** Your Hardware secrets and stories **

Admiral Huddy

Admiral Huddy

Admiral Huddy

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Feb 2003
Posts
29,640
Location
Chelmsford
There have been quite a few people asking about PC repairs recently. I don't think these people really know what they are letting themselves in for. I've been doing this for just over 7 years now part time and I've had some interesting experiences.. some good, some not so, some awkward moments, particularly the woman who got unchanged and changed in front of me, then left the house on my own!!

Please share your stories but for the time being, here are my top two. Enjoy :)

Shocking Stockings
Thought I’d share a couple of stories..

I’ve have found some bazaar things inside PCs including a bear bottle but this one takes tops.

This week I’ve been handed a PC that in meltdown. It has 5 HDDs of which two have failed.

The PC was built about 4 years ago by this chaps son, who is presently away. Realising that things could get hot he rightly placed a large 12cm fan in front of the drive caddy but he also placed a pair of nylon tights over the grill. The gusset and other leg where shoved just to the side. Over time, he hadn't spotted that the tights had made their way in to the fan and it stopped working. As a result, the HDD overheated and failed.

I could believe what I was pulling out and the fact I had to go back to him; "Excuse me Mr.X, your PC failed because your wife’s tights were caught in the front intake fan".

Important note, if you are going to use tights to filter dust, please use clean ones and please cut them down to size!.

Beer Bottled Vision

Another incident .. a chap called me with internet problems. On arrival, he said to me at the door that the problem is pron related and asked if I was ok with that. "Sure!", I said sniggering as I walked in. Now this chap had bear bottle glasses that made me feel quite uncomfortable.

He wasn’t quite clear at first, only that it was an internet problem when he visited various websites. Anyway, after about 10 minutes, I said, there's no problem with the internet so really didn’t understand the problem. It turns out that he couldn't log in to a live feed website as he'd been suspended.

“As that it?”, he asked.

“Yup”

I cried laughing all the way home.. the most entertaining £50 ever
 
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I had the unfortunate chance to work for PC World just over a year ago, must say it was possibly the most boring job i have ever had as i am technically trained but was still put in a sale role. Although i hated the job i did manage to meet some very interesting people... in both good and bad ways!

Intel Celery?!

Was talking to a chap one day as we used to get some people just coming in for advice, he turned to me asking about computer hardware, thanks to my experience and technical backgorund i was only too happy to help and offer any advice i could. We got on to the topic of processors and he was trying to explain to me how technology has advanged beyond anything he could imagin, he then informed me that technology had advanced to the point where CELERY was being used..

Me: "Sorry sir?"
Customer: "Yes they have started putting celery into computers now"

At this point i just smiled and said my manager was calling me to make a sale... poor guy i didnt have the heart to tell him he was a fool and fall to the floor in fits of laughter!

I know better then YOU!

I had a young guy come in one day requesting a gaming laptop, he informed me his budget was £1500 so i had no problems trying to help him.
He was joined by his 2 friends who were both joking around and generally having a laugh at their friends expense. Anyway he told me what game he wanted to play (some FPS game which i cant remember now) and that he has seen a laptop for £1300 that would play it with no problems.
He pointed the laptop out for me and after doing a little research i informed him that this laptop was not going to be enough to run the required game, he then looked at me like come crap and told me i was wrong! He then attempted to tell me how graphical memory worked and that although the dedicated memory was not high enough, the 4Gb of system memory would boost it and making the video card a lot faster!

I told him that the two systems did not work the way he thought and that no matter how much memory he shared to the video card this computer would not run the game.

After some time arguing i stopped him and said simply, if you don't believe what i am trying to tell you, please feel free to come back with the game and i will install it for you on the display model and you can try it for yourself and see how it goes! He agreed to this and arrived back in store about 2 hours later which his two cronies.

After about 20 mins of game installation, we ran the game NOT to my suprise it ran about 10 FPS which was unplayable. I then removed the DVD, looked at him, smiled and said, "Told You" and walked away :)

My computer wont work :(

I was called on site to look at a guys computer who told me it had popped and cut out, i instantly thought PSU or possibly motherboard so i unplugged the machine. I could tell this was not going to be a nice experience because the gents hour stank of smoke.

I opened the PC and as i suspected found the componants covered in tar and dust. In the end the PSU has blown so i cleaned out the pc as best i could installed a new PSU. before i left i thought i would open the psu to see how badly the damage was out of curiosity... to my suprise as i greeted by SPIDERS NEST! By the looks of things they had nested while the computer was off and caused it to burn out!
 
I was once asked to look at a printer that suddenly stopped working one day and just kept jamming up. Opened it up and found the problem pretty quickly, a mouse had decided to make the printer its new home but it chose right were all the gears were...
 
Luckily for me, my experiences of visiting people in their homes is always boring :(. Nothing even remotely exciting has ever happened. No naughty housewives...nothing, a few cheeky kids, but that's about it.

Some fat kid refused to give me the password to his account, so I had to shout him every 5 minutes I needed to restart the laptop... I thought about planting some pron on it and then showing it too his mum to see the look on his face, but I thought better of it.

Maybe in time something will happen.
 
Buchanan0204 said:
Luckily for me, my experiences of visiting people in their homes is always boring :(. Nothing even remotely exciting has ever happened. No naughty housewives...nothing, a few cheeky kids, but that's about it.

Some fat kid refused to give me the password to his account, so I had to shout him every 5 minutes I needed to restart the laptop... I thought about planting some pron on it and then showing it too his mum to see the look on his face, but I thought better of it.

Maybe in time something will happen.
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haha you should have taught that fatty a lesson
 
Stupid kid XD its hardly like your gonna be sneaking into his house at night times to look at his blatently interesting and confidential documents, or picture of some boobs :o
 
belial8321 said:
Stupid kid XD its hardly like your gonna be sneaking into his house at night times to look at his blatently interesting and confidential documents, or picture of some boobs :o
Click to expand...

That's what I tried to explain. Some people are so freaky about giving you their login password. They don't seem to realise it's only use if you have the computer in front of you. You just learn to humour people.
 
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