Tag Teaming..

I got a phone call this morning from a customer who is having a problem with their PC - I went to their house and examined the machine - The PC was around six years old, the case was made of non-penetrable, solid, titanium, or a similar alloy - It weighed an absolute Ton - It had an external handle, but you needed Superman, Geoff Capes, 5 Burly Blokes, the occupants of an African Village, or all of the above to lift it... It was very, very, very big and heavy and ugly.

This PC was an import, from IRAN - and whoever has put the machine together, has decided to put all the bits they can find, inside, because, BIGGER IS BETTER - or they were selling the PC by weight.

It had  2 x 3.5" Floppy Drives, 1 CD Rom Drive, 1 CD-RW Drive and 1 DVD Rom, a 160GB Hard Drive, a Soundblaster Sound Card / Amplifier Combo of a sort, occupying a CD drive bay - this had a maze of tentacles (wires) protruding from its back and all the way to the back of the case, there were 12 internal Fans attached to the case, some Suck air, some Blow, with no apparent logic. The mother board was a cheap ASRock effort, 775 Socket with a 1.6GHZ Intel Celeron Processor - there was an absolute maze of wires inside the case, a jungle, with no attempt to group these or tidy the inside..

The PC looked impressive (six years ago), but, its today and now!...

In-spite of my efforts, I could not get the PC past the Windows post screen. I looked inside, and I really did not want to mess about with that at the customers place. So I carried the heavy machine down the stairs, out of the front door and into my car.


When I got back to the workshop,  I carried the machine inside - enabled S.M.A.R.T. within the BIOS and proceeded to check the rest of the PC. S.M.A.R.T. gave me a warning with regards to the health of the Hard Drive, so I phoned the customer and informed her of the problem and the likely cost for rectifying it.. We had  the usual price Haggle, then agreed a price..

The next day, I replaced the HD, re-installed Windows, and tested the machine for 8 hours. Everything seemed to be ship-shape, so I took the PC back, through the door, up the stairs, re-connect the power and other cables, turn the PC on and all is working fine. However, this time, the customer had her friend in - a Sumo Wrestler pretending to be a woman, or it might have been a very ugly woman pretending to be a Sumo Wrestler - she challenged me with regards to my diagnoses, because she had one of these IRANIAN computers, I didn't think there were enough resources on the face of the planet to make 2 of these monsters, but apparently there are, especially in IRAN, and her HD is still working, but her Motherboard did pack in and so did the Power Supply (she had these changed by another) - Imagine being Tag Teamed by 2 IRANIAN women - Believe me, its not good - I couldn't be bothered arguing, so I just got the money and run.

Two weeks down the line, I received a phone call from the same customer - the computer is playing up.. I go back to the house, everything seems to be OK, no problems, no anything, so I just leave.

A week later, another phone call, there is a problem with the system - this time, I bring it down the stairs, out of the door, into the car and back to the workshop. I plug it in, everything seems to be OK - I simultaneously run a Benchmarking software, a burn in software, and around 10 other desktop applications, continuously, for 4 days, non stop - no crash, no nothing - everything seems to be OK.. So I take the PC back, out of the car, through the door, up the stairs, connect the cables and turn on - all seems to be OK.

2 Hours later, I received another call - the PC is playing up - I hate my customers, I don't even know what is happening, what are they doing or what the error was - so I went back again, they said its crashing, somebody did put some Thermal Grease between the Processor and Heatsink in the past, and that had solved their problems.. So I took the heat sink out - this was the worst Intel designed Heatsink ever, I cleaned everything, put some grease on and replace the Heatsink and fan - I was unable to push all 4 corners in, so I took the machine back to the workshop, I replaced the Fan and Heatsink. By then, I was really frustrated about the whole affair, so I just to took the new HD out, took the PC back to the customer and gave them their money back - I advised them to save their money and use it against a new machine, and if it needed repairing - then please ring somebody else..