Describe an occasion where you've come up with a fresh and different way of doing things

[Squish4058]

So I am currently an engineering student, applying for an internship and virgin media, and this question came up.

 

The only impressive thing I can think of is to do with computers so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with interviewing or doing interviews could you give your thoughts?

If you havent, just say if this if you think its impressive enough and different enough?

My Response

 

 

Over the summer my mother phoned me up to say she was having some issues with her very old laptop. In simple terms the issue was a heavily corrupted and unbootable hard drive.

The first thing I attempted to do was use windows safe mode, the same issue persisted so a more controlling solution was needed.

Next I found the .ISO file for the version of windows currently on the laptop and attempted to reinstall windows, this is a normal procedure for fixing windows problems of this magnitude.

The install failed because “Windows does not have access to the hard drive”.

My first action was to verify if the hard drive inside the laptop was working so I placed an Ubuntu USB into the laptop and was able to successfully copy 20GB of data to the hard drive.

Next I tried installing windows from one USB drive to another USB drive, both with and without the internal hard drive installed, with no success and the same error message.

In order to isolate the issue between the laptop or the hard drive within the laptop I installed the hard drive on my own computer and was able to successfully install windows, thus the issue being with the laptop.

After a few hours of online research, I attempted to boot a windows installer from a USB, copy installation files from the USB to the internal hard drive, boot the internal hard drive and install to the hard drive that it was getting the install files from.

 

 

EDIT: Submitted it, this is essentially now just a thread for bodged solutions 

 

 

[Bananasplit_00]

couldent mount the PSU in the LAN PC 1.0 with cableties so i used dubble sided tape, couldent make the LAN PC 3.0's motherboard fit the case i wanted(more like the other way arount tbh) so i spent hours fiddeling with screws, electrical tape and cardboard and made it so it could be mounted, GPU of the LAN PC 1.0 was a bit hot so i strapped a fan too it and made it run at 10C above ambient, needed a longer USB cable so i cut a USB charger cable at the micro-USB end and soldered on a bit of an old motherboard.

 

most of those are just stupid shit iv dont but its slightly inovative  

[RGProductions]

I can build a computer in 10 minutes (minus os install) using time saving things

[vorticalbox]

i wouldn't say mounting a hard drive into another computer has fresh and its certainly not new.

[Squish4058]

1 minute ago, vorticalbox said:

i wouldn't say mounting a hard drive into another computer has fresh and its certainly not new.

just fixed it, many thanks

[themctipers]

so today ive tried hooking up 5 speakers to my computer, i have 3 spare ones and the highs are great on them, but the highs on my current speakers are broke.

 

so i took out a preamp, and another machine that had the neccessary IO. it did not work

i figured out i had another speaker, and can hook that up. it uses rca.

the speaker has a rca output, well for its left channel. with that i used a splitter cable.

one cable goes to the left speaker of my main speaker, and the other one goes to the left of my other speaker. that speaker has a wire output for the left speaker

i simply connected the one from my main speaker to the left input of my other speaker so it outputs directly to a stripped wire.

i then twisted the four left side cables together and the four right side cables together

now it works.  

[Squish4058]

2 minutes ago, themctipers said:

so today ive tried hooking up 5 speakers to my computer, i have 3 spare ones and the highs are great on them, but the highs on my current speakers are broke.

 

so i took out a preamp, and another machine that had the neccessary IO. it did not work

i figured out i had another speaker, and can hook that up. it uses rca.

the speaker has a rca output, well for its left channel. with that i used a splitter cable.

one cable goes to the left speaker of my main speaker, and the other one goes to the left of my other speaker. that speaker has a wire output for the left speaker

i simply connected the one from my main speaker to the left input of my other speaker so it outputs directly to a stripped wire.

i then twisted the four left side cables together and the four right side cables together

now it works.  

thats about as barebones as you get  fkin hell

[RGProductions]

I've also done some crazy PC builds with some insanely ghetto solutions to mounting things in general. Hard drives, coolers, CPUs (don't ask okay) power supply, ram, GPUs, 5.25 drives, and more.

 

[john01dav]

On the topic of bad mounting practices, my SSD is taped into a CD drive bay.

[Squish4058]

1 minute ago, john01dav said:

On the topic of bad mounting practices, my SSD is taped into a CD drive bay.

Into or onto

[vorticalbox]

I once used empty 2 L bottles full of water inside an old toilet to reduce water consumption.

[themctipers]

1 hour ago, kris2340k said:

thats about as barebones as you get  fkin hell

pc -> speaker -> left channel -> splitter -> left speaker / other speaker -> left input -> left output -> twisting speaker input to speaker output

profit.

[Squish4058]

Submitted it, this is essentially now just a thread for bodged solutions

[Coaxialgamer]

my aio fans are outside my case 

[NunoLava1998]

doing my own Meaty Skeleton and skipping this bunch of crap.

[Thaldor]

Don't know about fresh but fun project from the early 2000's:

 

Problem: Want to connect PC to old CRT TV as cheap as possible

Possibility: Find solution to connect GPUs S-video to TVs SCART

Solution:

1. Strip S-video cable and solder some stronger leads to the stripped side so you can easily move cable components to different places

2. Cut some paperclips to pieces and soler them to the ends of the S-video cables leads made in step 1

3. Find out which S-video component goes to which SCART component (at that time I had only dial-up net so do this part without looking from the internet as help use PS1 component -> SCART adapter to see which conenctors even have current)

4. Profit