Anyone got some crazy computer repair, networking or IT stories?

[Pickles von Brine]

Good lord. That is a long night. Does the stadium have an ice rink? @jonrosalia At Madison Square Garden the team responsible for installing the wifi infrastructure ran into problems because the ice was reflecting signals and causing interference. Took the team a while to figure out how to resolve the problems during the reno. Thought that was rather interesting. 

 

 

When I think of anything else interesting or noteworthy over the years I will post something else. Keep it coming boys and girls!

[ExpiredTangent]

 replaced the hard drive in a veriton n282g (basically a laptop internally), lost the screws for the heat sync so i had to hold it down with a box of small parts and a copy of windows xp.

[jonrosalia]

8 hours ago, Lord Xeb said:

Good lord. That is a long night. Does the stadium have an ice rink? @jonrosalia At Madison Square Garden the team responsible for installing the wifi infrastructure ran into problems because the ice was reflecting signals and causing interference. Took the team a while to figure out how to resolve the problems during the reno. Thought that was rather interesting. 

 

 

When I think of anything else interesting or noteworthy over the years I will post something else. Keep it coming boys and girls!

naw no ice rink its a grass playing field and they where setting up truck loads of sub floor for a upcoming concert the guys that do the switch overs at the stadiums have it ruff . your job is to make everything that shows up work with the building the trucks for broadcasting are impressive as anything you can imagine since most sports games are 8k video now all that data has to be shipped around for playback and rulings the money they spend is mind boggling after you know what the cost is. finally got home at 3AM after loading in and zoning lasers finding out some of our cat cable is damaged and a network switch died on us but now im sitting in a airport waiting to fly to Orlando for some down time enough New York for right now.

 

on another note I love MSG walking the hallways is a great experience and being allowed to work their is a privilege to musicians and stage workers with the history that building has seen I love old venues they tell you their secrets if you know what you are looking at.

[derr12]

The dead guy pc. This guys friend died near his computer, and left his juices all over it. Comes into the shop and wonders if he have get the insides swapped to another case. Oh and his friend had hepatitis. 

 

Also the odd dead pci card caused by a mouse that got in, whizzed on it, electrocuted itself and died. Happened a few times. 

 

 

[kingmustard]

On 28/09/2018 at 6:41 AM, DimasRMDO said:

Not hardware related, but when my friend's laptop was infected with more than 1000 malware (virus, trojan, worm, bla bla bla) not long time ago.

I told her to do a clean reinstall but she refused, I removed all of the detected malware, it got better.... But everything would've been easier (even better) if I just did a clean reinstall, besides she lost a lot of files too (games, old work files, etc.).

Do you really believe her system had over 1,000 pieces of malware?

 

I think it's highly more likely you used a scanner and it, like most, flagged cookies as "serious issues" in hope of scaring people into thinking they really need that piece of software in order to protect them in the future.

 

I'd be surprised if you actually knew what malware was.

[DimasRMDO]

52 minutes ago, kingmustard said:

Do you really believe her system had over 1,000 pieces of malware?

 

I think it's highly more likely you used a scanner and it, like most, flagged cookies as "serious issues" in hope of scaring people into thinking they really need that piece of software in order to protect them in the future.

 

I'd be surprised if you actually knew what malware was.

She used to pirate lots of stuff (games, photo editor, video editor, etc.) and her laptop behaved like mental it was barely usable (ads showing up at desktop, high CPU usage, etc.), all the software I used detected mostly the same files (in a folder where she pirated everything). There was a slight different between them, some detected more, some detected less.

[aezakmi]

This one is the best (or worst) so far, it's long though so I'll use the spoiler thing on it.
 

Spoiler

 

A friend's place, circa two weeks ago DC.

 

3 weeks ago I gave my friend a new mobo for his build, it wasn't much but it was way better than the one he had, anyway, went to his place and installed everything in place, he kinda knows something about PCs like what's every component or how to troubleshoot stuff, anyway, everything was OK but a week after he calls me and "dude, the computer is acting weird, games are lagging, programs crash" and I thought it was the usual, fixed that problem a couple of times before, it's hard drive related, he has an ancient 80GB ATA drive and some sectors are damaged.

Went to his place and another friend of us was already there and they tried stuff like defragging and deleting junk files before I got there, that was OK, but the problem wasn't the hard drive, after a quick scan I found that the CPU was running 70C on idle and when he tried to play something, it throttled hard all the way down to 800MHz, the weirdest was that the northbridge was running hot too but then remembered it's normal for those old AMD builds to have a hot NB considering the shit heatsinks most manufacturers used back in the day.

