My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out
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Damn, either you were a really smart 13 year old, or you must have been super desperate and then amazed that that actually worked.
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Lots of percussive maintenance going on around here, but one that sticks in my mind was testing some of the first 486DX PCs in 1990. One particular specimen from Compaq would only boot after hard power off by taking the lid off and tapping the CPU with a screwdriver. Worked fine after that.
Smacked the shit out of our old CRT TV, worked!
That’s where the phrase “out of whack” came from. You just needed to give it a whack.
Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn’t get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it’s been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn’t crash any more.
I was an apple tech for a time. With iPads that were out of warranty (basically go buy a new one or GTFO) and exhibiting a certain display issue, I would take it in the back and slam the thing on a counter at a certain angle. Worked every time for that particular problem.
why and how did that work, how hard were you slamming it, I am presuming not hard enough to break glass, but than, what would such a slam do? I am going to presume these were LCDs, and maybe the the liquid crystals would have gone too cold, and maybe by smacking, you somehow freed them or something. I would like to know more.
Pretty sure it was a loose cable. They’re basically giant iPhones and I saw similar issues on those. I should also mention said counter had an antistatic mat on it to soften the blow.
I had a similar thing on an old crt monitor. The screen would start to flicker badly after a while, and 8 year old me found if you banged the side, just right, it would keep working for a couple of hours.
Turns out the circuit board had some dry solders on it and when I hit it on the side where the board was, it got the connection back for a while.
The old televisions. Used to be able to get a better signal by sticking a paper clip in the back; and then taking another paper clip and bending it so it can connect to the first while gripping a butterknife
Stopped using the PC for a week. Came back and an update came out and everything was good. Sometimes theres nothing you can do.
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
chmod -R 777 *😊 this is how you take your Linux security and make it Windows
Great idea!
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Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like “what’d you do‽ It’s working!”. Definitely a fix I wasn’t expecting.
When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.
Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn’t crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.
I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.
Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I’m still confused as to why that worked.
EHCI (system config) data was corrupt. Possibly from pulling the GPU while the motherboard board still had power (or residual power in caps).
CMOS wipe resets to blank and that data gets rewritten after BIOS runs the “wtf is plugged into me” routines triggered by blank data.
That’d be my guess.
I wasn’t aware that data could be corrupted by unplugging components, but what you’re saying is making sense. That could definitely have been it.
“Weird Shit” is always a possibility when there’s any power at all in the system. The PSU will keep low level power supplied for a surprisingly long time after being unplugged from the mains. 💛
Is it true that this power gets drained when you press the power button without the power cord plugged in?
Not in my experience.
I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days off VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is massive wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.
So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.
Kinky
I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.
A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I “revived” a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it’s gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff…
Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
I can’t say I’ve never been confused by keystrokes from objects laying on my keyboard, but I do usually figure it out within a couple of seconds at most.
I had to get someone to find a wireless keyboard they left in a random box because they never used it, yet they still connected the USB receiver for it.
