Being the local Techie Help stories

MrWatch · January 5, 2013

Might as well start this one up.

Around my community, I have been known(as I am sure most of you have been) as the techie to go to with any questions related to computers. A lot of my friends also ask me for help on buying parts for a computer, and to build it later.

A couple weeks ago, I helped a friend order parts for building his gaming computer. Simple selection - i5 3570k, z77 mobo, 7950 GPU, WD Black drive - the usual for a new mid to high budget computer. I told him I would have time to build it on Sunday, and to not touch it until then. He received the parts that Saturday afternoon and texted me that he was going to try to build it himself. I told him to look up anything that he didn't know before he did something new, and made sure that he also knew the consequences of messing up. He told me that he would try his best and get back to me later. Lo and behold, the computer didn't POST. Panicking, he called me up that evening and I told him to wait till the next day and not do anything until then. I expected that he had fried his motherboard or forgotten to plug in the CPU 8-pin or some other third thing.

I went over to his house that Sunday afternoon and took a quick look at everything. Standoffs were put in before the motherboard: check. 24-pin and 8-pin were connected to the correct spots: check. GPU was properly plugged in with all needed connectors: check. PSU was in the power on position: check. He even plugged in the front panel connectors correctly. So I decided that I would unplug everything and redo it to see if I missed something(and the clean up the atrocious cable management that he left). Still didn't power on. I knew something had to be dead. Checking the PSU on another computer proved to me that was not the problem. I switched out RAM with working DIMMs. Still no power. Finally decided it had to be either the CPU or the Motherboard, and proceeded to take off the heatsink. Unscrewing the heatsink slowly in the usual cross pattern, I started to wiggle it free and lift. I was greeted underneath by the shine of 1155 socket pins under the glow of a workbench light. There wasn't a CPU in the socket. I repeat: There wasn't a CPU in the socket.

....

I asked where the box was and they went to fish it out of the trash can. In the side, like all Intel boxes are packaged, I could see the CPU sitting there waiting to be found. Plugged the CPU in, powered on, and POSTed. Everything worked fine.

What are some stories that ya'll have with helping others with tech-related problems?