back to article Super-cool sysadmin fixes PCs with gravity, or his fists

Welcome to another Friday and therefore to another edition of On-Call, The Register's regular recycling of readers' recollections! This week, meet “Donald” [Why did that pseudonym come to mind? - Ed] who shared a tale that riffs on last week's dark, magical On-Call. Donald's tale starts with a late eighties gig “doing tech …

  1. Alister

    The beatings will continue until Morale Disk RPMs improve...

    I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

    1. hplasm
      Angel

      I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

      The heads would *probably* be parked until the disks were spinning...

      1. Sandtitz Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

        The story mentions this happening in 'late 80s' with 'ageing computers'. My first hard drives in the 80s needed to be parked manually with a small DOS executable. The "klunk" was quite audible.

        1. ICPurvis47

          Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

          I wrote a small TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program in X86 machine code to automatically park the heads on all of our hard disks, as they didn't auto-park but stopped where-ever they had last read. One of our workstations had a sticky drive too, so I swapped it for the one from my workstation so I had the problem, and every Monday morning I just opened the back of the machine and swivelled the HD back and forth (it wasn't screwed in) until I heard the disk spin up. Lasted several years like that until we upgraded.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

          ah yes, memorys of "headpark"

          those were the days

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

        "The heads would *probably* be parked until the disks were spinning..."

        Didn't disk drives use to have a parking track on the disk where the heads could land and take off? Any extreme shock could damage the heads - even when powered off.

      3. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

        Drives which suffer sticktion issues by definition have to have the heads parked on the platters.

        Headslap is damaging even if the platter isn't moving.

        1. agurney
          Coat

          Re: I wonder how many times he bounced the heads on the platters?

          should be OK if he removed the floppy first ..

  2. Martin 47

    Bloody kids, think they know/invent everything.

    Back when I were a youth the approved method of fixing vertical hold problems on a TV was to give the blooming thing a thump on the side.

    1. frank ly

      Did you thump it on the top to fix the horizontal hold?

      1. Alister
        Boffin

        Did you thump it on the top to fix the horizontal hold?

        No, don't be daft, for the horizontal hold there was a little knob you had to twiddle...

        (oh gods I'm going to regret typing that)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Back when I were a youth the approved method of fixing vertical hold problems on a TV was to give the blooming thing a thump on the side."

      An early 1970's cartoon depicted a couple of TV repairmen peering under the bonnet of their broken down van, one suggesting to the other that maybe a hammer would fix it.

      Everyone I knew got the joke.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Hammer to make car work. No Joke.

        Actually had to pay a guy to get my car going again, ROADSIDE support. Car wouldn't start.

        I was covered in baby vomit, it was Christmas Eve, just late enough in the afternoon that everyone had gone home. Wife small child, and unrepentant baby in tow. Stuck in the middle of town and the car doesn't start. This is what nightmares are made of.

        His solution rubber mallet firm thump to the rear bumper.

        Car starts perfectly.

        (I'm dumbfounded)

        Rationale:

        The thing had a submersible fuel pump in the fuel tank. Thump on bumper translated to thump on pump, allowing the thing to start.

        Anonymous for personal safety reasons.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Hammer to make car work. No Joke.

          Most V8 and some V6 Ford starter motor solenoids are notorious for failing at inopportune times. A good wack with a tire iron will usually unstick it in an emergency. (You often have advance warning that permanent failure is immanent because the car fails to start when hot, but starts fine when it cools down & the tow-driver gets in and casually starts it ... fortunately starters are an easy R&R.)

          Come to think of it, Granpa used to call a 5lb ball-peen "Ford tool #1" ...

  3. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    I think we've all done this havent we?

    Mainly with monitors, but can apply to base as well.

    It sets a bad precedent/example for the users though. I used to explain that it was a ver precise surgical wallop - not to be attempted by the amatuer.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "It sets a bad precedent/example for the users though."

