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  • I used to work for a very small company (only a handful of employees) wherein there was no IT department or staff. I was the nearest they had to in-house IT, and we hired a consultant for official work.

    One of our employees, a woman in her twenties, worked from home quite some miles away, and had a work PC to use. It was giving her grief so when she was up at the office for some meeting she brought it with her. It was a Dell minitower with a rather innovative case. It hinged vertically and swung open (well, if you forced it hard enough) to reveal a curious take on the internals.

    It was the state of the wireless card that astounded me. She'd gone wireless at home and fitted the card herself, and I had to stop and figure out what had happened to it. Normally, PCI cards are held in place by a screw, but Dell forewent this in favour of a green bar across all the slots. It was the first I'd seen of this approach and I had to pause to contemplate what the giant green bar represented. Ah, it's easy: you lift it up and all the card slots are accessible. The bar holds the cards down instead of screws. Reminds me of the nifty screwless design of the Macintosh LC. And to make it easier, all the screwless parts were bright green.

    So why was the wireless card's end plate all mangled? Clearly she had no idea what the green bar did. She presumably hadn't phoned anyone who might know about PCI slots, and instead drew some bizarre conclusions about PCI upgrades. If you can't put the card in from the top (big bar in the way), it must go in horizontally. But there's nowhere to insert it. So, first step is to rip out the blanking plate to allow the card to go in. Next, the card has to be fitted into the PCI slot with the wireless antenna part on the outside. But you can't fit the card's end plate in its entirety through the hole. Solution? Mangle the end plate so you can stuff it right through the hole so that the edge connector can line up properly with the socket.

    I wish I'd photographed it, but she was a popular person and I didn't want to offend. I think my boss felt the same way towards the upgrade as I did, so I think I could have got away with some hot pix of my favourite UAU.



  • I suffer with you. When I see things like these, I always feel almost as mutilated as those bits of hardware.

     

    Just yesterday I visited a friend of mine. Or rather his 10-year-old daughter had complained to me about three weeks ago that her computer (that I had organized for here from some garage sale) wasn't functioning anymore. When I got there and she turned it on for me, the screen read "Keyboard error or missing keyboard." I pointed my finger at the phrase and told her that it would help if she plugged in the keyboard. Of course it wasn't *that* easy. The keyboard *was* plugged in. So I unplugged it and looked at the plug: One of the pins lay flat and short circuited to another one instead of going into the appropriate hole on the PC side. I used a paper clip to fix the orientation of the pins and got the girl to admit that she had "played around with the cables at the rear". Her father was furious.

    The bad news is that even though problems like these are fixed within a minute or two by a knowledgeable person like me, "normal" people are at a complete loss and can only say that their computer is broken.

     



  • @TheRider said:

    I suffer with you. When I see things like these, I always feel almost as mutilated as those bits of hardware.

     

    Just yesterday I visited a friend of mine. Or rather his 10-year-old daughter had complained to me about three weeks ago that her computer (that I had organized for here from some garage sale) wasn't functioning anymore. When I got there and she turned it on for me, the screen read "Keyboard error or missing keyboard." I pointed my finger at the phrase and told her that it would help if she plugged in the keyboard. Of course it wasn't that easy. The keyboard was plugged in. So I unplugged it and looked at the plug: One of the pins lay flat and short circuited to another one instead of going into the appropriate hole on the PC side. I used a paper clip to fix the orientation of the pins and got the girl to admit that she had "played around with the cables at the rear". Her father was furious.

    The bad news is that even though problems like these are fixed within a minute or two by a knowledgeable person like me, "normal" people are at a complete loss and can only say that their computer is broken.

    For what it's worth, that's an easy mistake to make. I've ruined at least one monitor cable and a Sega cable like that (snapped the pins when trying to re-straighten them). Maybe I just have bad luck with the little pins, though. :)     



  • Reminds me of this picture:

     

    If something doesn't fit, simply twist it 'til it does. :D

     

    Source: http://www.dau-alarm.de 



  • @TheRider said:

    I suffer with you. When I see things like these, I always feel almost as mutilated as those bits of hardware.

     

    Just yesterday I visited a friend of mine. Or rather his 10-year-old daughter had complained to me about three weeks ago that her computer (that I had organized for here from some garage sale) wasn't functioning anymore. When I got there and she turned it on for me, the screen read "Keyboard error or missing keyboard." I pointed my finger at the phrase and told her that it would help if she plugged in the keyboard. Of course it wasn't that easy. The keyboard was plugged in. So I unplugged it and looked at the plug: One of the pins lay flat and short circuited to another one instead of going into the appropriate hole on the PC side. I used a paper clip to fix the orientation of the pins and got the girl to admit that she had "played around with the cables at the rear". Her father was furious.

    The bad news is that even though problems like these are fixed within a minute or two by a knowledgeable person like me, "normal" people are at a complete loss and can only say that their computer is broken.

     

     

    That happened to me in middle school. I was pretty much the only person really knowledgeable about computers around, and the computer lab suffered from a typical case of teenagers - hardware and software all kinds of broken, etc. This one girl came in and sat down at a computer, only to discover its mouse had been stolen. She borrowed one from another computer and attempted to plug it in. She at least knew where to plug it in...but how was another story. She attempted at least two or three ways until I told her that she would break it if she tried to force it. She continued to force it. I told her again. She did it again and got a slight shock. I told her a [i]third[/i] time that it wasn't going to work. She just looked at me like I was an alien.



  • It's obvious.  They did some googling and found this helpful site

     

    http://www.datadocktorn.nu/us_kortbyte1.php

     

    They just generalized it to any card
     



  • I must say that I love those Dell screwless cases.  It takes some (quite a bit) of getting used to, but anyone smart enough to be tampering with a computer's innards can figure it out pretty quick.  It's nice to be able to swap hardware around without fussing with tiny little screws and a screwdriver that's too long for the job.



  • @PuckeL said:

    Reminds me of this picture ...

    Hahahaha ... wtf!



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I wish I'd photographed it, but she was a popular person and I didn't want to offend.

    TRANSLATION: "I wish I'd photographed it, but she was smoking hot and I didn't want to blow my chances."



  • @Zylon said:

    TRANSLATION: "I wish I'd photographed it, but she was smoking hot and I didn't want to blow my chances."

    I didn't want to offend the people in the office who I worked with; I was too alien to them as it was. The woman in question was a lesbian, although I doubt I could really ever date anyone who's not a computer nerd herself. I'd go mad.



  • Let's not forget this classic:

     



  • The topic named nvidia 7800 wont work

    hehheheh 


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