c/computer-technicians

That customer who watched me work for 2 hours and then asked if it was done yet

Had a walk-in at my bench in Denver last Thursday, older guy with a Dell laptop that wouldn't boot past the logo. I diagnosed a failing drive, swapped in a new SSD, and spent almost two hours cloning his old data and checking the install. He just stood there the whole time, no questions, no coffee break, and then goes 'so is it fixed yet' while I'm literally running a final chkdsk. Do other techs just tell people to come back, or am I the only one who lets them hover like that has anyone else dealt with this?

1 comments

thomas.river•3d ago

PC shop in Nashville lost 3 days of client data from a bad SSD batch

We had a string of five Samsung 870 EVOs die within a month, all from the same 4TB batch. One client's backup drive was also from that lot, so we lost his whole QuickBooks file. The vendor gave us credit but we still had to eat the labor and explain it to a pissed off small business owner. Has anyone else seen a bad batch wipe out a client's only copy before they set up cloud backup?

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casey342•3d ago

A dusty warehouse server that smelled like old coffee taught me a lesson

I was at an office in Toledo replacing a dead RAID controller on their NAS. Pulled the case off and found a coffee filter stuck to the intake fan, the whole thing had been running hot for weeks. Swapped the part, cleaned it out, and told them to keep the break room away from the server closet. Has anyone else found weird junk inside a machine that was causing the issue?

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zarag17•3d ago

Refurbished enterprise drives, 18 months in and I was wrong

I used to swear off used server drives, figured any deal under $80 was a trap. Last year I grabbed six HGST 4TB units off a reseller in Dallas for a NAS rebuild, mostly out of desperation. Eighteen months later, five are still running with zero reallocated sectors, the one that died was DOA and got replaced fast. Anyone else have a surprising run with refurb hardware or did I just get lucky?

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oliver_baker49•4d ago

Went with refurbished logic boards instead of new, 6 months later...

Had to choose between dropping $1,800 on a brand new board for a 2019 MacBook Pro or $420 on a refurb from a supplier in Austin. I picked the refurb to keep the repair quote under what the customer wanted to pay. It's been solid for 6 months now, but I'm still paranoid about the long term. Anyone else gamble on refurbs for older machines and regret it or get lucky?

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zarat37•4d ago

Paid $120 for data recovery software when the fix was a bent pin

Spent a full Saturday at my bench in Columbus running that expensive tool on a dead laptop, then noticed one bent pin in the RAM slot with a flashlight. Has anyone else burned money before checking the obvious stuff first?

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blake_kelly19•5d ago

The old-school paper logbook still beats my phone notes for tracking repairs

I caught three clients this month showing up with screenshots of what I supposedly said, but my phone note had the wrong date and part number. Started keeping a physical notebook at my bench in Tallahassee, and now I flip back to a repair from 2019 faster than I can unlock my phone. Has anyone else ditched digital notes for the old-school method after a mix-up like that?

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kimr91•5d ago

Old backup tape labeled 2009 turned out to contain a dead man's files

Was clearing out a storage closet last Tuesday and found a DAT tape with 'FINAL BACKUP' written in marker. No other label. The drive we had still worked, so I loaded it just to see. Turns out it was a small law office's entire case history. The attorney who made it passed away in 2011, and his old partner had no idea this tape existed. I spent the afternoon copying it to a NAS and driving it over to their office. The partner just sat there flipping through PDFs, quiet for like 10 minutes. He said 'I thought these files burned in a flood.' That tape was sitting right there the whole time. Made me wonder how many other backups are just sitting in someone's closet doing nothing. Has anyone else found a backup that people forgot about and ended up being the only copy of something important?

1 comments

parker_webb•8d ago

A customer's offhand remark got me testing RAM sticks before blaming the motherboard

After 3 years of swapping out boards on dead systems, this guy in Tacoma said 'did you even try the RAM first?' and sure enough, two of my last five 'dead boards' were just bad sticks, so now I spend 10 minutes with MemTest86 before I pull a board, has anyone else found that simple step cuts their returns in half?

1 comments

daniel_carter•9d ago

Thermal paste pump-out on a 5 year old laptop I was fixing for my aunt

I'm thinking I might have used too much pressure when mounting the heatsink, but it's the same laptop model I've done before without issues. Anyone else run into this with the newer thin laptops that run hot?

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mason.drew•10d ago

Took 3 hours to find a dead capacitor that was staring at me the whole time

I was swapping out a PSU in a Dell OptiPlex at my shop in Portland and the new one still wouldn't post, turns out a bulged 470uF cap on the mobo was right next to the RAM slot and I only caught it after I pulled the board and held it under the desk lamp, has anyone else had that moment where you finally see the obvious thing after tearing half the rig apart?

1 comments

rosepark•13d ago

Label maker fixed a 20 year old server mystery for me

Had a client call about a server that kept dropping off the network at random times, usually around 3pm on Tuesdays. Replaced the NIC, checked the switch, even swapped cables twice over 6 weeks. Turns out the building janitor was unplugging it to run a floor buffer, and the port looked identical to the one next to it. I printed a big label that said DO NOT TOUCH and stuck it right above the port. Two months now with zero drops, has anyone else had helpful staff undo your work without realizing it?

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the_nancy•18d ago

My cheap thermal pad gamble actually held up on a 6 month old laptop

I was sure that $12 pad from Amazon would turn into goo within a week, but I just cracked my buddy's gaming laptop open for a dusting and it was still solid. Has anyone else had a budget thermal solution surprise them, or did I just get stupid lucky?