      It also hardly ever fixes the problem permanently. The vast majority of such TV faults were caused by unsoldered joints oxidising (no, not dry ones. Just about every set leaving the factory in the days of manual assembly had at least one spot on the board the solderers had missed. Wave soldering pretty much eliminated this cause in the mid-late 1980s)

      As for sticktion drives - replace them. I know it's easier said than done but in an environment where the labour cost of having someone look at it needs to be factored in, repeat calls will outweigh the price of a new drive.

      1. Stoneshop

        TV aging problems

        If you're talking about pre-1980-ish sets: they were full of modules, connected to the main boards with the cheapest connectors known to man*, and a thump would move the buggers a little creating fresh contact between the module and its socket. One more decade back you'd find most colour sets still having a few tubes (apart from the CRT itself) because of the rather prohibitive price of semiconductors able to deal with the 25kV required to drive the picture tube. Those would sit in sockets, also prone to oxidising and degraded contact over time. That part of the circuit was also used for horizontal deflection.

        * a friend started his career in the early 1980s designing video recorders. He was told not to bother about trying to reduce parts count: that was the job of a specialised department that would take his design and try to trim the BOM while not affecting functionality and quality too much.

        1. cd

          Re: TV aging problems

          * a friend started his career in the early 1980s designing video recorders. He was told not to bother about trying to reduce parts count: that was the job of a specialised department that would take his design and try to trim the BOM while not affecting functionality and quality too much.

          The real meaning of "Quality Control".

  4. imanidiot Silver badge

    Makes me wonder

    How many of those disks then developed read problems and died soon after.

    1. storner

      Re: Makes me wonder

      Consider that a bonus, since it would hopefully mean upgrading from the old MFM based disks to something modern and up-to-data, like PATA

      1. Stoneshop
        FAIL

        Re: Makes me wonder

        Consider that a bonus, since it would hopefully mean upgrading from the old MFM based disks to something modern and up-to-data, like PATA

        Back when MFM was common, you didn't "just switch" to IDE. You'd need a different controller, of which you could only hope it was compatible with your system's motherboard

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Makes me wonder

          IDE didn't need a "controller", per se, just an extension to the system bus ... The name is Integrated Drive Electronics for a reason. If the motherboard couldn't handle a generic IDE card, chances are that motherboard caused all kinds of other problems due to bad design.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Makes me wonder

      They are knackered anyway. A bloody good whack did the top.

      Used it a huge amount in the old days.....ahhh that distinct clunk, clunk,clunk sound of a drive.

      Compaq's were buggers for it.

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: Makes me wonder

        They are knackered anyway. A bloody good whack did the top.

        The unoffically-approved means of fixing drives from the old Sparc Storage Array (good old 9GB SCSI drives that had a tendancy to not spin up when you switched the array on) was to take the drive out of the array, knock it on the desk (firmly but not *too* hard) and then plug it back in.

        Worked abou 80% of the time.

  5. Mine's a Large One
    Pint

    No punching but...

    After hearing the frustration of a fellow support colleague who'd forgotten his changed-earlier-that-morning password and couldn't login, I told him that switching his PC off, waiting 30 seconds, and then switching on whilst pressing the embossed ICL badge on the PC would reset his account to a default password of "iforgotit". He sounded sceptical but tried it and it worked. Bless him... his little face lit up with his new-found knowledge, and he couldn't wait to try it out the next time someone called in with a similar problem. As it was lunchtime, he even bought me a pint.

    I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd reset his password to "iforgotit " whilst he waited for his PC to reboot...

  6. tony2heads
    Alert

    Percussive maintenance

    is a skill every tech guy should have

    Icon: isn't that a baseball bat?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    had a custard once

    complained that his screen was so dim he couldn't read it any more - new screen please.

    I found it, and brightness already turned up 11. It was, however, filthy. A quick look at my boss, (the BOFH but only an ex-policeman, so not so bad) we thoroughly cleaned exactly half the screen.

    Dirt was a collection of cigarette output, dust from adjoining factory, and general scum. Given the entire environment was a bit grimey this could have been quite predictable for the customers.

