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What's On Your Tech Bench?
Twev1701 writes "As a small computer repair company that has seen enormous growth in the past few months, we are now looking to expand our facilities. With construction starting on our office space, we now turn to the task of designing a new tech bench. Our existing bench is 6'x3', has a dedicated 15" CRT, 4 port KVM, and overhead storage bins for parts. With a new bench of 12'x4', we have lots of room for expansion. What essentials would the /. community put on their new tech bench?"
Actually, in my experience, the single most useful tool for computer diagnostic/repair (next to a philips screwdriver, of course =]) is Linux. Whenever a friend needs to reformat or gets some virus that keeps their machine from booting, or some such, I just plug their hard drive into my Linux box here and do whatever needs to be done. Recently, my Chief (I'm a Navy recruit) needed some files recovered from a system who's admin password was lost and/or corrupted. I just hooked his hard drive into my system, recovered encrypted NTFS files with ease and burnt'em onto a CD. Yes, a 15" CRT is nice, but if all you're hooked up to is a BSoD, it's not terribly helpful =] Also, both the laptop offerings are called "m5000 Series." Typo?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
One CRT isn't going to cut it. Get a second LCD mounted up on the wall. That much space, you likely want to watch more than one thing at a time and a switch box is frustrating.
.).
An old laptop with floppy drive (and a burner if you want to get fancy). Nothing is more irritating than having to walk back and forth for bios, drivers, and whatnot to put on floppies at your desk . . . There's always something you want to lookup online or download to use on your hardware.
Easily accessible tools. Not bins. Not a toolbox under the bench. A nice set of phillips and flatheads, maybe a couple needle nose just there on the wall. (Paint them fluorescent orange or something so they dont walk away if you want). Those all-in-one tool cases with their plastic snapin holders are not conducive to putting things away right.
An assortment of 'known good' parts in easy to get to bins doesn't hurt. And a nice sorted variety of screws is always good (I don't know what they do with them, but people seem to like hording backplanes and their screws . .
Easy to reach canned air. Easy to reach paper towels.
Two more 4 port KVMs would then fit right in. Wall mount those as well. Keep as much bench top space as you can free. The overhead bins are a GREAT idea.
Also several drawers running along the front. Norm (New Yankee Workshop) has a plan for a storage/workbench that would adapt really well for your requirements. Flush mount the power outlets (double the amount you think you will ever need) either to the bench surface or the wall. Beware static! ;-)
Garbage in, garbage out! A dedicated cleaning station with a good vaccuum set and supplies cordoned off from your workbench area would be a first stop for every computer that came in your place. Keep your workbench area clean with a dust bunny containment room!
Some things to consider -
1)KVMs with both VGA and DVI in, and a DVI out to a flat panel hanging on the wall behind the bench.
2) Big, scary Server PSU with a gazillion power connectors. Maybe two or three, and lots of extra molex connectors.
3) A universal notebook PSU with all the lead attachments. You know someone's gonna drop off a stinkpad and not leave their power brick.
4) A universal wall wart for powering troublesome peripherals that the owners neglected to bring the PSU for.
5) Multimeter
6) Nice soldering station, with adjustable temp and a variety of tips.
7) Big, honking USB drive for emergency backups.
8) Wireless Router with ethernet ports, and a gigabit hub to uplink to it, to test out networking ports, read Fark on company time.
9) Electrical tape in three colors, duct tape in two, gaffer's tape, superglue and a hot-glue gun.
10) Spare cables: USB in all its variations, ditto Firewire; Mini Din-8, DB9, DB25, Centronics and gender changers and adapters for all involved; PSU cords; Cat-5 patch cables, crossover cables; bluetooth mouse extenders, RJ-12 phone cords.
11) A n00b intern willing to go look for a bluetooth mouse extender cable.
12) A bluetooth mouse, to test bluetooth functionality.
13) Ordered bins with commonly needed hardware (plastic washers, mounting studs, screws, etc.)
14) Lotsa wireties in various sizes and colors.
15) Professional grade anti-static setup your technicians won't bother to use, all the while rubbing their shoes on wool sweaters and playing with styrofoam.
16: big magnifying glass on an articulated arm, preferable with a bright light.
17: Pin vise, and one of those aligator-clip armatures. And a real bench vise, too.
18: heat gun for heat-shrink connectors.
19) Locking toolboxes assigned to each tech, inventoried in the morning and at night. You'll save a ton of money on tools. What goes in those boxes is another post in and of itself.
SoupIsGood Food
I used to truly love my Klein screwdriver. There it is right on the home page. Sniff.
