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I got talking with a colleague today about some of the weird things we’ve seen over the years in this business and the weird ways we’ve fixed them. Before working here, he managed a computer store with a large repair department, so he’s got a few stories. As an independent contractor, I have a few as well. I figured I would throw this out to the SW community as well, since I’m sure there have to be some more good ones out there.

The weirdest fix I’ve done was for a computer at the refining plant of a mine. It would randomly behave in very erratic ways. Sometimes it would just freeze up, other times one program that was running would crash but everything else would keep going as if there was no problem. Occasionally when it would freeze, the screen would display a freeze-frame of what looked like analog TV static or the sound card would freak out.

There was no rhyme or reason to when these things would happen, it might happen 10 minutes into the workday with only the Windows and one program running (and not the same program), it might happen with 5 or 6 programs running in the background. I was the latest in a long line of people they had called in to try to figure this issue out.

They didn’t tell me what anyone else had tried. They wanted me to look at it without being tainted by what I thought others had done. I re-loaded Windows once, thinking that it could be corrupt (this was back in the days of Windows 2000, and it had been 2 1/2 years since it had been installed), but to no avail. I ran all kinds of diagnostics only to find very sporadic failures, 90% of the time everything passed, the other 10% of the time the failures were spread across the board. It was very perplexing.

Then it dawned on me what the company mined - metals! Conductive metals!! At the beginning of the refining process, the raw ore is run through giant rollers that crush it down into more manageable sized pieces before going on to be smelted down and separated into the different metals they sell. This creates a very dusty environment.

I shut the computer down, unplugged it, and opened it up to find slightly sparkly dust bunnies the size of large kumquats all over the place inside the case. I pulled one out and touched the probes of my ohmmeter to it. To my shock (pardon the pun) I found that there was about 300k Ohms of resistance in the 1-inch dust ball. There was the answer to the problem! As the fans blew on the dust bunnies inside the computer, they were changing the resistance of the system at random. I blew all the dust out of the PC and it started working just fine. I left feeling quite proud of myself for figuring out such a bazaar issue and with a very pleased customer.

A few weeks later, they called me back. It was at it again. I blew it out again and told them that they would probably have to blow it out every month. They asked if there wasn’t and easier way to deal with the problem because they were really uncomfortable opening it up themselves. I told them I’d think on it for a few days and get back to them if I figured anything out. A couple of days later, I saw a microphone pop screen in a recording studio that had been stored in front of a running fan for several weeks. It was covered with dust, caked with it in fact!

That was my “ah-ha” moment. I bought a cheap pair of pantyhose in the largest size available and went back to the mining company. I asked if they ever used the CD or floppy drives. They said they did, but rarely. I then proceeded to show them the pantyhose and carefully stretched it over the PC tower. I explained what I had seen at the recording studio, and that the material pop screens are made of is the same thing as a pair of pantyhose.

I told them that this setup should filter a lot of the dust out of the air that the fans in the computer were circulating through it, as long as they didn’t mind the weird way it made the PC look and it wasn’t too inconvenient with the removable media drives. They said it was a good solution for them, and they just vacuumed it off whenever it looked like it needed it, which turned out to be about every other week. I still do work for them on occasion, and to this day they still put a pair of pantyhose on their computers.

So there’s my weirdest IT fix - what’s yours, and what did it fix?

24 Spice ups
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TL:DR normally I just show up and everything works fine.

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10 Spice ups
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My weirdest fix…I once baked a printer circuit board in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

I had an HP printer (forget the model) that was fine until one day it threw an error code. I found online that it had to do with a control board that was easily removed from the printer. The supposed problem was poor quality solder joints, and the recommended fix was to heat in an oven to remelt the solder. I thought this was silly, but gave it a shot. We didn’t have an oven in the office so I took the board home and turned on the oven. My wife thought I was crazy. I baked the board, then let it cool. The next morning I reinstalled it in the printer and sure enough it worked like a champ! The printer ran for another few years before it died from another problem.

6 Spice ups
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HDD in the freezer to pull data off it.

Other than that - the countless times I walk up to a users computer and the issue is “magically” solved just by my mere presence.

