[RESOLVED] Stupid computer tricks, or WTF did you do that for?

[MAYHEM]

Some time last year a customer brought me his Compaq computer with an uninteresting problem that turned very interesing indeed. It seems he had attempted to Upgrade his processorand now the system won't POST. I told him I would have a look at it and give him a call as soon as I knew something. Now is where it gets interesting. It's an older Compaq desktop (very old judging by the case) so I assume (mistake) that he was using an Evergreen or Intel Overdrive chip. I am wrong, DREADFULY WRONG. I open the case to inspect the system and notice that first of all the board is a socket5 (P75-90), I then remove the fan/heatsink to find a K6-2 400! Now, I say to myself, "How the H311 did he get that IN there?" So, I pull the chip out of the socket There is a pin inside one corner that is bent over (to allow it to go into the socket). Needless to say I am shocked. So, I call said customer (as soon as I stop laughing) to ask him a few questions: "Your computer was a Pentium 75?" "yeah it was old and realy slow." So you put a K6-2 400 in it?" "Yeah, I wanted at least 400mhz." "And you found that it had an extra pin that wouldn't let it go into the slot?" "yeah, so I just bent it out of the way, why? doesn't that work?" "NO, that mainboard won't support that processor, it doesn't support the bus speed or the cor voltage or the clock mutiplier amongst other things. Where did you get the Idea that you could put that chip in that board?" (half a minute of silence) "W-Well I... I... I saw on a web site that THAT pin was all you needed to move to make it work. It ran for two days! It was faster than S***, ran like a scalded cat!" At this point I am trying unsuccessfuly to control my hysterical laughter, and tell him there is nothing I can do for it. He should come and pick it up and I would love to know the web site he read that on. The machine sat in the shop for three months through repeated telephone and mailed requests to pick it up, befor we diassemled it and threw most of it away. The board and CPU, on the other hand, hang on the wall, framed, In my computer room at home.

I would love to hear of your funniest experience.

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There is no Spoon!

[Jediab]

OK, the funniest thing that I had encountered was when I did phone support for Micron. A lady calls up, and says that when she is in Word, Excel, Notepad or someplace that you can type something in, random text would appear. It would not be in any sort of order. For instance it would be "3tdsihfiusyf87nv y53o8y" one mintue, then "r9g7tiu7 b0987y9ryb vb" the next. I had her power off and reseat the keyboard cable. That didn't really work. Then after having her check in the keyboard settings in both Windows 95 and the BIOS, and finding that all was correctly set, I started the RMA process thinking that it might be a bad keyboard. Mid way though this procedure, I overhear the woman's son yell to her, "Hey mom! Your boobs are on the keyboard!" I was a bit stunned at first, not saying anything about the boob thing. Then I hear the lady say to me, "Oh opps. That was it all along. Thanks for your help," and she then quickly hangs up. I guess that she must have had large breasts, and when she was leaning over to move the mouse, her breasts would press down on some keys, thus causing the text to appear. Needless to say, this one still goes down in history.

[APCSI]

My funniest experience was this: On an old 286 machine, I had set up a system where the customer backs up data to a 5-1/4 floppy at the end of each day. After approximately a month with no problems, customer calls to say that the disk is blank. Go to customers office and sure enough disk is blank and unreadable. Replace floppy and backs up with no problem. Two days later, calls again. Disk is blank and unreadable. I replace drive itself. Backup works. Next day disk blank and unreadable. Go back to customers office and ask customer to backup so I can watch procedure. Backup works. Disk is readable. Customer takes floppy and proceeds to attach it to metal file cabinet with a magnet...........
Enough said.

[This message has been edited by APCSI (edited August 09, 2000).]

[StormTech]

Just had a user who complained of random computer problems. Guess what!!!?? Found a magnet stuck to the case above the hard drive!!!!??? I guess that's why they call them users!

[jvalliere]

Had a call from the secretary to the boss of OUR DEPARTMENT!!! (The Computer Center!!!!)

She had just put in a music CD, but couldn't hear anything.

OK, I'm thinking something simple, not stupid. She's one of us for God's sake!! (well, kinda) I'm thinking no sound card, no speakers or even no cable from the back of CD-ROM to sound card.

I had to keep myself from laughing when I found out she didn't have a CD-ROM, only a 5 1/4 in floppy drive.

I did her a favor and deleted the help call ticket instead of closing it out with a description of what actually happened. I did,
however, tell every tech in the center about it.