It made the Xcelite tools seem like toys.
I have to say that one of the most useful things I've gotten my hands on in a long time is an IDE to USB cable. It saves tons of time hooking up drives that aren't able to boot for one reason or another for data extraction. All that slaving to another system and rebooting gets old real fast, but I end up working on quite a few laptops. I'd also reccomend a hard drive duplicator/maintainence station. As far as tools go, everyone has their favorite for one stop shopping, but I prefer the Swiss Army Cybertool. It's way more useful than the model with a USB drive, and has nearly every commonly used PC maintenance tool I need, including a pin for reset buttons. A bit bulky, but I wouldn't be without it in my pocket. I don't know what type of KVM you use (USB or PS2), but I would also reccomend keeping a genuine opposite, read not using adapters, keyboard and mouse handy. Typically, I use PS2, but every now and then I get a system like a Compaq iPaq (the desktop not handheld) that only has USB, and doesn't work well with adapted PS2 devices.
Also, I *heard* through the grapevine that a supposed Geek Rescue cd is avaliable on some torrent sites. And i've also *heard* that what is on there is quite useful in many ways. I'm sure you already have a disk similar to this, but what i've *HEARD* about this cd is that it is pretty handy. ;P
Yes,
and bootable Linux CD's like Knoppix http://www.knoppix.com/ and Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/ are also good tools. The CD's can be loaded toward Windows, or Linux/BSD tools depending on the system in for repair.Essential for out of the office repairs and analysis but also useful at the bench.
I'd definitely agree with the USB key/CDs.
:-)
Much of the time spent fixing is in diagnosis. Having a selection of USB keys and CDs to boot into memcheck and Linux environments for analysis will be very useful. Also have a huge disk around with *everything* on it.
You'll need power. Lots of power. Put a few mains sockets on the wall, and get a couple of big computer power supplies screwed to the wall with extra-long cables. Just make sure you have a means to turn them on and off- modern power supplies can be a pain in this respect. On the ATX ones, I recall you ground pin 10 to turn it on... but check this!
I'd also say my Leatherman has fixed more than its fair share of VCRs and computers
http://blog.grcm.net/
I prefer to attribute the origin of the name espresso to the "quick" way it is prepared in opposition to the usual italian way of preparing the coffee (at home) by using a special coffe maker tool called "moka" that produces coffe lighter than the espresso.
Gah! No, no, no! A moka (such as the classic octagonal aluminium pot that you are talking about) is an espresso machine. It's a cheap stovetop version designed to emulate the cafe espresso machines. The point of espresso and the reason an espresso is called an espresso is that the water (or steam) is forced through the coffee grains at high pressure, which is exactly what a stovetop espresso machine does. The heating of the water in the lower half of the moka builds up the pressure, until the steam is forced through the coffee, up through a tube and into the top half. You are right that it doesn't match a cafe espresso, you don't really get a crema with a moka. Another disadvantage is that because the water is boiling when it passes through the coffee, the coffee gets a bitter burnt taste when compared with a cafe machine, which runs at about 90 degrees C. All the same, it's still an espresso.
sig under construction...
A post card plugs into an expansion slot. during boot the system bios gives it's current status across the expansion bus. This boot status code can be read as two hexadecimal numbers. The post card will display these codes on an LED digital display as the system cycles through it's tests. If the system normally does not boot, the post card will tell you exactly where in the boot process the system failed. If it Fails on say (totally made up example) 2F, and you check the bios manufacturer's data sheet, you'd find that it failed while initializing video. These can get a bit more detailed than just beep codes.
As a macintosh repair tech I probably have a little different spread of toys than many PC techs, but I suspect the basics will be much the same. Some items have been added after a moment of inspiration, and have made life a LOT easier.
* A parts caddy. One is a large caddy, and is full of parts of course. Start out with one at least twice as big as you think you'll need, then add a second one later when you run out of space.
* Another parts caddy. This should be a smaller one, with 36 small drawers. DO NOT put anything in this one, it's for service. This is a huge idea. When taking apart a laptop, each step of disassembly, pull out a drawer and put the parts/screws/etc in the drawer and set it on the bench to the side. Set them down in a row as you take apart the computer. This does three important things for you. First, it makes it unlikely that you will lose a part or try to put a screw in the wrong place. Second, you now have a distinct order in which to reassemble the computer so you don't put a panel back on and then realize you have to take it back off to attach a cable. Since you can't always count on having a service manual, especially for a laptop, this is very important. Third, all the parts for each assembly step are grouped together, which also helps prevent delays in reassembly and "hmm I have parts left over...". This is good for laptops and desktops, but the biggest benefit is really anytime you really have to tear something apart.
