Well there's your problem! - What's your weirdest tech solutions/issues you have encountered?

[Pickles von Brine]

So wanted to start a thread figured it would be interesting. 

 

 

I had a customer bring in a custom built computer that when they walked past it, it would turn off. Took me some time to figure it out. One of the cables in the 24 pin was slightly loose. Pushed it in with a click and problem solved. 

 

 

Had another system where the ram would fail only after 12-15 hours of use. Even memtest on a fresh system past! After letting it sit for several hours memtest would fail. Turned out the memory control on the processor and a stick of ram was going bad in different ways. Really an odd one. 

What is yours?

[Dominik W]

It's not weird, but the fact that it works most of the time just makes it weird.

 

Restarting your device.

 

Like...how? How does that work? There's probably a simple explanation, either way, I bet people out there have something more interesting.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Dominik W
Fixed spelling mistake.

[NicolasD]

I had a user who was extremely frustrated that his computer would restart randomly multiple times a day... i spent 10 mins with him and saw that when he was moving his keyboard tray, it would happen.

the problem was a USB iphone charger cable that was placed so that he could charge his phone while working, the sliding tray wore out the sleeving through and was shorting the wires. the computer shut down everytime it detected a short circuit on the USB and that was it... we removed the cable, told him to charge his phone on the desk instead and it never happened again!

[Vishera]

4 minutes ago, Pickles von Brine said:

What is yours?

I have a system that sometimes booted fine and sometimes would not boot at all,

And when it booted it had no issues what so ever,

I tested all the components and all of them were fine.

In the end rebuilding the PC with the same components solved the issue (I probably didn't properly connect one of the cables)

[goy_man]

my pc likes to make me play hot potato with the ram sticks sometimes

 

I found this out when I was trying to install a new gpu 2 years ago. It would not boot, I was very confused and did everything you could imagine, I got so desperate I started playing with the ram sticks to see if it would boot with 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 etc. and then it finally did boot, but then I put all the sticks back in and it had the same problem.

 

I eventually painstakingly reseated every ram stick several times over trying to get the perfect click from each, when I did get the perfect click it finally booted, I still have this problem and I don't know if it's the memory's fault or the motherboard's fault but its made me apprehensive to even move the case as when I do move it or accidentally nudge it, the system crashes.

 

this may not sound crazy to you guys but ive legit spent hours until my thumbs were terribly in pain reseating these stupid sticks, and with several cuts from my case.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, Dominik W said:

Restarting your device.

 

Like...how? How does that work? There's probably a simple explanation, either way, I bet people out there have something more interesting.

 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

I had an Asus 10 GiG NIC fail so hard it shut down the entire network.  It was installed in an HTPC, it was simply a client with a 10 Gig NIC added for future compatibility.  The entire network stopped.  It was plugged into a switch that was daisy chained into the 'main switch' but every switch failed.  Power cycling the switches did nothing.  I tried to ping one PC to another, not the afflicted PC, and the result was this:

 

C:\Windows\system32>ping 192.168.1.50

Pinging 192.168.1.50 with 32 bytes of data:
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.

The solution was to entirely shut down power to the PC with that NIC in it.

[WhitetailAni]

Long story short if you have a bad optical drive in a Yikes! Power Mac G4, it will fail to boot.

That was a year of headache.

[Pickles von Brine]

I had my own computer having issues. I would be using it and then suddenly it would just come up "Windows is shutting down". Temps were fine and there were no other hardware problems I could find with my computer. Turns out, the power button had starting going bad and would randomly short...

[MultiGamerClub]

8 hours ago, Pickles von Brine said:

What is yours?

Win10Pro.

My own pc, freezes from time to time.. Probably gonna format it to be honest today or 10 hours from now (its 1.35am in norway xd)

 

My server running my minecraft server and media-content.. It doesnt do any heavy load, just minecraft 100% of the time doing 5% load on a 1700 processor..

But for some reason, without turning off.. it just idles.. but it disconnects everything and just runs idle with no operating system running at all..

Cant explain why it drops out like that..

