This one is for all the repair tech's in these forums

[pdn]

What is the craziest thing you've ever come across while working on someone?s pc that you still have a few laughs at?

I've seen someone stick a CD in an old 5 1/4" floppy drive thinking it was a CR-Rom!

I've also seen someone that had put an AGP Video card in a PCI slot (don't ask 'cause I don't know either).

 

[InlineFive]

Wow. That's pretty sad. I have nothing that would come up to comparison level.

-Por

 

[Paulson]

I don't have any crazy stories, but all I can say is sooooo many of the computers I work on are so dusty, I don't even understand how the continue to function. (Yes, I clean them as part of my job)

 

[Dennis Travis]

One that is close to your example is my neighbor who I built a system for is a writer but knows nothing about computers. He asked how to save to a floppy to send to people and I showed him even having him put in the disk in the drive. He called me one day saying it could not find the floppy!! Guess where he put it in? He opened the CDROM drawer and put it in there and closed the drawer. It damaged the drive! i was able to fix it but it would not read CD's after that till I took it apart and fixed it. I was SHOCKED as I have never in my many years both building and working on systems ever seen anyone do that before.

A friend in Tech support at a large SF Bay Area company called Livingston one day got a call that almost made him freek out. The dood was complaining that the equipment was not powering up and totally yelling at my tech support friend as though it was his fault. My friend asked him a few questions and guess what? The dood then asked, I did not pay my electric bill and the power was shut off, could that make the equipment not turn on? THAT to me was the most Stupid person I have ever heard of!

Can anyone top that last one?

 

[dkozloski]

A guy couldn't get the disk out of his floppy drive so he squirted melted butter in the slot with a turkey baster and pulled the disk out with a pair of pliers. He hadn't tried the release button.

 

[mechBgon]

I work at a non-profit agency and one of the old ~100MHz Pentium systems that was there when they hired me had...

:evil:

Let's just say I'll try to post a picture of this tomorrow. I was scandalized enough to save the item in question.


My own runner-up item: I got a call from my sister's apartment. Her roommate had bought some memory to upgrade her computer, but now it wouldn't run. Turns out it was an RDRAM-equipped Dell Dimension 8100, and the Dell's owner had pulled out one of the CRIMM placeholders and made a very good attempt at plugging in 512MB of Crucial PC133 next to the two existing RDRAM RIMMs! Uh... no. The Dell survived, not sure about the PC133 module.

 

[sharkeeper]

Some people can never get enough of this crap on their computer! :Q

Cheers!

 

[zodder]

I work at a non-profit agency and one of the old ~100MHz Pentium systems that was there when they hired me had...

Brother, I feel your pain. I work non-profit too and some of the stuff you see.............. :Q

 

[redbeard1]

Found a beer bottle cap in a floppy drive once. Found a penny in another.

 

[Unheard]

We had a guy bring a Packard Bell system into the store that I work @. He wanted to upgrade the onboard video, so he removed the video chipset from the motherboard with a butter knife and a toothpick. 2nd place is the women who swore up and down that when I dropped here backup CD, I knocked all the data off.

 

[WobbleWobble]

I've seen someone stick a CD in an old 5 1/4" floppy drive thinking it was a CR-Rom!

For some reason... I can so see that happening to more people if they still had those old floppy drives

 

[Jeff7181]

I found a wasp nest in a computer a neighbor used in his garage for reference manuals. He never knew it was in there until it stopped working... a few wasps flew into the PSU and jammed the fan, so the PSU overheated and according to him, went out with a bang. I wish I had pictures, but that was before I had a digital camera... or, now that I think of it, I didn't even have a 35mm camera then. It was amazing... they had started nests in two places, one in between CD-ROM drives, and one on the bottom of the hard drive that was about the size of a softball.

And I gave my brother my old K6-2 333 Mhz based computer... first, he unplugged his printer without unscrewing the little screws, and ripped the port right off the motherboard and pulled it out with the cable... never knew he did anything wrong since his new printer was USB, lol. Then when he was putting a USB 2.0 PCI card in, he noticed the fan on the CPU was blowing warm air, and touched the heatsink, noticing it was hot, and must have thought "wow, that's fuggin hot, I better take this out of here before it fries something" so he did and that was the end of that =)
Then, with his new XP2000 system I built for him, he plugged a USB cable in the front USB port the wrong way, forced it and broke the plastic indexing tab, shorting out the USB header on the motherboard which also took out the soft power switch on the motherboard, so he now turns his computer on with the switch on the power supply

Oh... and he's on his 3rd keyboard and 2nd mouse because when he gets frustrated he either hits something or throws something. Thankfully his 19 inch monitor isn't within an arm's reach where he has it positioned.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Then when he was putting a USB 2.0 PCI card in, he noticed the fan on the CPU was blowing warm air, and touched the heatsink, noticing it was hot, and must have thought "wow, that's fuggin hot, I better take this out of here before it fries something" so he did and that was the end of that =)

:Q

R O F L !