* KVM or similar switch, to switch video between your service monitor and up to 3 other VGA sources. USB switchbox to switch your keyboard between your service machine and up to thee other computers. Four VGA/USB combo cables to run around with. Number them, and number your switchbox positions. Some people opt for the "tap shift three times" KVMs, but I personally prefer the good ol pushbuttons.
* Tools. You can never have enough. I have particular need of my precision screwdriver set from Sears. It includes philips 0, 00, and 000 which are essential for laptops. It also comes with t5-t8 and small flatheads too. I also have a larger set of long handled philips 1 and 2, plus a set of large torx wrenches for t powermac g5's.
* multimeter. Doesn't have to be an expensive one. You need to test voltage (BIOS batteries, power supplies) and continuity (is that wire good?) $15 from radio shack is fine.
* firewire card in your service machine, and firewire enclosure, opened up, on your bench. This is for quick hookup and removal of drives for testing and repair, without having to reboot your machine. Another very "big idea", this will really help you. I *strongly* recommend a Granite Digital "FireView" bridge board, it has an LCD display and menu buttons and can be used to test a drive without even hooking it to a computer - extremely helpful and costs only about $100. Hard to find good diagnostic hardware of any type for that price. This will easily save you hours of frustration trying to track down a gremlin that ends up being a flakey or failing hard drive.
* air compressor, and a place to use it. (outside) You will be thankful for this when a machine comes in that looks like it was fresh dug up out of the ground. You'll see the worst ones at least twice a month, and they will send up a huge brown cloud when you first hit them with the air. Make sure it does not have a tool oiler in line, (yes, I've seen that done to a computer, once) and it would be better still if someone knew how to empty the water drain valve occasionally.
* cables and adapters. Like USB A-to-B, USB A-to-mini, firwire 6-6, 6-4, and 6-9. Parallel, maybe even some scsi (they come in handy from time to time). Serial, old and new style. Don't forget a DVI to VGA adapter (both ways!) because you will need them.
* floppy drives. Definitely need a 1.44mb usb floppy, and should also try to have a zip-100 if at all possible. Zip 250 is optional but good. DVD burner also manditory, for data backups. Anything else probabl
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I only half agree. I think grounding straps are basically stupid. However, grounding mats are a gift from the Gods. In my 10 years of tech, I've watched plently of ungrounded people take perfectly working pieces of ram and turn them into memory swiss cheese.
We have a couple of testing stations that have the following setup.
1. Nice grounded table, with grounding mat(s). We also have a couple grounded turn tables that really help when your building a machine.
2. Lots of 3 prong outlets.
3. A common area with all kinds of Power supply testers.
4. A couple of different 450 watt power supplies wired with power switches for different models of motherboards.
5. A common area with with a whole bunch of different ram testers.
6. All our work areas are very well lit. Each station also is equipped with a couple long necked work lights, at least one of them has a magnifying glass so you can make close inspections of parts.
7. A couple of our stations are equipped with grounded compressed air.
8. Bins with test parts (video cards, ram, etc) all conspiciously marked with a color coded label to that bench.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
1. Run a piece of angle iron along the front of the bench. Ground the angle iron with 10 or 12 awg wire. Touch this frequently and forget about those PITA straps. Or attach your strap to it if you're a paranoid numpty. ;)
2. Grab some anti-static mats. Screw them into your workbench. This will help you avoid scratching the customer's equipment, and if you ground them, further mitigate accidental ESD.
3. Make sure your floor isn't a friggin' carpet. If it is, lay some laminate floor over it.
4. A shelf for monitors. You want a monitor ever 3.5 feet or so.
5. A couple of "test beds", matching your most common configs. These are easy to make. Take the removable part of a case that the motherboard bolts up to, bolt a motherboard to it. Grab a piece of MDF. Bolt the case back to the MDF, and then bolt a harddrive, CD-ROM, and floppy disk to it. You can put this away and take it out easily, and it won't succomb to the "oh I'll just use this..." syndrome so easily.
6. A network jack and a phone jack for each monitor (or more).
7. An internet-connected PC with a floppy drive and a CD-Burner.
There, you'll all done. Assuming you have a shelf full of spares, you can fix anything -- safely and quickly.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
After years of doing computer troubleshooting alongside my system administration role, I swore that I would never do full-time tech support again without these two essentials:
First, hardware diagnostics for narrowing down motherboard/processor failures.
Second, a power supply tester.
