Failing a repair job - Am I good enough to work in this field?

[Proud Cipher]

I spent three hours replacing a fan in my mom's laptop.

 

It was a  HP Pavilion dv7-6143cl

 

The only repair videos I could find were filmed from 5 feet away and with English as their second language. I managed to replace the fan, after having to disassemble the entire laptop and remove the motherboard.

Reassembly proceeds, and I wind up with a few extra screws. Some of the plastic bits have broken, even though I followed the instructions given to me. Still, it fits back together. From the outside it seems fine!

Plug it in, power it on.... no display. Something went wrong and the screen isn't getting any signal or power seemingly. Other things like the lights around the trackpad come on, the power light comes on, the drives and fan spins up...

 

Failing a repair sucks. It's deeply demoralizing. I mean, I'm going to be taking the CompTIA A+ exam (the first half at least) this month. How am I going to work in IT if I can't fix a shitty laptop? I'm trying hard not to lose my drive here but this really blows man.

 

So I'd like to ask those who have worked in IT for a long time, techs, sysadmins...

Is it normal to botch repairs occasionally? Is it simply part of the process of becoming a professional, or is this a warning to keep me away?

 

 

 

[Spotty]

The first PC I ever built I forgot to plug in the CPU power cable and couldn't figure out why it wasn't turning on. We all have to learn somehow and we all make mistakes along the way. Don't let it discourage you.

[jaslion]

14 minutes ago, Proud Cipher said:

Is it normal to botch repairs occasionally? Is it simply part of the process of becoming a professional, or is this a warning to keep me away?

yup entirely normal

 

Shit happens. See this as a learning experience and try again later to see if you can fix the even more fucked device once you level up your skills.

 

Took me 7 tries to fix a google huawei nexus 6p after I royally fucked things up by accident. That phone SUCKED to fix but I did it. After 7 times. And like 3 years :p.

 

Showed me how much better I had gotten.

[Shimejii]

comptia is a pretty useless Cert, its pretty much for box stores that dont want pay people very much. Some of the absolute dumbest people ive had to deal with in tech Worked at Geek squad that were the full Certified people. By far the most useless cert when it comes to actually repairing stuff, if you know how to do repair, what to look out for, and in general know how to look certain info up youll be fine.

 

Most of the time it comes down to what exactly you fucked up and can you trace back to where you did it. If you are genuinely unable to figure out what you did wrong after looking back at your work, yeah id seriously start reconsidering a life in computer repair. You are going to have to figure it out quick, and make sure you are able to look up stuff. You cannot rely on others to tell you what you did wrong if you yourself cannot. 

 

It honestly should not take you 3 hours to take apart a laptop and replace a fan, that is WAY to slow. Even being careful it should realistically take you an hour at most to do it. 3 hours is not going to cut it on a job for computer repair. I know some chassis for laptops are a pain, ive had to take apart quite a few and some were a pain, but 3 hours for a fan? That seems really slow and something you are going to have to work on to get better at.

 

Its okay to fail if you are learning something from that failure. But if you fail repeatedly and learn nothing from it, at that point you are just wasting your time and other peoples time. Learn what you messed up, in this case it sounds like you either didnt plug in the display cable, you pinched the cable when reassembling the unit thus killing it, or you werent careful enough when taking it apart and broke some of the other connectors. 

 

Laptops have to be dealt with VERY carefully, especially ribbon and display connectors. Other then that it should be a pretty fast process, unless they use 4+ types of screws that you forgot to keep track of.  

[emosun]

18 minutes ago, Proud Cipher said:

How am I going to work in IT if I can't fix a shitty laptop?

*clears throat

"well this is a legacy product and we can attempt to fix it for you. but you should know that with this unit being well beyond it's serviceable life that even trying to repair it can cause irreversible damage.

why don't you take it home , think it over , and if you're ok with the risk we'll backup all your data and try a repair. The worst case senario is it'll finally be time to retire the equipment , best case is we repair it. i'll just need you to sign this form before hand allowing us to attempt a repair which may result in loss of functionality"

You don't have to be good at IT , you just have to be good at bullshitting people before you screw it up

 

[emosun]

oh btw , typing this on a dv6 missing about 20 screws on it's 3RD cpu fan with dozens of pieces of plastic chipped off of it.

[Needfuldoer]

34 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

Laptops have to be dealt with VERY carefully, especially ribbon and display connectors. Other then that it should be a pretty fast process, unless they use 4+ types of screws that you forgot to keep track of.  

Remember how much of a pain in the butt pre-2010s laptops were to work on? (Especially "home" models from big-box stores...) 

