Oddest thing you've seen a computer do

A couple years ago customer brings computer in. "I've tried loading Windows 98 and it's just not loading" (he was upgrading from 95). Started loading 98 in the morning and by 1:00 pm it had barely moved. Alrighty then, let's just let it load overnight and see what happens. Made sure all power saving shutdown sleep garbage was off and even made sure that it was plugged into a UPS. Arrived the next morning 9:00 AM and still running setup. By 11:00 AM it had actually finished loading all the setup files. The next thing that pops up on the screen is Windows telling me that the drive is badly fragmented. Two hour Defrag finishes loading Windows and you know what? The SUCKER RAN LIKE A TOP! 25 hour installation of Windows 98. Too bad I wasn't getting hourly for that one : )

Funniest one I saw was in a friends bios,
it was
IRQ for VGA = Yesabled

I fell on the floor laughin.

G.
If we "re-member" things, does that mean we "member" them in the first place?

Quote:

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Originally posted by MAYHEM:
Whydoes everyone take me so seriously???

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Rule number one, we don't talk about Project Mayhem.



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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews, movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

"Now that's a damn shame, folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white boy like that!"

Try this one on for size.
A customer brought a system in complaining about not being able to boot. I didn't have any other work at the time, so I told him to wait while I checked it out. This was about 10AM. My first guess was power supply dead. I replaced the power supply, didn't fix the problem. So my next guess was motherboard or some loose cards. Tried resetting all cards/cables/mem/etc. same results. No boot, no beeps nothing. I decide to replace motherboard. After changing everything, the system boots, the motherboard is temporarily outside the case and just basics (I/O, video, CPU and mem) (it was an old 486 as I recall). At this point, it is about noon. I explained to the customer, that the motherboard is bad and needed to be replaced, we agree on prices and I installed the motherboard in the case. Just before closing up the system I give it one more power on. The system refuses to boot again (arrrrgh!). The customer decides to leave for lunch at this point leaving me to do more work without questions (YES!!!). After removing the motherboard again and putting it outside the case everything works again, weird. So i did an old trick and used the cardboard washers on the brass standoffs and covered them with scotch tape to hold them in place between the stand and the board, figuring some kind of ground/short problem. Reinstall motherboard. No boot. At this point getting really mad at the situation. finally just out of pure curiousity I looked at the difference between inside and outside installation, what I finally figured out was that the PC speaker cord was too short to hook up while external but good for internal. So I figured what the heck I have tried everything else. I mounted the motherboard one more time and left the PC speaker off the motherboard. It boots everything is cool. Go figure. I replaced the speaker and the system worked fine from then on. Never seen that before or since. And just to make sure, yes I checked polarity on the speaker.

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Has anybody seen my Cable Stretcher?

I just remembered another one.

The first and only bad CPU I ever saw caused a really weird problem. Anytime a floppy disk was inserted into the system it would say that the disk was not formatted. I replaced about 4 floppies and cables, 2 motherboards, 1 power supply, 1 case, 2 sets of memory, 1 video card, 3 I/O cards, and 1 hard drive before figuring this one out.

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Has anybody seen my Cable Stretcher?

Actually Vanguard, I've seen that one many times. Way back in the day of the AMD k6-2 300, FIC made a motherboard that did not have a punch out for one of the screwholes for standard AT boards. Which was ok, if you were a semi-intelligent organism who actually checked the board and screw lineup. We just so happened to get an order for several hundred of these systems from a major military contractor. The man upstairs hired a bunch of highschool wannabe techs to build these systems and they would just put in all the metal standoffs that would fit and throw the motherboard in. The systems would error out with various messages from: "the disk is not formatted" to "error reading from drive a:" and this would last until the system just died. This is the story I got from the contractors in house support. So I go out. And sure enough, the floppy controller was in the spot occupied by screw holes on every other board in the industry, and sure enough, the wannabes had installed standoffs right underneath that controller, which fried the controller and the chip. Fun with newbie techs. grrrr....

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Do one thing everyday that scares you.
Do two things everyday that scare the bejesus out of someone else.

A few years back when I was an Ada programmer, I put an error message in some code for general (non-specific) exceptions that displayed the message "Error ###: You probably did something really stupid - didn't you"
I only got one user call on it, and she was laughing really hard.

I've got a couple of em.

First, an old cheat program for some game I used one time had a great error message. If you pressed a button that was not supposed to do anything in the program, it said "Invalid user, replace user and press any key."

Next, similar to the Numlock light. At school, the keyboard lights stay on for about 15 secs after you shut it off. Even weirder though, was that the buttons (num lock, caps lock...) still functioned in turning the lights on and off, but if you did this then the lights only lasted for about 6 seconds before fading away.