For all the time I spent and knowledge I gained, I found that billing hourly to track down these "hard to find" bugs where the P/S or mobo were flaky but not dead really caused technician and customer headache. I won't do it again without these two tools.
One tool I find extremely useful is the Linux Password Disk. It will boot a linux kernel and rewrite the Windows registry files to change the local Administrator password if it's forgotten.
z ip
The bootable CD image is here:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/cd050303.
A Logic Analyser: This is a device that looks a bit like an overly fat ballpoint pen with a wire attached. The idea is that you attache the wire to the ground of a circuit and with the tip of the pen you touch a part of the circuit and the leds (and with some: a buzzer) indicates if it is logicaly "high", "low" or oscillating. These can be switched between CMOS and TTL logic levels. Pretty handy to test low speed digital circuits, but pretty much useless for anything else.
Where I work there are 5 techs and everyone of course has a better idea. First what will the owner or boss allow, if cost is an issue. 90% of everything on my bench I purchased, the bench it's self I found in a back room full of junk, pulled it out and came in on my own time and put togather. My most important tool I feel is my data recovery system which is not more than a all in one Abit board mounted on a plywood board. Easy access to replace drives and even install pci cards if needed. I can not tell you how many times a week I use it to recover and or backup data from a customers computer or scan for virus's. It is mounted on my bench, above and out of the way. I bought the board and got a used cpu from the many junk systems we get stuck with every year. I went with the KV-80 model which has onboard everything including SATA. It runs Windows 2000 Pro for the OS and has an 80 gig hard drive, with a usb external backup drive. As for the rest of my tools, the usual diag Microscope 2000 and any other software I can find, multi meter, small set screw drivers Bench has on monitor with a 4 port KVM switch. Keyboard is mounter under the bench, so as to not take us space on the bench surface. One of our techs is a wiz at making CD bootable diag disk. I must admit, each bench here is different but each tech can work on 3 computers or more at a time, and it happens from time to time. So you can imagine our benchs are much bigger than the one you have.
when i used to to this for a living i used a ground strap when working on laptops. prior to that, maybe 1 in 15 i opened had some possible ESD damage. afterwards, none. it certainly doesn't happen everytime but sod's law says when you don't do it, if you work with enough sensitive components, something will die/degrade when you're working on it due to ESD.
This is less than stellar. First off, if you actually see copper on RAM, AGP, PCI or any other edge card connector something is seriously f'd up.
Edge cards are plated with tin/(lead)/nickel, or (90% of the time) gold. Gold is used because it doens't really oxidize, and if for some reason it does develop a microscopic layer of oxide, it's conductive and friendly.
Any gook on the edge connector is the result of something else touching it. Kimwipes and alcohol would relaly be the best way to remedy this problem. If the item in question (like a known good vid card or DIMM or whatever) is removed and inserted a lot, the gold will wear. It's awesome for conductivity, but it's still soft. Treat it with care. If it's inserted and removed from a contact that doens't use gold plated fingers, you'll not only get wear, but you'll get oxide buildup from that other metal. This also applies to non-gold edge connectors into gold fingered sockets.
Gold goes with gold, and nothing else, if you have any option at all.
Clean with alcohol (97%) and some kind of chemical safe lab wipe (like Kimwipes). Use dry abrasives like erasers as a LAST RESORT. Your parts will thank you by giving you long and happy lives.
</EE hat>
And yes, I do remember the days of fixing flaky Apple
Be nice to your electronics.
-dave
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
5. A common area with with a whole bunch of different ram testers.
It may be that I'm more budget-conscious than others, but I think ram testers are a load of crap. They're expensive and quickly become obsolete as new types of ram comes out.
A better solution, IMHO, is a couple known-good barebones PCs. For any modern computer you only need one supporting SDRAM and one supporting DDR. Neither machine needs a hard drive; just a bootable CD-Rom drive with a bootable memtest86 disk.
This setup also doubles as a generic parts tester; you can plug any pci card, hard drive, cd drive, etc. into these barebones machines to verify failure. I use an ultimate boot cd in each machine. It comes with memtest , hard drive diagnostic tools, and a bunch of other diagnostic apps.
2. Lots of 3 prong outlets
Make sure they are not just 3 prong outlets that have only 2 prongs wired. Check yours to see if the electrician failed to connect the ground wire.
7. A couple of our stations are equipped with grounded compressed air.
Well filtered and dryed grounded air is even better, sucks when you blow 3 gallons of water onto a mb.
Even better than compressed air is a tank of nitrogen, way cheaper than running a air compresser all day.
