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Computer Voodoo?
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
For most problems, I find smacking the user is more effective than smacking the computer.
...i had to code a html page without dreamweaver
now thats voodoo
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Oh, how I hate the command 'xset r on', I have to type this 3 or 4 times per xsession to keep my key repeat on. It likes to turn off when I toggle numlock, caps lock, etc.
... be warned!
This is ever since I played around with 'xset r off'
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
Usually whenever it would start going on the fritz a good punch or kick to the tower would get it going again. And also stop that damn whirring noise. It always makes me laugh when I'd see people hitting the monitor. Because THAT is where everything is XD
Not sure how it works, but I've saved 2 or 3 hard drives that reported tons of bad sectors with cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hdb and then cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb and repeating that a couple times. Seems to alleviate all the problems. The drives wouldn't format, and all the data would get corrupted, but after doing that trick, they haven't had a problem (with the longest running drive being 2 years after the fix and still going).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I once had a hard drive that wouldn't spin up if the computer had been off a few days. The only way was turning it by 90 degrees every time before booting the computer.
No, seriously. For some reason my presence is enough to get some computer problems to go away.
(until I leave...)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
In my repair monkey days, my shop used to handle data recovery jobs of all kinds. The problems ranged from minor filesystem corruption or unbootable drives to physical damage - heads, and even a bullet through a hard drive (No, I wasn't able to get anything off that one).
We had a variety of methods for dealing with the physically damaged drives that had suffered a head crash, but my boss had a technique he called the 'massage'. A clicking or noisy drive would be rotated around its various axes until the BIOS would recognize it on boot. Sometimes the clicking would stop and he would sit there holding the drive in that position or prop it up to keep it there.
Another method we used was to freeze the drives for a period of 15 minutes to 6 or 8 hours. Sometimes this allowed enough contraction to let the tracks line up again, and we'd get as much data as we could with the drive cold. Once, we even froze a drive between two ziploc bags of water with IDE and power cables hanging out the edge to keep the drive colder longer. It worked!
-- Shade
Technology tips and tricks.
Whenever I boot from Windows to Linux, I have to turn the power strip off for seven seconds for the network card to work.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I gotta stop using gentoo.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
me i always HIT the MONITOR because i know that EVERYTHING (is not) THERE but i'm felling better after that (and not worrying about my harddrive)
On the first pc I built one of the best ways to keep it in line in its last few weeks with me was to randomly yell and smack the pc, it didnt know when it would happen so it didnt risk crapping out on me :P
Nah, Ive never had to rely on any voodoo to keep my pc running .. but to eliminate some annoying buzzing sounds from fans nothing beats a swift smack on the top left corner of the case.
I had a roommate that smacked his pc cause it wasnt working the way he wanted it to .. but it was working perfectly fine (no hardware or software issues - all user issues) .. I told him I'd have to start a support group for his electronics (he hit everything) if he kept it up. Electronic Victims of **** still lives to this day (name censored so he doesnt come after me :P)
If it takes effort to do, let someone else do it.
I just remove the overhot battery, unplug the power cords, let it cool down, and restart it again.
...
But I do sometimes force it to exit to a menu state in certain programs, so that it will flush the video and data cache and write the threads out.
Am looking forwards to when Windows Vista is so common I'll be forced to upgrade my WinXP laptop to Linux, quite frankly.
I'd rather issue a kill command any day.
Besides, if I smack my laptop, the vibrations make me feel all funny
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My old TV card. No matter what cables you used, if the aerial lead wasn't bent at a 90 degree angle about 2 inches away from the computer, it wouldn't pick up a signal. In the end I just blutacked it down; I assume there was a loose connection inside, and the twist put out just enough force to make the connection.
For smacking the computer to keep a hard drive formatting from failing, I'd say something is loose. And that will stop working after a while.
The same is most likely true with the ethernet card.
The motherboard itself may have something loose, and the way to deal with all of it is to move components into other PC's and see how things go.
I've seen and met all hardware problems and beat 'em all (even if by buying a new component). The REAL voodoo lies in the software. Why in God's holy name does Windows fail to boot one time, and then boot successfully the second time?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
However, after I installed the card, Windows 2000 would crash with the following BSOD:
Annoying as heck-- somewhat expected from a cheap network card.
So one day I was wat home downloading Fedora with bittorrent--- my DSL connection was maxxed out. There was too much interference on the line, so I hit the little 'channel' button to switch to a different channel.
As soon as I hit the button on the phone -- *boom*, the computer threw up the Blue Screen of Death. ANd sure enough, I reboot, hit the button on the phone-- and *boom* -- Computer crashes again.
I have since replaced all of the D-Link cards with cards from other manufacturers.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
For some weird reason my computer kept stalling everytime I'd start windows waiting for the floppy drive to read. I don't know why, I'd just hear it make that "grrr rrrr rrrtt" noise for a half second, then suddenly my desktop would come up. Found windows came up way faster after I just unplugged it. -USB 1 gig key, eat it 1.44MB.
If you turn the monitor on, then the computer, it works fine.
At first, I thought it was just timing (maybe the PSU has to charge itself up or something, and the delay while I turned on the monitor was just enough time for it to do this), but even if you power it on at the main hours in advance, the monitor must still go on first.
I had a situation a while ago where my Windows XP install wouldn't boot. So I figured I'd try running it through VMWare in Linux. I set it all up, get VMWare set to look at the partition, unmounted the partition (yay FAT32 drives) and started the virtual machine. Sure enough, it booted with no problems. After a week or two, my roommate needed to use my computer cause his was on the fritz and mine was turned off. I told him before to feel free, so he boots it up, selects Windows XP through GRUB and it boots fine. I look at it and think, "What the hell?!" I rebooted again, tried to boot Windows, didn't work. Went into Linux, VMWare booted it, rebooted and Windows worked. So for 3 weeks (the time it took to get any important files and such off of there, because I didn't want to accidently blow a big paper or story away), the only way I could boot into Windows was if I had VMWared it before hand. Since then, I've reinstalled Windows, but I rarely use it now...I should re-allocate that HD.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
In general, with my main desktop machine and main laptop, if something funky is happening I will simply replace the part or parts in question to ensure a smoothly working machine, but I've had some interesting things with some old hardware I kept around for no real reason.
I used to have an old pentium (133 I think) that ran well, except that the CD drive would only actually recognize a disk if you tilted the computer at about a 20 to 30 degree angle when the disk was inserted. I never did figure out why this fixed it, luckily I didn't need to use the cd drive very often.
I also used to have a cable modem that would drop the connection if you so much as blew on the power cord. I always just figgured that was just some flaky hardware, and eventually got the cable company to replace it. Another really aggrevating hardware problem that I never figgured out was an old Sony DVD drive that I had. When you opened the tray, it would about 1 to 2 seconds later automatically close the tray, but when you opened it again it would stay open for about 10 seconds, just long enough to remove or insert a disk.
I think everyone runs into a situation where there is some voodoo involved in solving a problem, it becomes problematic when people stop carying about having any answers, and just care about getting something working.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
While trying to install Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris the installation kept failing for random reasons. The installer includes a console version of Tetris you can play while the software installs, I found out that playing it kept the installer from failing. That's what I call Computer Voodoo.
--- I w00t, therefore I'm l33t.
On my machine has to be installed with the TV card removed, otherwise the soundcard does not work.
I have no explaination for this at all. If you put the tv card in once everything is done, it all works fine. (If anyone else knows of this, it is suse 10.1 retail, Soundblaster Live! 24 bit (on an msi k8n diamond) and a hauppauge CX8XX based card.)
So I dont have to make a forth post, I have also put a hard disk in the freezer and swapped ram slots over (worked fine in one, but not in the other, with 2 identical sticks in 2 identical slots).
At a job about ten years ago we used both Windows 95 and NT 3.51. Rebooting from NT to 95 worked fine. If we rebooted from 95 into NT the network card wouldn't work. We had to power the system off and do a cold boot.
Not a computer one, but... my high school's music teacher had an ancient stereo amplifier that would make the sound muddy every few minutes. The solution was to knock on the case at a certain spot until the sound cleared up.
Right now my computer is fucked.
It runs perfectly stable.
But when I reboot, windows pukes, hard. It will refuse to boot completely even in safe mode until I run chkdsk. Chkdsk doesn't seem to find or fix anything, but once it finishes everything works fine.
still running Windows NT, AT box, dual Pentium Pros; it pulls so much power that it has actually burned out two PSU connectors. If you turn it off, you have to let it sit for a minimum of 1 minute; less than that, and it simply won't come up again. I don't know why not.
most of my friends have given me the name computer jesus due to getting them out of jams so many times. i haven't had to resort to much 'voodoo magic' but when i had an old TEAC 4x cdrom on my 486 i did. that bugger would only read discs if you were smacking it while it read. one day i got really pissed and yanked the tray right out of the drive. i put the tray back in and lo and behold the damn thing works perfect. i dunno how the hell that worked, but it did. the marvels of computing and angry german genes.
sup
Used to have a computer setup that would totally freeze at random times if the CPU was idle. As long as I was running seti@home or something else, no freezes. Let the CPU idle, it'd freeze within a half-hour. Never figured out if it was hardware or software or both; I seem to remember it happening on multiple versions/installs of Windows, but not in FreeBSD. And when I replaced the mobo/CPU, it stopped happening, even when I still had the samw Windows install.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I've seen many bad cases which bend when pressed on one side and which dont let PCI cards and their brackets align properly. When you screw them in the top of the bracket is either higher pulling the card out a little, or to one side. I just have that paranoia where I have to press the PCI card in and jiggle it to make sure the connector pins in the slot arent bent and touch the right pads.
I also tend to blow on the data surface of CDs, even really clean ones. Especially when I pull them out of paper envelopes, I suspect particles on that surface and tend to just blow on in before using the CD. I know the fast spin cleans it but.... I just have to.
But I never smack the monitor. What good will that do?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The problem has a cause, and there's a reason why the solution works. The fact that you don't yet know either of those things is no reason to pretend they don't exist.
Fuck Slashdot
The Sega 32X. Refuses to do anything, at all, unless you've let it warm up for an hour.
Got to love old school hacking
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
...you gotta type 'sync' three times before it works.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
For all of you who were dissing on the monitor smackers saying it'll never fix anything, it will, of course, fix monitor problems. My old CRT monitor one day began this annoying high pitched squeal. Turning it off and back on did nothing, but a good HARD smack on the side stopped it for a couple weeks before the treatment had to be repeated.
What I am using now (main PC motherboard died, gtg get a new one). This laptop is possessed, sometimes I type too quick and w/o having any part of me on the mouse pad, the cursor will jump around. Sometimes the I & K keys go out so I have to plug in another keyboard just to finsih whatever I was doing. Its freaky sp00ky. I cant wait until my main box is back up and running, this is evil. I went from a HP NX6115 to this evil thing, then again both were free and 'borrowed' from fiances work, guess I get what I didnt pay for (even though the HP worked wonders). *insert aggitation face here*
Memtest86 has solved about 75% of the all the voodoo problems I've had with my computers.
Most of the other 25% are directly related to water somehow getting on the motherboard...
If my kernel panics and I do a soft reboot from a serial debugger, 3c90x claims it can't find my card. Power cycling the machine fixes the issue.
Hmm, what you describe is not the result of being "advanced", but of being complex to the point that people cannot tell what is causing a specific state or failure or success.
'Magic' is when a device does something well, which one did not expect technology to be able to do, and in a way that does not make it obvious how the technology is implemented.
The story is about when devices do not do what they are expected to do.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I once had a buggy video card that behaved perfectly normally in Windows, but when I booted into OS2 on the other partition, touching the monitor would reboot the computer. I'm guessing there was some bad trace on the video card that was only active in a mode that the OS2 driver used, but was unused by the Windows drivers, and a static discharge on the monitor was enough to short out the card when it was in that mode. It was the quickest way to boot back into windows.
I was working for a graphic shop a while back and they bought a nubus PowerPC upgrade card. When card was inserted, the computer wouldn't boot. It took me some doing, but I found out that if I rearranged the cards that it would. The upgrade card had to be in the highest slot and the graphics card had to be in the last slot. The other card(s) could be anywhere else.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That wouldn't boot up unless freon spray was applied to the area just under the processor. (Okay, it wasn't real freon, but the CFC-free stuff...)
It seems that it had a few "cold soldered" joints on an IC or two, and freezing it brought them back into contact with each other.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Tell the enduser their network cable "got reversed" and somebody will have to go over there and turn it around for them.
First, if you ask someone to put the phone down to check for link light, they'll answer back in 3 seconds without checking.
Second, even if they actually wouldn't lie about it, they'd never get under a desk to fix it in the first place.
Even guys in suits do it every time, if you say someone will be over "later" to reverse their (known loose) network cable.
End result -- works every time if you do it right, and no credibility lost since everybody understands what happened.
I had just purchased a nvidia gforce 4200 and had it sitting proudly inside the open case of my computer when disaster struck.
:(
:D
A can of coke got poured into it and all over the place.
I saw the magic smoke
My heart sank as the coke soaked itself into the dust bunnies around the machine and dripped slowly from the (now stopped) fan of the new card.
I disassembled everything and did the only thing I could, I went and gave it a cold shower (just the mobo/gfx card).
Remarkably a couple of hours later the machine was back up and ran without issue for another 18 months
liqbase
Like you have to brake the rules of scsi to make it work.
I usually stick needles in a PDA. sometimes it works.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
I picked up a refurbished Toshiba Win95 book that was so old that it didn't even have a CD-ROM drive. It had an Intel 486-SL/33 CPU, 12 MB RAM, and an 800 MB disk drive. Win95 was installed from floppies: 13 of the buggers, with IE3 optional on three more. Anyway, it didn't have an on-board modem. I had to buy a PCMCIA modem card, and all I could afford was a used 14.4 Kbaud. Yes, I surfed the 'Net quite happily on a 14.4, but that was a good ten years ago. But that thing had the weirdest problem.
After using it for a while, like an hour or two, it turned on the modem speaker, so I could hear the modulated data whether I wanted to or not. After three hours, it just wouldn't hold a connection anymore, and nothing could get it back online. Well, I found that it was just getting too warm (but not too warm to the touch), so cooling it down made it perfectly useable again. The best place to keep it cool is -- where else? -- in the refrigerator. I was known as the only one within a thousand mile radius who kept his modem in the fridge's butter tray. It was the only way the modem would work for long stretches.
For Windows use, given how often it crashed otherwise, I kept the can of Diet Coke I was drinking visibly crushed right next to the keyboard. I never crushed the can enough that it would leak, but I crushed it enough that a third had to be drank already. Keeping that within sight of the book kept it from crashing.
When I switched back to desktops, I kept a Skuld UFO catcher doll suspended over the computers. When it was there, no serious failures to speak of. When it wasn't, the "System Halted" BSOD. Your guess is as good as mine.