 

 

[IkeaGnome]

1 hour ago, Proud Cipher said:

Is it normal to botch repairs occasionally? Is it simply part of the process of becoming a professional, or is this a warning to keep me away?

Yes. No one has 100% success rate. The good repair people are the ones that use this to learn where they went wrong and how they can improve themselves. 

[starsmine]

Man, I botch repairs ALL the time.

usually, its because its my first time repairing that particular thing and there is zero guides out there, and by the time its thrown at me its so far gone its questionable if its even viable, so the first one is a blind learning experience. So long as you are learning, even the tiniest bit, its all good. Its pretty much always a zero risk situation anyways, Either I fix it and I dont need to spend money, or I dont and I have to spend money. 

I will still always attempt to repair as it might save me money, not just today but next year with a different job.

Though im still a bit salty about my botched wii repair 14 years ago. 

[Proud Cipher]

Y'all are great

[Erioch]

I was working on a small plumbing project at home once.  I had to go to Home Depot (about 1.5 miles from my house) 6 times in one day.  The last time, I actually hid from the employee I spoke to the previous time because I told him all the wrong info about what I needed.  I waited until he went to a different aisle, grabbed what I needed and went home to finish the project.

 

It was "successful".  Eventually.

[fawncashew]

I can't really give you advice, as I am certainly less experienced at electronic repairs than you given you are going for an exam in it. What I can say is that having also attempted (and failed) a repair on that laptop model, its a real pig and if there was a laptop to struggle with, it would be that one! I remember being amazed that something so relatively old was so clearly designed not to be user-repairable...

 

Its an old laptop at this point - plastics will have been heat cycled (especially given how hot the GPU in these ones seem to run), and so it would be a miracle if plastics didn't break, no matter who you are!

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

Botching repairs is common, everyone does it and you'll get better over time. You don't want to know how many boards I ruined while learning to solder. But a couple of hundred 0402 resistors put in place by hand later, you do kind of get a feeling for it.

 

21 hours ago, Erioch said:

I was working on a small plumbing project at home once.  I had to go to Home Depot (about 1.5 miles from my house) 6 times in one day.  The last time, I actually hid from the employee I spoke to the previous time because I told him all the wrong info about what I needed.  I waited until he went to a different aisle, grabbed what I needed and went home to finish the project.

 

It was "successful".  Eventually.

My current record is coming in €200 over budget, 3 weeks over time, and tens of store visits on a built-in cupboard construction project. The one after that came in below price, was done in a couple of evenings, and looks way better. Honestly, we should get a botched project sticky topic somewhere on this forum so everyone can enjoy the schadenfreude derived from our failed attempts at home improvement and hobby projects.

 

All of which is to say, learning curves are real and they're littered with the dead carcasses of previous projects.  

[AI_Must_Di3]

On 8/4/2023 at 6:57 PM, emosun said:

*clears throat

"well this is a legacy product and we can attempt to fix it for you. but you should know that with this unit being well beyond it's serviceable life that even trying to repair it can cause irreversible damage.

why don't you take it home , think it over , and if you're ok with the risk we'll backup all your data and try a repair. The worst case senario is it'll finally be time to retire the equipment , best case is we repair it. i'll just need you to sign this form before hand allowing us to attempt a repair which may result in loss of functionality"

You don't have to be good at IT , you just have to be good at bullshitting people before you screw it up

 

WOAH! This isnt BS right here, this is how you HAVE to approach old electronic and plastic parts for a customer cause some people expect you to be a wizard and have a magic wand youre hiding to fix there stuff. People that know nothing about PC's that just type on them and click web pages think that because you are behind a counter or own a store that youve somehow walked thru the veil and have a secret vault of fix youre hiding and wont share. Im not even kidding around, well maybe a little, but if you havent done customer service and repair for PC's at a shop you should, cause you havent lived till youve been thru that!

 Anyway, as far as wrecking things ive done plenty of that too, my own, others, family, etc... custom modded cases to death, dropped all kinds of parts and dinged them up, etc... I fixed a HP monitor one time,the ccfl bulbs went out. Ordered them, got them soldered in etc... put it back together, it looked bright but the bezel was lopsided a bit. So i went to push it over a little and the screen cracked right across and it instantly became garbage. Its going to happen, but how you handle it and how you prepare for it is what will set you apart from others. I never threw out parts unless they were really torched and even then id take what i could from them cause you always want a stack of working components thats just for checking stuff. I got stuff all the way back to 1GB Maxtor HDD's! LOL. 

  Never be afraid brotha, just step wisely.

