What's brown and sticky and broke this PC? As another week ebbs away, The Register hopes that readers have a nice warm cup of whatever they fancy beside them as we present another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of the trials and tribulations of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Giuseppe" who told us about a quiet …
《I elaborate, you bullshit, and they lie.》
All out of the same stable just some more "fragrant" than others and varying in organic content.
Curious even in english the number of adjective that can be applied to lies or adverbs to lying.
Naked, flagrant, outright, white, deliberate, inadvertent, convenient, (un)neccessary.....just to name a few.
The means of lying vary. Elaboration is mostly lying by camouflage, obfuscation, conflation and confusion and may well not involve a single untruth or perhaps only an unstated fallacy the audience is induced to unconsciously assume.
Lying isn't the mere statement of an untruth. The liar must knowingly state the untruth(s) with the motive of having the audience accept those untruths as facts normally for some benefit for the liar. ie Exploitative deceit. Pathlogical liars are probably not technically liars by this definition not that this would excuse Trump. :)
If the ability to lie defines part of being human the AI/LLM is very nearly there. ;)
"Rule 1: [Even] The Doctor Lies." (River Song "Big Bang" S05E13 +28')
And he had poured a bit more than a sticky mocha on the Universe.
----
Really in this game its a mistake to treat your clients as a medico might by eliciting a history and symptoms - it really is more akin to veterinary practice - jump to the physical examination and observing the signs - then use that elicit (extract) information from the owner.
You can also try bluff. After cracking open a dead PC etc you might look the owner in the eye and state: " Ah! I can see what caused the problem. [Accusingly] Why didn't you say at the outset?"
You usually get a result. ;)
If you have a PFY you can try the good cop, bad cop thing for a change.
Call one morning from a know err... Challenging user.
Phone not working. Apparently it just stopped and the LCD display went black.
I head down and visual inspection confirms blackness of display.
"Anything happen before it died?" Says I.
"No," says user.
I pick up phone and get half a cup of cold coffee down my arm...
"Oh yeah, I did spill that earlier."
Cue much head Vs wall action..
At least, coffee only.
A former acquaintance ran an electronics repair shop. One nice customer once brought her no longer functioning mobile phone "it stopped working, don't know why". Upon opening it, my acquaintance found a considerable amount of moisture inside. I don't recall whether he was able to revive the device but do recall the subsequent conversation with the customer. "It was all wet inside, what has happened?!" To which she replied: "oh, it fell in the toilet." Ugh.
I had that with a television, only it was milk that the kid had spilt down the back of a valve TV... that was switched on at the time. The mum took the back off and washed the board - one of the earlier single vertical panel jobbies (she did at least switch off at the wall first). She was most dischuffed when I stuck a fan heater on it, with instructions to leave it on till I returned the following day.
To which she replied: "oh, it fell in the toilet." Ugh.
Before or after flushing? It matters. I'd still want to wash my hands[*], but not quite as "ugh" inducing :-)
* Always do anyway, before and after working on a "device". Also worth noting when a laptop comes in for repair that's not brand new and is suspiciously clean is a huge clue you'll find evidence of a spillage inside where users fear to tread. They'll often try to hide the evidence by cleaning the outside and rarely think further ahead to the time where someone will open it up and find the evidence.
A friend tells a tale of Asbestos contamination in a building which needed to be decontaminated. Most stuff was just thrown away, but the SGI Workstations under his aegis were deemed too valuable and they made him put the hazmat suit on and clean them out.
I have no idea what the risc (pun intended) to the staff was!
Used to have that with keyboards - a lot. The caller was always surprised with the question "did it have sugar in it ?" before telling them to go and rinse it while we got a spare out.
most spares had been through the rinse and dry many times.
Wyse terminals were also quite prone as they were small so often buried under crap on the desks and often in the line of fire from liquids. Not quite so well built as keyboards
Found 2 dead mice in the back of a farmer's PC once, (expansion blanker missing, amazing they squeezed in there) - only damage was a blown PSU, which by massive coincidence I had an exact replacement for (No, don't arsk, pure co-incidence, especially since it was a Time).
