Originally Posted by
Mygaffer
I am in for a copy of Dungeon Defenders, although I don't really have anything amusing to say so I don't know if I'll get it. Torchlight is a great game and I have already pre-ordered TL2, I can't wait!
1.So, here is a little story. I work at a computer repair and retail shop, a smaller mom and pop type outfit. So, a customer came in once and said he couldn't get his new hard drive to work. You see he had went to Fry's or Best Buy and bought an internal 3.5" SATA hard drive to pop in his system for extra storage. So we took it in for service and when we got around to it the first thing we did was open it up.
Turns out this guy had plugged a floppy power cable into the SATAI/II jumper! That is why it wasn't working. We just plugged in the proper power connector and the drive was fine.
2. Another story of user incompetence (and really its not their fault, they just don't know any better) was an Indian guy, really nice, but he had built a computer for his son. It was shutting down after only being on for a while and so I suspected overheating right away. I checked the temps in the BIOS and sure enough, they were super high.
So, I opened up the case and pulled on the heatsink. It used the Intel push-pins (which I never really liked) and half of it freely swung away from the motherboard. The user had only secured two the four push pins. Not only had he done that though, which to be honest is not super uncommon to see from an adventurous first timer, but he had used literally 20 times more TIM than he should have. It was oozing out the sides, it was all over the place. There was so much thermal interface material that it was acting as an insulator!
3. Speaking of too much TIM, we once had an intern wong with us. I won't name names as he has a very distinctive name. Well, I asked him to test some older processors we had in a bin, mostly old socket 478 Pentium 4's. So I give him a working motherboard, PSU, ram, and a station to work at and let him do his thing, after showing him how once.
Well, I came back after 2 hours and asked him how it was going. He says, "Well, I've tested 4 but 3 of them are bad".
Now these were all good processors when they had been put in the bin and processors almost never die anyway, so I knew something was wrong and I told him that couldn't be right. I went back to see what was going on and there was TIM, Arctic Silver, EVERYWHERE. On CPU's, on the bench, on the motherboard, all over his
hands. I pulled the processor he had in the board and there was TIM
IN THE SOCKET! I told him AS was conductive (I had told him this beforehand too) and that he had ruined the motherboard and probably some of the processors wouldn't be able to be used again b/c they had TIM in all of their pins. In their
pins. I asked him to just clean up and forget about.
Well he took another hour, didn't clean it up properly, and when I told him he has used WAAAY too much TIM he just told me, "I
know how much TIM to use". Clearly he did not.
He left that day and never came back to the store.
4. Last story. This time a story about the total incompetence of Fry's technicians. So, we have a customer who used to have Fry's service his computers. Once he found out about us and saw we did good work he brought us in a computer he had had Fry's put together for him. Turns out it had always had problems and they never made it work right.
I asked him to describe the issues and he said it would shut off after being used for awhile. Sound familiar? Well he brought it into Fry's and after they looked at it for a couple weeks it stopped shutting off, but it would get slow, have errors, and crash. This had been happening for about two years.
So the first thing I did was boot it up and get into the BIOS. Guess what? The machine had a Core 2 Duo in it and it was reading 80C at
idle! Keep in mind it wasn't a stock cooler either, but one of those copper circular Zalman coolers. I couldn't believe it. Guess what else? ALL the thermal protections had been turned off in the BIOS.
I opened up the case and quickly spotted the problem. The cooler had been installed backwards. So basically the fan for the Zalman cooler was literally an inch away from the rear exhaust fan and blowing in the opposite direction. It
killed all airflow over the cpu cooler! Not only had these poor excuses for a technician installed it incorrectly, when they realized it was shutting down due to overheating their only solution was to turn off the very protection mechanisms that shut down the system in the first place! I fixed it but that system was never really stable again, as it had been constantly overheating for years.
What do you think guys, fun stories?