Who'd have thunk it?

[Uriel]

Went round to my friend's parents' house to sort out their PC, which was refusing to POST -just giving the manufacturer's splash screen.

Unplugged, replugged everything. Reseated RAM etc. Stll no post. Down to the bare essentials. Monitor and keyboard only plugged in. It works.

Process of elimination narrowed the problem down to the USB printer. Try different cables. No post.

Solution: turn the printer on. It works. Everything stays working through several episodes of turning the printer on and off.

Well I'll be...

 

[Sudden]

The wierdest problem i've come across so far (given my bad memory anyway) was when a computer just wouldn't boot up unless the external CD writer was connected to it. Would POST and then give me some strange error basically saying that windows is no longer working (at least I think it POST'ed, i'm not sure if I knew what POST was back then). Plug in CD writer, and voila, computer boots up and works fine. For the life of me couldn't figure out why it was happening.