One thing I still didn't see is one of those computer with VESA mounts on both sides - so we could sandwich them between the monitor and the arm support. I think this would be quite handy...
There are some considerations about weight supported and load on the computer chassis - but nothing a little over engineering don't solve.
Thats some double sided joined up thinking right there!
whats the point bolting a mini pc to the monitor vesa holes if that means the monitor can no longer mounted either on an arm(wall) or a stand !
I guess the real ugly solution would be to get one of those two monitor stands and use one arm for mini pc , one for monitor :D
You mount the monitor to the back of the VESA case for the PC, then mount the VESA case for the PC to the arm.
My work has them for Dell's MicroPC line, they're quite effective enclosures. Support the usual VESA weights, have a thumbscrew to retain the PC, can be used with the PC's existing locking solution to prevent theft etc.
You can buy adapters which are double size plates drilled with VESA-pattern holes, intended to solve the problem of one size mount on the monitor and another size on whatever you wish to attach (I have one to mount a Pi on the back of a TV). That's one option. Another is that you can also get an adapter with two parallel VESA plates joined with a bracket to sandwich your computer between them an fit the mounting bracket onto the back.
Back in the day when I was still designing hardware, we made our roughly Mini-ITX sized (as it was about the time the standard came in) boards so that the VESA bolts went through the rugged, thin and convection cooled 'PC' and into the monitor. (basically a double-sided heatsink with the board sandwiched in the middle.) We even used to supply suitable bolts!
Some makers (ie Lenovo, suspect HP and Dell also do them) make screens with 'hutches' in the back for these micro PCs, makes upgrading an absolute piece of cake. If you're smart about it the only thing the user sees is their PC is suddently a lot quicker. Makes for a really clean workspace as well, assuming they connect wirelessly and use wireless keyboard/mouse combo the only wire is power and that can be hidden in the monitor arm, keeps the manglement types feeling all superior while making your life easier. (can also be used for 'Kiosk' PCs with the requisite touch screen monitor).
I worked in a diagnostic microbiology lab where they processed samples from every area of the body you could imagine (and quite a few you probably shouildn't). When the keyboards on the bench PCs stopped working I threw the dead one in the autoclave and supplied a new cheapy one from my store.
The story of how I persuaded computer services to allow me to purchase a quantity of keyboards has been told before. Suffice it to say, it involved inviting them round to see the lab and making sure we were processing "special" stuff that day. My purchase requests for keyboards and mice were never turned down again...
I been there before, the one place you made sure you washed your hands ON THE WAY OUT - unless you wanted to be off sick the next week and lose a stone or two (ie no, you WOULD be very sick, no skyving needed). They don't actually enforce the policy of not eating at your desk there, they let the after effects do that for them.
If it's an external keyboaed these days it just goes in the WEEE bin, we use Dells at work and I know how much a) a new keyboard costs, b) my time is worth and c) I really can't be arsed to even go there. Only exception is if it's a Precision laptop in which case we just hose down the motherboard and order a new keyboard (I KNOW it won't kill a Precision, come the nuclear armegeddon those cockroaches will be using them). Other laptops we also have spare keyboards but unless it's still got 2 or 3 years of warranty left it gets WEEEed (after removing the SSD that is).
We had an old Solaris box at my previous work that was the mail server and it just kept working, but eventually its 10 year on-board battery failed and was not user replaceable (soldered in FFS!) so on the rare occasion it had to be rebooted, it was not the time that was the big problem (got that from NTP shortly after booting anyway, so other than bizarre uptime figures from 1990s BIOS date not a big deal) but that it forgot the SCSI boot disks, so a paper note was left with it telling you what needed to be entered at the boot prompt for it to proceed. Eventually it was retired, but I think it was almost 20 years of use.
SUN and SGI boxes and even HPs had a PROM, not a shabby BIOS. Some real sublevel OS that you could enter by BRK-Stop and recover or reboot when the main OS got stuck and where you could boot or install from network, drive or SCSI-tape.
