Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn’t get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it’s been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn’t crash any more.
Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.
What a unique abomination. I salute you.
The cobbler’s sons go barefoot.
why use a case at that point, lol
At least it’s not with a customer.
After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.
Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.
Idk what it was till today , don’t forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn’t just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.
I’d hazard miniscule crap on one of the teeth the other mobo was juust enough in tolerance to catch
Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
I had to get someone to find a wireless keyboard they left in a random box because they never used it, yet they still connected the USB receiver for it.
I can’t say I’ve never been confused by keystrokes from objects laying on my keyboard, but I do usually figure it out within a couple of seconds at most.
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don’t know about dumb but it was embarrassing.
Had a coworker who kept complaining anytime she’d open any dialog boxes they immediately closed. Turns out she had a binder sitting on the edge of her keyboard right on the escape key.
How did she take it?
She was also quite embarrassed. As a fix, we moved her keyboard a few inches.
Hard.
I just spent the better part of the day trying to get a “music archival tool” to work, but I wasn’t able to get my Spotify account to connect.
The eventual solution I ended up with was to spin up a Windows VM, get the tool connected to my Spotify account there and copy over the config file from the Windows installation to my (Linux BTW) actual computer.
Of course, I’ve never really dabbled in emulation past old video game consoles, so getting a Windows VM up and running involved its own troubleshooting… The whole thing felt absurd, especially since there are so many easy ways to download music, but this was one of those times where I didn’t want to let the computer best me.
Nice. I had a printer that didn’t have the right driver for Linux, found that if you download the Mac driver package and unzip it they had their Mac driver as PPD file, so I was able to copy the text I needed and paste into the Linux file, and run a command to push thr PPD to the print folder and assign spooler/model
chmod -R 777 *😊 this is how you take your Linux security and make it Windows
well, it locks you out of SSH key logins, so on a well configured host it can sometimes increase security
Great idea!
You fucking heathen
“I’ve got nothing to hide!”
I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.
A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I “revived” a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it’s gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff…
“Power off, then on again.” This was after a mystifying issue where the printer would do the invoice format and backgrounds, but refuse to print the text, and had a seasoned copier tech stumped. Still scratching my head on that one.
An ice tray to cold down a router.
I changed ISP, the new one told me that it would take like a week to send me the credentials to use my own ADSL router 🙄, in the meantime I had to use the cheap-ass one they provided.
The new service crashed like after five minutes of use, after some some back and force with the technical support unsuccessfully I notice that the router was extremely hot when the connection crashed and normal when it started to work again.
It has not any cooling system, and being in the middle of the summer didn’t help either.
So…. I tried to put an ice tray from the freezer on the router and it worked. To be “safe” I put a plastic bag between them to avoid any condensation dripping onto the device.
Ha! Reminds me of a job I worked at years ago. Corporate saw it fitting to change all the thermostats for the air conditioning to be controlled remotely by them… in a different state, with different weather…
In the winter it would stay cold and they would never turn the heat to an appropriate temp.
I took a hook and installed it above the thermostat. In the mornings I would fill a plastic bag with ice and hang it on the hook.
Too cold? Move the bag closer to the thermostat. Too hot? Move the bag further away.
Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.
When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.
Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn’t crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.
I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.
Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I’m still confused as to why that worked.
EHCI (system config) data was corrupt. Possibly from pulling the GPU while the motherboard board still had power (or residual power in caps).
CMOS wipe resets to blank and that data gets rewritten after BIOS runs the “wtf is plugged into me” routines triggered by blank data.
That’d be my guess.
I wasn’t aware that data could be corrupted by unplugging components, but what you’re saying is making sense. That could definitely have been it.
“Weird Shit” is always a possibility when there’s any power at all in the system. The PSU will keep low level power supplied for a surprisingly long time after being unplugged from the mains. 💛
Is it true that this power gets drained when you press the power button without the power cord plugged in?
Not in my experience.
Possibly helped somewhat for older machines where pressing the button made the fans spin for a little, but modern systems are somehow smart enough to not even bother doing anything
Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked
People who say violence never solved anything have never really been intimate with a printer
Worked on my cars dragging brakes the other day. I need to service them…
Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like “what’d you do‽ It’s working!”. Definitely a fix I wasn’t expecting.