    The clean half was now so bright that it looked like a nuclear detonation.

    We left a note suggesting they may give their devices a wipe from time to time...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: had a custard once

      Once had to attend to a PC deep in the bowels of an underground railway system. It had only been installed for a few months - but was encrusted with grime as if it had been there for centuries.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: had a custard once

      somebody please explain "custard"

      new one on me.

  8. Tom 7

    Early hard drives oftn had this kinfd of fault

    the proper method of 'repair' was to take the drive in hand and oscillate the case in the the same plane as the disks. Working on the disks alone reduced the chance of percussive un-maintenance of other PC parts.

    I did accumulate several of these that were chucked out at work and they ran great for years unless turned off. I must have had nearly 200MB of them at one point!

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Re: Early hard drives oftn had this kinfd of fault

      Yep, I used to have to do that with my first ever HDD in my Amiga 2000 - the 80MB slab that had originally far too much out of a grand!

    2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Early hard drives oftn had this kinfd of fault

      .. it was all about the wrist action......

      (to rotate the casing with sufficient rotational acceleration that the platter moved a little).

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aaah, the good old thump.

    1) I used to service an own-brand laptop PC, that was built around a Uniwill chassis. Not a bad machine for the time (2004-ish) but used desktop class processors, as most did back then. A desktop P4 in a laptop chassis creates "a smidgen" of heat. This machine also used to use a socketed BIOS chip, fairly close to the processor, and eventually the heat seemed to "creep" the chip out of the socket with hot/cold cycles.

    In they'd come for repair, I'd open the box, take the laptop out, drop it from about 4" which shook the BIOS back into the socket, boot it up, test and return.

    2) Toshiba laptops, back in the days they were grey and the best you could get. I'm thinking a 2520CDT or something. Anyway, one range used AMD K6-2 processors and Toshiba had just moved to those low profile CPU sockets that slide side to side to lock the processor. You just put a large flat blade screwdriver in a hole and lever it over. Except their sockets were moving back by themselves after a few months, unlocking the processor and causing no POST.

    The quick fix was two screws to lift the keyboard, take out the long screw directly in the middle of the chassis, slide the longest flat screwdriver you have under the top case until you feel it touch the side of the processor. Smack the end of the screwdriver which locks the processor again.

    (Eventually Toshiba came up with a fix that involved something that looked like a lego brick to drop into the screwdriver hole, stopping it from moving back)

    A note on hard drives - not necessarily from "the olden days" but drives covering the last fifteen years or so have a head support when off. A little capacitor stores enough juice to ping the arm into a plastic holder which is away from the platter surface as the power is removed, which means they can put up with a fair amount of G if powered down. On a laptop drive, often the (glass) platters will shatter before the head/arm are damaged.

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      If it's attached, I'd guess that you'd break the data/power connectors before you caused any damage to the disks, or the parked head.

      I can confirm though that you can drop an unpowered harddrive from above head height, onto a solid floor and it will still work fine. Well, by fine I mean that it managed to hold an OS for fifteen minutes while the the PC was QC'd and it got sent to a customer regardless.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "eventually the heat seemed to "creep" the chip out of the socket with hot/cold cycles."

      My Apple ][ had several chips that were in sockets. Every couple of years the machine would play up. The cure was to take each of the chips out of its socket and then replace it.

      The sockets had tin plated contacts - not gold. The chips were drawing a low current - which apparently allowed the build up of oxide between the chip pins and the socket.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Some of the guys I worked with there started out doing field repairs on home computers - at the time, Amiga 500s and Atari STs were the big players.

        Most 500 faults were fixed by just taking out every removable IC and replacing them again, for that same reason I guess or to reseat them. They could confidently go into a customers house with just a chip puller and a philips screwdriver and fix most issues.

      2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

        Acorn Atoms!

        .. had the chips in sockets mounted on the other side of the PCB to the keyswitches. After a few weeks pounding by teenagers, it was necessary to whack the back of each chip with something a little lighter than a hammer, such as the handle of a screwdriver.