Now, for general use on desktops and laptops, I keep a plush voodoo doll or two around. I can't quite afford a collection of Tux plushes just yet, so I use the next best thing: Cozy Heart Penguin, one of the Care Bears (along with the patron Care Bear of cryptography, Secret Bear). Those usually convince PCs to play nice.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
my girlfriend had an old pentium 266 laptop that her father decided needed to run XP with only 64 megs of ram (because that was the minimum requirment and he didnt want to buy more ram) it was the slowest thing ever but if she offered it a cookie it worked quick as if it was a modern computer and whats real funny is the only cookies she gave it were from websites
Just today I turned my computer on after leaving it on hibernate for a week. The "thaw" as I guess it could be called, failed (the computer hung before showing anything useful) so I rebooted. Windows starts up fine and then tells me my hardware has changed and I need to reactivate Windows. Except my hardware hadn't changed since the last boot (over the course of owning this computer, admittedly it had changed a lot). Oh wait, I can't activate over the Internet anymore, I've installed it too many times on the same machine, I have to call Microsoft, speak a 42 digit number slowly into the phone, get put on hold, be told I spoke the number wrong, put on hold again, read part of the number to a person, and then type another 42 digit number read to me over the phone. Then my computer will work again.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." - Barry Gehm
"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose [Freefall #255]
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I've had two weird things occur with computers. Windows Networking is a mystery. I find it to be extremely finicky and will work one second and not the next. I.e. you can browse the workgroup, then restart and you cannot. If I knew what I did to suddenly make it work all those times I'm sure I could retire.
When I was in high school long ago I had a CGA monitor that was tinting red randomly. I used to smack it and it'd be cool. This went on for a year or more then I took microelectronics which included soldering. They let me take a soldering pen home with some solder and the stuff for removing solder. One night me and the monitor had a reckoning and on a whim I resoldered half the circuit boards. I have no idea which one was the problem one but it fixed the problem. I don't think I've done anything half as cool as that since. Yeah I'm a sad geek.
If I had mod points left I would have done it myself. I never actually thought to try and do that. It makes perfect sense now that you said it. I always assumed that when used dd setting the input file and output file to the same thing would cause it to get stuck in an infinite loop. But now that you posted that and I thought it out some more, it makes perfect sense. DD will just grab the amount of data you specified as the block size from the input file and dump it to the first part of the output file (which in this case would be the same section of the disk). It will then increment by the block size on the input file and place copy it to the output file by the same incrementation of the block size, rinse, repeat ad infinum until it hits EOF...
Again, great little one liner command to remember in the tool bag...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I had a Lexmark all in one printer, scanner, blah, blah, blah that wouldn't work after we moved. The PC just didn't recognize that it was attached. The copy function worked fine but it didn't depend on the PC for that function. Uninstall and reinstall, troubleshoot USB cable, remove USB hub, all of the normal troubleshooting steps. Finally, buried in Lexmark's website, was the suggestion to have the PC power and printer power be supplied from different outlets. Not different circuits but different outlets. Craziest frickin' thing I've ever heard and even crazier was that it worked! If anyone has a good explanation for why that would work, I would love to know.
As for being on topic...I can guarantee that shit will break everytime I try to take a long weekend or vaction. The corollary is that everytime I'm on site for a "just in case", I end up not being needed.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I keep various old expansion cards, motherboards, and processors hanging on the wall in plain sight of my beige box. The threat of disembowelment seems to keep it inline.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
I work in a corporate helpdesk environment for a mid-sized retail chain. We use IBM Netvista SFF boxes for our cash registers and they have a tendency to occasionally stop recognizing the network. Reconnecting network cables doesn't work and neither does rebooting or power cycling the machines. Oddly the only thing that seems to fix them is to power them off and cycle the power button several times with the power cord unplugged. Seems to be some sort of residual charge that clears when the system's cycled without power. It works consistently enough that it's in our internal troubleshooting documentation too.
No offense is meant to the poster but you do realize this is slashdot, right?
:(
/.ers would be interested in reading, even if they already know about it.
For some reason that question just seems like something a bunch of "normal" people would talk about during a break at work. I've never met a geek stupid enough to smack their spinning hard drive to keep it from fucking up, as an example. Hot swapping PCI cards sounds like something I would do shortly after rebuilding my first OEM computer in the 90s while I still didnt know shit and was sub double digits in age. (guess it woulda been an ISA card then actually)
Does anyone here actually do crap like that?
When I first started reading the article / summary I thought he was talking about the "voodoo" that makes stuff work and there would be loads of insightful comments about the underlying technology behind computers
PS. That seems like something
True story: I used to identify bad RAM chips in old Apple II units with a dowsing rod. Finding one bad RAM chip out of 24 was a horrible pain in the ass, the normal procedure was to remove half of them, replace those with known-good RAM chips, see if the mem diagnostic passed, ok, it wasn't in the half I removed, put those back. Take out half of the chips that weren't removed before, replace with known good chips, repeat, etc. in a binary search pattern. This was horribly unproductive, particularly if the memory fault was intermittent. And even worse, once in a while, due to all the handling and insertion/extraction, or maybe just from static discharges, you'd ruin a chip in the known-good set, which really screwed things up, you could go back and forth for HOURS.
I remember when I was a little kid, I used to watch the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow show on late night TV, and some weird guy demonstrated how to dowse using a couple of bent wires made from coat hangers. I was skeptical, but eventually I became known for some rather startling dowsing stunts, I used to challenge people to hide my keys in a location I was unfamiliar with, in houses or buildings I'd never been to, and could find them 4 times out of 5. So when I became a computer tech, I figured, what the hell, it couldn't hurt, it couldn't possibly take MORE time to try dowsing than to do the elaborate binary search method. And to my astonishment, it was a LOT faster. Sometimes it took me a couple of tries, but pulling just a couple of individual chips was a lot faster than pulling 12 chips at a time, and my results were way above the expected average of just pulling a chip at random. BUT.. I made absolutely sure that nobody ever saw me dowsing on their machines. This is Computer SCIENCE, after all, it isn't computer VOODOO. Ha!
..yes that's right. My flatmate said his floppy disk couldn't be read. ... driving the dust out.
So I dropped to my knees and gave tht floppy drive the "kiss of life" i.e. blew into it
It could then read disks.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes/jokes from the Tom Baker era of Dr Who.
He stumbled across an old spacecraft on a very distant planet. As he sat down at the control console he remarked, "this looks like Earth technology". As he began to power it up it slowly came to life then started to fade back out. He kicked the bottom of the console and the rocket resumed slowly coming back to life. The Doctor remarked "Definitely Earth technology".
I just LOVE the implication that this sort of "kick it to keep it working" is a characteristic aspect of our technology that (in the world of this SF TV show at least) sets us apart from other species.
I use Microsoft Windows. I'm not sure why - certainly its usage doesn't make any sense. But, for some reason, it occassionally allows me to use the computer in a semi-useful way, albeit for short periods of time at best. I know, wacky, huh?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've never had a problem like this with my computer, but a TV that I have would work and then suddenly turn off. The only way to turn it back on was to lift the cable line or wiggle it around. Obviously, some sort of connection inside was messed up.
Eventually, it stopped working so I opened it up and didn't see a problem, but it worked when I flexed the mainboard. So, I just left the screws off the back (holding the board to the case) and every few months had to shove another piece of cardboard inside to flex the board more and get the TV to work. Needless to say, eventually this process didn't work so a friend of mine and I opened the TV again and played with flexing the main board while the TV was powered (bad idea) until there was a small explosion on the board. We then saudered the connection where the explosion occurred and amazingly the TV has never given me trouble since.
It sounds like the real corollary is: "To any sufficiently dumb user, cause and effect are indistinguishable from voodoo"
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Some years ago, a friend of mine had his PC pluged into a power socket without ground connection. Ocasionally, the PC would freeze.
Connecting the ground pin on the power plug to his house's floor with a wire would unfreeze the computer.
What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?
I assume we are supposed to skip the weird, funky coding it takes to make an otherwise standard webpage work in ie?
Didn't you ever play the role playing game "Paranoia?"
:)
Machine Empathy is a mutant power that makes all things electronic (be they computers, appliances, or killbots) into your best friends.
I submit that people who program computers, and like computers, naturally develop this mutant power.
(Incidentally, the best part of the game was that computer programmers were called "high programmers" and were worshipped (and feared) by the rest of society. That is how it should be.)
Like any respecable geek, I've got multiple pcs hooked up to a single monitor via a switch. Which is fine, except for 1 computer, an old PII shitbox. If it doesn't detect a monitor plugged in at startup, then it turns off the vga, so no video even if I plug in a monitor later. Damn annoying... if I'm using one of the other boxes and I want to switch on the PII, rather than just hitting the on button and leaving it to boot up headless, I need to switch the monitor over, turn it on and wait 10 seconds for the vga card to test, before going back to whatever I was doing on the other computer.
I love how people have to mystify everything. There is obviously no computer voodoo. All things happen for a reason, and it takes just a little bit more effort to find that reason and fix it. This way you never have to worry about messing up your hdd because you smacked your computer.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
The first pentium-based PC I bougth (a DELL P120) had a desktop case. For some reason, when I wanted to put a new HD in it, I had to try a few combinations before finding out that to boot the damn beast, I had to put the biggest HD alone on the primary controller, and the CD as a master on the secondary controller, while the other HD was the slave. Any other combination would'nt boot, period. Oh, And I had to isolate the primary HD from touching some part of the chassis, otherwise it would not boot as well. Go figure...
[Pruneau
When I was a teenager we had a computer that had one of those new fangled high speed 28.8 modems. The thing worked like a champ until one day it wouldn't dial out to connect to any BBS systems. Tried everything would could think of. Then one of us lifted the phone off of its base (yes...it was a corded phone) to listen for those classic handshake signals (you know the ones I'm talking about). The modem worked! We couldn't explain it. It turns out it would only be able to communicate with anything if we lifted the receiver and leave it off the hook. I would disconnect the handset to avoid any interference getting through; I didn't want any of my ASCII art downloads to get corrupted!
I had a first generation Nintendo. The game cassettes would sometimes give funky signals (flashing and such) on the screen when put in. So, I would take the cassette out and blow really hard into the cassette and then slam it back into the machine and turn it on. In most cases the game would then boot up normally. I'm sure there is a reason why it worked, but I only cared that it worked and not why.
My pal had a Dreamcast that started to give the "No disk" error even when there was a valid disk in the drive. One time, I noticed that when I went to close the bay, it would start to load for a second, but when it clicked shut it stopped and went back to the "no disk" screen. So, I stuck a spare sock in between the CD door, propping it open a half-inch, and it worked again!
The condition gradually got worse, but if you increased the gap, it worked again for a little while...
I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.
Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.
I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.
Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Is a great way to haunt a computer.
Take out all the cards, rub some fine steel wool above it. Put the cards back in.
Turn the computer on. It will not boot (there were thousands of shorts, but they all burned up once voltage was applied).
Power off, power on. It should boot. No tiptoe away. Any vibration will cause it to lock hard or reset (in any OS).
It will get a little better over time. In some cheap companys you wind up with everybody walking around like theres a cake that will fall.
Laughing at the memory. It's good to be evil.
I once had a PSU that whenever the computer got nudged (and since I had the box on top of dresser drawers it got banged around a lot) the computer would shut off.
Eventually I unscrewed the PSU and put it on the top of the case upside-down. From then on until I replaced it it was solid as a rock. I guess a fan was slightly out of wack or something.
Back in 1993 (all the way until 1998) I had a recurring quirk with my 386SX and Windows 3.1. If I loaded the drivers for my Sound Blaster 2 and enabled 256 colors, I would randomly (about 50% of the time) get a "Divide by zero" error when Windows launched. It would dump me back at the command prompt, where I would continue to type "WIN.COM" until it finally loaded. Once Windows loaded, it was fine until the next reboot. Sometimes it would load on the very first try. This problem survived several reformats of the hard drive, and a couple upgrades of DOS. There was no discernible pattern to when it would occur, so I just tolerated it until I upgraded to a Pentium II in 1998.
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The weirdest problem I've ever seen was after my brother replaced his motherboard one time, if you slightly touched any part of the machine it would reboot immediately. It took me two hours to finally solve this problem. I tested each and every component to find they were all good. There was an extra mounting post remaining from his motherboard change and apparently it was in the right place to short out the motherboard enough to resest with the slightest of movements.
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Installing windows on a dodgy machine, only way to keep the system from hanging was to click the mouse constantly, not not too much. Too much and it crashed anyway,
Of course it was a 486 so install took hours. But windows got installed in the end.
"But I never smack the monitor. What good will that do?"
It will do good if your monitor happens to be going flakey.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Blowing in the Nintendo game consoles over and over and over again to get them working?
For a long time, I had a computer that had an impatient BIOS and a lazy CD-ROM drive. The drive would take much, much longer to spin up than the BIOS would wait for data. If you booted up the system with the CD in the drive, the CD would spin up at poweron, then spin down immediately after reaching full speed with no requests pending, and when the BIOS got around to checking it for boot media, it would time out before it finished spinning up again and started reading. The window of opportunity for inserting the CD and having it be recognized was only about a second long. I found that if I inserted the CD right after the BIOS reported the results of scanning the primary IDE channel, while it was scanning the secondary IDE channel, it almost always got to the "scan CD-ROM boot sector" phase right as the drive was hitting full speed, and I could boot from the CD.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The street lights are always shutting off just as I get to them. I get a lot of blown incandescent bulbs when I flip them on. Mechanical watches always used to quit on me. I mess with over the air tv and radio reception.
No idea why.
defenestration!
Sometimes I go to compile something (on Mac OSX with gcc) and it will give me some silly errors. Later I'll go back and try it again for kicks and it works. It's happened many times, and I try to block any ration explanations because it gives me an excuse for when my own code doesn't compile (solar interference? could be)
Long ago making an "archival backup" of your 5.25" copy protected disk required more voodoo than science. Many times a copy wouldn't take no matter what parameters or copy program you used. The trick that I used was to carefully turn the media inside the envelope until a small hole in the media lined up with a hole in the envelope. This was used by some old Schugart(sp?) mechanisms to synchronize the read head to the media. The Apple ][ mechanism didn't use this method and the hole was completely ignored. By lining up the hole in the source and the destination disk and then making the copy, it would work.
Was it a Presario 2100?
My brother had that problem with WoW on this laptop. Don't think he ever tried opening the CD-ROM drive, though. He's "given" it to me so long as I lose weight. (40 lbs down and counting. Woohoo!)
For a good while, I ran it underclocked to 1.06GHz from the max of 1.79GHz. Then I had a friend service a bad part on it, and found out what the problem was. The inside of the system was caked with dust, with the fans and heat sink being especially bad. He cleaned all that crap out, and now the system runs happily at full speed.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
My dad works for the Arkansas Washington County Road Service, and he is something of a computer nut, so he would 'recover' the computers they were throwing out. I was pretty profoundly poor and also a computer nut, so I would take some of the stuff off his hands.
Anyway, I used to have three or four MFM hard drives in various states of disrepair. (I think they were 40 *meg* hard drives, but I only had a controller to control up to 20 meg, to give an idea how old this hardware was.) One by one they died, until finally only one was left. When it gave up the ghost, it would spin up, then immediately spin back down. I dug into it and found some connections I could short across while it was spinning up and then break the connection, and it would keep running. I was too poor to want to go spend $1 on a pushbutton, so I just had two wires hanging out of the front of the computer that I held together while booting the PC. I ran it that way for over a year...