Every battery is replaceable if you're brave enough.
Why they don't invest another few dollars in a socket has always been a mystery.
Also, whenever I replace a battery, I write the replacement date on the battery itself, and make a little sticky label with the same information for the outside of the case.
> Mostly it was just 00:00, Jan 1 1980
But your files would stamp minutes to hours later.
Directory of C:\DOSUtil
01/01/1980 01:07 AM 3,438 KEY-FAKE.DOC
01/01/1980 02:35 AM 5,120 CORELOOK.COM
01/01/1980 02:35 AM 33,462 FASTOFF.EXE
01/01/1980 02:52 AM 1,536 COLOR.DOC
01/01/1980 03:15 AM 999 SCRNDUMP.DOC
01/01/1980 04:39 AM 64,646 I'M-HERE.EXE
I used to suffer this as punishment for my crime of using Linux in the evenings and Windows for work during the day on the same laptop. For some reason Linux set the clock an hour earlier and then Windows would fail to update it most mornings. I learnt the hard way that a bunch of Active Directory stuff can fail in really confusing ways if your clock is out by an hour.
> Linux using a sensible timezone such as UTC, and Windows using a local timezone and applying any daylight saving difference. That's the kind of amateur hour crap I'd expect from Microsoft.
{I can't believe I am defending MS....}
ARPANET was working in 1972, when unix was young and malleable (and NOT dominant; DEC System 10s may have been a majority). ARPANET crossed four time zones.
DEC/ARPANET ad from 1972: https://postimg.cc/kR8gmHNb
MS DOS did not have built-in networking (hooks, but not the drivers) for about another 20 years (Win311). The most common "networking" was sneakernet. (Yes, I dealt with CompuServe and was always asking what time it was).
As for DOS up to WinME: You are right. Since Windows NT 3: UTC, including NT 4.0 Windows 2000 etc you are wrong and do nonsense unbased and easy to disprove bashing. There are tons of better things to bash on Microsoft, currently mostly their rudeness in GUI with the constant popups and notifications.
You can check in powershell on all NT based windows version (which have powershell) easily: Compare Get-Date with (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime() and check with (Get-Date).IsDaylightSavingTime(). Which is currently false in Germany. Oh boy how I hate that DST nonsense.
> Last I checked Windows (10) wants hardware time to be local time.
Oh THAT was you point. You should have said so! Reading minds over the internet is not there yet. And that discussion is aeons old. Why should the BIOS not be local time, it is irritating that you enter the BIOS setup, and the time shown there is wrong. You correct the date, and expect that, when correcting it, you have to enter UTC? That is not a sensible expectation. On top it would have other issues: Take DST into consideration, and that many countries have different DSTs, and timezones. And it is constantly changing, the Windows insider blog lists those corrections often, way more often than you'd expect. Why I mention this? The BIOS would need to have it for all countries if you enter the date, and for all those constant changes too. The the UTC-BIOS expectation is simply the wrong approach in the real world.
It is even worse than I said - Since Windows XP, tested:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001
So, AC, what IS your problem? Okay, I needed two days to enter "Windows BIOS time UTC" into a search engine 'cause I didn't care. Linux can use BIOS-local time too.
> Last I checked
must have been around BEFORE Windows XP, and not "Windows 10", as you claim. How I know? That key does not seem to work with Windows 2000, just tried in a VM though, not real Hardware.
Burned, melted, weird colors from weird chemicals, cables without isolation 'cause melted away, rust on "stainless steel" 'cause with chemicals "stainless" means nothing...
The food and drinks on top maybe, depending on how much they value their life or how dangerous the chemicals in that lab were.
I was once asked to fix a home computer that "stopped working occasionally", it looked suspiciously hastily cleaned with traces of a wet wipe on the exterior. Inside was an unthinkable horror, the terrifying kind of spiky, hairy black mould which took to the air as I opened the case.
It turned out that it had taken a full cup of very sweet, milky tea a year ago and then lived in a damp room. The thermal mass must have caused condensation that fuelled the mould. I ended up flooding my workshop with ozone and going over every surface with the strongest disinfectant each respective surface could handle. I shudder to think about people in the same room as that thing when it was actually turned on.
