PC Tech woes. Follow

Anyone who has ever worked on a computer acting up before knows how I feel right now.

I work for as a computer tech for a small texas company, not giving the name, that builds and sells computers. Today, we had to change the motherboard out 4 different times on the same system for one retarded reason after another. Intel motherboards... god I hate them. Anyways, so I just finished building the system.

Intel E6600, Intel DG41TY, 4 GB of Kingston ddr2 800 (2x2gb), Sony Optiarc dvd rw sata, and a seagate 250 gb sata hard drive.

Put it up on our testing table, plug it in, pop in a memtest... no post. So I take out the ram to see if its the ram. I get the no ram beep code. So I put in one stick at a time. First stick, posts. Take that one out, put in the other stick, posts. So i try the other slot... both sticks posted in that slot too. Turns out, the board would not work if there were sticks in both slots. And yes, we tested the power supply just in case it was some weird power issue. No problem with the power supply.

Second board. First change. Put everything in, turn it on, it posts, but I get no video. After testing it on several different monitors and using the dvi port, we decided that it had a bad video chip, or video connections.

Third board. Second change. Put in everything, plug it up, turn it on. No post... By this time I was about ready to chunk the computer out the window. My boss told me to try another processor in case this one had some problem. We put in an E5200 which we KNOW works... No post. We try the ram, try the power supply, even try taking the board out of the case in case there was a short somewhere. We start taking out the processor, when I noticed something... The board was missing an ENTIRE LINE OF PINS!!!

Fourth board. Third change. Put everything in, put in on the table, when I go to plug it in... an electrical arc shoots between the capacitors... Thats right, the power supply fried. After the smoke literally clears, we pull out the power supply, rewire it, and turn it on. The processor, ram, and motherboard are now fried. Not intels fault this time but... Still hate them.

Fifth board. Fourth change. Get everything in, test the powersupply, test the board, test the ram, test the processor, put it all in. Rebuild the system for the 4th time, everything works. Oh hell yeah everything works. Run memtest on it, passes, go to install windows 7... The @#%^ing hard drive was bad. It would read off of a usb adaptor... but other than that it would not read as a bootable drive.

Second hard drive. It worked. We got 7 installed, get the drivers updated, sysprepped it... Because it took so long to build, the customer called back and said he did not want it, he would call dell. It was a "will call" meaning they were coming to pick it up. We took too long.

Do you know what a computer looks like after flying through the air into a dumpster? I do... not. But I wanted to <_<

To get the state of mind I am in right now, imagine this post written half in crayon, 1/4th in poo, and 1/4th in food. Merry christmas intel.

Edited, Dec 28th 2009 11:43pm by lightningcount

3.5/10

Hey I dont decide what the guys want in there... I just build em. Ive put too many Nvidia 9400 into what people called "Gamer systems" to make me puke.


However last week I did get to build a nice one. Phenom 2 965, Asus R.O.G. Crosshair 3 mobo, 2x Sapphire 5870s, 4x Kingston 2gb 1333, OCZ Vertex Turbo 30 gb, Ultra kilowat PS. Btw that PS was completely modular including the 24 pin and 8 pin.

The fun just never lets up in Texas!

/yawn

I got to build 165 computers about a week and a half ago, for our engineers. We ended up with 5 faulty boards, 4 of those were due to Assembly error when some of my less technically inclined technicians pulled the cap off the LGA 1366 socket (which is on there much tighter than the socket 775 ones) and dug it inadvertantly into the pins bypulling the top off then the bottom, and one just flat out no booter. Other than that, we had one bad video card, and one case that was apperently dropped off a cliff in shipping that split the front bezil. Everything else worked just fine the first time. I only got to actually assemble about 74 of them myself though, because I had to share.

I discovered a few interesting facts though!

1. One of my bosses apperently thought you had to push the heat sync mount pins into the board, and then turn the screws to "lock" the heat sync in place. We're not exactly sure which 3 computers he built before we managed to tell him that actually is how you remove the heat sync, but i'm sure we'll find them by the magic blue smoke eventually.

2. If you try hard enough, it is apperently possible to wedge a firewire header into that 4 pin CD audio port on some motherboards. I'm still not entirely sure how he got it in there.

3. I can apperently build a fairly high end engineering computer, from boxed components and a closed case, to bios post, in 14 minutes.

4. When one's boss wagers lunch that he can build a computer faster than you, one should probably let the boss win anyways...

5. The stickers really do make the computer go faster!

We now return you to whatever this thread was actually about!

I blame Tailmon.