A non-computer story, but more interesting one, is of an old Ford Escort I used to have. The starter went out on it, and, again, I was poor, so I dug into it. I finally figured out that the relay was kicking out too far and shorting out against the housing, so I duct taped a kitchen sponge to the inside of the relay housing and put it back together. I never had a problem with the starter again for the 2 years I had the car.
That same car later had the fuel pump go out. When it went out, I asked my stepdad if I should check to make sure the pump was out instead of a wiring or power problem, and he said nah, it's the pump. So I bought a replacement - it didn't help. So, I hunted around under the hood until I found some leads that were hot when the key was on, but not when it was off, and I used ties to secure an extension cord from the leads to the fuel pump. The car ran fine.
That was in the summer. When winter came along, one day I needed to defrost the front window as I was driving down the road. I flipped the vent from dash to defrost, and the engine stopped running. (I was doing 50 mph down the road at the time.) I flipped it back to vent, and the engine started right back up again.
Somehow I had found a wire that only gave power when the vent was not on defrost. I never fixed it, just kept the inside warm enough that it didn't frost over.
Now I'm a software developer and not poor. I virtually never fix (or jerry rig) anything myself, other than software and the occasional computer hardware issue.
The large majority of "computer voodoo" is because of Microsoft's buggy crapware...
Back in the DOS days, people were convinced things worked better if they left the power off for long periods of time, before restarting.
Windows got more complex, and had too many of those things to name. Hitting the tower is a popular one. Moving the mouse around while waiting to prevent lock-ups is another very popular one. There are certainly millions of them. Linux, too, has developed a few, because some drivers are iffy, but they make up the tiniest fraction of what you see with Windows zombies (aka. users).
When I'm helping someone with a Windows system (I keep that as rare an event as possible), I still see similar nonsense. Windows XP's setup will allow me to partition hard drives #1 and #2, but WON'T let me format them there, and I have to put them in another system to do that part. Not to mention all the drivers that will just corrupt themselves after working fine for 3 months, if you just LOOK at the system funny. It's no wonder voodoo is so popular with Windows systems (and pre-OSX Macs, to be fair).
.
With that said, I have seen some frustrating hardware problems. After 6 months of working without any problem, my always-on Linux system starts crashing every day for 3 days, and then won't start up... Typical crappy power supply (bloated capacitor).
I had a Charter cable modem which would work whenever the tech guys were here (I called them out a dozen times over 2 months), but would fail miserably just moments after they'd step out the door. It took me a while before I realized that the thing would work for amout 5 minutes after it was power-cycled, and only then would it crash. They would never take my word for it, and I had to cancel my service to get rid of that piece of shit.
I've seen a few network cables, which test-out just fine, and work most of the time, but after the machine has been online for a while, it will fail, and need to be rebooted... This is partially Windows voodoo, because the stack is unstable, and can't handle many errors. But mainly, it's because of cables with marginal connections, which work about 95% of the time, enough to pass tests, but cause all sorts of problems in real-world use.
Then there are the occasional network cables with crosstalk, which can be hard to diagnose if you don't have an advanced/expensive meter, and give many of the same symptoms as above.
There was one case where a guy would play music CDs for an hour, before they started skipping. He changed CD-ROM after CD-ROM, before asking for my help. It was pretty obvious when I saw the sheer ammount of lint in his system fans. It would run fine while the system was cool, but the fans not spinning would drive the tempurature up to insane levels shortly, and the CD-ROM was just the first part to show symptoms.
Another Windows one is IE's download dialog... It takes so long before it appears, that when it starts there is already a few KBs downloaded, so it claims a 500KB/sec download rate on a dial-up modem, and only gradually goes down to about 4K, as it's really doing. People think that's accurate, and actually come up with the great idea of stopping and restarting downloads several times every minute, presumably because the server or their ISP will only allow them to download "fast" when the download first starts.
God I hate Microsoft...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
Just running the diag tools provided from the company is often a good solution. It will check the drive, and recover the data when it can. Failing that you can always try Spinright from GRC. It's not the magic tool Gibson sells it as, but it can recover drives nothign else can. Take the drive, set it near a good fan, and let Spinrite at it. You'll either have your data, or a totally worthless drive. So try other recovery methods first.
I used to manage a set of 5 Pr1me computers that contained 16-port intelligent (for the time) serial cards. Our offices were way in the back, far exceeding the valid RS232 cable lengths, and some cables that we built were longer than needed, so they were coiled under the floor.
Well, occasionally someone's terminal would get into a position where you ended up with reflections on the line and the terminal card would spew crap to the terminal and the out-of-spec cable would bounce the signal from the terminal back to the controller. After a few of these we figured out that if you changed the characteristics of the cable just-a-bit and then flush the buffers, the cable would settle down. Several folks tried just the flush-the-buffer approach, but that never worked. The first character that you typed sent it into a tizzy again.
Well, I had a new guy (Arnold Robbins at Georgia Tech, for those of you that know him) working with me and we got one of these. I told him, "Let me show you how we earn our money around here", and proceeded to track the cable and find the section under the floor where it was coiled up. I picked up the cable coil, shook it around a little bit and changed the way it was coiled and then dropped it back under the floor and replaced the tile. I then went over to the console and flushed the buffer and said, "that should do it." He's looking completely goofy about now and asked, "what did you just do?" I told him that it was plain 'ol black magic and why we learned a lot of practical things in the middle of all the theory so we could get the job done while other folks were telling us that shouldn't work.
It was beautiful thing.
OK, geek reminiscence over. Time to get back to work...
I had a 19" CRT (I can't remember the manufacturer) that started to go bad in a very peculiar fashion. It started by making a high-pitched whining noise regardless of the screen resolution. I was able to fix this problem by propping the screen up on the left (thereby tilting it to the right a couple degrees). This worked...for a time.
Eventually, I came home from work one day and the screen was blank. I tilted the screen even further, and it eventually came on. I couldn't work at a 45-degree angle, though, so I fully laid the screen down on its right side. My Geforce Ti4200 card's drivers did thankfully have a functionality for distorting the desktop screen (nvkeystone I think it was called), so I was able to continue using the monitor, laying on its side, for another four months. The thing did eventually die, and I replaced it with a a 17" NEC LCD which is still serving me (actually my parents) very well.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I said it. There!
It's a girl!
I remember coming across an actual online article for computer using witches that warned about the dangers of casting spells while in the proximity to your computer. There was also a section on spells to keep out computer viruses, etc. I sent the article off to someone once, but the email got lost in a purge onetime. I would love to have it back as it would make a great scene in a movie somplace.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?
Ask Slashdot.
(...though I'm not quite sure it works...)
--<Mike>--
If you ever thought you did crazy stuff to get something working just get 1 of these Nforce 4 Lan Party motherboards and mix it with some Corsair or Kingston RAM...I promise you that you'll have a situation that is no less deserving than a witch doctor's intervention.
One day one of my servers at a remote location 'died'. One user who claimed to be pretty computer savvy reported that the machine wasn't seeing its hard drive anymore, it was giving invalid boot device error messages. Sure enough, I could tell the hard drive wasn't even spinning up. I pulled the drive out, asked the secretary to slap it, reinstalled it, and the server booted. Without a word I strolled out of the office. The self proclaimed 'computer savvy' user still tells tales of how I 'bitch slapped' the server into repairing itself. Incidentally the machine has been working fine for 9 months now.
I wonder what they would have thought if my next step, putting the drive in the freezer, would have fixed it? To the untrained user, anything us geeks can do to fix a computer is considered nothing short of magic.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
I used to have a pretty bad CD-ROM drive in a server that would spin down while reading for no apparent reason. I eventually found out (probably because I accidently bumped it) that smacking the face of the drive HARD a few times would not only cause it to make some interesting buzzing and wobbling noises, but it would eventually spin back up and continue to read data.
My first PC started dying on boot, not even geting to post. It sounded like it was working but is still seemed dead as a doorknob, not even a beep code.
So pokeing around inside I switched the RAM slot and it worked. For a week, and again started dying on boot. So I switched the RAM slot again. Started up fine, for a week or two. Went on like this for a couple of months. Some times not even switching the RAM, just pulling an reinserting it.
I finaly realied that it wasn't the RAM, but the power supply that had a losse connection in it. Every time I switched the RAM I would jostle the power cables. Replace the PS and every thing worked fine.
I used to have a problem where after I would format my HD, after the new OS was installed, the computer would freeze while it was booting up. The solution was to take off the side panel, boot it up (always worked), then __slowly__ put the panel back on. I only had this problem after a fresh install.
My favorite thing to freak users out is when their drive refuses to boot (the clicking death type, not the scraping heads of destruction type), I place the drive in the freezer over night. Next morning it usually boots fine and lives long enough for me to ghost the data off.
One of my computers had a problem detecting hard drives attached to the primary ATA controller. So my dad blames lilo and linux, and comes up with this weird key combination to boot windows. Of course it does nothing, because the hard drives are detected by the bios before linux is even loaded.
I have an uncanny knack for fixing most things through simple sheer luck, trial and error and plenty of physical encouragement. (Seemingly far more than most people). I think my biggest triumph was fixing a friends phone line when it had been kicked out of the wall socket. The 7 or so wires had been ripped from their connections. I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder and randomly attached the connections while listening for a dial tone. Much to my own surprise, I got a dial tone after about 15 minutes of stuffing around with it with only 4 of the 7 wires attached. I got my mobile and called the landline number, it rang, and it actually worked - I could hear myself and talk through both the mobile and landline. I then called my mobile from the landline just to make sure and that worked too. That was the really surprising part because unbeknownst to me at the time the landline had a block on outgoing calls. I can only assume some of the wires that weren't attached were responsible for the call blocking feature ( I wouldn't know, I know nothing about the tech behind phone systems!) Being a University pad, everyone used the newly "unblocked" phone to make an enormous amount of phone calls, international calls included - expecting that they wouldn't be charged. Apparently they didn't get charged, but there was a rumor that they did. I never did find out because I had a falling out with my friend not long after. If you want to try this then be careful when stripping the wires from the wall socket with your teeth (the line had an extension from the wall). I was unfortunate to have a wire poke up my nostril while another was in my mouth and received quite an unexpected jolt to my face! Who knew there was enough power running through a phone line to give you a shock...
ogglelog
I had (still have, actually) this old Compaq Presario computer with a Pentium 200 MMX processor. The thing was never the most stable computer out there and was a pain in the but to work on, having non-standard screws and proprietay memory, as most Compaqs of that era did. One day I realized that I had a bunch of old hard drives lying around, so I decide to make this Compaq into a makeshift file server by adding the two larger drives in to the machine and brought it to school with my at the start of my Senior year. The machine's sole purpose was to act as a file server AND as a second internet/instant messaging terminal that I could use when my primary desktop was otherwise engaged. The machine didn't do this well as it seemed to suffer a 25% random reboot rate while using it. (Windows 98, couldn't even get Linux to come close to running on it.) This wasn't really any different from the sort of behavior it had shown since the day we purchased it, shortly after the MMX processors were released, so I just put up with it until...
;)
One day I'm playing Serious Sam over the LAN with some friends. There's a brief lull in the action and so I reach over for the 1 gallon bottle of apple juice I was drinking from. Well, instead of picking up the apple juice, I tip it over and the entire contents spill out ON TOP OF the Compaq. I of course, immediately jump in to disaster recovery mode and race to the kitchen to grab the paper towels. I start cleaning up the mess, expecting the wrost for the Compaq in the process. I could see where there was apple juice in all of the little crevices and I'm darn sure some of it actually got into the computer. Some had spilled on to some school papers lying next to the machine and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose any notes so I took plenty of time to salvage those papers.
After I finished cleaning up the mess, I check the computer. Mouse and keyboard input seem OK. I start up Winamp and it seems to work OK. I run scandisk on all of the drives and they all report being OK. I can't find a single thing wrong with this computer. And I'll be damned if that computer didn't have a single random reboot after I spilled apple juice on it. It became the object of admiration and jokes amongst my friends, and one friend even managed to find one of those fruity, rainbow colored Apple Computer stickers that he wanted me to put on the case. I never even bothered to open up the computer to asses the damages (partly becuase I was lazy and didn't have a torx screw driver at school). Truth be told, I was afraid to even move the comptuer or otherwise disturb it since it seemed to be working OK.
A quick addendum to this story... right before graduation I purchased another hard drive for my primary desktop machine that was about 4 times the total capacity of the drives in the apple computer. I copied all of my data off the apple computer on to this drive and pretty much relegated the apple solely to web surfing detail. About a year and a half later, I need another hard drive for a client machine and so I decide to finally open the apple computer to raid one of the hard drives in it. I was even more amazed then that the computer still worked. There was brown, sticky apple juice residue on everything in the computer. There was even a puddle of this gooey gel that had pooled at the bottom of the case. It was all over the cables, the drives, everything. I was even more surprised and even a little bit proud that the computer still worked after that ordeal.
I guess that just goes to show: if you want a stable computer, get an Apple.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
We wrote a script once that would gradually slow down the mouse pointer. We installed it on the interns computers and watched them get frustrated when their mouse pointer wouldn't move. We explained to them that they had to unplug the mouse, swing the plug end rapidly around their heads, and then plug it back in, and it would be fixed.
We would conspiciously watch from quite a few cubes away and watch this mice get whipped around in the air! It was the most hilarous thing we've ever seen! You'd think that they wouldn't buy it, but when push came to shove they did it and it worked for them after looking like fools!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I got a widescreen LCD monitor from Acer at work. I believe it's the 2016W model, but I could be wrong; going from memory. But here's the weird thing. I have it set exactly to their specifications in terms of resolution and refresh rate and whatnot, but the screen looks very fuzzy and blurry. On bootup it starts at the recommended 60hz, but if I set it to 85hz (from the recommended 60), it still looks blurry. At the prompt asking me whether or not to keep the setting, I say "no" and it restores it back to my 60... at which point looks crystal clear. I have to do it everytime I boot up. Not just that computer/graphics card either. The monitor used to be on another system of ours, different OS, different graphics card, and I had to do the exact same procedure. >
I removed Windows from a server and installed Linux. It's worked just fine ever since, and the next time I have the same problem I just know the same wacky fix will do the trick.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
To get my first computer going I would have to first unlock the door and find the power "wires" and touch one of them to the PSU. Then i'd have to manually spin the main 120mm with my finger to get it spinning. (I just wish I didn't do it at night, that was one bad cut) Then I'd put on the headphones to try and save my hearing from the 60db beast so I could use it. Then I'd have to jiggle the RAM while the computer was on to get windows to detect the second stick, after that the wire for the fan would fall out and id have to try and push it back into the molex connector. By that time I'm sure I had done something to windows and would need to reformat. Ahh I miss that old thing.
I yanked the extra memory and just left the printer that way.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It was always handy to add a BUGS=OFF line.