Replacing a PC, lifting up the ancient Compaq to discover, ancient spilled coffee, that had developed into mould, developed into sapient life had a ideology dispute with its neighbours which developed into a nuclear showdown & the inevitable mutually assured destruction. No amount of scraping would shift it so the new PC was carefully placed over it for another four years.
Malachi : We will solve our own problems, as you commanded. The time has come to convert the unbelievers.
Bender : Convert them?
Malachi : To radioactive vapor!
Pre conditions: this happenned in a hospital in the consultant's/secretary's office.
Issue - we had to replace the PC - standard upgrade program.
Problem - PC glued to desk
.
.
.
Old PC was working fine (don't think the 'water level' had got high enough - yet), we just needed to get a crowbar off Facilities to remove it from the desk there was that much spilled beverage holding it down. We left the secretary to clean the desk before we fitted the new one. Assume the consultant was suitably chastised (No, you DON'T want to piss off a medical secretary).
This was not solely restricted to health board - also found the same situation in a major international insurance company.
<anon to protect the guilty and save me from any lawsuits>
I think the most unbelievable one I've had was soup in a laptop, and not just thin watery Cup-a-Soup type but full on chunky home made vegetable. It turned out the user had put their laptop and pot of soup in their laptop bag together (!) and the container lid had fallen off.
It was quite interesting, the laptop actually still worked but the bottom half of the screen was obscured by bits of vegetable floating around! He was fortunate, it cost us for a replacement screen panel but that's all, the remainder was easily cleaned.
Early 90's? No CPU or fan throttling, the PC almost certainly used just as much power sitting there idle as it did working the CPU at 100%. If the user had an especially new screen, it *might* have had some early EnergyStar functions, but not likely. So yeah, turning off both the screen and the PC was pretty much mandatory at any responsible company who didn't have money they wanted to burn :-)
If you want to kill something properly you need orange juice.
I had someone spill orange juice all over my laptop shortly before I was going to give a presentation. I quickly emailed someone my slides and then shut the laptop down. Luckily it was the days before discs were soldered on so it was a quick swap to have a functioning laptop the next day. The original laptop was ruined though...
London, 2003-ish
Minor commotion in the office, my desk’s around a corner so I can’t see what’s going on.
By the time I stand up, I can see one of our Senior Designers running back to the desk with paper towels.
I think, “Ho ho, we know what’s happened here”
Walked over.
Designer, sheepishly, “I spilt some water, but managed to mop it all up. Didn’t get any in the keyboard” And she was right, this was the time when Apple thought it was a good idea to encase their keyboards in a nice transparent acrylic matter collection device, so there was always some evidence of lunch or liquids left in the bottom.
The back of their desk faced me. Experience told me to wipe the bottom rear edge - damp.
Me: “Did you wipe the whole desk?”
I touched the top of her Mac Pro (Dual CPU, maxed out RAM, fancy display card). Wet.
Before I could reach for the power switch… Bzzzzzt, pop. Black screen.
Replacement mainboard.
Well, at 08:31 UTC (when the article was posted), it would have been lunchtime in some parts of Russia, and some parts of south Asia - much of which seems to have a penchant for non-hourly-offset timezones (and many people there wouldn't have been having lunch, because Ramadan)… ;-)
Hang on, it looks as though someone has been editing the Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons timezone map to show the invaded and illegally occupied parts of Ukraine (including Crimea) as being on Moscow time, rather than in the same time zone as the rest of Ukraine.
That's a bit shifty, isn't it, as it could certainly be interpreted as endorsing the invasion (or the person(s) who made such changes could potentially even be an agent for the Russian "Ministry of Truth"?)? Are the occupying invaders actually trying to enforce such a time zone shift on civil life, and, if so, with any success? (I suppose there could just about be an argument for maps reflecting de facto situations (but only with suitable 'temporary' delineation) rather than de jure ones, no matter how unpleasant?)