Just want a stable pc.. sigh.

 

Also my oldest machine running xp or vista, something from 2003..

Ol' family computer i never had the heart to format.

Just dips after an hour or so.. not sure why.

Could be anything at this point.

 

I have a shit/book ton of weird things that happened at my previous workplace too.. but thats a whole other story haha.

[dkoudijs]

Long ancient story that was passed down to me.

Good funny read of IT loree

 

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

[Heliian]

We've got some software that won't connect to its host without a cd drive present.

 

Found out when new laptops wouldn't work.   Solution, $40 USB cd drive.  We don't even use a cd.  Stupid tech. 

[8tg]

Had a problem with our shipping dock software where selecting a certain quantity of lines was hard coded to immediately crash the program to the desktop for no reason whatsoever.

The “line limit” was 185. If you picked 185 lines in the papercheck application it would crash.

184, fine.

If you selected multiple lines at a time and grabbed 186, fine.

Just 185, complete crash. 
 

Later learned it was a testing feature that was never removed.

[Rauten]

I remember back in the day, playing Team Fortress 2 (before it became a hat economy simulator), DirectX would crash for no apparent reason, even though my computer was well above recommended specs (not like TF2 is particularly demanding), before entering a match.

In the main menu.

 

The solution? Use admin command lines to forcefully start a specific Windows 7 network service.

Mind you, my internet and LAN connectivity worked perfectly.

 

No idea what the hell happened there, but it worked. Everytime I booted and TF2 "acted up", I would run that command and it would work flawlessly.

[Pickles von Brine]

On 2/22/2022 at 4:48 AM, Rauten said:

I remember back in the day, playing Team Fortress 2 (before it became a hat economy simulator), DirectX would crash for no apparent reason, even though my computer was well above recommended specs (not like TF2 is particularly demanding), before entering a match.

In the main menu.

 

The solution? Use admin command lines to forcefully start a specific Windows 7 network service.

Mind you, my internet and LAN connectivity worked perfectly.

 

No idea what the hell happened there, but it worked. Everytime I booted and TF2 "acted up", I would run that command and it would work flawlessly.

That is an odd one. 

[Kisai]

The weirdest thing that I've ever run into was trying to get Mass Effect 2 to run.

 

When Mass effect 2 was released, if you had "tweaked" your network (mine had been tweaked for a game that was extremely sensitive to the nagle algorithm), the game would refuse to launch or run unless I went into the network and reset the settings back to stock.

 

Turns out it was the ECN feature. Likewise Final Fantasy XIV also had a "LSO/TOE feature breaking connections" issue way back in 2013. Turns out, same reason. If you had a Realtek network chip, the LSO/TOE feature was broken.

 

A lot of "weird" solutions involving network hardware, are due to some naïve setting that was changed by the user, or by another "optimization" solution made before. This is why "reinstalling the OS" tends to solve problems for people, because all these optimizations and solutions are now gone.

 

Your ISP can change the modem, or their hardware on the other end, and one day everything will work, and the next day (following a minor outage) it will no longer work. You did nothing. But your network settings that worked before, no longer work like before.

 

[The_russian]

One of the weirder ones I've had with personal devices was an issue with my 2013 MacBook Pro.

 

It would randomly shutdown when not under load. If there was any load at all it was fine, but at idle with all programs closed it would randomly shutdown after a few minutes. Seems backwards but nothing too weird yet.

 

After a lot of searching it turns out there was a defect with some power chips on the motherboard and I was definitely not the only one with the issue. The first solution was to run a script to put a load on the CPU and essentially prevent the laptop from completely idling. Another solution was to disable the driver for Ethernet to Thunderbolt for whatever reason. Getting weirder.

 

Then came the head-scratching but funny part: The 2013 MacBook Pro came with a PCIe 2.0 x2 SSD. Some mad lad figured out that if you replace the SSD with a newer one that was PCIe 3.0 x4, it drew just enough more power to keep the laptop from triggering the shutdown issue. Replaced my SSD with the newer one that was also higher capacity and sure enough I haven't had the problem since and it's been many years. 