      3. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "The sockets had tin plated contacts - not gold"

        The oxide buildup wasn't due to the low current. That was the dissimilar metals of the socket and the IC pins causing corrosion in the presence of moisture (in the air). the low current just meant that the oxide layer wasn't being punched through.

        Gold plated sockets need gold pins. Tin (solder) plate need tin pins. Mix at your peril.

      4. Wilseus

        "The sockets had tin plated contacts - not gold. The chips were drawing a low current - which apparently allowed the build up of oxide between the chip pins and the socket."

        My old Acorn A3000 had a tin plated header for the RAM expansion (in those days Acorn machines either has sockets for discrete chips or as in this case used their own design of memory modules) and was notorious for the pins oxidising, requiring the module to be removed and reseated every so often, although mine never suffered from that problem.

    3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      On a laptop drive, often the (glass) platters will shatter before the head/arm are damaged.

      We had an engineer (in the late 90's) who was tasked with measuring mobile phone coverage. Rather than going through the hassle of parking, booting up his laptop, doing the measurements and shutting it down again, decided that he would drive along with his laptop on all the time.

      After his third hard-drive[1] in a month he was banned from doing it. Not only could he not do the measurements but it would cost us about a day to recover his laptop, put a new drive it in, re-image it and then put his specialist software back on.

      [1] Out of interest, I opened one of the failed hard drives. A nice assorment of magnetically-coated glass crumbles fell out..

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        He inadvertently found the fastest way to securely erase a laptop drive.....

        (We used to use a sturdy nail and a big hammer, just pierce the thin metal top case and listen for the shattering glass. You then have no data loss worries, and as a bonus you have a new maraca)

        1. G.Y.

          I took care of a hard dive once by putting it on a stone step and treading on it. The drive enclosure got bent 45 degrees; disk was unlikely to spin again

          1. jake Silver badge

            Good gawd/ess, man!

            How much do you weigh? Would take a couple ton(ne)s to do that with any HDD that I've ever seen/used/dealt with ...

    4. Stoneshop

      Toshiba laptops, back in the days they were grey and the best you could get.

      Well, except for IBM, but if your company's IT budget was less than a double-digit percentage of an average African country's GDP, they were out of the question.

  10. The humble print monkey

    Percussive maintenance

    Boiler stopped working at our NFP - called the installer who was on the other side of town.

    Sounds like impeller stiction. Give the pump three slaps, each 40% of a good punch, give me a call back if it doesn't work.

    Now my lovely colleagues assume that I'm also a heating engineer..

    1. hplasm
      Alert

      Re: Percussive maintenance

      Hoover Nextra tuble dryers are like that- if they buzz when the 'go' button is pressed, and don't run, hold the button in and smack the panel on the 'NEXTRA' logo, hard.

      It seems that there is a flakey relay behind there, and it is a 'semi-official' fix...

    2. Stoneshop

      Re: Percussive maintenance

      DEC once marketed an Unibus serial interface that consisted of the actual Unibus board (might have been two, can't really recall), a 19" 4HE box with three line cards fitted with the D25 connectors, and an interconnect cable. Problem was, the backplane in the distribution box wasn't stiff enough, and inserting the middle card would bend the backplane causing the middle of the edge connector to not make contact. Which caused three or four of the ports on that card to stay dead.

      The field change fix was to fit a piece of wood between the backplane and the rear panel of the box. This was informally known as the "2x4 fix", although the actual size of the piece was a fair bit smaller.

  11. jake Silver badge

    With no part 2 this is a FAIL.

    Part 1: Wack computer to start disk.

    Part 2: Archive everything important on that disk while you still can!

  12. mikeHingley
    Thumb Up

    eyyyyy..... sit on it

    many moons ago i used to work PC support, and we had a particular range of PC's in the estate - the Mitsubishi VS550 - there was apricot involvement also - all i know was that someone thought these were a suitable replacement for the aging IBM model 50's that they had.