I had a friend have a hard drive that simply would not spin up. He REALLY needed the data off that drive. After about 6 hours of messing with it, he picked it up in frustration and slammed it against the desk. Well, it spun up. He didn't ask any questions, but IMMEDIATLY "Ghosted" the drive to another one. The drive lived through the "Ghost" and never started again. And the data was mostly OK.
I've been a Macintosh admin for nearly 9 years now. Pre-OS X everything was voodoo to the users. I hoped with all my heart that maybe they'd just 'get it' with OS X and a computer would be a computer. But no, it's all still voodoo to the Mac user. I guess that's the way Apple wants it. Everything is done for the 'user's experience'.
Hell some of it is still voodoo to me. And half the time I think it's voodoo to the Apple support staff as well.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Back in the day, I had an old Amiga monitor that developed a short somewhere on the logic board. Never quite figured out where it was, but I did figure out a solution. You see, if you torqued the board just right the short would go away. So I did the quick-and-dirty - I used a piece of rope to hold the board in the proper position. Worked like a charm for me. ;)
:)
I later included that monitor with an Amiga 1000 I sold a co-worker. He ended up using it for several years - but the monitor bugged him. So when he finally upgraded to a new system, he did the only logical thing with it.
I hear Amiga monitors make a pretty sight when hit with a 20 gauge.
SYS 64738
Having to power-down in order for the computer hard disk to cool down for a while so it would become readable again, giving a short time period where it would be possible to copy some data to a few diskettes, power-down when it gets too hot again, (rinse and repeat LOL) ...
Fortunately, the hard disk was only 10 MB so it was still possible to get it done in an hour or so.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
And as for more "VODOO", how many times do you get: "It was broken till you came over to fix it... Now it is just fine." Happens all the time... I respond with "it must be my magnetic personality" but I know it just bugs folks that have had a problem and spent 45 minutes or a few hours rebooting a number of times and doing everthing over and over and I come in and it magically "fixes" itself. The other thing that I've told them is that the computers are afraid of me and straighten right up or I'd format them and install Windows ME. Of course for Windows there is always a "REBOOT" vodoo that I do before I attempt to "FIX" anything... Usually fixes 99% of the problems right away. ;) Then I give them a good dance about why it didn't work right... Cause if I told them they were just f&$#ing idiots, and don't deserve to own a computer; I don't think I'd get good reviews or repeat business on the side. ;) (Users = JOB SECURITY)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Whenever I build a new PC or upgrade a PC, I ALWAYS test the machine before closing the case. 99% of the time it works fine, then I close the case and life is good. However if I close the case before testing it, 99% of the time something will be wrong that will require me to reopen the case. How does it know?
I have a friend. Her and her husband's computer works completely normal. To him, anyway, when he only "checks email occasionally". But for some reason, when the wife uses it, she says their antispy software shows the husband's profile/browsing history is mysteriously always infected cookies from a bunch of porno sites that they never visited! Seems like it's worse when she gets back from being out of town. Like the ghostly hackers know when she's been gone, or something.
There's some spooky voodoo for ya, right there. They should probably call Ghostbusters, or something.
VOTE!
Years ago, I spoke with a repair tech at a local repair shop. He told me about a problem with Apple II machines that exhibited very specific symptoms. A customer would call him, describe the problem, bring the computer to his shop, and the machine would suddenly work perfectly. The actual problem was a loose connector (or expansion card, I don't remember) and the simple act of putting the machine in the car and driving to the shop was enough to reseat it and correct the problem.
He was eventually able to recognize the problem over the phone. He would tell the customer that the computer was lonely, and should be taken for a ride around the block. It worked almost every time.
Just this weekend, I installed linux on a dead badger I found on the road. I had to get several badgers before I finally corrected all my kernal panics, but eventually it worked. All REAL Linux gurus need a dead badger running Linux around. Now, if I could only find drivers for the new printer I installed...
... had 64MB of 72 pin SIMMs. Now, since this box was my little hardware bitch, I eventually ended up breaking some of the metal tabs that held the RAM in. Being a midtower case, whenever it would lock up I'd give it a swift kick to save myself the trouble of reaching down and pushing the RAM back in. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.
Ah, I love that machine.
"What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
Well, my friends and family all thought _I_ was wacky for using a Mac, but who's getting the last laugh, now? Funny, because everyone loved the Apple ][ at school, but they all went cheap(er)-PC when it came to the GUI.
-SMUG since 1994
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I use Microsoft Windows.
;)
Problem solved, no voodoo about this thing, Windows is supposed to work semi-useful, the rest is bells-n-whistles
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The solution?
If I didnt,it'd very difficult to get it to open
My friend has the same problem with his samsung drive too.
Sadly,recently I had forgotten to leave a Cd in the tray : game over I guess - It wouldnt open at all any longer! Its a drive that would work perfectly if it had a Cd inside...
Wincopy
Windows is filled with this kind of shit! Nobody knows why it works, nobody knows why it should work, but everybody knows that, if you have this problem, then you do this in Windows and it just works!
Google your next Windows problem. See if I am wrong.
I go to restart httpd after changing the config, no go. It claims my DocumentRoot doesn't exist. I look at the filesystem, yep it's there.
/etc/init.d
/etc/init.d/httpd so that I could insert debugging help without changing the original, followed by the startup refusing to fail.
% cd
% mv httpd httpd.bak
% cp httpd.bak httpd
% service httpd start
Starting httpd: [ OK ]
%
Stupid computer. Fix discovered on a previous occasion when I made a copy of
We have a home wireless router hooked up to a cable modem that just craps out every once in a while. Certain p2p things will work, but browsers won't; someone told me that was a DNS problem. Regardless, I tried a number of technical, reasonable fixes. Nothing. So, if you unplug the router and modem and plug them in IMMEDIATELY, it still doesn't work. But if you lerave it unplugged long enough for the hamsters inside to forget whatever the problem was (say 5-10 minutes, these are rocket scientist hamsters) it works. Until the next time it craps out again.
"Just because you're eloquent doesn't mean you aren't a fucking crackpot." -Wavebreak
My parents had an old Packard bell. Before they got rid of the evil machine, we had to pull some pretty wierd stuff to get the computer to connect to the internet. First, if the computer was turned off and you wanted to get online, you had to physicly disconnect the power. Easiest way was by taking the plug out of the power supply. Wait at least 30 seconds and plug it back in. Boot the computer and dial into the internet, everything was fine. Until you reboot or shut down. Rebooting and still being able to connect to the internet required shutting down, un plugging, and booting after 30 seconds of being unpluged. If you failed to follow these steps every time you turned the computer on, then you would endlessly try to dial into the web in vain. We tried everything, new modems, different ISP, everything. That was the only way that computer would connect to the web.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly:
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
enlightenment...
Back in the day when I was a network admin (think 286 and the powerhouse 386 with a whooping 8mb RAM), we had occasional issues with one networked PC or another. Most of the time I'd carry a fairly large hammer with me and would place it on top of the computer case while I had it open to investigate the problem and work on the machine. The sight of the hammer freaked out more than one person in the office because they thought I intended to really use the thing. Apparently it had a similar effect on the computer because I never had a problem getting the thing to work again in short order. They also behaved just fine after that implicit threat (the computers, not the people).
--Udo.
I had to do the pull out the plug one on a computer before :(....it was a faulty power supply :(
I fear the Y2038 bug
I learned that SATA was hot-pluggable after Vista nuked my partition table so bad that another XP system wouldn't boot up if the bad disk was plugged in during boot.
I guess the only voodoo part of this was trying to install Vista...
I bought a clearance Super-Nintendo from CompUSA for $5 when I worked there. We didn't even sell them, but someone got suckered into taking it as a return. It worked find for about a week, then we ended up resorting to blowing on the cartridges for another week or two.
... :)
Finally it stopped working alltogether, but addicted to one of the games, I set to taking it apart and finding the problem. While it was apart, I found that if I held the game cartridge in with a certain amount of pressure it would work, but too much pressure or none at all and it would not operate at all.
Searching throughout the house for an appropriate weight, I ended up finding a 3 quarters empty bottle of Amaretto in the parental unit's liquor cabinet that worked perfectly. I spent the last semester of my senior year with a bottle of alcohol staring at me that I could never drink - for if I did my game console would die on me. It didn't last once summer started, though
I've seen this problem with a "CyberDrv" CD-RW in a COMPAQ. It had another problem after that. A round piece of steel like a washer in the middle of the plastic part the CD spins on came loose, and that was keeping the CD from being held by the magnet at the top of the drive cover. I used superglue on it, and could get it to play CD's again, but it would currupt digital data horribly.
if you smack your computer hard enough, it is less likely to crash if you are running Windows 95/98.
I was having problems with my dv4130 freezing up...no reason i could figure out, but when pressure was applied to the touchpad, it worked find, rather than holding my thumb on the touchpad, i opened it up to see where the pressure was really needed...no help...but it was the board under the touchpad, not the touchpad....so i folded up cardboard, stuffed it in, closed it back up and havent had a problem since....
Ah, sweet, sweet C++ and array out of bounds errors. Memory bugs are always magic. Like I once worked on some code with an errant delete in there, and the project I was working on had very strict version control processes. When I ran the extensive test suite, it caused a crash in someone else's code. My code got committed, since another "unrelated" part of the system was crashing. Luckily, we found the real problem quickly.
That's all normal though. The really funny business was when a friend asked me for some advice on his code. He'd made a minor change, but it crashed the system badly. The sytem had been working before, so he stripped back and back his change until he found it worked again. It turned out that with a "do nothing" statement like int notUsedVar = 1; taken away, a bad memory error surfaced. I had to convince him not to just leave it in and keep going with his work =)
Back in the Win98 days I had a homebuilt computer with some 4x CD-ROM drive, that I don't remember the name of. The problem was, that when booting from the Win98 CD (did a lot of reinstalling those days...), the standard drivers on that thing woulnd't recognise th CD-ROM drive. For some time I just had a bootdisk with the drivers that came with the drive and everything went smooth - that is, until that disc went fubar.
/idle
Well, I was young at the time and had plenty of time to allocate to such problems so I found a solution: Rebooting with the disc tray open and closing the drive during POST worked. When done like that the Win98 standard drivers would load for the drive.
Today I have no idea of just how I go the thought "Hey why don't I reboot with the drive open", and I Don't remember if tried sacrificing goats to the Computer Gods.
I had an old harddrive (4gb... back in the day!) that would randomly stop spinning, so I had to kick the case to get it to spin back up.
Also a more recent issue is I had a computer that randomly after shutdown, windows (including my PE disks and the recovery console) couldn't read the partition, but if I booted up a linux live cd (ubuntu or mepis, whatever I had on hand) and mounted the partition in linux, windows would be good to go again...
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/
My computer was having problems booting up. I would turn the power on, and the power light would come on, but the computer wouldn't actually boot. I think it would stop while trying to read the bios or something. The trick was to just press the reset button after powering on the computer. I think that the power supply in the computer didn't quite have enough capacity to sustain the startup instant power on of everything in the system. Basically, the initial power-on would discharge the capacitors completely, and the power supply didn't supply the 12 volts needed to read back the BIOS at the critical time. A "reset" switch was all that was needed to have it retry once the initial power on was over.
Hello: I once owned an ancient Motorola StarMax( a Macinitosh clone). It was upgraded with a G-3 processor and actually worked pretty well as my son's computer except it would periodically just go completely dead. No startup. Nada.
One day I smacked it in frustration and poof, you could start it up again, chime and all. I guess it had a loose connection somewhere, but after checking out its innards I could never pinpoint where it was.
So when it "died" a swift sharp smack would always "resurrect" it.
Go figure...
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce."- Mark Twain
My friend had a computer, I think it was a Cyrix 166, although it might have been an Intel or an AMD. It was in the early Pentium days at any rate.
:)
He somehow got what I think must have been a bizarre IRQ conflict between his sound card and his modem. When he'd first boot up Windows, you would not hear the Windows startup sound. However, the sound was queued up and waiting for packets to go in and out of the modem. Logging onto Earthlink would cause the sound to finally play, in fits and spurts, synchronized perfectly with the in/out indicators in the taskbar modem monitoring program.
Oh man, computers have come a long way since then!
-- Posted from a Powermac, routed through an OpenBSD router, no Windows anywhere in the process
I have one that still can't explain (maybe someone can explain this).
I worked at a local grocery store as a cashier. Every now and then a credit card reader wouldn't work when someone would slide their card, even after trying many times. This man came through once and grabbed a plastic bag, stuck his card in it, and slid it threw with the bag still over it. It worked.
This worked so well that anytime a customer would come through with a card that didn't work after sliding it many times I would take their card, put it in a bag, and it would usually work then on the first try. It was so weird, I would even get really strange looks from people. Can anyone explain why this worked?
I usto own the game "Stunt Race FX" for the SNES when I was younger and it had a bad habbit of bugging out on me five or ten minutes into the game. One day I remember randomly putting the game in the freezer and leaving it for an hour. Turns out it worked fine after doing that.
My father got an 386SX 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM when it was THE thing to have.
:)
Later on we upgraded to 8MB and then it was time to get the overdrive processor that had it's own slot on the motherboard, I was a happy camper, finaly a floatingpoint co-processor for my povray renderings.
Well we plugged it in and noticed that instead of the 50Mhz we should be getting we were getting 66Mhz.
Since it didn't have any active cooling devices and this was a desktop computer we left the hood off to see if it got to warm. After some heavy use of the new processor (I think it was Warcraft 2) I can hear a creaking sound coming from the computer and then the screen goes blank, everything stops. Suddenly *boing* the co-processor flies out of it's socket. I'm sitting in my office chair and from that I'm throwing myself (still sitting in the chair) and I catch the co-processor mid flight, and I emidiately start juggling it since it's hot as h*ll. I get it on to the desk and I let it cool down.
After it's cooled I plug it in again and it works... phew... so I start playing WC2 again and the next time I hear the creaking sound I take my thumb and press it down on to the co-processor, I can hear and feel the burn on my thumb but since then it hasn't jumped out again. Infact I think it's stuck now
Recognize that? That was the proper way to stop a classic Unix system. Synch first, to make sure the write cache is flushed and the file system is clean. Then reboot. But repeat the synch command twice, because you never know, just one might be bad luck. Old style voodoo...
I once bought a relatively cheap Gigabyte Geforce 2 MX video card. It worked fine for two days then died. After trying to fix it I found out that the video card worked if you bent it the right way (on one corner) while the computer was booting. After that I added some cardboard and duct tape so that the card would always stay bent. It worked something like two years, occasionally failing because the duct tape would move and the whole thing returned to normal. After I replaced the thing, I finally took it out. It was twisted by 10 degrees in its normal state!
My ATI video card fan would not shut up; the constant high-pitched whine drove me nuts. So I took apart the card and peeled off the bright ATI logo sticker exposing the fan bearing. I put a few drops of cooking oil in there (didn't have any WD-40 around), booted up, and the noise was gone!
Of course the noise came back a few months later, so then I just removed the fan and underclocked the chip so it wouldn't get so hot. Who can enjoy 100fps with that noise?
One of my hard drive controllers was failing so every time I booted up my computer I would have to go into the bios, and set that hard drive to disabled then exit the bios without saving...