Slava Ukraini!
I'm the one who made that edit to the map. This issue has already been discussed several times on Wikipedia, and each time the result of the discussion was to show the occupied regions in UTC+3, because the map has always been de facto:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Time_zone/Archive_2#The_map_is_wrong_2
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2023/05#Controversial_edits_to_time_zone_map
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:World_Time_Zones_Map.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:World_Time_Zones_Map.png#Ukraine,_occupied_regions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Time_zone#Impostor_among_Wiki_redactors
Yes, Russia does enforce UTC+3 in these regions, and the people there actually observe it, as reported by many sources:
https://www.euronews.com/2022/12/22/in-occupied-mariupol-russias-rebuild-is-erasing-ukrainian-identity-and-any-evidence-of-war
https://tass.com/society/1568025
https://tass.com/society/1605439
https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-04-15-23/h_00609580d75a9b63187cedb954119ae9
Your accusation is ridiculous. I have absolutely nothing to do with the Russian government, I'm not Russian, I've never been to Russia, I don't even speak Russian, and I don't endorse the invasion of Ukraine. And neither does the map, because it still shows the occupied regions as part of Ukraine, with the border between Russia and Ukraine (white line on the map) as internationally recognized. The map simply shows that these regions observe UTC+3, because that's the reality.
For many years I was the on-call support for manufacturing control systems and related hardware. It wasn't uncommon to get calls at 2:00 am along the lines of:
Them: It's broke and won't run.
Me: Hardware and software haven't changed in 5 years, what happened?
Them: Nothing, it just doesn't work.
Me: This can go one of two ways. You can tell me the dumb thing you did, I can quietly fix it and go back to bed and you can get on with your shift, or you can make me spend 2 hours figuring out the dumb thing you did at which point I am going to have to have a conversation with your plant manager, and their boss. What dumb thing did you do?
Them: Well, I might have...
And that dear readers is the story of my life.
Trying to get the operators to tell me what they did wrong ... although reputation comes into it with the stories that have been spread......
"I cant tell him...... I heard he nailed someone's head to a table for breaking a guage......" "Thats nothing I heard he set fire to the boss's car after the boss parked in his spot..." "Oh hes done that before.... although he does tend to let the boss get out first now"
I had a friend who worked at a school and one of the Macs there (a Mac Classic) stopped working because of something brown and sticky. Or perhaps I should say some things brown and sticky.
The Mac had been set up so that students could load software (Claris Works mainly), but not save anything to the hard drive - if they wanted to save work then they needed to use their own floppy disks. So a broken floppy drive on a machine meant that the machine was, in effect, broken.
The floppy drive on this particular machine had been jammed full of twigs. Why? Who can say. But it definitely put the machine out of commission until the floppy drive was replaced.
That's a very odd thing for someone to try to jam into a floppy drive, and also something people don't tend to have at hand in a computer lab.
Is there any chance this happened during a spell of nice weather when the windows were left open when the students had gone home? I don't know exactly why a bird would think that's a good place to try to start a nest, but it seems more believable to me than a person bringing a handful of sticks from outside with that goal.
Depends on the age of the kids, I guess. Potentially not just physical age, but mental age and/or maturity age. Some kids will often do stupid stuff "just because".
On the other hand, one of my first jobs as a field tech was to visit a university site where one of the library PC floppy drives had failed. I found a couple of coins in it. Turns out that over the summer, there are Open University students there and many are mature students and sometimes have very young children in tow :-)
Another site visit was to nursery/infant school where a CD had been inserted that didn't show up and wouldn't eject. Tray-less CD and the little darling had missed the CD slot and slid it into the gap between the drive and the case. Along with the three others I found in there when opening it up :-) (Didn't charge for a non-warranty call-out since it was our badly designed case that allowed it happen in the first place! At least the school had the forethought (or past experience) to pay for tray-less CD drives))
That must have been an aftermarket modification then- Wikipedia says Apple never shipped the Macintosh with a Twiggy drive.
