post the last thing you fixed/installed

[F1N3ST]

A PCI video card. 9200 Radeon ftw?

 

[iamwiz82]

 

[lxskllr]

About 3 weeks ago I was picking up my daughter, and my lower radiator hose blew in my Jeep. I had the old one in the back that I kept when I replaced it. It was cold as hell out, and I didn't have the clamp tool to take the clamps off. I managed, but it was a miserable 1/2 hour.

 

[grrl]

Aragon preamp. Either I fixed it or it fixed itself. Also headlights on my wife's car. I didn't have the desire to replace the fan belt last week though. For the $25 it cost at the garage, it wasn't worth doing myself in the dead of winter.

 

[PieIsAwesome]

OCZ Vendetta cooler on my Athlon II. What a pain in the ass. I wish all this bracket and push-pin nonsense would stop and instead screws+backplates were the standard.

 

[TheVrolok]

Last thing I fixed? Had to mount a few mending plates on my wooden futon. That thing isn't coming apart anymore.

 

[Chunkee]

made screens for my windows that the effing cat and his local crew busted all to shit...

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

For me it's something new every day. I fix stuff for a living.

Today it was this:

 

[Toastedlightly]

I replaced the timing belt and water pump in my Miata. It was nice working in a shop with both a lift and all the tools I would ever need.

 

[MartyMcFly3]

Water softener

 

[Schadenfroh]

Speaker bar on my HP LP2475w, nice having a headphone jack for my Audio-Technicas.

 

[pyonir]

replaced some capacitors in my parents' Mitsu HDTV.

 

[MartyMcFly3]

replaced some capacitors in my parents Mitsu HDTV.

Were they Flux???

 

[pyonir]

Were they Flux???

I've said too much!

 

[Hyperlite]

new HDD in my comp...

 

[amdskip]

More drywall work tonight on my kitchen remodel, actually drywall mud. Man that stuff gets everywhere when you sand it.

 

[RedCOMET]

Re-calibrated a Gas Chromatograph at work. at home fixed an old chair with a bracket and a screw.

 

[skyking]

Water softener

same here. It was for our group B community well. The thing would not draw brine, so I tore into it. I found bad seals, a piece of teflon seal from the submersible pump and a clogged screen on the venturi.
It works now but I fear the pump will be next. At 200+' depth I will hire that one done.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Just finished a major exterior overhual on my house. I hired roofers but did everything else myself, replaced a leaking 3 pane bay window, lots and lots of rotted soffit and rough ceder facia, 3 coats of paint on all exterior wood, also installed radiant barrier throughout the attic. Took a couple of months working evenings and weekends but well worth the effort.

 

[Scouzer]

neatly installed sirius into my car. had to pull the stereo and all. that was 2 years ago. i can barely assemble cardboard boxes, i dont do much myself.

 

[ahenkel]

Slapped a second fan on my H50 mmm push/pull.

 

[CZroe]

Fixed an "Antivirus 2010" scareware infection that spontaneously installed when simply VISITING a website on a fully patched but EXTREMELY slow netbook (one of the early ones that was never supposed to have Windows loaded on it's 8GB "SSD"). Even with every tweak in the book, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are unusable, so I had to stick to FAT32 with FalshPoint/FlashFire filesystem drivers and Internet Explorer to make Internet browsing even remotely feasible and even then it locks up for minutes at a time with the SSD access light just solid and the entire system unresponsive between nearly every launch or page change.

I'm not sure which triggered it, but I had browsed from Engadget to MaxConsole to ModMyI when the Java logo showed up in my taskbar tray area next to a fake Security Center logo. It was entirely a drive-by exploit of IE/Java as nothing was downloaded and executed deliberately by me or my actions. After that it was tons of fake virus scan windows and messages popping up.

It was relatively unsofisticated even though it was launching in Safe Mode... "End Process Tree" on "av.exe" was all it took to delete the av.exe and "JNvc" files it created. Luckily, FAT32 would've made that easy enough to do even if it were truly rooted and the process could not be killed. Anyway, that caused the system to no longer run EXE file because it had configured itself as the handler/"virus scanner" for any executable files accessed, including CMD (launching gave you the dialog to create a file association with the "Always use..." box grayed-out). That meant that I couldn't launch REGEDIT either. A work-around for, say, launching MSCONFIG was to point it (or any EXE you attempt to launch) to MSCONFIG.EXE. That doesn't work for REGEDIT of course because REGEDIT will try to add that EXE to the registry and balk at the fact that it is unable to do so (considering the EXE isn't a formatted REG file). The work-around for launching REGEDIT was to create a "START ...REGEDIT" batch file and run that. From there I exported then deleted any reference to av.exe and compared it to another XP system's registry to restore the keys to what they should be. That actually hosed it slightly worse (corrupted icons; still unable to launch EXE files). Ultimately, after all that, I just did a restart to confirm that av.exe was not loading/reinstalling itself and then used a BAT file to launch iexplore to nab the latest MBAM. Malware-Bytes Anti-Malware didn't detect the actual files from the infection (rather than delete immediately, I copied them and left renamed version in the original directories in case an accurate detection was needed for repair) but it did detect the damage left behind as an Application File Exploit and fixed that.

I had to repair my icon cache after that and all was back to normal. I guess it's a lot easier than if they had used one of the truly nasty rootkits but I was still plenty angry about all the wasted time (my other PC is having a hardware problem and this was really all I could use).

I learned my lesson. Next time I'm forced to use IE, I'm getting rid of JRE, Flash, and browsing with no images or add-ons! Somehow, I'm still not sure that would've helped. I just wish I knew which of those sites' adstream was compromised so that I could inform them and know which were safe to return to on te same netbook. I resorted to my iPhone when I want updates from those sites.

 

[DarkWarrior2]

I replaced the CF card in my m0n0wall box. I had forgotten that the original card was only 8MB and flashed to a later version. D'oh!

 

[SearchMaster]

My favorite repair recently was the blower motor in one of my HVAC systems. It took me a few hours to fully diagnose it because it would work one minute then not another, and I couldn't tell exactly when it was supposed to be kicking on or not. Once I knew for sure the problem, finding a replacement was nearly impossible - nobody sells HVAC supplies to a regular joe, you have to be a contractor. In addition, GE makes a billion slightly different models with different numbers for each manufacturer and nobody carries my exact model. eBay actually had them for the princely sum of $400.

I asked a contractor friend if he could buy one from a supplier for me and he mentioned that he might have one in his basement. He brought it over (free of charge), it was dirty as hell (had to scrub the wires just to see the colors)...it also was a two-speed and mine was a one-speed...but I hooked it up and it has been working great since. Always nice to save a few hundred bucks.

Today I'll be replacing the speakers in my van. Not a hard task but it's still an installation. My best repair/installation was a complete remodel of a bathroom, down to the studs...expanded the shower, moved the toilet, tiled the whole thing and it looks and works fantastic. It took me several months because I wasn't in a hurry but it cost me well under $1000 including granite topped vanity.

 

[meltdown75]

the level attached to the handle on my toilet at home.

had a party a couple weeks ago and it broke, just wear & tear i guess.

in terms of computer stuff, i fixed my buddy's wife's lappy a couple weeks ago. used the Dell factory image restore option, there was a virus or something that wouldn't allow a login, it would just automatically say "logging off" when i logged in. couldn't seem to fix it in safe mode, so i just backed up their files and nuked it.