I click things.. and eventually....
2) Same computer, a hard drive mysteriously stopped writing one day but the cache was still working. So you could seem to format the drive and write stuff to it, but once it was rebooted it would magically revert back to its original state. Her friends though I was some super-hacker who had somehow set some windows permission setting so that no one could modify the drive. Took several hours and formatting the drive with a Debian boot CD before I figured out what was going on.
3) This one time a customer complained that the OS/2 time setting interface didn't work correctly. He'd set the milliseconds but a second later the time would be wrong. Well after digging around inside the assembly language timer driver, it turns out that there were two interrupts the driver would listen to. The first one happened every 22 milliseconds or so. The other was a 1 second periodic interrupt. Turns out the OS could easily ignore one of the 22 millisecond ones if the system was loaded, so to work around this and keep the the system from regularly losing millseconds, the driver would reset the millis to 0 when the 1 second interrupt came around. It further turns out that this was "Working as designed" (Although not documented that way) and the bug was closed as a nofix.
Good times...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have an old dual p3 board DVD266u-RN that needs a few minutes to randomly freeze and/or reboot during varios parts of starting up.
Underclocking seems to do the trick, untill it has been running for half an hour, then the P3's run stable at 1.4Ghz. It was strange explaining to friends at LAN parties that the thing needed to 'warm up'. Come to think of it, I replaced the caps on this thing not too long before it started this behavior.
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
it is amazing how many "problems" are fixed just by shuttin the machine down, and then powering it back on. this works 99% of the time, no matter if it is a mac or pc. what changed??? nothing. you all decide.
I work at a web design company now and I've encountered two crazy voodoo happenings.
First, it seems that in certain circumstances how elements appear in Internet Explorer can be affected by white space. Those twats. Anyway, you just delete the white space and put the code on one line and you're golden.
Next, for some reason, our web server is a testy sonovabitch. Occasionally after I upload a webpage with additions/corrections the website will not display the updated page. Yes, I know I'm uploading the file and I've tried it numerous times. It will often take minutes for the page to update. However, I find that all I have to do is go take a piss and when I come back the page is working. Maybe it has a shy bladder too.
Support Liberty, Support Ron Paul
Back in the old days I had a 386 and the most amazing game came out: Warcraft. Problem was, it wouldn't run on my computer; always froze up during the map loads. So, I gave it a corner massage! Gently massage both corners of the lain down computer during the loading caused the maps to always work flawlessly!
A friend had an elitegroup notebook (a really cheap one) with built-in wifi (b). While helping him set it up, wndows crashed one time, so we unplugged and took out the battery to powercycle it. Suddenly the wifi was gone - the hardware wasn't being recognized. After trying out a whole lot of things and being frustrated, we figured, the heck, we'll just do the same thing we did when it disappeared - unplug and remove the battery on the running system. It actually worked.
And it kept working for the next two years. Whenever the wifi-hardware stopped being recognized nothing would help (reboot, shutdown+wait, shutdown+unplug+wait, fiddle with drivers etc. etc.), except unplugging power chord and removing the battery while it was running - and it worked every time.
I have no idea why that would even work, it sounds very silly.
years ago a graphic arts vendor was padding it's financials by shipping out demo RS6000 server and raid units to customers. on their books they'd list it as a sale and a returned product, even thought they were actually just demo units(they ended up getting in serious trouble for this behavior, but that's another story). they shipped one of these units to my company, and i remember trying to ship the unit back with out success. it sat on our shipping dock for over a year in it's original shipping crate, and was never claimed. so we ended up stripping it for parts. a total of twenty 4gb barracudas came out of the clovis raids. after some heavy usage, the 4 GB barracuda drives(before seagate had the 5 yr warranties) would start acting wonky, usually when you would try to read a critical file off of the drive. i remember these drives as being popular for their performance, but unpopular for their noise and heat. anyways, call me crazy, but i could tell by the sound of the drive that it was repeatedly trying to read the same sectors repeatedly before failing. mac os 7 and 8 would spin the watch and either recover with an error message that such-and-such file was unreadable, or it would tail spin endlessly and require a force quit/reboot. i'd make note of which files were problematic and copy as many of the other files as possible. when i was ready to copy off the final files, i'd pull the drive out of the mac, let it cool off to room temp, stick the drive in a ziplock, and into the freezer. meanwhile i'd stick a replacement drive in the system, rebuild it, and prep an external scsi case for the frozen drive. i'd boot the system completely, install the frozen drive, power the external scsi box, use scsi-probe or FWB scsi DA to discover and mount the drive, and Viola! i'd be able to copy my files off the drive.
this usually gave me a 5-10 minute window before the drive started acting up again, and at least on one occasion i crashed the heads into the platter(prolly from condensation). in any event, after a successful copy, we'd end up low level formatting the drives and press it back into service for photoshop scratch drives or disk image drives for cd replication.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I once had a system with a K6-2 450MHz proc, w/384MB of RAM and a Voodoo3 3000. I had just gotten interested in overclocking (when I saw the PII kids do it better). Anyway, after I got my K6-2 450, I had caught onto the burn-in bandwagon, even following some people do extreme-temperature burn-ins. I let that bastard burn for a good 8 minutes while I had it running Windows. It worked great till the 8th minute, when the screen finally went berserk. Then I decided that wasn't good enough. I took off the aluminum plate over the core and performed the same thing. This time I ended it at 5 minutes, when it felt unbearably hot 5 inches away from the core. Still ran fine. What'd I do next? I hooked up a 60W peltier to an Alpha HSF and applied a hearty amount of silicone gel around the socket. It eventually smoked awhile later. But hey, I got it up to 580MHz! And then there was my Voodoo3 3000, in which I took a shit-ton of that craptastic RS thermal paste that came out of pen and painted on the back of the card. I put a huge custom 'sink out of some mainframe onto the back of it and O/C'd that pretty high too. I was also using the Epox mobo box as its enclosure. Mobo on top, drives in bottom. I made cut-outs for the face-plates. I used to transport this mother to LAN games too! (If anyone's wonderin', I used to live in AL).
I work at a not for profit computer refurbisher so Voodoo is what I do day in and day out. Some choice bits from this last month are; The system that refused to install win2k until I walked over and clicked the install button. The volunteer had been fighting it all morning as had a couple of other techs. I didn't do anything they didn't do it just liked me. Getting a dead system to run again by turning it upside down. I am going to assume that it had a short some where that opened, or a loose chip that the movement reseated. Standing there with a wireless NIC antenna in my hand because that was the only way the system would see the network.
It was a small porceline buddah that sat on a problematic hp9000 in a small New York Finincial firm. The Senior Sysadmin (nicknamed:Satan) placed a cigarette across the buddahs upturned hands. The problems suddenly went away. Thus began my journey into computer spiritualism. Since then I've seen everything from rubber chickens in the datacenter hanging from noose made of cat 5 to Zombies and walking dead changing tapes and installing servers... oh wait... thats the the graveyard shift...
"What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?" Installing Windows XP.
I used to "admin" a celeron that would only recognize the full amount of RAM on the second consecutive boot. It'd only see half of the available memory the first time one powered it up after the night, and all of it the second time. I guess something had to heat up a bit to connect.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
As everyone knows, Commodore VIC-1541 Toaster is a very, very odd thing.
I once got a C64 game collection. The store was half across the country. Got home. Tried playing the games. A few didn't work. We mailed the games back to the store for replacement.
The games came back with a note "If the games do not work, turn the floppy drive to its side." With a helpful diagram.
Flipped the drive to its side, tried running the game, and wham - time to enjoy some games.
I later ran into some games that had such a weird copy protection that, in turn, didn't work while the drive was on its side...
Now, honest truth to tell, I've looked at modern attempts at DRM/copy protections with rather bleary eyes, but I think Starforce and the Sony XCP rootkits seem to have finally beaten this stuff - time to get worried about nasty copy protection schemes again...
We had Mac 6840AVs with NuBus slots.
The cards needed to be reseated from time to time.
My manager would simply smack the outside of case with a rubber chicken (while off)
This seemed to reseat the cards very well.
Also, putting a hard drive in the freezer for 20 minutes to recover data, but everyone has done that.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Had a network card that just wasn't worked, passed all diagnotics, lihgts on the switch showed data and link, finally noticed the lights on the card were not on, dont remember how I figured it out, but I found bending the end of the card up fixed it. I stuck a old garth brooks cassette under the nic and propped the back corner up, worked perfectly after that.
:)
:)
On a very odd note. My mom once said loudly "I don't like you" to the microsoft paperclip in office when it came on the screen. The computer promptly turned off. No errors in logs or anything, just shut right off after that comment.
Had a AMD network card that would crash any pentium system, but worked fine on AMD systems
And had an old server I had to power of for 5min then reboot twice to get it to post, quite annoying.
But the worst of all, I did finally find out what it was, was with my first computer.
The place I got it from accidently put my modem and mouse on the same IRQ, so for a few weeks my mouse wasn't working when I wasn't connected to the internet, and when I would connect my mouse would start working fine. But my downloads would freeze until I moved my mouse. Stop moving the mouse the download would stop. So for a large download I had to constatly sit at the computer and move the mouse in circles. - I still have a habit of moving the mouse if a download freezes unexpectedly
I have seen other very odd stuff I might post more later.
I've seen an article where the authors tried this they used distilled water and a sealed case to make a "full-immersion" watercooled system.
It didn't work (but didn't destroy the components), until they tried it with oil instead. The theory they expounded was that water, as a polar solvent, has effects on charge that a long-chain hydrocarbon doesn't. The capacitance of the water was throwing off the timing of the more sensitive components of the system.
I had a Duron that I had overclocked from the normal 100Mhz FSB to 133. Most Durons of that era really didn't like to do that and I had to significantly increase my vCore to make it happen. For some reason if I cold booted my machine it would lock up while the OS was loading. If I rebooted after that it would boot and run with no further issues. Better than that, if I detoured through the CMOS config page and exited immediately or paused the POST, it would boot fine.
Who would think you'd need to let a duron warm up before taking it out for a test drive.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Just this last week! Initial problem: In 3-computer household, lightning strikes, killing DSL gateway router. It was a very powerful strike; the surge protector didn't save it, only half of the PCs in the house got knocked out, and a light bulb popped and a battery operated toy on top of my monitor started up all by itself. Freak accident.
Partial solution: New router arrives, but of course QWest doesn't support my Linux boxen. Tossing the Windows exectuable CDs, I type random IP addys into Firefox until I find the secret one that connectes to the router without the CD.
New Problem: Connecting the *second* computer to the router. The line is live, but the same IP doesn't work. Neither does any other. It simply won't let me in. search for hours for the solution. It's midnight...
Solution: and ANOTHER lightning storm makes the power dip just enough to reboot everything. When all the machines come back up, the second computer now shows up on the network. It connects. Problem solved.
Yes, I take credit for this solution. I was cursing Cthulhu, who answered.
I was on the train having all sorts of trouble installing Mandrake 10 on my laptop I had to give up because I arrived at my station. Anyway the next day, absently, I peeled off the 'Designed for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP' label, tried again and it booted first time. Magic I still have the label, if SysAdmin hack me off, I'll sneak in one night and stick it on a critical server :->
I'm surprised there aren't more Windows stories. Sure, the hardware stories are funny but virtually every truly bizare computer experience I've ever had has been strictly Windows-related. The one that immediately leaps to mind is this:
A few years back I was installing XP on my sister's computer and the network card didn't work out of the box. The driver disk was long gone, the search-for-a-driver-on-the-XP-installation-CD wizard didn't work, so I was downloading every driver I could think of on my laptop and copying them over via USB key... nothing worked. An hour or so passes and I've now tried every driver I've found that even remotely stands a chance of working, including several drivers from sites written in Bulgarian.
So, out of sheer frustration, the next time I reboot (a just-for-the-hell-of-it reboot--not because I actually installed anything new) and see that damn "Found new hardware!" crap I hit "yes" when Windows asks me if I want to allow it to connect to the internet to search for a driver.
And I'll be damned if it didn't somehow connect to the internet and download the appropriate driver. I was stupified... there wasn't any other form of net connection on her computer. I fired up Firefox and Windows Update to check--why yes indeed, they were both seeing the internet now.
I dunno, perhaps there's some sort of Zen lesson to be learned here, but at the time I was quite livid. My sister was like "cool, it's working now" and started surfing while I sat in a corner waving my hands around and gibbering quietly.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
If it is an error, then by definition it can't be intentional. You need to rephrase your manual.
Om
The hard drive went on my PC just over a year ago. I replaced it with a larger one and tried to boot, the fans started up and then nothing - no beeps, no clicks, no output, nothing. Tried all sorts without any success, eventually I took it into PC World and explained the problem, the lad there said let's have a look and connected it up to his monitor - bingo booted straight up no problem. Once it had booted from another monitor it would then boot fine from mine.
Just over a year later the new drive went as well, so I bought a replacement and installed it but same problem - wouldn't boot, no beeps, nothing.
So I couldn't help thinking it might be something to do with the monitor - borrowed a monitor from a friend and the thing booted straight away.
Why?
Every so often, a hard drive will start making horrible clicking or grinding noises. If I buy a new hard drive, format it, copy the data over from the old one, then throw the old one away, everything's fine! I recommend this fix to anyone with failing hardware.
...I resorted to reading the instructions!
See, I was building my current box and it wasn't booting. Turns out ATX2.0 has a SECOND power connecter for the CPU. A magic, voodoo, connector.
FGD 135
I once had a celeron 300 that sat on top of a 15 inch speaker and never once thought about the magnetic field it generated at 200 watts. Several times I brought it over to a friends house and everytime without fail, every byte of data would corrupt. So I would just reformat, install the games and swear he had a grimlin. It wasnt until i brought it over to another friends house that I realized when it was sitting on the speaker it adapted to the new field and when I moved it, the harddrive would just fall to pieces. So I just started bringing over my stereo with me and never had another problem...
You computer probably was dirty inside, with static causing dust to bridge conectors and pins. This is the single most cause of crashing aside from Microsoft Viruses. The Applejuice neutralized the static, washed the dust away and the goo prevented it from returning. It probably was just enough to remove the static and to wash the dust away but not enough to short-circuit the electronics.
Come my story:
I've been a PC freak for nearly a decade, with all my boxen custom built. The fist one being a Cyrix 200+ the first CPU to require a fancooler. Overclocket to 75mhz system clock. Custom DTK Mobo, built extra for it. Blazingly fast back then. Anyway, all of my PCs where built by me, exept the first one which was built by my geek comrades who had a PC company back then. It's after that decade, when a computer starts going haywire without the obvious reason of MS Viruses, I allways go for the "there's a spec of dust shorting your mobo or periferals out" option. Open box, clean it (canned air, carbonfiber brush, cheap shaving cream brush, whatever), close, turn on. Problem solved. Just did that the other month with an ancient laptop of a friend that showed funky stripes on the screen when booted. Dirt on the grafics chip.