The last one happened last week. My grandfather's HP froze, then died, then refused to POST or even turn the lights on. I wrote tech support, and they provided me with this fix:
1) Unplug the Pavilion from the power outlet
2) Hold in the power button on the machine for about 30 seconds
3) Plug the system back in and turn it on.
4) The system should now boot properly.
It actually worked! I then brought it back to his house, and it doesn't work anymore. I am going to write them again soon, but it's crazy.

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A mind really is like a parachute: It's a million-to-one you'll need one in this lifetime.

.

Once at work I was doing work on 2 PCs at once. I returned to PC one after working on PC two and it appeared to be switched off. The power saving had switched the monitor off but the PC was still on. I proceeded to pull out the power and ide cable from the HDD and remove it from the machine. After using it in another machine to transfer data i plugged it back into the still powered on PC. At this stage I happened to bump the mouse which brought the monitor back on. I realized what had happened and tried browsing the drive. Worked fine, the new folders were there and all. Accidental hotswapping!

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[ i N S A N i T Y 2 0 0 0 ]

I once had a user in an application that is Mainframe based and he got a message stating that (UserName) will now be flushed....what is up with that? Kind of personal if you ask me... https://forums.windrivers.com/

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Ever stop to think....and forget to start again?

Also, last week had a computer playing Bethoven's (sp?) 5th....turned out the CPU fan had fried...I guess the heat was causing it....weird... https://forums.windrivers.com/

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Ever stop to think....and forget to start again?

Hear is one i think you will apprcate. I was on a warranty call at a new hotel. bad motherbord in one pc we will call it pc1 and a bad power supply in pc2. replaced and tested each macine closed the call and left. I recevie a call the next day from the software people setting up the 2 pc's they woudl not work. this time pc 1 power supply was bad and pc2 moterbord was fried. i oder parts next day and replace and test agin works fine. once again i receve a call from the software gentalmand almost crying he said fire came out of both power supplys and he had been shocked. I asked what he was doing and sain hooking up a serial cable that ran form pcc 1 to pc2. I talk to the owner of the hotel and had me call the electritioin to get him back out there and to fix the outlets. well what had happend was the electrition wired one plug backwards i think and this caused a short with he searial cable commpled the connetion and boom your pc's just became carrirest of 110. well to find out the software person called by about a monty ago and the electrition had wired several rooms wrong also. alwasy carrya and outlet tester.

My neighbor got a new IMac because it matched her new decor, Then they installed Virtual PC Because she didn't want to learn Apple Soft ? Took to long to figure out Windows in the first place. Her words not mine ! ( some people have more money then brains to start with) https://forums.windrivers.com/

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If all else fails read the directions !

My neighbor got a new IMac because it matched her new decor, Then they installed Virtual PC Because she didn't want to learn Apple Soft ? Took to long to figure out Windows in the first place. Her words not mine ! ( some people have more money then brains to start with) https://forums.windrivers.com/

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If all else fails read the directions !

Quote:

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<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Drinkumfirewater:
Funniest one I saw was in a friends bios,
it was
IRQ for VGA = Yesabled

I fell on the floor laughin.

G.
If we "re-member" things, does that mean we "member" them in the first place?

I don't think your member is appropreate subject matter here. I don't want to know what you do with your member. Don't take me there Crystall!!!! Ha Ha!!

</font>

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I write programs occasionaly for the USAF using what else Quick Basic 4.5. A very old and unsupported language. I use a 4 key combination to enable a trouble shooting view screen status bar at the bottom of the program. Left-Cntl & Right-shift & "T" & "V". Try it and you will notice it's imposible to get all the keys without using two hands. Study it and realize there is no reason to use these key combinations in normal operation. The bar would display several very funny and very facicious down right nasty error messages for me to use durring long de-bugging sesions. Upon release of the program, I disable the status bar and compile the program. Opps I missed it in one of the patches and sure enough some one pressed the keys just right to make the status bar pop up. Until you do certain things in the program it will be blank. Then when you least expect it you get a call from your customer (a full bird colonel) asking what's this message at the bottom of my "Yellow" screen that says "get your fr**ken fingers off the keyboard and on your DI**. It's time for a PEE break." Well you can imagine my suprise and dismay when I had forgotten all about those debug errors and was kindly reminded by the boss to get a life. He asked (Ordered) me to report to his office with an explanation for the condition of his monitor. You see he left the error message on the screen while he found my number. His monitor had turned all shades of yellow. The monitor had lost its red gun at the exact moment of the error message and turned yellow and appeared to be full of urine. He was convinced it was my fault. He suggested I seek professional help and an alternate line of work. The monitor was returned for warrenty repair. The program was re-compiled sans error messages. https://forums.windrivers.com/

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I have the cure for ESTO, PEBCAK, and ID10T diseases. A 14lb sledge hammer.