There's a simple formula, too, for figuring that out:
- Figure how many inches of bench length you have.
- Figure 1 outlet per inch.
- Multiply by 3 for top, middle and bottom mounts.
- Multiply by 10 just in case.
More seriously, and almost literally, you cannot have enough power outlets. People who provide techie areas just don't friggin' understand that one. We need DOZENS AND DOZENS of power outlets. We can consume a good 12-24 per 6FT of bench.KVMs help reduce that need, but with outlets being a buck each or less, in bulk, then why skimp?
P.S. 20-30 outlets per 6FT of bench seems like a good rule-of-thumb for the techie.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I also like to keep a soldering iron and mulitmeter, but i guess that depends on the work you do. other weird stuff I keep:
1. One of those little mirrors your dentist uses, so i can see whats behind a mess of wires, read lables on the back of racked routers, etc.
2. a pickle grabber. ESSENTIAL. looks like a clicky pen, but with prongs comming out. it's great for grabbing screws you drop in the case.
3. a little magnet. again, for picking up screws. just be careful with magnets.
4. duct tape....because, well, it's duct tape.
Right, so after scrolling down a while and finding nothing on the actual topic of tools:
a lbum24/TEEPE_2X402S_TO_1_603CAP_TO_GROUND_SHOT2.pn g (should have a pair of very fine tipped soldering irons for re-work)
1) 2 metcal re-work stations
2) 2-3 rolls of solder, varying diameter
3) 2 bottles of liquid flux (someone will steal one)
4) IPA, swabs and cloth wipes
5) Machinist chest (small) loaded with the RightTools (TM) (ESD safe snips, strippers, pliers, etc.)
6) bin box for scrap devices and solder soaked wick for "proper" disposal
7) PC w/ 17" LCD, mounted on a swivel arm.
8) the kitchen sink.
other:
* One bench with an inspection microscope for taking nice pictures like this: http://xbx.networkboy.net/modules/gallery/albums/
* Community station with a Zyphertronics and low temp solder (you can recover and reuse the solder a couple times, feels chincy to do, but that shit is pricy)
* Solvent tank, if you can afford it and the OSHA regs, etc. Makes cleaning boards a breeze.
All the above is with re-work in mind, and if you need to do debug I highly suggest a seperate station or two with a good scope (I like Tek) and Logic analyzer, DMM (should have lots of these floating around any lab), etc.
If you want some pics of my bench setups for my lab let me know (email the admin of the site the pic came from).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I would have kits and cables to conect any disk to a very simple, test "box" SCSI, SATA, IDE (2.5" & 3.5"). including a PERC 3/DC (Dell RAID card) Box is in quotes because it would never actualy be closed.
:)
It should have a multiboot disk drive (Linux and a few other OSs.) a 2nd very large drive for dumping rescued data. A DVD/CD burner and DAT drive for returning rescued data to clients.
A small vacum cleaner and some canned air are esential (Broken computers tend to be dirty).
A set of Jewelers screwdrivers (For laptop work).
A Leatherman (look it up)
And last but not least; an anty static wrist strap.
PS: Ohh and a competent enginear.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I would have kits and cables to conect any disk to a very simple, test "box" SCSI, SATA, IDE (2.5" & 3.5"). including a PERC 3/DC (Dell RAID card) Box is in quotes because it would never actualy be closed.
:)
It should have a multiboot disk drive (Linux and a few other OSs.) a 2nd very large drive for dumping rescued data. A DVD/CD burner and DAT drive for returning rescued data to clients.
A small vacum cleaner and some canned air are esential (Broken computers tend to be dirty).
A set of Jewelers screwdrivers (For laptop work).
A Leatherman (look it up)
test motherboards that support the more common dimm formats. (Cheaper than a memory tester).
A stack of utility software like ghost and a Windows pasword hack utility.
And last but not least; an anty static wrist strap.
PS: Ohh and a competent enginear.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
blah blah never seen a PC part blow due to static blah blah :-) , trust the experts. They may actually know something.
No, you've just never looked closely enough to see the damage. Most often the ESD damage is not catastrophic but does degrade a chip or two, leading to errors or slow performance, or maybe the chip's premature death months hence.
Just because you don't get a micro-nuclear explosion doesn't mean you didn't break something.
Heck, I once grounded the wrong side of an FM antenna (in the pre-polarized-plug days) and saw a spark. The electronics ran fine for another 6 months until some part finally croaked.
At the risk of sounding officious
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Lots of good tool tips in this old article at Tom's Hardware Guide:
. html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20020820/index
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