    And they were a massive improvement.

    Right until they stopped working. After extensive analysis (not by me i hasten to add - I wasn't that clever to figure out what was happening) it was found that the heat dispersal for the CPU was inefficient and cause the CPU over time to ease itself out of it's socket.

    Our solution... switch of PC, lift PC 2-3 inches off desk. Drop. The inertia tended to force the chips back in to the sockets enough to let it carry on for a while.

    Thumbs up because.... eyyyyyy

    1. Andy A

      Re: eyyyyy..... sit on it

      Used to work for ACT/Apricot. The original Xi had a 10Mb drive, made by Rodime in Scotland.

      We had endless reports of drives not spinning in the mornings, especially when the weather was cold.

      The drives seemed to have been built with a fair amount of moisture inside the casing (it can be damp in Glenrothes) and condensation formed on the platters. The surface tension where the heads were resting was strong enough to stop the drive spinning.

      Rodime's "official" fix was to slap the right hand side of the box. The heads bounced into the air, and the platters started moving before they came down again.

  13. POKE 649,0
    Pint

    Yep, been there done that. Had an old 530 G1 that suddenly started having mutliple drive failures. As it is a "business critical" manufacturing system it needed high availability at all times. So I whipped out the offending drives and gave them a nice even whack on the nearest aircon unit. Luckily the server started booting again allowing us enough time to take a final backup. I then replaced the drives, rebuilt the WINDOWS 2000!!! OS and restored the backup of the database to the server. All good.

    This was only last year!! Don't get me started on why I had to rebuild a WIN2k server in 2016 though as I'd be here all day.... It is Friday and the beer is calling me already.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "Don't get me started on why I had to rebuild a WIN2k server in 2016 though as I'd be here all day"

      Short version: because it works.

  14. NoNBNforMe

    The technical term for this is percussive maintenance.

  15. wolfetone Silver badge
    Trollface

    If only beating the crap out of everything made everything work. There'd be no political problems then.

    1. annodomini2
      Trollface

      Unfortunately the Politicos think this is also the solution to social problems.

    2. Swarthy
      Trollface

      Retrophrenology? Seems to work - if you can avoid the GBH charges....

  16. Peter Christy

    A technician is someone who knows where to slap a device to get it working.

    An engineer is someone who knows why you have to slap it there.

    A GOOD engineer is someone who knows precisely how hard to slap it!

    --

    Pete

    1. jake Silver badge

      Uh ...

      A FIELD engineer is someone who knows precisely how hard to slap it!

  17. MarkB
    Alert

    It goes back a fair way...

    My father did national service as a radar fitter in the RAF.

    He claimed that "the apprentice knows it needs to be hit; the engineer knows where; but only the fitter knows how hard"

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: It goes back a fair way...

      INVOICE:

      Hitting machine with hammer - £5

      Knowing exactly where and how hard to hit machine - £995

      1. IsJustabloke
        Coat

        Re: It goes back a fair way...

        "Hitting machine with hammer - £5"

        Looking back to what I shall euphemistically call "different times" the correct text for this invoice would have been...

        "Service machine using Irish Screwdriver - £5"

        Ahem....

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It goes back a fair way...

          ""Service machine using Irish Screwdriver - £5""

          That's inflation for you.

          It used to be an itemised bill of "6d for hitting with a hammer - 19/6d for knowing where to hit it".

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: It goes back a fair way...

            I heard it "Giving telly a thump, 6d ... Knowing where to thump it, 19/6d ... knowing how hard, That'll be a guinea, guv."

            Funny thing is that I'm a bloody Yank! ;-)

      2. tony trolle

        Re: It goes back a fair way...