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :P~~~~~~

Quote:

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<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Darren Hensley:
I write programs occasionaly for the USAF using what else Quick Basic 4.5. A very old and unsupported language. I use a 4 key combination to enable a trouble shooting view screen status bar at the bottom of the program. Left-Cntl & Right-shift & "T" & "V". Try it and you will notice it's imposible to get all the keys without using two hands. Study it and realize there is no reason to use these key combinations in normal operation. The bar would display several very funny and very facicious down right nasty error messages for me to use durring long de-bugging sesions. Upon release of the program, I disable the status bar and compile the program. Opps I missed it in one of the patches and sure enough some one pressed the keys just right to make the status bar pop up. Until you do certain things in the program it will be blank. Then when you least expect it you get a call from your customer (a full bird colonel) asking what's this message at the bottom of my "Yellow" screen that says "get your fr**ken fingers off the keyboard and on your DI**. It's time for a PEE break." Well you can imagine my suprise and dismay when I had forgotten all about those debug errors and was kindly reminded by the boss to get a life. He asked (Ordered) me to report to his office with an explanation for the condition of his monitor. You see he left the error message on the screen while he found my number. His monitor had turned all shades of yellow. The monitor had lost its red gun at the exact moment of the error message and turned yellow and appeared to be full of urine. He was convinced it was my fault. He suggested I seek professional help and an alternate line of work. The monitor was returned for warrenty repair. The program was re-compiled sans error messages. https://forums.windrivers.com/

</font>

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Whilst installing (or trying to) a USB smart card reader so a Dell PC could access photos taken on an Olympus, I got one of the best status messages in the hardware manager. There's the standard "This device is functioning properly" and "This device is not installed or does not have all the drivers installed" and so forth. This one was "(Code 11) Windows stopped responding while attempting to start this device; and, therefore, will never attempt to start this device again." Turned out to be a bad reader.

[This message has been edited by Sparky625 (edited January 02, 2001).]

ok i have a computer with a burnt out mother board but it still runs. after buying a new chip a 233mhz i ran win95 but no sound bugey cd drive. i tried win 98 runs with cd rom working sound working https://forums.windrivers.com/ but lots of bugs but it runs do you who thinks it can be fixed https://forums.windrivers.com/ https://forums.windrivers.com/ https://forums.windrivers.com/ https://forums.windrivers.com/ https://forums.windrivers.com/

Testing Shareware for a PC User Group on my 8088 XT (few years ago), ran some dog of a program, screen went flip and the 8088 monitor program signed on. Having started on CP/M I was used to a monitor, but had never seen it before on an 8088, never have since.
Tried to see if it would do a memory dump or anything, but it seemed to have crashed.

A 386 PACKARD BELL WITH A "WORKING" MODEM/SOUND COMBO CARD. https://forums.windrivers.com/

Saw the error that Windows will never try to use this device again... thought it was strangely worded, anyway....

The solution to all problems:

format c:/q/u/c/s https://forums.windrivers.com/

Oldies but Goldies.
An other solution:

format c:
setup all the absolutely needed staff and then
GHOST THEM

Strangest thing I think I've ever seen was when I was asked to take screen shot of one of our digital video surveilance recorders (basically a Tivo on steroids). I hit PrtScn, shut down the recorder software, and switched over to Microsoft Paint. I pasted the screen shot in, and just boggled as the live video was still playing in my screen shot! Paint wasn't designed to do animated GIF's, let alone display live video from a camera. And it was definately Paint, because I could draw over the top of the video!

Closest we could figure was that there was some weirdness with DirectX that was superimposing the video over Paint.




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Captain Troy D. Pack Rat
`akbar Press

If you're furry and you know it, hug the mouse!

The wierdest error message I have come across while fixing a customers computer is the following:
The normal sort of Windows error box appeared with the red X but the message inside the box said "This program has completed normally". That said it all about Windows 95 as far as I was concerned.

My favorite is still:

keyboard failure or no keyboard present, press F1 to continue

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The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

Our voice mail system has an interesting error message.

"Sorry you are having difficulty. Please get help. Good bye."
http://cwm.ragesofsanity.com/s/big/Duhard.gif




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Captain Troy D. Pack Rat
`akbar Press

If you're furry and you know it, hug the mouse!