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For several years my pc would only turn on while at a 45degree angle, not on its side and not upright but tilted 45degrees. After it turned on I could put it back and it'd be fine.
Eventually I moved and when I moved the pc ended up upside down and shaken, I put it down and a screw fell out of the psu. Problem solved!
Had a dvd player that would skip all the time even if it was a brand new dvd. Got pissed off and threw it at the wall. Girlfriend plugged it back in a couple hours later and it never skipped again.
I did this with a google home mini. I could not get it to work correctly, got mad, threw it at a wall, and put it in a box.
A few months later I found it, plugged it in, and it works perfectly. Except the strange rattle if you shake it haha
Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer
Sticks were maybe the first human technology and we've yet to top it to this day.
Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.
Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a "defective" piece of hardware he couldn't manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it's our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.
He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam... CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.
Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.
Retail is depressing.
Do I want to know what csam means?
Child Sex Abuse Material.
Basically (and usually) child pronography.
When I worked as an intern in a fancy restaurant I had my workspace in the kitchen below the radio (which was always on when we were prepping). I had braces at the time and the general opinion was, that I was functioning as an extension to the antenna. The radio was only working when I stood at one specific spot (or when I was not present at all).
In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.
A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn't care.
Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I started using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.
When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said "hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!" And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.
The look on my manager's face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must've looked like to him. "Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!" Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn't possible to explain it a way that didn't sound crazy.
In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.
In engineering speak, that's referred to as "percussive maintenance".
I had a situation ten or so years ago working on a machine that displayed an error code i didn't recognize. I looked in the manual, and it had descriptions for error messages like (E1, E2, etc.), but the message was a couple numbers higher than the highest error in the manual (and as a side note, it's really dumb to program a machine to give an error message without a corresponding key).
I looked through the handwritten old log book for the machine, and found someone referencing the same error code in the early 90's. The error back then occurred after the machine was moved, but it cleared up after being moved again. We guessed that the issue was a loose connection that got jostled back into place. The machine had just been moved slightly again before our issue, so we assumed it was the same.
We ended up opening the machine, and just poking around until we hit the right wire that reconnected itself and cleared the error message. We wrote that down in the log book as a "digital re-alignment" (digital as in fingers).
Sounds exactly like some shit that would happen to me, lmao. Glad you didn't lose your job over it!
The old televisions. Used to be able to get a better signal by sticking a paper clip in the back; and then taking another paper clip and bending it so it can connect to the first while gripping a butterknife
Was playing Pokemon Platinum trying to catch Rotom while a friend was struggling to get his Nintendo DS to read a game cartridge. Part of catching Rotom is walking up to old electronics in a haunted building and smacking it, including an old CRT TV. Since my friend was still struggling with his DS after I caught Rotom, I walked up to the old CRT in the room we were in and thumped it with my hand on the side. His DS started working again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At a previous job we were swapping a ton of laptops out with newer models and at the end of it the boss let us know that we could keep some of the old ones for ourselves if we wanted. Everyone then set about to re-imaging their designated laptop only to find that there was some Dell encryption on the drive that functionally bricked it if you didn't unlock it before you formatted it (I don't remember the specifics but none of us were able to figure out how to bypass this). We only had one laptop left that hadn't been touch and still had the app necessary to unencrypt them but there was only one hard drive slot so I ended up pulling the dvd drive out and sticking a sata cable in the slot for that and using an old PSU off the shelf and jumping it to actually power the drive. It was incredibly janky but it worked.
Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked
People who say violence never solved anything have never really been intimate with a printer
An ice tray to cold down a router.
I changed ISP, the new one told me that it would take like a week to send me the credentials to use my own ADSL router 🙄, in the meantime I had to use the cheap-ass one they provided.
The new service crashed like after five minutes of use, after some some back and force with the technical support unsuccessfully I notice that the router was extremely hot when the connection crashed and normal when it started to work again.
It has not any cooling system, and being in the middle of the summer didn’t help either.
So…. I tried to put an ice tray from the freezer on the router and it worked. To be “safe” I put a plastic bag between them to avoid any condensation dripping onto the device.