        Saw an ICL on site engineer hit a power supply in a ICL 2966 mainframe with hammer to get it to work. Our spare had been used up in a 2988 a few days previously

  18. Yesnomaybe

    Greek toolkit

    In my distant youth, I worked on a large yacht. The engine-man was a big Greek fella, very good at what he did, and as I was not particularly busy I often offered to help out in the engine-room. (Re-lapping 32 cylinders worth of diesel-engine is repetitive but satisfying)

    He had a fairly pragmatic and quick way of sorting things out. It involved a sledgehammer, with a cut-down handle (I am guessing the only reason for this was that it is difficult to get a proper swing with a full-sized handle in a cramped engine-room. He compensated for this by being built like a brick shithouse)

    If something didn't work as it should, he wold give it a good tap. Still no joy? Hefty tap. Most bits of kit would have gotten the message by now and bucked their ideas up, but sometimes it needed a smack, with a bit of a run-up. Generally, at this point, things would either work, or need replacing. Either way, issue sorted.

    1. Bob Wheeler

      Re: Greek toolkit

      There is no problem that can't be fixed by hitting it harder.

    2. imanidiot Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Greek toolkit

      If it doesn't work, get a bigger hammer. If it breaks it needed replacement anyway.

      1. m0rt

        Re: Greek toolkit

        "There is no problem that can't be fixed by hitting it harder."

        Broken hammer?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Greek toolkit

          Actually a hammer normally breaks by the head coming off the shaft. Solution, use another hammer and a wedge!

    3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Greek toolkit

      Generally, at this point, things would either work, or need replacing. Either way, issue sorted.

      "If at first you don't suceed, use a bigger hammer."

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If in doubt....

    ...give it a clout.

  20. mtp
    Angel

    Faith healing

    I once came across a monitor that I knew had a dodgy connection on the VGA connector. I clasped my hands on either side of the monitor (quite vigorously) and loudly proclaimed "you are healed!".

    The screen immediately came to life and I left feeling smug with some very surprised people behind me.

    1. analyzer

      Re: Faith healing

      Did that with an IBM Thinkpad and it's desk expansion with a dodgy connector, I was late in as I was going to be in an international conference call and got sent to this blokes desk. He was complaining about how it was always happening nobody could fix it etc etc. Did the faith healing thing then after the call finished, well early for a change, went and fixed the connector as everybody else apart from security had buggered off.

      We really shouldn't do these kinds of things, it only creates a rod for our own backs when the bloody pests insist that only we will do regardless of what the problem is :P

      1. cd

        Re: Faith healing

        "We really shouldn't do these kinds of things, it only creates a rod for our own backs when the bloody pests insist that only we will do regardless of what the problem is :P"

        Found myself nodding assent. When I worked in an Applecare center, sometimes other techs would come up to my desk (I was only T1 like everyone else there) and tell me they had a customer who would only speak to me. "I can't get them off the phone" I wondered why the disconnect button on their machine was suddenly faulty.

        It did go the other way once. A famous recording artist called and wanted help with setting up a studio with their Mac. Across from me sat someone who was brilliant at that, so I explained what I was doing and set them up for a confab.

  21. Mike Moyle

    Not so much an actual repair as a "Fonzarelli Moment" -- The large university that I attended had a campus center/student union building that included offices and a university-run hotel which was frequently used by parents bringing little Jimmy or Jane to check out the school before applying. One student group that I was a member of had its office on an upper floor. One day, I entered the elevator followed by a Jane, her parents, and and younger brother. The elevator in question had a quirk that there seemed to be a built-in delay of a few seconds after a button push before closing the door. ANY button push - even the door close button - appeared to reset the delay. You got used to it after a while but if you weren't aware of it it was annoying. So I push for my floor and pater familias reaches in front of scruffy, disreputable-looking hippie me and pushes for theirs, and the elevator just sits there. So -- right before the delay would have ended -- he reaches over and pushes the button again, which resets the delay. Getting visibly irritated -- and, again, JUST before the reset -- he hits the floor button AGAIN, followed by the door close. Me, I'm just slouching there watching this. He's just about to hit the button again when I raise one hand and say, in a quiet, bored voice, "Hold on," and, without otherwise moving, shoot a snap-kick at a randomly-chosen spot under the control panel, which resonates with a loud, satisfying BOOM. Having thus delayed things just long enough, EXACTLY at the moment of impact the door slides closed and the elevator starts moving and I go back into the same bored slouch I was in before. The expressions of shock (on the faces of the parental units) and awe (on the face of kid brother) were priceless. If there IS any lesson to be learned from this, then it's that sometimes just LOOKING like you know what you're doing can solve a user's problem.

