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Am I the only one who almost replaced a whole PC over a $6 cable?
A customer dropped off a tower at my shop in Boise last Tuesday saying it kept shutting off every 20 minutes, and I had the new power supply picked out before I even opened the case. Turned out the SATA cable to the boot drive was pinched behind the drive cage and had rubbed down to bare wire, so I swapped in a spare I had in the bin and it ran clean for a full stress test. How do you all handle the urge to just throw parts at a problem instead of slowing down and actually tracing it?
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averyc9410h ago
Staring at a tower and already mentally ordering a power supply is basically a personality test for techs, and we all fail it. That pinched SATA cable is the perfect example of why the boring answer is usually the right one, because a wire rubbed to bare metal against a drive cage is about as obvious as it gets once you actually look. The urge comes from experience too, since nine times out of ten it really is the PSU or the RAM, so the brain just skips straight to the ending it already knows. Problem is that tenth time humbles you in front of a customer and you eat the cost of a part you never needed. What works for me is forcing a first pass with no tools at all, just eyes and a flashlight, before anything comes out of the case. It slows you down enough to catch the dumb stuff first.
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