 

[SgtZulu]

I still remember the idiot from this forum that thought Plug and Play meant he could swap video cards with the computer running.

 

[Bovinicus]

Originally posted by: Paulson
I don't have any crazy stories, but all I can say is sooooo many of the computers I work on are so dusty, I don't even understand how the continue to function. (Yes, I clean them as part of my job)

I hear that. A friend of mine was having some troubles with his system. When I popped open his case to poke around I was amazed at the amount of dust in the system. Both of his parents smoke heavily, and they did so while using the computer. There were a couple of dust bunnies about the size of a baseball in that case.

Just today I was doing a little "spring cleaning" on this system (Deletion of unecessary files, software tweaks, updates, etc.) and found that the FDD was unusable. Upon closer inspection, me and my associate realize there were chunks of metal stuck in the drive. Using tweezers, scissors, and some other various tools we pulled out of our asses we pulled out these chunks. I'm going to show them to the owner so she can have a good laugh. Her kids probably did that when they were real little (This computer has been in storage for a while).

 

[NesuD]

Guy I know was showing his buddy from college his slick overclocked slot A Athlon from one of those specialty overclocking Vendors. It was very impressive what with the Huge Heatsink and 4 or 5 famsall stacked up on it. His friend from college was so impressed with it that he reached right in the case and pulled it out to take a closer look. Problem was the system was runninf when he yanked it out. Needless to say It never ran again.

 

[DaFinn]

Back in the day, my friend bought a new pci modem and didn't read the installation manual carefully enough. He put in the new modem WHILE THE COMP WAS RUNNING, and then restarted. Funny, but it would not boot after that. He called me and told what had happened, and SWORE he had followed instructions carefully... Only it said " Install drivers first, then shutdown, install card etc..." He thought that drivers=the card.

 

[bluemax]

I had one woman come into the store I worked at, asking for special bags to store her 3.5" floppy disks in. We were curious at that...

Then she asked if it was safe to store them in Ziploc bags.

We asked why she would want to.....

Then she went into tirades about how us IBM employees were supposed to know out jobs, etc... She eventually summed up that the information would come off the disk if it was shaken or exposed to air.

We tried for almost an hour to tell her it doesn't work that way, including a demonstration of tossing and dropping a disk and then using it perfectly.
She left in a huff to go get some more plastic bags.


Some people.....

 

[Kaieye]

I was asked once to take a look at a computer that stopped working once and I found that when I open the box that a floppy cable from the drive was stuck into the ide port. Luckily, nothing broke and I was able to repair it with no problem.

 

[erikistired]

roaches crawling out of the pc. it's hard to explain in words just how nasty the computer was. but mentioning the roaches that crawled out when i pulled the cover usually does it.

oh yeah, btw, the pc was still working. he brought it in every month or so for a cleaning. it was in his bedroom, not outside or in the garage. can you even imagine what the house was like? these folks had a horrible funk about them, spread throughout the whole place in just a few minutes.

 

[Fraggster]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
A guy couldn't get the disk out of his floppy drive so he squirted melted butter in the slot with a turkey baster and pulled the disk out with a pair of pliers. He hadn't tried the release button.

 

[gsellis]

If this thread is your cup of tea, go read Tech Tales

Only one I had was just a definition problem. Back when I was doing VM/CMS dev, I supported SAS. Was upgrading the apps for an area. The customer calls and tells me that their tape drive is not working. I switch to troubleshooting mode and cannot remember any tape write or read code in their package. I figured I had missed it and there was that little backroom I had never been in, so hoof it on over to see what the deal is. As I walk in, customer drags me along to see and we walk right by that little room, right up to the IBM XT running a TN3270 session. She points to a 5 1/4 inch floppy and says "the tape is not working."

It was just a problem with some code that wrote a text file to floppy. Not a big deal, but sure had me going trying to figure out why the tape job was not working before I got there.

 

[thorin]

When I was in High School I used to volunteer with the schools tech (even got paid) ....... ya ya I was a Uber Geek

One of our brilliant english teachers somehow managed to stuff 2 3.5" floppies into the drive on a Mac SE.

Thorin

 

[Unheard]

Originally posted by: fisher
roaches crawling out of the pc. it's hard to explain in words just how nasty the computer was. but mentioning the roaches that crawled out when i pulled the cover usually does it.

oh yeah, btw, the pc was still working. he brought it in every month or so for a cleaning. it was in his bedroom, not outside or in the garage. can you even imagine what the house was like? these folks had a horrible funk about them, spread throughout the whole place in just a few minutes.

Weve had the roach problem @ my work before. Thousands came pouring out of this old 486. It was just nasty. It seems they used the powersupply as their home.

 

[pdn]

Originally posted by: thorin
When I was in High School I used to volunteer with the schools tech (even got paid) ....... ya ya I was a Uber Geek

One of our brilliant english teachers somehow managed to stuff 2 3.5" floppies into the drive on a Mac SE.

Thorin

L.M.A.O.