    1. WonkoTheSane
      Thumb Up

      Plus several million for style!

  22. DECUS4ever
    Trollface

    Exorcise those PC demons

    Back in the day, PC monitors were made with a giant glass tube under vacuum. We had a number of these. Our secretaries had color versions which was a big deal at the time. We noticed the color wasn't uniform across the screen as happens with CRTs. Having been around TVs for years, I knew that there's a hand-held degaussing coil you use to remove the magnetic field from the CRT mask (go look it up) and it clears up the discoloration.

    You take the degaussing coil, plug it in and basically wave it around the screen to remove the magnetic field. During a slow time, we sent one of the PC techs out on the task to degauss the secretaries PCs. A younger secretary watched intently as he waved the coil around the monitor. By the end of this, he had her convinced that he was exorcising the PC demons from the PC so she would have any problems.

    Of course I got a call from our boss to explain what was going on. I had to convince the CFO that we hadn't been invaded by Satan and that it was a joke. The whole concept of how a CRT worked was totally lost on him. We toned down the joking for a while but she never looked at us the same again.

    1. cd

      Re: Exorcise those PC demons

      Also fun to hit the degauss on a monitor and hear swearing from the adjoining cubicle.

  23. the Jim bloke

    Used to have a work ute..

    with a dodgy radio - just about a full spiral rotation of the left arm at the elbow, from the steering wheel to the dash above the radio got it working nicely again. eventually got easy to pick the right spot to hit by the dent in the dashboard.

    The ute (toyota landcruiser) was mine to use during the day, but officially allocated to one of the engineers as part of his contract for driving in and out of work.

  24. TeeCee Gold badge

    Got the T-shirt.

    As a known "guy who can sort your PC without having to go through the support process", a colleague called me over to have a look at her machine.

    Boot failure with no disk found. I powered it off, lifted the front edge about three inches, powered it on and dropped it at the appropriate point in the boot cycle. Cue sound of disk spinning up and the machine boots normally.

    "Wow. I'd have thought that would be more likely to break it than fix it."

    "Well, it was hardly going to make things any worse. I suggest you copy your stuff off while you can...".

  25. LanMan

    Another trick used on a 3Com 3Server

    We had hundreds of 3Com 3Servers - a headless fileserver with SCSI drives installed at sites all around the US at our clients. They worked quite well, but sometimes when restarted, they would just hang. I found a solution when I was on site once and didn't want to deal with doing an old restore. You could hear the drive start to spin, then after a few seconds it would power down. So, I figured, it just wasn't getting up to speed. The trick was to power on the box, listen to it spin, turn it off then right back on again. Might take several tries. Jump starting a drive. It worked most every time. Of course, then you'd get a backup and a new drive on the way, but it bought time. And I can still remember the "you want me to do WHAT?" response from a client. As well as the "wow, thanks!".

  26. Trixr

    Hitachi hardware expert repairer

    In the early 2000s, Hitachi manufactured a whole run of HDDs for Dell computers, and lucky us, we decided to refresh hardware in two of our student labs while these units were still in active release.

    One machine after another, disks would fail to spin on boot - not every time, but as time went on, the drive jamming got progressively worse. (I can't actually recall now what the real issue was - perhaps the actuator or spindle itself.)

    As this went on, the boss jumped up and down at Dell, who *finally* found the problem with the Hitachi units and actually acknowledged, that yes, they (in fact the entire workstation) would be replaced under warranty. It took a while to arrange swapping out nearly 100 machines, so I could enjoy the googly-eye effect from bleary-eyed students in the lab as I went around thumpa-thumping the northeast corner of each box before lectures started/.

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