[Budd]

An irate woman calls the shop huffing and puffing because the scanner I sold her a week before doesn't work. I told her to bring in the scanner and her computer and we would set it up for her. An hour or so later she shows up with her computer and her scanner. After I got everything hooked up, I found the scanning software had been installed and the scanner had been used. There were some scans saved in the scanning softwares photo album. I told the scanner worked before and made a few scans to show her her scanner was working still. She procdeded to tell me that the scanner did not work before and I was not telling her the truth. So I showed her her scanner was working before she brought it in by showing her the semi-pornographic picutes of her and her husband that were still in the photo album.

We haven't heard from her in awhile.

[DevilChicken]

customer brings in machine complaining of a no post situation. pop the case cover to find that the customer installed a sb pci 128
and plugged the floppy drive power cable into the cd audio cable input on the sound card.

Doh!

[lasy tech]

This woman buys an IBM computer and calls right away that it's no good as it will not "run windows". She then volenteers she even put in the boot disk and it still don't work. I ask her the normal questions like "why did you put in the boot disk"? Anyway, I tell her to remove the disk and shut the machine off. I tell her to turn it on, she does and after a min. she says it still doing the same thing, a blue screen that says system summary at top. I ask her if she was pressing any key, she said yes, the F1 because the computers said to. She was entering setup because it says to press the F1 durning post to run setup. So I tell her to shut it off and turn it on, and set on her hands. It booted. I then asked her if the screen said press F2 to detonate if she would push that button too. She got pissed and called me a really bad name and hung up on me.

[Truckerman]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by MAYHEM:
He should come and pick it up and I would love to know the web site he read that on. The machine sat in the shop for three months through repeated telephone and mailed requests to pick it up,


So what website did he read about this chip transplant on ??

[ShadowWynd]

We built a system for a guy that included a nice NEC 4-CD changer. As soon as the guy got his computer home, he opened the case up to see if we had overlooked anything.

He found a two-wire header "loose" in the motherboard. This was a line from the power supply to any front-panel display (which his computer didn't have).

After a few minutes of searching, he found a port on his computer that would accept a two-wire connector.... the digital audio output port on his CDROM.

He plugged it in.... BOOM!
No more CD-Changer!

[lazy tech]

There was this guy who wanted us to format his hard drive and reload windows. He then called and wanted to know what we did to his backups. Seems he had backed up his data from his hard drive to his hard drive. DUH!

[Remember When]

Remember when Windrivers were showing people using air conditioners to chill mineral oil so they could immerse their Celeron 300a motherboards and all to overclock them to 600? Funniest thing I ever seen.

[MAYHEM]

The guy never said what the web site was and I never heard from him again. Spent two days searching, never saw a site that even mentioned it was possible. On a whim I called AMD told the TechRep the story. All I can say is that I'm glad I wasn't paying for the call because the Rep spent ten minutes in hysterical laughter before he could get enough breath to tell me it wasn't possible.

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There is no Spoon!

[Shrike]

The most stupid thing I ever had was when I was working or a helpdesk once. This woman phones up to say that she can't read a floppy disk, and the disk was now jammed in the drive. I told her to just yank it out, and was just about to hang up, when she pipes up with "It's probably because I hole punched it!" it turns out that this disk was with some documents that she had needed to punch. This was a pretty stupid thing to do in itself, but thinking that the disk was usable after that? Missing sectors perhaps?
Bear in mind that this was a 3 1/2 inch rather that a 5 1/4. It is possible to hole punch one of those disk (I tested it :-) ) but it takes a fair amount of force!

[AlienDyne]

A guy brings his machine along, some time ago.
He says he couldn't boot into Windows. Some files were missing. He also says he brought it to us a month ago(!) and we fixed it.
I put it on a monitor and turned it on.
The only thing that was installed were Windows 98 system files.
The date the volume created was a week ago(!!).
"Excuse me sir. Did you say you brought this machine to us a month ago?", I asked him again.
"Yes. You said you fixed it, but it seems you did nothing!", he replied.
"We fixed it sir, but it seems that you don't remember you formatted it a week ago!", I said.
His face turned into red. "How do you know that?", he said.
"We fixed it, so it tells us everything now... sir.", I replied.

The guy probably had formatted it and couldn't reinstall the software for some reason. He thought we'd install it without first checking what was wrong.

He left it for two days, we installed the software, we tested it and, of course, we charged him!

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"Matter is passive. In spite of its power, it can't be controlled without the human mind." Sokrates

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