Most people don't keep their PCs clean. I do. I clean my Keyboard 4 times a year and my comps at least as oftern. Once a year I open the ones with fans in them and give them a thourough clean up, vacuum cleaning and all. That combined with Linux or - nowadays - Mac OS X is the best insurance against bad suprises. It's electronics, people. Keep them clean.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
NARY?
Hands down the illest ventriloquist this side of the Mississippi River, Hah!
My other favourite is PSU fan bearings. I usually stab a pencil in through the air vent and that jogs the bearings enough to shut up the grinding noises when they're getting old.
The worst voodoo is getting windows "network neighbourhood" to work with its random ability to see computers whenever it feels like it. I've never fully understood how to troubleshoot it, and luckily now i'm on linux, it isnt an issue.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
It's a shuttle XPC barebone with an AMD CPU and a nforce4 chipset. As we have had DHCP troubles right before, it took me ages to 'debug' that..
My guilty voodoo/OCD thing is obcessive saving. If I hit Ctrl-S or :w! I do it at least three times in a row. Three is a very rare minimum.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I used to have a friend who was a very active Amateur Radio operator ("ham"). He had rooms full of equipment and operated just about every mode available (AM, FM, SSB, SSTV, TV, Packet, Satellite, etc.). Anyway, his philosophy was that if a certain piece of equipment failed to function properly, and nothing seemed to work, the thing to do was shut it off, call your friends, go out and have a good meal and some brewskis, get a good night's sleep, then wake up the next morning and switch the thing back on. Chances are, he said, it would work just fine. "This is what we hams call 'FM'" he told me. "'FM?'" "Yeah, 'FM' -- 'Fucking Magic.'"
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
I recall an incident from several years ago, when I was at school in a physics lesson. Some of the school equipment was less than perfectly reliable. After completing a practical electronics demonstration (The old paperclip-and-cork motor, I think) I noticed another group of students were having problems - their power supply unit was not supplying.
I walked up to this lot, and without speaking just pressed the tips of my fingers against its plastic top, closed my eyes... and it turned on. I then mysteriously walked back to my own desk across the room. The stories of the 'psychic repair' lasted for a full day - quite an endurance with the rapid turnover of secondry school rumors.
The trick was simple though - having used that supply in a previous lesson, I was aware that it would only turn on if a slight weight was placed on top of it. Presumably this made or broke a contact within its rickety construction. Once started, it would work until the mains input was switched off.
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
T. M. Pederson
"Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentation"
I find ignoring the problem usually works. After ignoring it for a few weeks I will run across a fix while doing something totally unrelated. Jack
Thanks for reminding me of that particular voodoo. At the time I felt very foolish invoking it, but it worked. Speaking of Macs, does anybody recall the voodoo involved in getting multiple SCSI devices working? Often you'd have to break the rules of termination or randomly switch IDs around until it worked. Coaxial ethernet termination also seemed not to play by the rules.
I have collected a substantial repertoire of voodoo for getting Windows 95 and 98 to function more-or-less as advertised. It ranges from the almost-sane (like never giving up on anything without rebooting at least five times -- I'm convinced there must be race conditions on Windows 9x startup that cause it to only _sometimes_ successfully complete everything it's supposed to) through the seemingly unnecessary (like keeping a backup copy of explorer.exe and putting a line in autoexec.bat that copies it overtop of the copy Windows actually uses every time the computer is started) to the frankly bizarre (like the schenanighans required to get print sharing to interoperate with Windows XP, some of which apparently vary depending on the printer model).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I once added a TV Tuner card to my homebrewed NT machine. No matter how hard I tried, it simply refused to operate, even with NT specific drivers for the card, it would always give an error saying it was unable to share an IRQ. The manual for the card said that the only devices using IRQ 9 (still remember the IRQ) should be the TV Tuner card and the video card.
After a bit of digging I was finally able to determine that IRQ 9 was indeed being shared by more than just the tuner card and the video card; my ZIP Zoom card was also using IRQ 9.
For those who don't know what a Zip Zoom card was, it was a stripped down SCSI controller mainly used for external Zip SCSI drives.
After a few months of being unable to use both my Zip drive and tuner card at the same time, I grew weary of plugging/unplugging the cards based on when I wanted to use them and finally decided to do something about it.
The first step I took was to take a second look at the offending IRQ and changing it. The Zip zoom controller had a few jumpers you enabling you to change the port and IRQ. Finding out that the offending IRQ was 9 I thought it was a simple task at moving the IRQ jumper and therefore assigning a different IRQ.
I still get the same error. Move the jumper to its original position, same error. This is when things start to get weird. I keep moving the jumper between positions and NT still keeps saying it's using IRQ9. I boot into Linux and shuffle the jumpers back and forth and amazingly Linux says the IRQ for the card changes.
I then take a closer look at the card and its documentation and notice that the only IRQs the card supports are IRQ 5 and 7 (and NT reports it as having IRQ 9); I still remember the "hmm... this is odd" feeling I got when I found that out.
Long story short, it turns out that NT's HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) decided that my Zip Zoom card belonged best at IRQ 9 and assigned IRQ9 to it accordingly. I was then able to change the IRQ for the zip zoom card so that it used the a different IRQ than IRQ9; thus enabling my to finally use my Zip drive at the same time as my TV Tuner card.
This is what I call voodoo.
2. Have you tried turning it off & on again?
3. What happens when you try?
4. have you moved your computer recently?
With 1. I often get embarrased laughs as they unplug the desk fan or phone charger.
With 2. I am regularly accused of black magic as this cures perhaps 25% of non functioning equipment.
3. often works because users have calmed down and do it properly this time - whatever it is.
4. gives me a chance to "tell off" people who think the whole hospital revolves around their office work rather than the patients, doctors, therapists & nurses that I often think the place is for!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I worked in Apple Tech support during the Great Quality Implosion of 95-96. Virtually every product, especially at the low end, had major quality issues. To this day, I collapse weeping into a fetal ball when I hear "Performa 5200" and other models "of which we never speak."
I think I will go take another shower and try to wash off the horror.
When I connected to the internet with a 14.4k modem, I used to think that when my connection was taking a long time, if I moved the mouse around a lot, it helped speed up the process. Like making the computer "think about" more things reminded it to finish loading the page I was looking for, or resume downloading. The funny thing is, it seemed to work.
http://godkillzyou.blogspot.com
When I was in the service I was a das3 tech and would help the radio tech's out from time to time. One late night we had a 524 radio that the PS was arching to the chassis. So I stuck some gum I was chewing on the chassis at the point of arching and it stopped. We sent it and never had a complaint.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
The hideout of the incapable technician is the blaming of the user.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
With hardware as cheap a it is, i wouldnt risk my data or time to such nonsence.
Even back when a cheap pc was 2grand, what is your time/data worth?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In case noone else posted it yet, here's an old story.:
You laugh, but one of DEC's best field service upper level support guys carried a rubber chicken in his tool box. Once, he got called out to fix a dead 11/70 at a critical installation, where a newspaper was waiting to switch over to electronic composition, and lots of money was being lost while this system wouldn't start. This 3rd level tech got called in when the local guys couldn't fix it. It was a very important account, and high up DEC executives were waiting for his, as well as all the managers of the newspaper. This guy walked around the system for a quick visual inspection, and noticed a loose cable in the back of the thing causing the problem. He plugged it in while no one was watching...and then took out his rubber chicken, danced around the system chanting gibberish and waving the chicken, and then hit the boot button...the system started....the DEC managers wanted to fire him, then kill him, but the newspaper folks, who had a sense of hunmor and were so glad he got it going wouldn't hear of it, and insisted that this guy oversee the installation of this gear at all of their other sites...DEC Field Service guys...some of them, they were like that, back in the day...
My old Amiga used to overheat while I was working on term papers (and playing music, and playing games, at the same time -- back in 1995). When it would do this, no amount of rebooting, or smacking it around would work. First the sound would die, then it wouldn't print, then it would go into guru meditation and wouldn't boot at all. I can only assume this was due to one after the other of the custom chips failing after excessive multitasking in an unairconditioned appartment. If I dropped in from a height of about 3 inches I could get it to boot but the sound and printing were still a no go. So I put it in the freezer (A1200's were nice small machines) for 30 minutes, dropped it a couple times, and printed my paper just in time for class.
The first thing that comes to mind is mysterious printer wackiness on Windows computers. That's almost a post in itself. I'm using a HP 1410 all in one with a Dell Latitude D600 running XP. The printer will only work if it's connected directly to the computer. Plugging it into a USB hub makes Windows think that it's a completely different device, and it wants to install the drivers again. There are certain Excel documents that will not print out entirely on it - it just stops printing and feeds the rest of the page through. Last time, I tried printing to PDF and then printing from Acrobat, and that worked.
We have a display here (proprietary, explosion-proof, and very expensive) that goes out of whack sometimes. Hitting it usually brings it back.
I don't reply to ACs
I used to have an old white box with an IBM serial mouse, and a Boca 14.4 internal ISA modem. For some reason whenever I called a BBS I would have to smack the top of my computer desk before it would connect. It would just hang there until I smacked the top of the desk. Turns out there was an IRQ conflict with the modem and the mouse. When I was smacking the top of the desk it would jiggle the mouse and (somehow) allow the modem to connect. This went on for about 6 months. Finally I was able to resolve the problem by purchasing a PS/2 mouse.
The number of times problems have disappeared just with my mere presence, I considered printing up a proxy.
We have a Hewlett Packard Laserjet 4M+ in our office. If it runs out of paper, it signals 'Paper Jam'. After you refill the paper, you have to open and close the ink cartridge hatch to get it to resume operation.
It still runs fine though, so we won't replace it until it really craps out.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Here's one of my favorite wacky tech stories to tell. Working offsite my boss and I went back to the hotel and were trying to wrap some things up. We had some files that we wanted to get off a USB drive, one of those Firelite 80GB drives which do not require an external power supply, it's just powered off the USB. The drive worked fine earlier in the day, but for some reason it was not turning on when plugged into the laptop. We tried different USB ports, plugged it in a number of times, shoved that cable in good, rebooted, etc but it would never spin up.
So what's my genius boss do? He turns off the table lamp and immediately the drive turns on. I guess there was some bad wiring in the electrical outlet that was shared by the laptop and table lamp. Once the lamp was no longer on it allowed more juice to flow to the laptop which trickled down to the usb ports.
and even pigeons have it :). B.F. Skinner and Superstitious Pigeons. It's just a basic side effect of automatically associating meaning with events that happen in close proximity in time.
One problem I kept running into when I was still fighting with Windows PCs was that, no matter what odd problem I had, I would always find a half-dozen answers, each different, each saying "Oh, yeah, you have to do /this/" with no real explanation. Half the time, the various answers would even conflict -- "that's an IRQ issue, move it to another slot" or "that's not an IRQ issue, it's a CPU speed issue."
The big problem was that each answer seemed authoritative -- nobody would hedge their response, say "well, I tried this, and it seemed to work, but I don't know why," no efforts were made at explaining it or even testing to see if it wasn't one of a dozen other things that had actually solved the problem.
Really, this points to a larger problem, which is the general inability of people to properly troubleshoot, and the further inability (or lack of time) to properly re-test what they think is the solution, in order to fully understand it.
This isn't as much of a problem in the Linux or especially Mac worlds, becuase inevitably these crazy problems center around hardware, and not software, but there are still some doozies out there.
I suppose this is what you get when anyone, anywhere, can post anything to just about any kind of forum, and said posting becomes easily searchable. It's just a shame that the scientific method is so far removed from so many of those posters...
I once dropped a hammer on a motherboard and cracked the board. The board stopped working and wouldn't power on anymore. A friend of mine who was trying to figure out what was broken accidentally shorted two wires of the ATX power cable and the machine started up again! So finally we soldered on a wire (green and black wire if I recall). The bad thing was that we couldn't stop the machine with the power button anymore so everytime I had to shutdown using the power supply switch.
My old 486's keyboard had the fat kind of connector, like a ps/2 plug but much bigger. Over time the motherboard connector must've gotten damaged or something odd because the only way for me to get the computer to recognize the keyboard after turning it on was to wiggle the plug up and down in the connector. Sometimes it would just beep like crazy until I got it. In retrospect I think my pc just needed it's port "massaged" before it would let me work.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I once had a similar solution for a driver/bios problem at work. Someone working with a linux box Matrox G200 called and told me that rectangles and bitmaps weren't drawn properly or not at all) anymore but everything else seemed to work OK. I logged in to his box, edited the configuration to rotate the screen 90 degrees, told him to log out, turn the monitor accordingly and retry. It actually fixed the problem, since back then, rotating the display would turn off all hardware acceleration. It later turned out that a newer bios for the graphics card was a better fix.
- The ZX81 came with 1K of memory. Most people bought an "16K Expansion pack" that connected to the "Expansion bus" which was simply part of the motherboard coated with aluminium. Thing was, the expansion pack connectors tended to be made of copper. After a while, the whole thing oxidized and you had to clean it with some liquid (alcohol? I can't remember).
- The ZX81 used tapes, but was very finicky about recognizing them. I remember many a day cleaning my tape-recorder read head with alcohol.
Find It! Keep It!
Coming soon to a mac near you
Sometimes after I'd installed a new 3.5" floppy drive in a system the activity light would come on immediately and stay on forever when booted.
I'm sure some of you already know what I'm talking about here.... You have to take the floppy drive out and turn the computer UPSIDE DOWN!
Yeah... Sounds crazy I know, but it worked every time!
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Anyone who remembers hard cards knows you have to slam them against the table quite hard to reset their bearings from time to time.
Well this thread is the perfect venue to relate one of my favorite "voodoo" stories.
... then one time when it happened I realized what was going on. Turns out I had a keyboard on one of those sliding keyboard trays. I put my coffee mug on the desk, up above the keyboard. Occassionally when I would lean forward to pick up my coffee (which I usually did after bringing up a message box), my stomach would nudge the keyboard tray forward. Now, if you look on your keyboard you will see the ESC key in the upper left corner. Well, as the keyboard moved ever so slightly forward, the desktop (above the keyboard tray) would lightly press against the ESC key, closing the window. And of course as soon as I picked up my coffee mug I would lean back in my chair, which released the ESC key (so I didn't hear the tell-tale beeps of a key being held down). Well, the obvious solution to this problem was to give up coffee ;-)
Years ago my computer started developing this wierd problem. First thing in the morning I would get myself a coffee and sit down to sift through my email (Outlook). Randomly, while reading an email, the message window would close, leaving me staring at the list of messages again. If I double-clicked the message it would re-open and I could continue reading. These mysterious disappearing message boxes would happen once or twice a week, but only early in the morning. I tolerated it for months
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I worked at a company (mercifully long out of business) that was psychotically cheap.
Apparently one day they needed some screws, and rather than going to the hardware store and spending three bucks, they dragooned several people into spending most of a day removing "extra" screws from peecees around the office. I said they were psychotically cheap.
Anyway, two of the four screws attaching my motherboard to the case were removed. After that irregular modification, I could reboot my machine by smacking the case (apparently causing a short circuit). Some weeks later I was demoing the forgettable latest software revision of the company's product to some directors and other bigwigs. Of course, during the demo the software went a little crazy. I looked at the screen carefully, slid my right hand along the case like I was looking for something, and at a seemingly (to the audience) random point hit the case HARD.