 

 

[RollyShed]

We had a problem with a PDP-8 computer (1980s?). It would keep shutting down. I wrote a short programme in binary, quite short, and keyed it in via the toggle switches on the front panel. Hit Go and it would stop, hit Go and it would stop. However it always stopped at a different point in the programme. For some reason, long forgotten, I traced the fault to a capacitor in the power supply. This capacitor was part of a circuit to shut the computer down if the power to the computer failed.

 

And? The capacitor was supposed to give that bit of circuitry a continuous voltage but being faulty all that circuit saw was a half sine wave.

How what was happening and why I my reasoning was correct I can't remember. However a replacement capacitor and a good computer.

[Implications Unpleasant]

Back in about 2010 I wanna say I was given this old ass pentium 4 desktop from my uncles office, times were rough so it was all I had for my personal use.
Thing was, it refused to boot up windows after a shutdown. It'd work perfectly fine on a fresh install, and then just wouldn't boot back up if you shut it down. Looking back on it, it was probably a failing HDD, but I was no were near as tech savvy back then so I did what any 12 year old would do.
Reinstall windows every time I wanted to use the pc.
I did this for almost a year.

And you wanna know what the best part is? Like 2 days before we finally got rid of it, I figured out I could've just hibernated it.

[Donut417]

At the job we need the computers and internet to do everything. Our company is based out of South Dakota and Im fairly sure we use a VPN to communicate with the servers out there. The software we use was first copyrighted back in 1980, and it looks like it. 

 

What I do is pick and or pack orders. We use a paper pick ticket as we dont use any type of scanners or much of any tech. To place an order the customer calls, faxes or does online ordering. All orders pass thru the company's HQ and are sent to us. When the internet goes down, we cant get new orders. The other step of this is we have to weight and print out shipping labels for UPS and FedEx. Again without internet this can become a pain.

 

Now to the strange thing. Our scaling computers (2) have UPS's. But for some strange reason IT told them not to plug items in to them until the power goes out. A few months ago we got this rack mountable mega Jesus Eaton UPS for the network equipment. Currently this SOB is siting on a pallet right under the wall mounted rack. With absolutely NOTHING plug in to it. It makes no fucking sense. I shake my head every time I walk in to that office, because we have to get shipping docs for truck orders out of that printer. I tried to explain to them that plugging the shit in to the UPS's will stop downtime. But what the fuck do I know, Im just a peon. I guess the good news is that the power rarely goes out. Though the servers out in South Dakota have strokes all the time and tickets get stuck in the print spooler. 

[RollyShed]

24 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

But for some strange reason IT told them not to plug items in to them until the power goes out.

Your IT is definitely in the dark ages, 1800s? A bunch of kids? You need to get some older guys who know what electricity is.

Ohhh, I forgot, we all retired a decade or more ago.

[Bitter]

Had a laptop I got for free... It would run perfectly fine for hours or days but sometimes it would shut off and not power back on for minutes, hours, days. It would shut down under heavy load, under light load, under no load, wouldn't wake from sleep, wouldn't boot cold, wouldn't boot warm, completely random whether it would work or not work. Windows or Linux did not matter. Ran it off a USB stick,  same thing, pulled the HDD and ODD, same thing, tried everything I could think of and could not find the problem. Even ended up handing it off to the IT guy for a school the person who gave it to me worked for and paid the guy $50 for a shrug.

FINALLY I found the problem after stripping it down completely to bare chassis and bare board. It had been fluid damage and one SODIMM slot had a single contact that had corroded and would stick into the plastic slot and barely make or break contact with the RAM and that was the cause of all of this. I managed to clean the corrosion, get the rest of the contacts freed and working normally but this one contact would not ride freely in the plastic anymore and was weakened by the corrosion. I made a special tool from a safety pin with a hooked end ground to the same thickness as the slit that the contact rode in and was able to pull it up. I could install memory and it worked fine unless you flexed the chassis, so long as you didn't bend the laptop and board the system was stable.