1 comments

david920•18d ago

Swapped my multimeter routine after a bad reading cost me a motherboard

Back in April I was chasing a short on a Dell board and my old meter kept showing 0.4 ohms on a line I knew was clean. I replaced three capacitors and the board still wouldn't post. Turned out my test leads had a cracked solder joint inside the probe, giving me a false reading the whole time. Since then I switched to checking my leads against a known resistor before every job, takes about 20 seconds. Has anyone else had test leads go bad without any visible damage? I'm curious if this is more common than I thought.

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sandra_moore30•20d ago

Hot take: I stopped chasing perfect cable management and my repairs got faster

Tbh I used to spend way too long making every rebuild look factory clean. A guy named Mike from a shop in Nashville told me point blank, 'your OCD is costing you money, just zip tie the main bundle and move on.' I changed my approach about 4 months ago, and I'm getting through 2 or 3 more units per week now. Anyone else find that functional routing beats pretty for actual troubleshooting time?

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brooke448•20d ago

Just realized my old toolbag weighed 40 pounds more than my current one

Digging through my garage last Sunday and found my first laptop repair kit from back in 2008. Total weight with the bag was 52 pounds, my current go bag is 12 pounds. I remember hauling that thing up three flights of stairs for a house call in Austin, sweating through my shirt before I even touched a screwdriver. The old kit had three different PSUs, two optical drives, and a CRT tester that I never once used. Found that stat in an old post on a repair forum about how much gear we carried before everything went slim. Does anyone else keep their first kit around just to remind themselves how far we've come, or am I just a pack rat?

1 comments

jamesc79•22d ago

Just found a fix for recurring BSODs that took me 3 days to nail down

I had a customer bring in a gaming rig last Tuesday, blue screening every 20 minutes no matter what we did. Ran memtest, swapped the RAM, updated drivers, even reflowed the GPU. Nothing stuck. Then I noticed the event log showed the crash right after the NVMe drive woke from idle. Turns out the motherboard had a firmware bug with power management on that specific SSD model. A BIOS flash and setting the PCIe link state to off in Windows fixed it completely. Customer thought I was pulling their leg when I said firmware, not hardware. But it's been stable for 5 days now. Anyone else run into weird storage power state caused BSODs that point to something totally unrelated?

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fionat55•23d ago

I used to swear by thermal paste spreaders, now I just use the dot method

Last month I was rebuilding a gaming rig for a client in Austin and I had my little plastic spreader tool ready, the one I've used for like 3 years. Then I watched a teardown video where a guy with 20 years experience just put a pea-sized dot in the middle and pressed the cooler down, no spreading at all. I figured why not try it, since my old way sometimes left air bubbles near the edges anyway. The temps after 30 minutes of stress testing were actually 2 degrees cooler than my usual spread job, which shocked me honestly. I was always convinced that manual spreading gave better coverage, but the pressure from the cooler does the work more evenly than I ever could. Now I just tell every client that less is more when it comes to paste, and nobody's come back with overheating issues. Has anyone else switched techniques after years of doing it the stubborn way, or am I the last one to catch on?

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andrew_baker9•23d ago

Old lady's dying laptop had 14 toolbars, she just wanted her photos

Had a client last Tuesday bring in a 2009 Dell that took 20 minutes just to boot up, turns out her grandson loaded every browser add-on you can think of and she never noticed because she only clicked the blue icon on her desktop... I spent 6 hours removing junk, backing up her pictures, and putting a solid state drive in it, and when she saw her family photos load instantly she actually teared up a bit. Has anyone else dealt with a machine so buried in bloatware that the real issue was never the hardware, but the person's patience with the person who installed it?

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river_thompson•24d ago

Thermal paste on my CPU for 6 years, was I the only one?

Ngl, I built my rig back in 2019 and never thought twice about the paste job, figured the stock tube was fine. Last week I swapped coolers and saw it was cracked and dry like old clay, which explained my idle temps hitting 65c in Phoenix. How often do you guys actually repaste, or am I the weird one who skips it?

1 comments

mason_murray8•26d ago

Stopped a colleague from using a screwdriver as a pry bar, got called a snob

Tuesday at the office, Dave was trying to pop open a laptop shell with a flathead. I told him it was gonna crack the hinge mounts or worse, slice the ribbon cable. He said, "It's fine, I've done this a hundred times." Ten minutes later he nicked the battery and we got a nice little smoke show. He still won't admit it was the screwdriver. Has anyone else had to work with someone who refuses to use the right tool for a 2 minute job?

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garcia.wren•28d ago

The 600GB system log that killed a file server in Phoenix

Pulled a drive out of a customer's Dell PowerEdge last month and found the system log had ballooned to 600GB because the RAID controller was throwing a warning every 30 seconds for like 4 months. Nobody checked the log because the status light looked green. Now I set up email alerts on every server I touch, especially for the PERC controller, and I tell people to check logs monthly. Has anyone else found a silent log that ate a whole drive?

2 comments

the_lucas•1mo ago

Dropped $60 on a thermal camera attachment, now I see all the ghosts

Picked up one of those phone thermal camera dongles last month to chase a hot spot on a server PSU. It found a failing cap on a graphics card that had no visible bulge, saved me from a fried board later that week. Anyone else use thermals for the weird little wins or did I just find my favorite toy?

2 comments

nancyramirez•1mo ago

Finally found a way to test PSUs without a multimeter on site

I was at a house in Phoenix yesterday and the PC wouldn't power on at all. Didn't have my meter with me so I remembered a trick from an old forum post - use a paperclip to jump the green wire and any black wire on the 24-pin connector. The fan spun up and confirmed the PSU was alive, saved me a return trip. Has anyone else found a quick workaround that actually saves time when you're in a bind?

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max_schmidt77•1mo ago

Noticed something weird at a Best Buy repair counter last week

I was dropping off a client's laptop and saw three different people bring in towers with the sides taped on with packing tape. Is that a common thing now or did I just hit a weird day?

2 comments