand, I have Norton's Antivirus, and firewall". :rolleyes: .

Customers, that not only are not forthcoming with vital info, but will lie to you. Best example, so far was the lady who had a Sata DVD burner, that just went out on her windows 95 rig. She swore it worked fine the previous day, kinda hard with no SATA connectors of any type inside the box.

Completely unprotected boxes riddled with virii, and spyware, running at the speed of frozen molasses. That have never been connected to the internet?

Removing a CPU HSF, to view dirt on a biblical scale. Had to chisel the crud from between the Heatsink fins.

Computer that had just spent 3 weeks in the shop, (pro's of course), and now failed to boot. They did offer to build her a vastly superior rig for only $2200. The Ide cable to her HD had been intentionally installed backwards. And she payed these bozos $100.

 
I think the hardest thing I've ever run into was my parents PC. It's not so bad now, but its not uncommon to sit there and watch my dad click on the flashing banners saying he's won something..... :rolleyes:

 
omg, the driver setup for windows 9x on the old family packard bell was such a pain in the ass. Combined soundcard/modem I found out years later. It was the last pre-built oem computer I've ever allowed anyone I know to buy.

Hours on phone support w/ them telling me I need to reformat and run fdisk, when I had told them dozens of times I've already done that, go to the next step. I swear, it was a robot on the other end of the phone.

Recovery CD's and hidden recovery partitions are my new favorite stupid ass ideas. If they want to sell computers with software installed, give out the effing actual disks!

 
a defect floppy power connector.

normaly i only put then datacable disconnect from the board, but not the powercables.
and to find out the floppy powerconnetor could be the problem for a ever restarting/freezing pc system...
 
1) People that complain when anything goes wrong with Windows98 or ME and expect you NOT to have to format/reload that POS. “But its worked great for 4 years.” Then you get it out of them that they just had it done 4 months ago.

2) Like DR_K13, Anything from HP/Compaq. Why in H E double hockey sticks does a printer need 8 processes at startup? Oh and if its attached to a HP computer, why does there need to be 50 startup processes? And can someone explain to me what good the HP System driver actually does?

3) Recovery CDs and Recovery partitions, for gods sake include the actually software disks if you’re gonna bundle your bloatware crap with it.

4) Anything from Symmantic. Norton is the most bloated POS virus scanner ever. I’ve seen it cause more problems then it could ever hope to solve. Its real time scanner, doesn’t scan in real time. And why does it need 8 or 9 processes to work… errrrr I mean not work?

5) Proprietary anything inside of the case.

6) Dells. What is the deal with all the plastic tabs and push buttons to get your crap open or take it out? I think it’s the case for the XPS 2100, a button on the top and the bottom of the case then you have to use your third arm to swing the side of the case out.

7) ASUS’s way of minutely changing chipsets so you can’t use the standard drivers and have use their old non-updated drivers that don’t work either. I have one system that still can’t burn CDs faster then 16x or DVDs faster then 6x because of this.

Thats all for now.


 
Most of the time, it's just trying to fix the screwups from my parents or others out there that know just enough to screw EVERYTHING up... I've learned in my life, that if you want your security tested, give it to my mom... within 5 minutes, she'll have some spyware or something.... within 10 the PC will stop working... I still have yet to figure out how she does that...

I'm also not a fan of people hovering over me as I try to troubleshoot their system... "Look, I know what I just tried didn't fix the problem.... maybe if you weren't standing above me breathing down my neck, I could think about the PC and not the uncomfortableness you're inflicting on me...."


Keep on Folding!!

 
OSUguy98 said:
Most of the time, it's just trying to fix the screwups from my parents or others out there that know just enough to screw EVERYTHING up... I've learned in my life, that if you want your security tested, give it to my mom... within 5 minutes, she'll have some spyware or something.... within 10 the PC will stop working... I still have yet to figure out how she does that...

I'm also not a fan of people hovering over me as I try to troubleshoot their system... "Look, I know what I just tried didn't fix the problem.... maybe if you weren't standing above me breathing down my neck, I could think about the PC and not the uncomfortableness you're inflicting on me...."


Keep on Folding!!

Click to expand...
So true... so true... Parents to flashing banner ads, are just like moths to a flame.

 
DaSmurf said:
omg, the driver setup for windows 9x on the old family packard bell was such a pain in the ass. Combined soundcard/modem I found out years later. It was the last pre-built oem computer I've ever allowed anyone I know to buy.
Click to expand...

Removing anything from the preinstalled packard bell suite now that was a pain in the arse.



Recovery CD's and hidden recovery partitions are my new favorite stupid ass ideas. If they want to sell computers with software installed, give out the effing actual disks!
Click to expand...

Hold on there. I put a hidden recovery partition on every PC i build for people. It is a hell of a lot easier when they FUBAR something and i have to reinstall to have an EXACT image of what software they had when they go "what CD? You mean those coasters you gave me?"
:rolleyes:
 
Spectre said:
Removing anything from the preinstalled packard bell suite now that was a pain in the arse.
Click to expand...
Ah the Packard Bell Navigator.... what a piece of crap that was. My mom refused to do anything without it. To this day she refuses to forgive me for kamikaze upgrading the PC to Win95 because it didn't have that "nifty room looking thingy." That and the crappy 3D games pack it came with. Now Megarace... that was the only cool thing on that PC.

 
GlobalFear said:
The family business still uses a system with that case for invoicing. Custom wrote OS and that computer ran them 5 grand at the time. All proprietary.
Click to expand...





Standard practice for us - ( now ) ;)



 
ANYTHING with winME on it. I hate working on that. As said b4 its almost always a wipe and reload. And I just sell them on more ram and winXP. I had someone bring there comp in and they told me they cant get on the internet. Plug it in, turn it on and a huge cloud of smoke come flying out the PSU. They were like. "Oh yeah, i forgot about that" i cant stand that crap. Some people just dont care. Or bugs man, "My comp keeps shutting of and i dont know why" Well its prolly because u got 2 generations of roaches shorting your board out dumbass. And smokers, OMG i hate em. "I didnt know the smoke was bad for the computer" When i bought it, the case was white. Now its yellow. Thats like smoking for 20 years and not knowing y u cant breathe right. Other than that. ANything HP, Dell, Compaq mostly. All proprietary....all a PITA. Dell's XPS What a piece of crap a job that should have taken 2 hrs took 3 days. But that's a whole nuther story. If you dont get it custom made then dont get it i say. I will admit my dad owns a dell. My i work on it so it works good. Just hope the parts dont die cuz a psu is like 100 buck and the cpu fan is like 50.
So anyway. Theres my 2 cents.
 
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