Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.
We didn’t have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.
but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,
then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus’s window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.
Somewhat related.
I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It’s pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there’s no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.
It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.
My electric piano requires a very accurate punch in order to the A3 key to work again, I’ve even read in forums that is the ONLY WAY to fix it. Sounded dumb at the time but it was the fix.
Sounds like sorcery.
I wanted to install an extra hard drive in my computer, but the power supply didn’t have enough connectors. I actually had a spare power supply unit, but upon testing, the 24 pin cable was too short to reach the motherboard.
I ended up using both PSUs. Only one had a power switch on it, so that was connected to the hard drives. I had to use a paperclip in the unused 24 pin connector to make it output power. The 2 PSUs had a wire running between the ground pins of a random unused connector, and they were on the same phase circuit.
The hard drive PSU had to be turned on first at the switch. Once that was on, I could press the power button to turn on the computer. I think I used it for about a year before buying enough upgrade parts to effectively replace the entire computer.
For starters I’m old enough that if your TV or monitor was fuzzy or blurry you gave it a good bang on the top. This worked 50% of the time and was considered common practice but it sounds stupid in retrospect.
But wait there’s more: I boiled a demo disc (videogame magazines used to come with a disc of demos for new or unreleased games). During a particular print run of Official Xbox Magazine many of the shipped discs would skip or fail to read and dropping them into boiling water for about 30 seconds was a way change the refractory index of the plastic and fix something that was causing the laser to be unable to read them.
I guess this is my jam because that last one reminded me of another hilarious practice from that era: “Toweling” an Xbox. First generation hardware of the Xbox 360 we’re prone to detecting an overheat and sometimes entering a state where they wouldn’t boot up anymore and display an iconic “Red ring of death” where the LEDs on the front would light up red and it would it never finished booting. But it was running, just it wouldn’t continue. While it was getting a little warm, it seemed to be more a failure of the sensor rather than a catastrophic overheating. So naturally the solution was… Get it hotter. Wrap it in towels blocking all of the fans from doing their job and get it hot enough that the sensor would seem to go out of range and reset itself. This returned it to normal operation for hours or days, for some people indefinitely. Fortunately I haven’t “toweled” any electronics lately.
I worked at a joint that sold 360s. The ‘towelling’ was a real thing. Apparently they used crappy solder, which when combined with inefficient components and poor cooling, caused the GPU to develop dry joints. Wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would get it hot enough to cause the solder to melt again, and reflow the joints.
At least, that was the story going around at the time. Whatever the real cause, it often worked. That hardware was such utter dogshit, I’m still amazed that the brand survived. They must have lost so much money in that debacle.
Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.
Coworker’s story: Trying to fix a prototype in a hotel room at a European trade show. Soldering iron on hand, but it was a 120V iron and glowed white hot when plugged into a 240V outlet.
So they had one person solder and the other person keep unplugging and replugging the iron from the wall at roughly 50% duty cycle.
OK, this wins. Far out…
I think this might actually be the dumbest. My fear of electricity is one of the main reasons I focus my tech shenanigans on the software side of things rather than the hardware.
You have to do a lot more work on the software side to release the magic smoke
Told a janitor to not unplug the equipment rack in a closet to plug in their vacuum cleaner. Why they thought that plugging in their vacuum there, rather than just using the outlet not 6 feet away outside the closet is beyond me.
Further, why that closet wasn’t locked in the first place. But this was almost 30 years ago and it was another time in IT.
I spoke with the janitor and she started plugging in her vacuum in the adjacent outlet. Then I went to the director of IT and got the capitol cost approved to secure all of the networking closets in the building, which there were 6, one for each floor. Only the one floor was an issue as that closet also house a sink and drain for the janitors to use. There wasn’t another place we could move the networking equipment to without laying out a lot of money.
I have two… these are from the old days of computing :)
One: guy said his monitor was showing wavy lines on the screen (old CRT monitor days). Went to his office, looked at his monitor. Sure enough wavy lines. Looked the top of his monitor. Removed the clock sitting on top of said monitor, no more wavy lines. Don’t put electric clocks on CRT monitors folks.
Two: working in a school system. Just before classes started. Get a call “none of the computers turn on”. Go to the classroom. Check a few machines. Machines “turned on” but didn’t boot the OS. Listen to one of the machines… hmmm, no drive noise. Tap it with the back of a screwdriver. Drive spins up, computer boots. Later found out that it was a semi-known problem with Seagate drives. If they sat to long without use, the heads would get stuck.
I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn’t fucking around now.
We’ve tried talking, we’ve tried percussive maintenance, now it’s time to take things up a notch and let these silly little machines know who’s boss.
Stabbed twice…worked like a dream afterwords.
I was working on a e-commerce site for a large furniture manufacturer. They wanted to add a new attribute to a site that dealt with the fabrics they used. This would have been somewhere near 500 individual products with their own value for this attribute. We had to get this lined up on the product csv because somebody didn’t think to do it in the erp. One of my managers was set to go in and use Excel to merge the lists, but I realized he would have to do this every month until the end of time. I wrote a quick script on the site to do this anytime the product csv needed to be updated. Write once, run forever.
Easy.
When I was 13, we had an Apple IIc. My mother used to take the cable that connected the computer and the monitor to work with her so I’d focus on homework rather than playing Ultima IV.
But it was a monochrome signal. I straightened out a metal coat hanger and plugged it in… it worked just fine if you didn’t bump it.
Damn, either you were a really smart 13 year old, or you must have been super desperate and then amazed that that actually worked.
Dead PC.
Unplug PC.
Lick finger.
Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.
Plug in PC.
PC works.
I had a similar issue where a dead PC was resurrected after swapping the power cable. It’s never been a fix since, but I still try it.
What?
Bro fingered his PC
Opened and revived a DOA GameGear by cleaning off the furry, green, PCB corrosion. Didn’t have any Isopropyl around, so I used vodka.
Needed to get a server back online when it’s CPU cooler had failed
Found some random cooler for a totally different CPU, smeared thermal paste on it and zip-tied the cooler to the mobo and case as best I could.
That thing ran like a champ for almost 6 months till I got around to replacing it