[TechuntrTM]

Don't feel bad, computers are crazy, simple stuff can become hard at times for no reason, also some days just seem to be bad days to work on machines. But don't sweat it everyone messes up here and there. Doesn't matter how long you do it. 

[CrowTheRobot]

On 8/4/2023 at 6:55 PM, Shimejii said:

comptia is a pretty useless Cert, its pretty much for box stores that dont want pay people very much. Some of the absolute dumbest people ive had to deal with in tech Worked at Geek squad that were the full Certified people. By far the most useless cert when it comes to actually repairing stuff, if you know how to do repair, what to look out for, and in general know how to look certain info up youll be fine.

 

Except it can also be a foot in the door for those looking to switch careers without doing a full new college degree.  I spent five years only getting as far as a TA position with my Bachelors in Education, then when my job got cut the first summer of COVID, I tried to apply to a bunch of jobs using three years of part time experience from an on-campus laptop repair job from college (I graduated in 2010, mind you) and my "freelance" work I tried to do on the side.  If I even got an interview, it never went past first round.  Then I blitzed the A+ in about a week and a half of studying, applied for a temp job, and literally got the job the same day.  That three month position got extended to a full school year (it was with a local school district), and was eventually used to move me onto a full time permanent State-level job with another district, that then led me back to the original district when one of my old colleagues left.  This doubled my base pay from my TA years, gave me retirement and all sorts of extra benefits, and relative job security, all with only having a Bachelors in teaching grades 1-6.

 

CompTIA stuff might not be for everyone, but for some it can be a really helpful tool.

 

On 8/4/2023 at 6:33 PM, Proud Cipher said:

I spent three hours replacing a fan in my mom's laptop.

 

It was a  HP Pavilion dv7-6143cl

 

The only repair videos I could find were filmed from 5 feet away and with English as their second language. I managed to replace the fan, after having to disassemble the entire laptop and remove the motherboard.

Reassembly proceeds, and I wind up with a few extra screws. Some of the plastic bits have broken, even though I followed the instructions given to me. Still, it fits back together. From the outside it seems fine!

Plug it in, power it on.... no display. Something went wrong and the screen isn't getting any signal or power seemingly. Other things like the lights around the trackpad come on, the power light comes on, the drives and fan spins up...

 

Failing a repair sucks. It's deeply demoralizing. I mean, I'm going to be taking the CompTIA A+ exam (the first half at least) this month. How am I going to work in IT if I can't fix a shitty laptop? I'm trying hard not to lose my drive here but this really blows man.

 

So I'd like to ask those who have worked in IT for a long time, techs, sysadmins...

Is it normal to botch repairs occasionally? Is it simply part of the process of becoming a professional, or is this a warning to keep me away?

 

 

 

 

I botch shit all the time.  I literally watched a Chromebook start smoking in front of me and the guy the next position above me at one point because I absentmindedly plugged in the battery before everything else was properly reconnected.  I've had to apologize to my boss for accidentally killing a brand new Chromebook basically right after unboxing it.  I've forgotten to reconnect everything and had to reopen devices.  What matters is how you learn from it.

 

In your case, open it back up and double check the display cable.  Make sure it's not pinched and that it's fully inserted in the correct connector.  Display cables are finicky as fuck.

 

Three hours does indeed seem like a long time, but if you're new and relatively unsure, especially about what ends up basically being a full disassembly, you'll get more comfortable with time.  Just keep at it.

[leadeater]

On 8/5/2023 at 10:33 AM, Proud Cipher said:

Failing a repair sucks. It's deeply demoralizing. I mean, I'm going to be taking the CompTIA A+ exam (the first half at least) this month. How am I going to work in IT if I can't fix a shitty laptop? I'm trying hard not to lose my drive here but this really blows man.

Laptops just suck to work on, especially older ones and ones not within the business product lineup. Plastic clips almost always break and this gets more likely as the plastic gets older and older.

 

A stupid ribbon cable not seating properly or moving when you move the board around to mount it back in if you have to do cable first etc isn't that uncommon. The more you work on laptops the better feel you get for it and the success rate goes up quite a bit but they are and will always remain a pain in the ass to work on while they continue to use plastic clips, tiny cables, ribbon cables, require excessive disassembly for a basic and common to fail part.

 

You could have built 10000 desktop computers, doesn't actually mean you are much better prepared to work on an annoying laptop lol.

 

Mistakes will always happen, you'll do it again, you'll do it another 10 times at least. And 10 years from now you'll still make a mistake, it is what it is 

[Elijah Kamski]

On 8/5/2023 at 8:38 AM, Spotty said:

The first PC I ever built I forgot to plug in the CPU power cable and couldn't figure out why it wasn't turning on. We all have to learn somehow and we all make mistakes along the way. Don't let it discourage you.