The machine instantly rebooted, of course.
My technical virtuosity was never, ever questioned during the six months I remained at that company.
I used to do user support in a lab full of smart guys. I would always say "I'll be right over" and then wait fifteen minutes. When I got there the problem would be solved.
This is the exact sort of thing that inspired me to choose it as a Slashdot username!
Here's some weird computer voodoo, and it seems to be replicable almost anywhere but in MS's labs. I installed Windows 2000 on a PC with a SB Live! Value in it, and also on another PC with an Audigy. Now randomly on boot, the PC won't see the sound cards.
Also, on a completely "normal" PC, Windows takes various amounts of time to start up. It's not always the same. Yet, computers are just 0s and 1s, they're logic, they're not variable. Also what's not always the same is sometimes the USB mouse is detected and sometimes it's not.
Back when Windows 98 was around, I used to start up and randomly there would be fonts and GUI widgets missing. Sometimes everything would appear normal.
In Windows 2000 also, when I used the Win+D shortcut to minimize everything, sometimes the taskbar would disappear and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes when I opened a "Favorite" in Internet Explorer, it would open in a different window than the one I selected. Sometimes in Internet Explorer, clicks aren't even recognized even though you can tell somewhere in the system the click had registered, because the "dotted outline" selection cursor (or whatever it's called) is around the link I wanted to open.
It's very odd that sometimes there is a certain behaviour and other times there isn't, even when nothing else on the system has changed.
I have a friend who once dropped an EMPTY plastic cup on top of his computer. His PC restarted, and as soon as Windows came back up, his sound card didn't work. Somehow, dropping the cup on his PC corrupted his sound card drivers!
Back in the DOS days, some PCs had crappy power supplies or motherboards. If you left them off for LESS than 2-3 seconds, the memory wouldn't clear and you'd have a garbaged system. Naturally, the cure was to leave the computer off for "longer" - long enough for everything but the cmos to lose voltage.
Another problem, one that's probably more severe today, is heat. If a computer is overheating, leaving it off for longer definately helps.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm surprised no one has posted this yet: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html To be honest there have been so many incidents that most have simply been forgotten. One recent one was a PC that didn't get past POST until a USB webcam was unplugged, then it booted fine, even with said webcam reattached to the same port. One which I liked was a friends laptop that would not do anything. Black screen, no sounds, nothing. I just press the on button for just over a second and it works fine ever after... I was known as having a magic touch after that :)
At the school system where I used to work, we had a librarian's computer that would periodically not boot. We tried to see what it was on site, but to no avail. We took it from that school to our central computer fixing place to take a longer look. (it was about a half an hour away) When we turned it on the next day, it booted fine. No problems at all. We took it back to the school and it was fine, until the next time it decided to not boot. Again, we took it back and magically worked fine, same scenario as before. So we tried leaving it unplugged overnight to simulate being at the other place, thinking that would do it. Nope. So we took it back, and of course it worked. So, the 'fix' to the problem was to take it back to the office, leave it in the van, then take it back the next day and everything worked just fine.
I had a similar problem with my last DVD burner. Audio would play mostly fine (except for a strange click at the beginning of every track), but data would always be currupted.
SHAKE: Why don't you go check the gutters?
FRYLOCK: Why would it be up in the gutters, Shake?
SHAKE: That's where your DVD burner ended up when it decided not to work.
FRYLOCK: Oh, I damn sure better not find that up there.
SHAKE: Well, that's the last place I remember chucking it.
A friend of mine built his own computer.
However from the start he always had a weird problem with the start button - he would press the button, and it would turn on, but when he let it out it would almost always turn off.
He would have to press it just right in a certain, random sequence to get the thing to turn on.
Sometimes he would spend 10 or 20 minutes just trying to get the thing to stay on.
Two years later, for one reason or another he ends up getting a new video card and asks me to install it.
I notice what a pain in the butt this problem is, and check out the insides of the case.
It turns out he had his reset pins wired the power switch, and vice-versa.
I'm not sure how he could press the power/reset button in a strange enough way to get the machine to stay on, but it did work with some effort for three years before I found it.
Also, I have an older RCA tv that will randomly change to whats playing on channel 66, no matter what channel you're on.
If you smack the heck out of it on the back of the TV, it rights itself, at least for a while.
I remember the first floppy drive that I ever owned, a Commodore 1541(what an upgrade! I was using the Commodore Datasette).I purchased it from a friend (?). He said it wasn't working any longer and I could have it for $5 USD. 'SOLD!' I said, and took it home. Well, he was right. It didn't work. It turned on, and all the noises indicated it was running. But in name only. No files would load. Then I logged on to a local BBS and the sysop told me that the first production run of these 1541 drives had a defect. Something about the heads not being secured properly so they could come out of allignment with use. Even very infrequent use as it turns out. Back on point, sysop tells me to remove the cover of the drive and locate the cylindrical read/write head unit. Now, with your trusty screwdriver loosen the one (yes, just one) screw that holds it all together and start manipulating it as you attempt to load a file (LOAD "$",8), which I did. And then, after some clickety-clacketys, voila! success! Alas, the fix lasted only a few days at best. But enough to get some good games of Dino Eggs in! I still have that miserable 1541 POS somewhere in the house.
Gotta Poop
I have a HP zv6000 laptop, which has an issue with linux 32 bit(many distros, kernels, custom and stock)... the system timer runs twice as fast, which doubles the rate of time, videos, music, games, etc. In Linux 64 bit however this isn't a problem with newer 2.6 kernels... however I could not get the propreitary ati driver to compile or run in accelerated mode. So I found myself dual booting 32 bit (double timer) and 64 bit (buggy and slow graphics). I found myself googling, searching forums, and sending emails to hp (none of which were responded), however no amount of boot-time options or custom kernel recompiles, distro reinstalls alievated my problem. Fortunatly a BIOS update from HP fixed the problem (but of course it required Windows, the OS which isn't affected by the buggy hardware).
My computer works. But if I turn it off, and then turn it on again some time later, the POST screen never comes on. Either I get a blank screen or a screen with red text that says my ATI needs to be connected to a power source (hdd style power cable).
At first, I thought this was a connection issue. I would open the box, wiggle the board, wiggle the power cable. Switch the power cables... and after a certain mysterious combination, it would work. And no problems then on.
Then one day, I turned on my computer, and I had to do something. It just sat there with a black screen. I came back and restarted it and it just worked.
That is when I think I understood what the problem is: I say it must be a capacitor the doesn't fill up fast enough on initial boot that makes the card think that it's not connected to a power source. But if you leave it on for a few minutes to 'warm up', it just works. Of course, the fiddling around masked the fact that it was staying on for that crucial amount of time, and made me think that the voodoo was that.
It's still all conjecture, but yeah, that's my voodoo.
I have a piece of MIDI authoring software that was released in 1995 (MIDISoft Studio, for anyone who wishes to know). I got it for free with a new PC way back when, and with each new computer since, I have made it work...until now. I got a Dell, and MIDISoft worked fine up until I installed a new Audigy 2 card (ironic, I know), and it stopped working. The software would start up fine, but if I tried to open anything, it gave me an error saying that I was out of memory. I have not seen such an error since the days of Win 3.x, but knowing the software to be an old coot in young territory, I played around with compatibility and memory settings to try and fool it - to no avail. Not that I expected XP's "Run in Windows 9x Mode" to work anyway.
Now, I was slightly terrified because a) I loved my MIDISoft like I loved my then fiance, and b) our wedding recessional was written in that software, stored in their proprietary format, and irretrievable until I fixed it, and the wedding was only two weeks away - not enough time to reconstruct the piece. So I tried every other MIDI software known to man (except for the stuff you have to pay for), but none of it could read the file, nor did I like the interfaces. I'd used one piece of software for ten years - I wasn't planning to change.
Then, one day (I won't go into detail on how I discovered this) I found that if I had Firefox, Windows Media Player and Trillian open at the same time, MIDISoft would work. AIM was insufficient - it had to be Trillian, and IE would not take the place of Firefox. I didn't try WinAmp instead of WinMP. Close any one of those three and *poof* functionality disappeared. As long as they were open, however, MIDISoft was happy.
Epilogue: Shortly after the wedding (which went off without a hitch, BTW), I had to reinstall Windows, and MIDISoft hasn't worked since. Even with those three programs open. *Sniff* But, that's my computer voodoo story!
We got broadband, and had to install adsl filters on every phone socket. After a few months, we started having phone trouble, specifically that people couldn't ring us. We could pick up the phone, get a dial tone, and dial out, but sometimes if someone tried to ring us then it would give a busy tone (without us being on the phone at the time). At first we blamed my sister for being on the phone too much, but then the problem worsened. One day I got a call from home (I'd gone to uni by then) and there was bad static on the line. I rang back and the call was fine. The next week it was fine, but I was told that several calls to different people that week had had noise very much like old dial-up internet "static". I agreed to look into it when I got back in a few weeks.
When I got home the problem had worsened even more to the point where no phones in the house had a dial tone any more and no calls were possible. The internet was working, so I tried unplugging the modem data cable to see what happened, but we still had no dial tone, so I figured that it must not be the internet interfering. I tried plugging one phone into the master phone socket, which normally has a line in it running to the other sockets in the house, so unplugging this isolated all the other phones. Problem gone. Ok, so it wasn't the line, it was something in the house. I went around and unplugged everything from every phone socket, then reconnected the sockets to the master, and plugged back in the phone I'd used earlier. All fine.
So I plugged things in one-by one until every socket was filled again except the pc's one. Everything working fine. This was odd, because I'd tried unplugging the modem earlier and the problem was still there. A quick glance under the desk gave the difference: this time I'd unplugged the adsl filter as well, and not just the modem. A little experimenting confirmed that whenever this filter was plugged into a phone socket, even with nothing plugged into the filter, every phone in the house went dead. I guess it had a short in it or something, but that wouldn't explain the earlier problems we were having, especially the "people sometimes can't ring us" one.
I wonder how long it would have taken a bt engineer to find it?
Many years ago i had this problem with my modem.. It simply would not work, so i uninstalled the driver, then rebooted. It worked.. wow, not exactly voodo, but the funny thing was that this happended every time. If i booted my PC without having the drivers reinstalled, my modem simply was dead, so i made an habit out of it: Each time I was about to shut down my pc, i remembered to uninstall the drivers.
Well, afterall, it was Windows 95, so the fact that strange things occured aren't really that strange at all, i guess.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
That's what I call it. One place I worked, the main stats machine (PC) every now and then would not boot. I found out later that the fix was to lift it up off the ground one inch, press the power button, and drop it to the tile floor.
When I discovered that this was actually their written procedure, that HD got replaced that evening.
But serously, there really are people out there that naive to believe that, whatever the reason, if it works, Impact Maintenance is an accepted procedure.
Freezing hard drives also seems to be a point of contention. It does work. Not often, but it does work. If a drive refuses to spin up, or starts and immediately spins back down, there's about a 1 in 6 chance that cooling it will help long enough to get your data off.
My favorite though is the millenium falcon when Han smacks the dashboard to get it to boot up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've seen this one, and the cause for it, in equipment I've acquired.
That "fat kind of connector, like a ps/2 plug but much bigger" is a 5-pin DIN plug. The mechanical forces one of those connectors can couple into the mating jack without crumpling can sometimes tear the mating jack loose from its soldering, especially if the motherboard manufacturer doesn't spec a jack with mounting tabs, or doesn't provide solderable plated feedthrus for them, and especially if the solder in the waveflow soldering machine was getting a bit tired when that board went through.
With one (or more) contacts loose in its feedthru, and mating surfaces oxiding on exposure to air, you sometimes do have to treat it like a knife-switch, moving it back and forth to make it self-wipe and make electrical contact.
The real fix, of course, is touch-up soldering of the loosened contacts, but that's a skill to develop elsewhere, not on a computer you care about. The next best fix, once you get the connection working, is to tie down the cable so it can't move from that position.
true story.
in about 1997 or so, me and my colleague were synical unix admins, who laughed at most microsoft products. (for what it is worth, i don't belittle them out of principle any more). in any case, we ran linux on our desktops. my friend got a new mouse - a microsoft mouse. no matter what we tried, we could not get it to work under linux. dead as dead. so as a joke, my colleague used tippex (same as wite-out and liquid paper) to remove the microsoft name from the mouse and with a pen wrote 'hyundai' or something similarly stupid on the mouse. he plugged it back in - and suddenly it worked. i kid you not.
I used to have "backup" copies of my C64 games. Raid Over Moscow (I think it was that game) must have used some sort of disk error based copy protection. The only way to run the copy was to issue the run command and then immediately unlatch the drive lever. That would move drive head away from the disk and create an error. Once I heard the drive click a few times, I could then relatch the drive. The game would then run perfectly.
Just ask the Czechs
Actually, three times isn't exactly voodoo; older unices wouldn't block on the second sync either.
So typing sync, (enter), sync, (enter), sync, (enter), halt, (enter) slowed the operator down enough that there was enough time between the first sync and the halt for the synchronisation to actually happen. It's basically a meatware hack, and since it's a nice easy memorable one it stuck.
As a veteran NES user, my friends and I have discovered two tricks that are far superior to simply blowing the cartridge. The NES much prefers that you gently release slow, hot, and heavy breath upon the cartridge, for a good 5-10 seconds. The point is that the moisture from your breath collects on the connectors and aids in transmitting the signal between the console and cartridge. Simply blowing on it has a far lower success rate in my experience.
The other important trick is, as you slide the cartridge into the console slot, push it in as little as possible, just enough that you can then push down and have it click into place. If you slide it all the way back it will be much less likely to work.
Some people have been shocked to see me use these techniques and get cartidges to work that hadn't in years...
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
[Pauses.]
[Rereads post in bewildered disbelief and the horror of dawning realization.]
[Smacks forehead repeatedly into desk in shame.]
Now I wish I hadn't recycled the machine years ago so that I could try this out and see if it would work ADB and audio shared the same portion of the bus. I feel like a clever idiot now.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
A Story About 'Magic'
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words 'magic' and 'more magic'. The switch was in the 'more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the 'more magic' position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the 'more magic' position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on 'more magic'.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
I do remember errors and crashes, but they weren't as important to me as having a desktop metaphor that just worked. Remember pop-up folders? Remember how you used to be able to organize programs in the Apple menu? Remember how the File, Edit, etc. menus never used to move around on you? Remember icon and list views that actually maintained consistency? Remember how creator/filetype codes actually worked (when you didn't have to interact with files from foreign systems)?
I think the reason I stopped loving the Mac OS was the Dock. That horrible abomination. The Dock put an end to pop-up folders. It put an end to launching programs from the Apple menu. It put an end to knowing where your applications were so that you could open them without even really looking at them. It put and end to window-shading and replaced it with the mouse-over hunt-and-peck for minimized windows.
The Dock embodies everything that is bad about the Windows taskbar but manages to do it all worse. It's a terrible application launcher, a terrible running program manager, and generally a terrible waste of desktop space just to be pretty. Oh, and I hate have the trash move around.
