Comments on: What Was The Biggest Mistake You Made As a Computer Technician?

By: Mount-n-Tech PC Repair

Mount-n-Tech PC Repair — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:27:59 +0000

Here’s you a good one you may get a kick out of, I repaired a pc for my sons friend and he had no money to pay for the repair despite having a job at foodlion, so after fixing the pc, he said he was going to bring me some chedder and pepperjack cheese from where he worked as payment, well I got the chedder chesse but never did get any pepperjack. True story

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:21:43 +0000

Quick hard drive diagnostic because if the hard drive is really bad (which it will usually be if you spend months shutting it off my removing the power cord) a quick diagnostic will usually show it’s bad and you never have to perform the long full hard drive diagnostic.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:19:03 +0000

However one of the stupidest things I’ve done:

I was trying to be nice and make a friend out of it. I heard someone needed some computer and I offered to look at it for free, not a big deal. Big mistake. Not even the power button worked that well anymore. The computer had been shut off incorrectly for far to long. Instead of doing the obvious like checking the hard drive w/ a simple diagnostic tool you can find off the hard drive manufacturer’s website or through Hiren’s disk, I used chkdsk. It took several hours and never completed and instead eventually rebooted. I guess either windows was too corrupted for it to work w/ chkdsk or the hard drive was bad. But I spent the whole day waiting on chkdsk I never did the quicker method of just running hard drive diagnostic. Not a big deal, said I would do it for free. But it made me look bad because I spent several hours and never fixed even though I said I was a computer expert. The friendship never materialized either because I found out that we would only communicate when there was a computer problem.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:11:42 +0000

Someone here said something about dual booting w/ linux and windows and the grub loader. He said he removed linux and had to reinstall windows because of the grub loader. That’s UNNECESSARY. Go to the recovery console using the windows disk and recreate the boot sector, Done! It’s not that hard. I used dual-booting when I was in college because I was taking a computer science course on linux. When the class was done, I removed linux and recreated the boot sector and everything worked fine.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:36:57 +0000

One of my superiors was working on the company server because it ha problems.I walked in an asked “have you tried rebooting it”.He stared at me and I was embarrased.

By: DJMonsta

DJMonsta — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:54:30 +0000

Not really had many but i bought a fairly nice motherboard off ebay for my then new build. I bought a cheap celeron to test it, didn’t wanna use my current core 2 duo E8600 coz i didn’t wanna blow a £200 cpu. Anyway, put the system together, and system would just keep restarting 30 seconds into the startup. Rubbish i thought, and blamed the second hand motherboard. So got rid, bought a cheap Gigabyte mobo and tried again. Same thing. As it was the first time i’d ever used LGA-775 socket mobo’s and cpu’s, turns out i hadn’t fastened the heatsink and fand screws onto the mobo properly!! Doh!!

By: rr

rr — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:24:13 +0000

Going to school for PC technician instead of fiber optic cabling, or something else.
If I did cabling I would working now making big bucks as I live in Southern California and that will always be in demand. The PC industry is flooded and a poor career choice IMO. To the guy who did autobody 25 years I hope you have everything you want already because to switch that for PC tech is a bad move I think.
You may think I’m a nay-saying but I’m just being honest. As far as PC knowledge I know tons and even do some programming so its not that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Anyway that’s my biggest mistake.
as a hobby I love computer stuff and projects but as a living, the same amount of study would give me 10x pay in any other area than PC Tech.

By: JT

JT — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:34:58 +0000

I remember getting a call from a friend saying that his desktop had changed which had a “virus your computer has been infected bla blah wallpaper” that would never switched back to the windows xp one or others thems.

So i Run several antivirus and malware tools thinking that it might possibly fix it.Yet still no changes.even smitfraudix didnt changed it.

To get rid of it for once and for all…FORMAT was the only solution left.Backup everything on another partition…fresh copy of windows and installed drivers and applications and network connectivity.
All neat.

Was not really a mistake for me until i found on that there was a quicker solution to fix that problem on a blog 1 week after that when i was browing the net that on what that “desktop virus” problem was to be supposedly.

Its the thing you find in display properties>customise desktop>add web page to desktop and you just had to delete it!.
LOL i laughed/so yes i guess i spent a lot of time in front of his pc re-installing everything..instead i could have done that but i didnt know about this solution when on the site.Well it also made me confident because i gave my best re-installing everything os drivers and apps and network and left no mistake doing it ang got the pc fresh and running and also go that my friend thanked me for.

i’ve learnt from that that format isnt the only option and also i was young and still learning in my it essentials course and it was my third or fourth computer repair task.So yes i guess its a mistake that i’ve learnt from

By: ray

ray — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:27:54 +0000

hi all

i have been pottering with pc’s bout 7 yrs and a few months ago a friend of my g/f who works in a school told my g/f that if i was interested in a pc for spare parts as they have 1 at the school that is going to be thrown out, as the county technition has now released it for disposal.

however upon opening the pc as it wouldnt boot up i noticed that the cable was not attatched to the HDD plus the HDD cable has what looked like a porpouse made hole cut into it, and all the pins on the HDD were bent which i carefully straightend with a small metal footbal pump adapter i replaced the cable expecting the HDD to have been formated, however it booted up with no problems to which is in constant use, the pc is a DELL Dimension XPS T700r

By: PR Tech

PR Tech — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:57:22 +0000

The first couple of months I was out on my own in the computer repair industry (9 years ago), my ex-boss asked me to install a faster processor into his system. No problem, right? Well, I didn’t know you needed to apply thermal paste (grease) between the processor and the heatsink. I fried the processor and motherboard. My ex-boss took it in stride, but I still feel bad about it to this day.