The Unlikely Computer Repair
I was recently talking to a fellow computer technician who owns a bricks and mortar computer shop and has a few techies below him. He told me a story of a very unlikely scenario that occurred when repairing a computer.
The story starts when a customer brought his PC into the shop to get his computer repaired as it frequently kept restarting/shutting itself down. They tried the most obvious solution which was to replace the power supply because bad power supplies can behave similar to this. They left the PC running in the shop with the new power supply in it for about a day with no problems, gave it back to the client who took it home and the next day called them again saying it had the same problem.
They tried the next most obvious thing which would be to replace the ram. They ran many tests on the RAM and it came up fine. The next suspect was a bad motherboard so they replaced the motherboard; the computer still has the problem.
They thought it must be the hard drives or the operating system. So they put in a new hard drive and reinstalled the operating system; same problem.
They suspected that even though the ram came up fine in the tests that it still may have problems so they replaced the ram. The computer still had the same problem.
One of the lower level techs said to the business owner “It is pretty much a new PC. We have replaced everything on this computer except for the caseâ€Â.
The business owner said “well, replace the case then†and the tech replied “what the hell would that do?â€Â, “just do itâ€Â.
So the tech replaces the computers case and the problem never occurred again.
I ask the business owner “So, what was it?†and he said that it turned out to be one of the wires in the front of the case where the LED’s, power and reset buttons are. Although upon visual inspection there didn’t seem to be anything wrong, there was something in there that kept losing contact for a split second.
The moral of this story; never discount the small things no matter how unlikely they are.
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Finally, this is the first time I have read something that did happen to me as well. I had taken the computer and had asked many technicians why this was happening. I kept getting the same answers and problems but just did not want to believe any of them, i.e. change the motherboard etc. It was me who finally figured it out because of the fact that each and every time this happened I would go inside the computer and eventually play with the wires leading to the reset LED and power on switches. Toggling them would make either the fan run or the computer to start up temporarily and then shut down. So one day I decided to see if I could change the switch and the technician at one shop told me it was better to just buy a new case, which I did, problem solved. There had been so many startup/shutdown articles that I read but none ever mentioned that the wires could be the problem ?.
This brings back memories. We had a few of these back in the 90’s. I remember we tried everything, and none of us wanted to believe it was the case. Finally we couldn’t resist, we changed the case and the problem was solved. I recall we still hesitated with next one. When the third one came around we wasted no time changing the case. We even experimented with one to see if it was the switches, led’s, or grounding. I jumpered a ground wire to the power supply and the mobo and it stopped the problem. They all seemed to cheep cases too.