Anything wrong with being a swap-jockey?

[TechnoPro]

There seems to be 2 discrete methodologies on hardware repair:

[1] The swap-jockey who will simply try a different part based on the problems logical point of origin.

[2] The diagnostician who has the means, time, and savvy to run a battery of tests and metrics.

While the latter is more professional and elegant, it can also prove to be less efficient, time-wise. Or so my thinking goes.

I know this attitude can carry over into the software realm as well - the whole troubleshoot and fix vs. reformat mentality.

So what's your style? Personally, I blend both methods, but I favor the diagnostician.

 

[montag451]

Depends on the prob.

 

[BIGGDOG]

I reformat more often than not simply because I like things sort of perfect. I pay for this logic as well. $1300.00 for a RAID card and 8 250 gig drives for my back up server.

 

[Stan]

I work in the corporate world. We ghost first, ask questions later. A typical ghost and rebuild of a workstation takes 17 minutes (the user netboots the machine, and it pulls a new build down). If that doesnt fix the problem, we swap them in a new Optiplex GX620, run Dell diags on the pulled one until something fails, order the Dell part, they ship it to us, we swap it in, and it goes back on the spares rack.

Having a 'tech' go to the machine, and diagnose the problem would take an hour, then if its a swap deal, another hour, etc. It just doesn't make sense, time is money.

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: TechnoPro
There seems to be 2 discrete methodologies on hardware repair:

[1] The swap-jockey who will simply try a different part based on the problems logical point of origin.

[2] The diagnostician who has the means, time, and savvy to run a battery of tests and metrics.

While the latter is more professional and elegant, it can also prove to be less efficient, time-wise. Or so my thinking goes.

I know this attitude can carry over into the software realm as well - the whole troubleshoot and fix vs. reformat mentality.

So what's your style? Personally, I blend both methods, but I favor the diagnostician.

I tend to swap for hardware-related problems but reformat for software-related.

I think the latter comes from the fact that I do most of my software troubleshooting for friends and family, so a nice clean reformat and reinstall not only usually resolves the immediate problem, it makes future troubleshooting easier (and better possible to do over the phone since I know EXACTLY what should be on the machine).

MotionMan