The sad thing is that since Mac OS X came along, I've completely stopped using the Finder and now only use the Terminal to manipulate files and launch applications. Irony of ironies -- Apple has made me a predominantly CLI user.
For that reason, and that reason alone, I vociferiously HATE Mac OS X. It killed everything that made me love the Mac in exchange for fixing all the things I really didn't care that much about -- a trade-off that didn't have to be made. They could've had both like the started to in the early days of Rhapsody, but no -- Jobs wanted the Dock and he wanted something "lickable." I still use Mac OS X, and even recently bought a Mac Mini to replace my aging, first-revision PowerMac G4, but I'm primarily a Linux user now.
I just still have need for a few apps, but that's as far as my loyalty to the platform goes. I'll be happy when I can one day just simply ditch it and stop paying a premium for an OS I drive by CLI that doesn't even have a good way of organizing your workspace.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Magic violates the first and/or second law of thermodynamics. Technology does not.
Even if you got ahold of an alien spacecraft from an advanced civilization, you would be able to identify its energy source and heat vent.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Bad Motherboard? - took it out, pulled CPU and HS, turned it upside down, dropped it 6 inches onto desk - copper bits in slots came out
Bad Power Supply? - pulled, shook, stuff came out (solder this time)
Noisy Fan? - pulled off label, WD-40, taped - still running 2 years later
Jammed 3.5" FD? - removed, openned slot, shook, credit card came out (3 year old was learning how to use the Home ATM)
Laser Cart Runout? - holed, copier toner poured, 3000 pages later..
Vent Fan Thermal Sensor (small cricket disk actuator for 24v) - pulled, cleaned in WD-40 (love this stuff!!); rinsed in 90% alcohol - still working 15 months
Worst One? - Ford Escort kept spitting out spark plug wires, push them on and drive an hour - ptouie! - put on barbecue glove and pushed on while HOT - no ptouie
Frankly, what works just works - it's the attitude that matters most.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
I had an PIII ASUS mobo that had everything integrated. I lied to the system and used some unsupported components that were newer/faster than the mobo was rated for. It was always unstable under heavy load. One day I knocked over a two day old beer and pretty much soaked the mobo (that's what I get for leaving the case open all the time and not using the no-beverage rule that I impose at work). I wiped it up as much as I could & thought about washing with water but didn't want to risk that either. After everythng was dry, I didn't think it would boot but it did AND the instability issue was 'fixed'.
heh, I remember I had to tilt my old PC 45 degress or else it wouldnt start up
My moment of Computer Voodoo that I've seen work for me MORE than once (two laptops, and a desktop, to my immediate recollection) - a machine that refused to start when you pushed the power button - or else components would come up to speed but the screen would remain black and no beep code occured...
I pulled the power cord from the unit, left the cord plugged in to the wall (in the laptop's case, the battery was @ 0% capacity, so it wouldn't turn on without being plugged in), HELD the power button down, and plugged the unit back in. It fired up immediately.
No rhyme or reason. But it's become one of my 'last ditch effort' tricks in the bag.
I have 2 hard drives, both bootable, but sometimes the secondary drive boots up instead of the primary. I have no idea why this happens. It's rare, but it does happen from time to time.
Me and my house mates had a PS2 at our house it was a very old one after a while it started geting very unreliable freazeing up games not loading etc. Anyways after a while it got to the stage where was totaly unusable so my mates for a joke suggested doing the drop test on it he said pick it up about half a meter when it freezes then drop it. to my absolute amazment it worked got another month out of that PS2 before even the drop test couldnt help it. We did have to drop it 6 times an hour to keep it going though. we got some proper funny looks from people when they came round :)
Given many of Apple's overly generic error messages, I always kind of thought troubleshooting a misbehaving Mac as kind of voodoo, as you would just try stuff at random until it went away. Though maybe OSX is better at that now, or at the very least you see the error messages a lot less.
My parents had a PC where the printer would report "input jam" whenever trying to print anything. Interestingly it printed just fine when connected to my Amiga. To make matters even more strange, it was unable to even print a testpage, if it was connected to the PC.
My thought after seeing those symptoms was, that maybee the PC was infected with some kind of virus. However even when the PC was turned off, the printer couldn't print a test page, only when the printer cable was disconnected could it print.
The printer was still covered by waranty and was sent for a repair, and the paper tray was switched, which solved the problem. How a defective paper tray would only be a problem while the printer was hooked up to the PC is beyond me.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Long story short:
T20 laptop, originally shipped with 98
User upgrades to XP Home. Setup completes. User activates normal video resolution. System crashes with persistent bluescreens.
I look at the thing. Bad CD drive? Yes. Can this thing boot from a USB CD drive? You need a T21 for that!
I dig up an antique Win98 CD and do an upgrade to Home on that. Works! I run convert to NTFS. Same bluescreens.
Redo the effort, install XP Home from scratch but on FAT32 vs. NTFS. Works to this day without any issues. Instruction to the user - any tech you'll take this to will want to run convert on this machine. Please tell them if they do that the machine will not function.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I once had a computer shipped to me from a friend a few time-zones away. The shipper completly screwed up the package, and as a result some damage happened to the components. I was able to get everything working, installed windows, ect. Worked great, I was quite happy that I was wrong about there being damage done *particularly to the motherboard*. So I put in a CD for a game to re-install, played a bit, computer crashed. I rebooted, and it failed to find an OS, or even a Hard Drive. Confused, I tried a few more times, then put in the windows xp CD to see what it had to say..and it booted into windows from the hard drive. I removed the CD-rom..rebooted...failed to find the hard drive. For whatever reason, this computer would ONLY boot, and find the hard drive, if the windows xp cd was in the CD rom. I still cant explain this.
It might violates the laws of thermodynamics according to our current scientific achievements. But science has a way of proving itself wrong over time... so I'd rather believe in magic than state that if there was such a thing as aliens then their spaceship would definitely have "heat vent". But that's just me!
lucm, indeed.
I finally got my terrabyte of disk space I'd been promising myself, all RAIDed.
:P
I get a super-duper SCSI card. All of my PCI slots are used up when I'm done.
Boot up, use, no problems. Until I get myself a USB reader for CF/MMC/SM/everything.
I need to read a CF card. Plug in, read. I leave it there.
Days pass.
I need to reboot. BIOS startup hangs.
Swap RAID card PCI slots. BIOS hangs.
Take RAID out, BIOS hangs
Take SCSI out, BIOS hangs
Take everything but the video card out, BIOS hangs
Unscrew motherboard, check everything, rebuild PC, reboot
BIOS hangs
UNPLUG USB READER
PC boots
Check BIOS options - none for USB device booting.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaah! I learned my lesson (It's a Syntax motherboard)
Well, I did have an Amiga 500 once, it wasn't easy to get hold of. A friend of mine came to the shop 10 minutes before me, and got one. I had to wait two weeks. I'm not quite over that yet. Still, I got Amiga number 1172 or something, and it was like coming to heaven (at least after filling the extra 256kb slot and getting the extra disk drive). But then, out of the blue, it stopped working, or some things stopped working, that worked on all my friends' Amigas. A game would crash at some arbitary place, or at the same place every time, or some disk wouldn't be read, or the machine just wouldn't start, or it gave a strange noice, or whatever. Sometimes it was my Amiga, other times someone else's. Luckily, we had some sort of instinct that told us what to do. Of course we had to twist it. So we lifted the Amiga up and twisted. And it worked. Every time. Of course sometimes it was the disk's fault. But not to despair. The simple solution was to throw it hard on the wall, two or three times. It worked every time as well.
It became pretty clear to me with Win95 that I had to follow a spellbook just to get all of my software installed, otherwise it wouldn't work or unexplained things would happen.
This continues even with XP as I can attest to, having just gone through a 4X clean install to figure out what had to be installed first instead of it "Just Works".
About twenty years ago it was a common practice to remove and re-insert cards in an HP2680A terminal. It was explained to me the (gold plated) leads somehow lost their connectivity. Since the cards DID wobble a little, I accepted it as a plausible explanation. It usually worked too.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
For some reason my ipod (gen 3) often freezes so none of the buttons work anymore ie. you can't control it or turn it off in any way.
I found out by pure chance that blowing very hard into the bottom connection port several times will unfreeze it. I have no explanation to why this works, but it does, and has worked for over a year now - otherwise the ipod works fine, and i have no idea why it ever started freezing.
WHAT THE F*CK DOES THAT MEAN?
I had a CD-ROM drive once that would "eat" my CD's. Whenever you put a CD in it, closed the tray, and reopened it, it would be empty. Closing and reopening it would make the CD reappear. ;-)
- Felix
"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." -- R. Kulawiec
My old boss's son had a computer that would not format the drive. Once the DOS reformat command (which I have happily forgotten) was typed, it would say "Reformatting 1%" then go to 0% and hang indefinitely. I inserted a Mandrake CD, and it installed fine. Worked for at least another year, actually booting into DOS for the CNC program to run the router we had. I always use this story to show how Linux is not only EASIER, but POSSIBLE to install on equipment Windoze gags on...
ive had to jiggle the ram and videocard before booting and older machine.
if i didnt jiggle the ram, it wouldnt be recognized, if i didnt jiggle the videocard, it wouldnt boot.
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
What? No Count Zero references? You people call yourselves nerds?
The silver bullet on a Mac, repair permissions, always works.
After seeing some replies talking about old NES tricks, I decided to share mine. I have an old-school, side-load, Model 1 NES. Got it for xmas when I was six. It has long since passed the point where the "Breath of Life" will do it, but...it will work if (and only if) the console is upside down. I don't even remember now how I discovered this anomoly, but I swear to Christ it's true. It worked like that, uninterrupted and unmoved, for years. Then I moved into my new house, and my girlfriend hooked up the NES. Upside right. Wouldn't work. Flip it, it never fails. Let me emphasize, this is an original, first production run NES, circa 1985. And it has been running like a champ for going on twenty years.
I'm gonna go play some 1943 now...
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
...this is why I choose a Mac every time, and I mean EVERY time, I have the choice. I spend 8 hours every weekday at a dozer inflicted on my by my employer doing this sort of crap all the time. Every Mac I have ever owned has simply worked. Like the rolex, they take a licking yet keep on ticking. Only time I've lost a Mac is to the 2nd law of thermodynamics (oh, and a bastard melbourne airport baggage handler who dropped my old PB1400 too hard a few years back, but even that was more due to age, wear and tear.) I got 9 years of happy (if slow) work out of my old clock-chipped 6100 66av (spun out to 88Mhz) and it was running 9.2 and photoshop 5.5 quite nicely right up until it died of a mobo failure, prolly heat related.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
I once helped a friend build a new comp, and it would freeze after about 15 mins of Warcraft 3. I suspected overheating, so I opened up the case and felt components to see which were overheating... nothing obvious. So, I tried blowing on the motherboard near the ram... and it unfroze! and then re-froze. The hilarious part was that a fan didn't seem to do the trick- it had to be a human blowing on it. so i spent the next 2 minutes blowing on the motherboard while he tried navigating the menus to get back out of warcraft. I guess the part that was really wierd was that the comp didn't bluescreen. It would just freeze until the temperature came back down, and then resume operation like nothing was wrong. He later RMA'd the thing to get one that was less tempermental.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
They say that USB is hot pluggable, but I've stopped hotplugging keyboards at work after two beeped and powered off in exactly the same way when I hot plugged a USB keyboard in. These aren't cheap computers either, they are rackmountable cases with high end motherboards and cpus.
I used to get that error all the time with my Windows 2000 machine. After a lot of looking around, I finally got a solution. It's a driver issue. The latest drivers suck. Downgrade by one driver revision. Can't remember the numbers, but just check to see what the latest 2000 drivers are, and go back by one.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My fan was making noise, I tried everything but visibly the bearings were worn out. So I got a new one. When I came home to replace it, the old fan didn't make any noise anymore. And it is still silent today. The new fan sits on top of the case. I think as soon as I remove it, the old fan will get noisy again :-)
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I had quite a few monitors at work (which happened to be a school) where the VGA connector would come loose just inside the machine. Kids would complain about having a blue/pink-hued screen, at which point I would walk over, and firmly give the monitor a slap upside the CRT. Most times this would jiggle things enough that they contacted again, and normal colours would return. Sometimes it required a few smacks, but the look on the kids' faces (not to mention the teachers) was definately worth the sore hand afterwards :-)
My favorite: I once had a laptop with modular drives, and somewhat spontaneously, my zipdrive module (remember those?) stopped working. No response at all - the laptop just didn't think anything was in the drive bay. I asked my stepdad to come over and check it out.
He pops it in. It works fine. He leaves.
I go to back up my stuff the next day. It's gone again.
Here's an odd problem I ran into:
...\windows\fonts directory to something else, reinstall Access, and then put back the original font name. I have no idea why Access hates Hatten.ttf.
MS Access installed on a machine one day refused to run and gave the error message "no valide license". The fix was to rename a font called Hatten.ttf in the
Almost literally. Over the years of assembling computer systems, particularly early on, systems that would work well were ones that I had in some way injured myself in building, usually a skinned knuckle from working in a sharp sheet-metal case. Systems that were assembled with no bodily harm would almost always need a hardware fix fairly soon afterwards. I started calling this my "blood sacrifice." It got to the point that one time, when the hardware assembly had gone smoother than ever before and I was completely unscathed, I actually pricked my finger and touched a drop of blood to the inside of the case.
I've since realized how stupid the whole thing was, but even so, if I skin a knuckle or cut a finger on a case I make a joke about blood sacrifice and breathe a little easier.
I once had the CMOS battery go out on my 386. This machine wouldn't autodect the hard drive, so it had to be set manually. Before I got around to hunting down a new battery, I could set the hard drive type in the BIOS with my eyes closed.
-Uberhund
My cable modem has some voodoo.i ght-goes-on-light-goes-off.html
http://members.optusnet.com.au/a1291762/2006/03/l
Some time ago a HD of mine stopped working; I bought a new one, and cried for the lost data; some time later, I tried again, and it worked, so I rushed to recover my data. Then I realized that, second time around, I had mounted it in the chassis upside down; I did a few tests, and indeed the drive would start only when mounted upside down. It has worked flawlessly ever since.
This is really going to date me but here goes....
Once upon a time, CD burners were a very new thing. We had just gotten one in at work. We didn't burn much because the disks were expensive. This new guy started in our shipping department and he asked if we would copy a game for him if he bought the disk. We told him that would be fine. He brings in his software and his blank disk. We carefully put everything in the machine and set the disk to burn.
When it's done, I very calmly pull some oven mitts out of my desk drawer and pull them on as I wander over to the machine. I pick up the newly burned disk and juggle it for a bit (like a hot potato) as I walk over to his desk. He looks up and sees me, taking in the oven mitts "What're those for?" "Oh...because the disk is hot. Why do you think it's called burning a CD?" I toss him the CD and tell him not to burn himself.
He sits there juggling his new disk for about 30 seconds before he realizes that it's not really hot. In retaliation, he chases me around the warehouse with Nerf gun.
The only real requirements are the ability to keep a straight face and to come up with something that is remotely plausible.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank