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Car mechanic IT problem solving
Submitted by: WindITtech – Sun, 12/23/2007 – 10:54
I'm the IT guy for a very small web retail company, one owner and 4 employees. The owner is great at tinkering with old muscle sports cars from the 1960s and 70s, but knows exactly zero about computers. I got the call last week from the owner that the main desktop computer at the office had shut itself off and would not turn on again, and that all shipping and order fulfillment was shut down...that's a BIG problem here! It's a 2-hour drive for me to get there, and as I prepared to start driving, I got another call from him, "Hold on--don't leave, maybe I can fix it myself...."{Famous Last Words}
Ouch -- that's scary! I waited all day, still no call to drive to the office. That evening about 7PM, the owner shows up at my house carrying a hard drive and a 12 pack of beer. He says, "I got it working for an hour or so, but it crashed again. I got the documents and email backed up on CD, and now I just need you to get everything else off this hard drive and onto CD."
I said OK, great, how did you fix it? He said "Well, when I try to fix a car that won't start, the first thing to check, is there battery power and a spark? So I opened the computer case, and found the metal box where the switch is and the wall plug comes out of. Figgered that must be the power supply, and checked it with my engine analyzer.No voltage, and it was HOT to the touch. So I went to the back shed and opened all the old dead computers there. Some had power supply plugs that were different, but I found one that had the same plugs. Swapped it out, and the computer worked for a while and I made some backups, then it crashed again. When it crashed the second time, I searched 'hard drive' on Google to get a picture and removed that part to bring up to you. The new power supply was very hot to the touch again, and the smoke came out."
Yep, this auto mechanic diagnosed the problem, swapped a power supply, found the hard drive and pulled it, then brought it to my house. I had the data off the drive burned on CD for him before beer #2.
The final postmortem on the computer was that the box had been shoved back up against the wall behind the desk, and all the mouse, video, keyboard etc. cords were bending the sockets. There was a visible crack in the motherboard where these connectors were hard-soldered to it. This was somehow blowing power supplies.
So -- all the best holiday wishes for every IT person here in the shark tank. Don't you wish that the owner of YOUR company was also an auto mechanic???
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