 

Took my syringe of super cheapo thermal paste out of the backpack and decided to repaste it, everything was OK until this point in particular, he turned off the computer and unplugged everything until the forbidden words came out of our other friend's mouth: overclock. what if we overclock it too? so games can run faster, and look here's a trick to make it run way cooler so you can overclock better, his laptop screen was showing an overclockers.net guide on how to delid the CPU, then both started talking about overclocking and delidding, I said we didn't had the tools to delid and they mentioned the guide only showed an office cutter, while saying that I took off the heatsink and was cleaning it and the next second I only saw an empty socket on the board, yeah, dude started delidding the CPU right there, after a while we heard the typical pop sound of the IHS coming out, it was done, the IHS flew inside the case and then... there was a part of the IHS that wasn't glued at all, the blade slipped inside and destroyed 3 of the small transistors, it was dead, it was finally dead, after all these years the old dog had died, not doing what it usually did but brutally murdered, silence filled the room, when we turned off that rig none of us knew it was going to be the last time.

 

This song was played in loving memory of Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2008-2018

Here's an example of the delid done right, the missing glue can be seen too

 

 

 

 

[Pickles von Brine]

1 hour ago, aezakmi said:

This one is the best (or worst) so far, it's long though so I'll use the spoiler thing on it.
 

  Hide contents

 

A friend's place, circa two weeks ago DC.

 

3 weeks ago I gave my friend a new mobo for his build, it wasn't much but it was way better than the one he had, anyway, went to his place and installed everything in place, he kinda knows something about PCs like what's every component or how to troubleshoot stuff, anyway, everything was OK but a week after he calls me and "dude, the computer is acting weird, games are lagging, programs crash" and I thought it was the usual, fixed that problem a couple of times before, it's hard drive related, he has an ancient 80GB ATA drive and some sectors are damaged.

Went to his place and another friend of us was already there and they tried stuff like defragging and deleting junk files before I got there, that was OK, but the problem wasn't the hard drive, after a quick scan I found that the CPU was running 70C on idle and when he tried to play something, it throttled hard all the way down to 800MHz, the weirdest was that the northbridge was running hot too but then remembered it's normal for those old AMD builds to have a hot NB considering the shit heatsinks most manufacturers used back in the day.

 

Took my syringe of super cheapo thermal paste out of the backpack and decided to repaste it, everything was OK until this point in particular, he turned off the computer and unplugged everything until the forbidden words came out of our other friend's mouth: overclock. what if we overclock it too? so games can run faster, and look here's a trick to make it run way cooler so you can overclock better, his laptop screen was showing an overclockers.net guide on how to delid the CPU, then both started talking about overclocking and delidding, I said we didn't had the tools to delid and they mentioned the guide only showed an office cutter, while saying that I took off the heatsink and was cleaning it and the next second I only saw an empty socket on the board, yeah, dude started delidding the CPU right there, after a while we heard the typical pop sound of the IHS coming out, it was done, the IHS flew inside the case and then... there was a part of the IHS that wasn't glued at all, the blade slipped inside and destroyed 3 of the small transistors, it was dead, it was finally dead, after all these years the old dog had died, not doing what it usually did but brutally murdered, silence filled the room, when we turned off that rig none of us knew it was going to be the last time.

 

This song was played in loving memory of Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2008-2018

Here's an example of the delid done right, the missing glue can be seen too

 

 

 

 

Wait he just delided his CPU right there and destroyed it? Wow...

[Pickles von Brine]

I am currently trying to fix the inventory system at a friends place and god did I step into something good here... and fell off into the rabbit hole. 

[KhandakeF]

Doesn't answer your question, buttt

 

you might like r/talesfromtechsupport

[ElZamo92]

I used to work at the IT department at our family business. We had about 50 POS machines all over the country (Mexico), most of them running on REALLY old hardware (most of them were Pentium 4 in 2015), so I was tasked to keep them all in working order since they were all mission critical. This one time one of the stores called me because they needed help with a machine a third party technitian had repaired  before I was given the job. To put it simply, whoever tried to “repair” the old low profile Compaq was an idiot. It originally had a broken PSU (a proprietary one that is no longer made), so this technitian bought the sketchiest ATX PSU I’ve ever seen, disassembled it and bolted it to the side panel with the shroud removed. It was an accident waiting to happen. I carefully discharged the capacitors on this monstruosity and proceeded to move all the internals from the original case to a CoolerMaster case+PSU combo I got from a local store. Thankfully, the only thing that died was the exposed PSU, so it was literally plug and play.   

[Pickles von Brine]

10 hours ago, ElZamo92 said:

I used to work at the IT department at our family business. We had about 50 POS machines all over the country (Mexico), most of them running on REALLY old hardware (most of them were Pentium 4 in 2015), so I was tasked to keep them all in working order since they were all mission critical. This one time one of the stores called me because they needed help with a machine a third party technitian had repaired  before I was given the job. To put it simply, whoever tried to “repair” the old low profile Compaq was an idiot. It originally had a broken PSU (a proprietary one that is no longer made), so this technitian bought the sketchiest ATX PSU I’ve ever seen, disassembled it and bolted it to the side panel with the shroud removed. It was an accident waiting to happen. I carefully discharged the capacitors on this monstruosity and proceeded to move all the internals from the original case to a CoolerMaster case+PSU combo I got from a local store. Thankfully, the only thing that died was the exposed PSU, so it was literally plug and play.   

That is some sketch stuff right there.