Lol, I pulled out the entire CPU once from its socket trying to remove the cooler and bent a pin XD

[CrowTheRobot]

6 hours ago, Elijah Kamski said:

Lol, I pulled out the entire CPU once from its socket trying to remove the cooler and bent a pin XD

 

I did the same when trying to replace my stock AMD Wraith with a 120mm AIO, but actually had at least one or two pins totally break off my 3600X.  At that point, literally the only 3rd Gen Ryzen I could find at MSRP on Newegg was a 3700X.  Thankfully my wife was of the mindset that it was more worthwhile to get my PC back up and running for $300-ish than to wait and hope for the 3600X's to return to a reasonable price.

[Elijah Kamski]

On 8/8/2023 at 3:39 AM, CrowTheRobot said:

 

I did the same when trying to replace my stock AMD Wraith with a 120mm AIO, but actually had at least one or two pins totally break off my 3600X.  At that point, literally the only 3rd Gen Ryzen I could find at MSRP on Newegg was a 3700X.  Thankfully my wife was of the mindset that it was more worthwhile to get my PC back up and running for $300-ish than to wait and hope for the 3600X's to return to a reasonable price.

Good thing u kept her

[Strongit]

Just throwing in my two cents. Messing things up once in a while is totally normal; I've been in IT professionally for almost 20 years and it's been a hobby since I was 12. Just a couple years ago I accidentally ripped off the entire mount for the BIOS battery on a computer at work so even seasoned vets get it wrong.

 

Take it as a learning experience, try to figure out what went wrong and move on from there. You got this.

[NumLock21]

On 8/4/2023 at 6:33 PM, Proud Cipher said:

I spent three hours replacing a fan in my mom's laptop.

 

It was a  HP Pavilion dv7-6143cl

 

The only repair videos I could find were filmed from 5 feet away and with English as their second language. I managed to replace the fan, after having to disassemble the entire laptop and remove the motherboard.

Reassembly proceeds, and I wind up with a few extra screws. Some of the plastic bits have broken, even though I followed the instructions given to me. Still, it fits back together. From the outside it seems fine!

Plug it in, power it on.... no display. Something went wrong and the screen isn't getting any signal or power seemingly. Other things like the lights around the trackpad come on, the power light comes on, the drives and fan spins up...

 

Failing a repair sucks. It's deeply demoralizing. I mean, I'm going to be taking the CompTIA A+ exam (the first half at least) this month. How am I going to work in IT if I can't fix a shitty laptop? I'm trying hard not to lose my drive here but this really blows man.

 

So I'd like to ask those who have worked in IT for a long time, techs, sysadmins...

Is it normal to botch repairs occasionally? Is it simply part of the process of becoming a professional, or is this a warning to keep me away?

 

 

 

Botching can happen, but when it happens too much, it shows this person lacks the attention to detail, and isn't delicate and precise enough to be handling electronics, where maybe this isn't the right path for them. Mistake is what makes us professionals as we learn from what we did wrong, and gain experience from it. This is your first repair, it went wrong, but it's also your very first step into become a pro. Don't be too hard on yourself and keep going.

[RokinAmerica]

I teach my employees this: if you make a mistake, it is only bad if you do not learn from it.

 

Make sure you understand what, why and how it happened.  But if you don't, then it becomes time to fish or cut bait.

 

I will teach anyone right up until I have to terminate. All I ask is learn from your mistakes so we can both eliminate and teach others from it.

 

My personal opinion right now, from your post, is that you are a person very sincerely concerned about their performance. I would give you a probationary period to learn and show you are invested. I prefer a positive, sponge like mind and professional behavior to know it all's.

 

Stay strong and follow what you love. You will be successful and content in life. 

[Rusty Proto]

It doesn't help that laptops and phones SUUUUUUUCK to work on, and often you'll rip a cable as you make a careful dissassembly. That's actually about par for the course. Next time you may want to check on one of those Framework laptops or something. 

 

...anyway, next time I went in that thing, that would be one of the first things I would check on--anything that might have gotten damaged or ripped on the initial dissassembly. Everything in there is so fragile.

[F4tal1ty]

A terrible old HP Pavilion shouldn't define your entire IT career. I've destroyed multiple laptops trying to repair them but it still didn't stop me. Most of the time, repairing old laptops will be very tedious but it should teach you things. Don't really worry about not being able to fix it imho. It should just a learning experience if you don't fix it.