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I recently repaired a pc for a friend and needed to replace the motherboard.
I advised that all of their precious photos shouldn't reside only on the pc and they should copy everything to external media.
The CD drive was busted but they had a temperamental external drive they used for burning.
This was fine until I realised they had to literally bash the external cd drive to make it eject. It sat on top of the tower!
I pointed out the error of their ways, but needless to say I am reluctant to help in the future.
I'm sure there are horror stories out there, care to share?
My aunt and uncle gave me one of their pc's to take a look at and see if i could fix a few weeks ago. The problem was with the operating system, but of course i cracked open the case just to have a look inside. I swear to you there was like a five foot long spiderweb that floated out, and i was amazed at the inside...it literally looked like it had snowed dust in there. It was like half an inch thick. I'm surprised it hadnt caught on fire yet.
My name is JRComp, and I approve this message.
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I like the folks who try to install XP on a Celeron 300 with 32Mb of ram...two or three a year still cross my desk.
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I picked up a PC that had dust about 7 inches deep, I was completely amazed. The onboard graphics gave out due to overheating....
One of my mates seems to have hard drive failures fairly often. One day I come around to his place and his PC starts rattling a bit. *CRACK* He hits it hard on the side... "It always does that, that fixes it for a while though"
He never backs up his stuff either!
Mattwizz3
Gigabyte P35-DS3R
E4500 @ 3.2
4GB DDR2 800
9800GT
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Three stories from my days as a service tech come to mind.
One was a fellow who asked a "mate" to install a SCSI CD burner for him. His mate was lacking the required 50 pin SCSI cable so decided to force a 34 pin FDD cable into each end. This resulted in a lot of mashed pins, a dead CD burner (this was when they retailed for around AU$800) and a dead SCSI controller.
The next is about a machine that looked as though it had been used as an ashtray. I kid you not, this was the foulest PC I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. It was covered in a thick layer of sticky tar and when we opened it the smell was unbearable. There was a 2cm thick layer of dust in the bottom of the case that had bonded with the same tar like substance on the outside. Both the PSU and CPU fan were gummed up. We did get it cleaned up and working, but I'll never forget that smell.
The third was a PC that took over 50 minutes to boot up. The user pretty much used the desktop for everything, and I mean EVERYTHING! It was her temp directory, her programs directory, work directory, everything. She had multiple instances of Office loading at startup, several different anti-virus programs and a plethora of other software loading at startup. This, however, is not the funniest part. She didn't bring the computer in because it was slow, she brought it in because her desktop finally caved in and bunched all her icons onto the left hand side of the screen in what appeared to be a never ending mess.
Anyway, hope you found something amusing in there.
Coffee...The true life blood of the IT Industry!
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"... It was her temp directory, her programs directory, work directory, everything. She had multiple instances of Office loading at startup, several different anti-virus programs and a plethora of other software loading ..."
I was given a PC from my dad's work, apparently it was giving them 'too many problems'... I get it home and boot it up, I note that its a 400MHz Celeron with 128MB of ram and a 4GB HDD... Win XP boots up, then a stupid animated cursor program, then MSN, ICQ, Adobe pre-loader, office 2003 pre-loader, 2 anti virus programs, multiple errors and a desktop theme program.....
Wasn't quite 50Minutes but was still bad, I sat for 15 min waiting on the desktop before I could even open the start menu.Mattwizz3
Gigabyte P35-DS3R
E4500 @ 3.2
4GB DDR2 800
9800GT
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Being in our teenage years now, my friends and I are what many of you adults will call "lazy". And this is the cause of the following stories I have to tell you:
In our grade 7 and 8 years at school, we were "guinea pigs" for a laptop program the government was trying out. Every one of us recieved an HP/Compaq NX6110 laptop with an Intel Celeron Processor, 1 GB of RAM and Windows XP Professional for use with school work. We thought it was the best thing sinced sliced bread. We were to keep them through grade 7 and 8.
To start off with, when class was over and it was time to put the laptops away, I watched everyone just hold the power button to shut them off quick.
Sometimes I would watch a friend power it off this way, then tell him it wasn't good for the computer and Windows, only to be told it wouldn't hurt anything and that I was "full of sh*t". In the end, I didn't care because at least I was shutting my laptop down the right way.
I was one of few people who actually shut down Windows the right way on our laptops. Well, when a computer isn't shut down the right way, Windows leaves temporary files on the hard disk, which brings me to my next story:
In our grade 8 year with our laptops, a good friend of mine was having a lot of trouble with his, and, being known as the "computer nerd" of the bunch at school, I was proud when my friend came straight to me to check out his laptop instead of going to the school laptop technician like he was supposed to.
His laptop was painfully slow, and it kept telling him that drive C was low on space.
At lunchtime, he watched as I ran disk cleanup. I burst out laughing when, 20 minutes later, it said it found 6 GB of temporary files - the result of not shutting down right for over a year.
Besides the laptops, each of us also got a spare battery. Each class had a cart to store the laptops in overnight, and a huge battery charger to accomodate 30 batteries.
During class, if our battery died, Windows went into hibernation, and we could go back to change our battery and put the dead one on charge.
During our grade 7 year, the battery in the laptop belonging to one of the girls in our class started to die, but still had a a few minutes left. Instead of waiting of it to hibernate, she flipped the laptop upside down while everything was still on, with the hard drive spinning, and took the battery out. She did get a scolding from the teacher for that.
So that's pretty much the story with the laptops. Other than that, no one at school ever shuts off the school computers the right way. They just hold the power button because they're lazy. It used to make me mad, but I down care anymore because they're not my computers and I shut them down the right way.
-Trent
"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving may not be for you."
-Our tour guide at Fenway Park in Boston, MA.
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