Funny stories (hardware related).

[A Satanic Panda]

I work in the IT department of a magazine company I have a few:

 

I once had a MacBook Air's CPU fan stop working. We assumed the motor died or something and told me to replace it. That would mean a complete dis-assembly/fan swap that would have taken over an hour, was cut to under 20 minutes when I found a small piece of wiring insulator caught in the fan. Turns out that was problem.

 

At our office we use these power over ethernet (PoE) desk phones, meaning they draw their power and data from a CAT5 cable. Normally our set up is every desk would have 2 RJ45 ports, one for internet access and one for their phone. When we were setting up some people in a new office each desk had only 1 RJ45 port. So to get phone data and internet for each person we bought RJ45 spliters for each desk. Sense the spliters would split one CAT5 into two, PoE wouldn't work on their phones so we bought a bunch of AC adapters. But it turns out that our switches support IEEE 802.3at, which is PoE on all four twisted pairs not just two, so it carriers its power and data on the same twisted pair. So we blew a tonne of money on AC adapters we didn't need.

 

Not quite hardware, but the show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8 about how frustrating it is getting users to turn their PCs off and on again isn't even an exaggeration.

[BTGBullseye]

Not quite hardware, but the show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8 about how frustrating it is getting users to turn their PCs off and on again isn't even an exaggeration.

I hear ya.

 

At least the people I manage for understand what 'turn it off and on again' means, they aren't computer anti-literate like the IT Crowd people are. (anti-literate is different from illiterate in that the people actively try for a lack of knowledge, and will do everything within their power to forget anything they learn about computers)

 

I sincerely believe that most people should be using Chromebooks instead of any other PC. (yes, Mac is just another form of PC)

[A Satanic Panda]

One of the interns here walked in asking for a new shark teeth, one with "softer and flatter keys" which are supposed to help him type better. We had one shark teeth in storage that fit the bill but it had a crumb city under the keys. Got the shark teeth out and a can of compressed air and said I would clean it for him. In the middle of him saying "no it's fine I'll just get it dirty again", I let the air rip and a plume of crumbs came out of the shark teeth, and he shut right up.

 

Clean your keyboards regularly guys.

[SymphonicMetalFanatic95]

On the first build I ever put together, I screwed the motherboard directly into the case without putting stand-offs underneath it. That ended up causing some strange problems in the long run and the board didn't become broken beyond repair, but I must have messed something up pretty bad because it had some really strange boot problems. It would always freeze up on the initial boot screen and, for reasons beyond me, giving the top of the case a good smack would be enough to get it going again. What a mess that was.

 

...and I don't fully understand the how and why of it, but re-mounting my motherboard on top of the stand-offs, as was suggested by a friend of mine, seemed to fix these stupid problems. It would still act up a lot because I think that or something else I did caused it some long term damage, but it no longer froze up without fail at every boot. 'Twas a good learning experience for me.

[Jeb_CC]

It would always freeze up on the initial boot screen and, for reasons beyond me, giving the top of the case a good smack would be enough to get it going again. What a mess that was.

You could have only figured that out if you actually decided to give it a slap. XD What even went through your mind when you were doing that. That's like, straight out of a movie kinda shit.

 

The only thing funny I can think of wasn't really funny for me, it was funny to everyone else though. I had a really old netbook and the power plug (don't hurt me, I don't know the proper names for these things lol) inside of it kept coming loose and I'd have to glue it back every week or so. Eventually this was tedious and annoying having to open up the netbook so often so I tried to find another way for the power cord to reach the plug inside. Apparently the only way it reached was if the netbook was lying on its side. So in favor of not having to open up the netbook so often, I succumbed to my days as a floor dweller and was pulling this off for a good few weeks before I finally just stopped bothering. XD

 

 

Thanks to Google for supplying me with such helpful images once again.

[SymphonicMetalFanatic95]

You could have only figured that out if you actually decided to give it a slap. XD What even went through your mind when you were doing that. That's like, straight out of a movie kinda shit.

 

Yeah, not too proud of myself there.... I was just pissed off with my computer at the time, and hitting the case was the first thing I thought to do out of frustration. I thought it starting when I did that was only a coincidence for about a month, but then it happened way too consistently for me to believe that anymore. In other words, the correlation between the computer finishing booting up and me smacking the top of the case was quite high.

 

As for that problem you had, that's rather strange. Never experienced much weird stuff having to do with notebooks, laptops etc. but then most of my experience working with computers comes from using desktops so far.

[BTGBullseye]

You could have only figured that out if you actually decided to give it a slap. XD What even went through your mind when you were doing that. That's like, straight out of a movie kinda shit.

Actually, percussion repairs were incredibly common for older systems, as it can cause poorly seated components to regain connection. It is my go-to fix for any problem I can't immediately place the source of. (and it works 9 times out of 10)

 

I can't believe I never mentioned this before... I used to have a stick of DDR2 333MHz RAM that could be used to permanently turn any RAM slot into a RAM stick killer. Just insert the stick, start the system, turn off the system, and insert any RAM sticks you want permanently destroyed. Worked on all Intel and AMD systems that I tested it on, and I have never even heard of anyone that knew what caused it. Still have the stick floating around my junk component bin somewhere.

Edited March 28, 2017 by Guest (see edit history)

[Jeb_CC]

BTG, that is Evil. XD You need to calm down a bit there.

 

But uh, I'm probably a real hypocrite pointing out the hitting of technological objects. XP I mean when I had my old Nexus 5 Phone, the power button had a faulty connection or something so if you pressed it once it would think it was being held down, resulting in; I could never turn my phone on. It would just boot up and power down continuously until it drained itself of battery life. Nexus phones are built like bricks and they're real hard to open, so I resorted to just slapping my phone a few times until it stopped thinking the power button was being held down. XD

I actually found an app though that turned the volume button into a power button so I got that and that fixed my problem in a real annoying way.