Journal Kainaw's Journal: Bad Computer Case Design 2
If you've been fixing computers for friends and family as long as I have, then you know this one very well. Family member spends all hours of the night downloading music, games, porn, and every known virus and worm to his computer. It dies. You are asked to fix it. If you are like me, you do an fdisk-format-reinstall. I don't have time to waste on virus removal tools.
Now, what if you've done that and the computer locks up during the install. You try again and it installs, but now Windows XP refuses to allow SP2 to install. Restarting, it complains of a disk error. You try again. It installs but you have a completely new error now. Hmm... bad memory or bad disk?
You do a very thorough check on both the memory and disk. Both are fine. Still, the random problem that appears to be data loss continues. So, you put completely new memory and a completely new drive in it. The problem remains - and is actually worse.
You take the computer into work where you systematically swap out all drives, memory, video card, network card, fans, power supply, and finally the motherboard and CPU. Still, the computer runs fine. It just has a terrible problem with data loss that causes the operating system to fail.
You go back to the same old question. "Did you do ANYTHING at all to this computer in the last week, month, or even year?" Of course, the answer is "No." You ask again and again and again until you get the answer. "I cleaned the dust out of inside of it."
First thought - he damaged the motherboard. But, you changed the motherboard. In fact, you changed absolutely everything inside the case. The only thing you didn't change was the case, the little door on the front of the case, the power and reset buttons, the power and HDD lights, and the mono speaker. Then, it hits you...
"Did you just get dust out of it?" The answer comes back right away.
"There was dust and a bit of stuff that looked like tin foil in the front." It wasn't tin foil. You are certain it was lead foil in the 1/4" gap between the back of the speaker's huge magnet and the bottom of the hard drive bracket. So, you remove the speaker all together, put all the original parts back in, reinstall the operating system and, magically, it works fine.
Who decided it was a great case design to put a big magnet 1/4" away from the hard drives? There's a good three days of my life wasted on someone else's idiocy.
I feel your pain brother (Score:2)
It's like Hugh Laurie says on House: "All patients lie."
Damn (Score:2)
Right now I have three dead (or semi-dead) machines that for the life of me I can't figure out what the problem is. One installs all the way (ubuntu) but then refuses to boot off the harddrive (bad ide controller maybe?) However it boots off the usb cdrom just fine and runs the live Ubuntu cd like a champ. Weird.
The other two are more sporadic (one boots sometimes, and sometimes doesn't) May be a bad mb/cpu or it might be overheating. The other boots once, but it is impossible t