3 Spice ups
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Derek_A - Oh yeah… I remember that fix… the 3005 series printers :slight_smile:

1 Spice up
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I had one yesterday morning when shortly after I got to work. One of the Admin girls’ PC would not boot, it would get o the Dell logo on the screen then hang. I unplugged the power cord for a minute then plugged it back in, no go. I took the hard drive out and put in an identical machine I had on my desk and it booted up so i knew it wasn’t the drive. Took the now working PC back to the desk, plugged it in and no go. WTF!. So i went back to the KISS principle and unplugged on device at a time. The first was the keyboard. Unplugged it and bam the PC booted up. Powered off the PC again and plugged the keyboard back in, no boot. So I replaced the keyboard and she is working fine now.

2 Spice ups
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Back in the days of the P3 chips… I worked on a computer that the owner would turn the machine off every night when he closed up shop, and every morning when he came in, it was running again. He’d work on it for a couple hours, and then it would turn itself off without warning. this would happen repeatedly for about 30-40 minutes, and then it would work fine the rest of the day. This had been happening for months before I came in to work on it. this had me absolutely stumped too.

Turns out that it was 2 different problems rolled into one. the first one - the computer shop that he bought it from set a power on timer in the bios for him and he didn’t know. It turned on at 6:30am every day.

The second problem was a bit more tricky. I came in one day and sat and watched the computer, and about 9am or so, it would suddenly shut down. It wasn’t always consistent day to day when it happened either. The problem turned out to be the store next door. When they had their doors propped open in the morning, the reflective solar film on one of the doors would bounce sunlight in through his window at a certain time, causing the tower to sit in some pretty strong sunlight, and it would cause the psu to overheat and shut off from thermal protection.

Since this had been going on for 7 months, the seasonal changes in daylight hours would shift what time of day it happened at. As it got later in the day, the angle of reflection changed and then it would stop shutting down. If the store next door didn’t prop one specific door open, it didn’t happen at all.

I ended up changing out his power supply and shifting his desk around to a different location to get it out of the direct sunlight from the reflection.

5 Spice ups
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I fixed a series 2 laser printer once by taping a paper clip to the prong on the top door. The sensor detecting if the door was open was worn and the prong was not making contact. The extra length the paper clip gave the prong made the contact.

3 Spice ups
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Duct Tape over a users mouth. That whining sound just stopped. Lickety Split.

5 Spice ups
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Samsung 305t, 30", 2560 x 1600, LCD. Primary processor was a Altera which for that model is well known to overheat and lose contact with the ball grid. After having to run the heat gun on it twice in less than a month I took matters into my own hands and came-up with a permanent (subjective) fix.

First, there were the paperclips…

AceGoober_305t_Repair_001_10-38-2013.jpgNext was bending the paper clips:
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After that the bent paperclips were test fitted into a modded Northbridge heatsink from an old, dead motherboard.
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Heatsink lightly covered with Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 thermal compound, placed on Altera I/C then customized cover (square hole cut to allow heatsink to poke through) bolted into place. Paper clips stick out far enough for the cover to hold it in-place.
AceGoober_305t_Repair_005_10-38-2013.jpg
Monitor re-assembled with a Yate Loon 12SL-12, 120mm fan attached to the back. Power is provided from a Molex extension out the bottom expansion slot of their case. And, to ensure the mark of true I.T. ingenuity was applied, the fan was surrounded by a cowl made from aluminum foil. :smiley:
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The 305t was released back in late 2006, early 2007 so it is basically 10 years old. The fix was applied on October 30, 2013 and is still running to this day without a hitch.

6 Spice ups
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a long time ago i had some data on an old external 40Mb (you read that right kiddos Mb, not Gb) scsi hard drive.

it refused to spin up until i bumped it on the side with a hammer, then it sprang to life and i managed to get the data rescued.

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i had a mouse that wouldnt work in strong sunlight before

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Way Back When, my dad had an Ericsson portable pc with a 10mb hard drive mounted to a full length expansion card.

When the hard drive started to die, his IBM employee friend (who was later my first boss) would get it running by removing the lid of the drive and gently pushing the heads back to the parked position.

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Laser mouse?

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Put a Surface Pro 3 in the freezer when it stopped turning on.

Didn’t work…

2 Spice ups
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Shouted at the faulty hardware due to frustration, all of sudden it worked. Not sure what i did exactly but i’m noting the shouting as a fix for future use.

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1 Spice up
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We did this one several times with some low-end HP printers. The lights might’ve stopped working on a couple, but they printed like they should afterward.

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IT office stayed nice and cold, till the main building A/C started dying in a bad heatwave, and ours couldn’t cope. Server closet was tiny so we did whatever was necessary. So we got a bonus portable A/C, which had a dripping problem, and we rigged up a drain tube solution which looked like the old still from the MASH TV series.

2 Spice ups