I have a pixel 8 and had a faulty screen caused by poorly installed latches that held down the screen. Slapping above the power button seemed to fix it for about 20 minutes.
Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.
This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.
What a unique abomination. I salute you.
At least it's not with a customer.
Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.
We didn't have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.
but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,
then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus's window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.
Fucking baller status. There were a couple of fixes, not as complex as yours of course, that I figured out during the wild west of internet and virus infection. Can't remember any of it in detail, but yeah, shit was it's own kind of puzzle and was awesome to find a fix like this.
This reminds me of way back when i beat a virus with task manager.
This one was showing as a process in task manager. If you killed it, it would just reappear moments later. I even tried finding the folder it was installing on my pc via rightclick on the program in task manager and clicking "open file location" closing the program and deleting its install folder. But it would still come back, installed somewhere else.
After some time messing around, i noticed that another program would show in the task manager, then the virus would appear, and then the other program would close and disappear from the task manager. All within about 1 or 2 seconds
So i killed the task, waited for the other program to appear right click it fast, open file location, and there it was, a different folder with a program that auto runs when the virus is removed to reinstall the virus and close itself to avoid detection.
I deleted that folder and then killed the virus program in the task manager, and it didn't reappear. I had won!
I seem to recall it was resistent to virus scanners for this reason.
But this was about 20 years ago so i doubt there are viruses that unsophisticated now.
Yeah around the same time as those fbi ones there were ones like that but they generated new ones with randomized names trying to hide. I think
I had something similar. I was looking at my processes one day for some reason, when I noticed CuteFTP. Now, I knew what it was, but I knew for a fact that I hadn't installed it. Some investigation led to a hidden folder containing some scripts. One of them was for remote control via an IRC channel. So I hopped in the channel and had a chat with the user who was set to admin the bot on my computer.
Edit: Formatting.
I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days of VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.
So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.
Kinky
Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like "what'd you do‽ It's working!". Definitely a fix I wasn't expecting.
My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out
Coworker's story: Trying to fix a prototype in a hotel room at a European trade show. Soldering iron on hand, but it was a 120V iron and glowed white hot when plugged into a 240V outlet.
So they had one person solder and the other person keep unplugging and replugging the iron from the wall at roughly 50% duty cycle.
When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.
Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn't crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.
I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.
Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I'm still confused as to why that worked.
EHCI (system config) data was corrupt. Possibly from pulling the GPU while the motherboard board still had power (or residual power in caps).
CMOS wipe resets to blank and that data gets rewritten after BIOS runs the "wtf is plugged into me" routines triggered by blank data.
That'd be my guess.
I wasn't aware that data could be corrupted by unplugging components, but what you're saying is making sense. That could definitely have been it.
"Weird Shit" is always a possibility when there's any power at all in the system. The PSU will keep low level power supplied for a surprisingly long time after being unplugged from the mains. 💛
Is it true that this power gets drained when you press the power button without the power cord plugged in?
Not in my experience.
I'm not sure if this counts because it wasn't intentional on my part, but... When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to "lodge" the lense back into place yet the fall wasn't high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of "That's probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don't go trying that on other things randomly".
A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I "revived" a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it's gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.
I wouldn't recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff...
I have two… these are from the old days of computing :)
One: guy said his monitor was showing wavy lines on the screen (old CRT monitor days). Went to his office, looked at his monitor. Sure enough wavy lines. Looked the top of his monitor. Removed the clock sitting on top of said monitor, no more wavy lines. Don’t put electric clocks on CRT monitors folks.
Two: working in a school system. Just before classes started. Get a call “none of the computers turn on”. Go to the classroom. Check a few machines. Machines “turned on” but didn’t boot the OS. Listen to one of the machines… hmmm, no drive noise. Tap it with the back of a screwdriver. Drive spins up, computer boots. Later found out that it was a semi-known problem with Seagate drives. If they sat to long without use, the heads would get stuck.
When I was a kid I had a tv develop a big rainbow circle in one corner underneath where I set a speaker on top of it. I took it off but the circle didn't go away. A quick google search later and that's how I learned what degaussing was.
Somewhat related.
I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It's pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there's no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.
It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.