I was in school in the 2010s and kids still do this even at all ages. All the CD drives (obsolete by the time I left school) were either glued shut or full of folded bits of paper, because during an ICT lesson apparently the best thing people could think to do was fold up paper and jam it in any hole they can find on the computer.
Had that before, although PC floppies are significantly cheaper than MAC ones. Those shutters on 3.5 floppies did have a habit of leaving themselves behind when the little ladies wanted their flopppies back at the end of lesson (Note: who used which machine was always traceable, at worst by the login times, and it was mandatory for them to keep flopppies in a case - a lot didn't bother, hence bills to mummy and daddy for a new floppy drive) - 2 x expansion blanking plates can get the sleeve out quite easily for those skilled at it. Quite a nice budget earner for us, covered the damage we couldn't attribute to anyone (like missing mouse balls). The joys of working in a school....
Was at work when I got a call from my wife:
[wife] My laptop is making a strange beeping sound and there's water coming out of the corner of it!
[me] Umm, OK, what did you do?
[wife] I spilt a glass of water on it
Told her to shut it down and leave it to dry. Laptop was fine the next day and soldiered on for a few more years.
Years ago (well it is 6 years since I left that company and it was a long time before that) we used to run Compaq Prolinea machines (big beige machines), these had a solid metal cover on top so no liquids could get in that way. However they sat on very thin rubber feet (only about 2mm in height).
Along came user with coffee or tea - usually with sugar in it. It would get spilled on the desk and mostly mopped up - the machine wouldn't show any ill effects and keep on working as it was fine.
But along comes someone who needs to move the pc for another reason - after 5 minutes of crud clearance you would reach the chassis only to find it is very effectively glued to the desk, and requires prying to break the bond. Most of the time we could get it free without damaging the desk surface but a few times.
Before smoking was banned in most buildings, I had the opportunity to service a Toshiba Tecra used by a heavy smoker... who also spilled some coffee with milk/cream on the keyboard some days previous to the call and continued to use it! The complaint was the keys were not responsive!! I leave it to your imagination to identify the smells that came out of that when I first opened it up. I didn't have to finish the job, my boss declared it a bio-hazard and called it a day. Thank you Sir!!
One day my hand held Brother scanner, that lived on the window shelf behind my desk, stopped being detected when I plugged its USB cable in. Quick call with Brother who asked me to RMA it.
It arrived back a couple of weeks later, in working order, with a note that there was sign of liquid damage but they'd repaired it under warranty at no cost (kudos, Brother!). "Water damage??" I thought, "it's above and behind my PC, nothing fluid ever goes there!".
Some months later and we get a torrential downpour, from an unusual wind direction, while I was home. There's water coming in via a previously unnoticed leak above the window and begins pooling on the shelf...
Also failed school PC in Somerset, due to water ingress by situating PC right under a leaking glass roof where water worked its way
onto the motherboard.
Ex Mrs Oncoming Scorn (During the Monsoon summer of 2007 IIRC) on seeing a tiny leak in the conservatory roof, where dripping water from the guttering was being blown under the flashing at the point where the flashing of corrugated plastic roofing sheets met brickwork just in the corner of the tenement decided to clear the drainpipe & prop it up via the sons bedroom by poking the guttering with a broom handle. The result was the guttering seperating from it had happily been situated for years.
The result of this was a massive Niagara outpouring straight on to the previously minuet leak flooding the conservatory.
My father-in-law (W W Chandler) was trying to debug a persistent fault in the first Colossus II (which he built most of) in early June 1944 at Bletchley Park, and stayed overnight to try and fix it after everyone else had gone home. The rain started and then got heavier, the roof leaked, and a pool of water started spreading across the floor to where he was working on live 500V valve circuits.
Not being easily discouraged, he put his wellies on and carried on working standing in the water. Found the problem (a parasitic oscillation IIRC) about 3am and fixed it, went home.
Next morning (June 4th?) it successfully ran for the first time and cracked the German High Command codes which confirmed that they'd fallen for the Calais feint, and D-Day was authorised as a direct result.
If is wasnae for his wellies... ;-)
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