Whats a tech issue that drove you insane but turned out to be something simple after ?
Whats a tech issue that drove you insane but turned out to be something simple after ?
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So im sure most of us had this some tech issue drives you insane you try everything start with more serious things and then when you figure it out its something so simple that you facepalm.
Mine was on an older PC it kept having issues turning off or not turning on otherwise it worked properly.
Tried pretty much everything: psu, ram, cmos clear, cables, default bios, etc.
The issue turned out to be a faulty power button in the end…
The little black pin on older hdd (I was about 12 years old)
holy fuck i literally went insane and almost gave up
so basically:
internet worked fine until one day when i woke up and booted my computer, i didnt have access to steam,discord etc. took a look at event viewer to see that my ipv4 was missing??? okay, reinstalled the lan drivers (since i use ethernet). restarted the computer, nothing. looked online and saw that you might need to use command prompt and specific commands to reset the firewall and ip. didnt work either. by that point i thought something must be wrong with the router. restarted the router multiple times, nothing. i then tried to hard reset it, because that was my only hope. i was so anxious and waiting there next to my computer. will..it..work… turns out, yes it fixed it! i felt so happy and really thought i was in nasa and just sent a rocket into space. few hours later, IT HAPPENED AGAIN… i was literally about to just give up and not work with computers ever again. then my mom came and said: “Does the wifi extender need to be on all the time?” i literally rushed downstairs to unplug it and voila! everything works til this day. (note that it happened a few weeks ago).
I had something similar with some USB Hub. I went through bios reset and windows reinstall before I’ve noticed that cliped cable (because of some very tight zip tie) from the USB Hub.
My old HP Probook had issues with the Intel ethernet adapter being screwed up every power cycle (showing “Device could not start” until I manually installed the right driver again). Tried every single thing, including driver related things, tried disabling driver updates through Windows Update, etc. etc.
Turned out that Windows Update had a driver from some other adapter it deemed suitable that was slightly newer than the one it should actually run on. It kept installing that *every, single, time*, no matter if I had internet, had Windows Update disabled in every single way, it just did it.
Found a simple unofficial firmware updater, ran it, rebooted and that was somehow all I needed to do. Never had the problem again.
No idea what the program actually did as basically nothing changed as far as I could discover.
*Thanks Windows…*
For months, I had the issue that stand-by didn’t work, and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I discovered it was a crappy Trust game controller that prevented my PC from going into stand-by.
My pc was not turning on after repasting.
My power button was loose i had to press harder
A recentish one I had was at work. I manage a number of remote systems that function as distributed repostiories for our main server that span, well, the globe, so maintaining proper network connectivity is essential, as traveling to Europe to troubleshoot is not really feasible, and sometimes the local techs leave me wondering how they have jobs. Anyways, I had 1 system in particular that wouldn’t register in DNS and so couldn’t replicate the contents for distribution. Spent a solid 2 weeks following every trail I could think of to no avail, even had other departments checking things, like our networking department checking switch configurations) and was about to have the site attempt to reimage the system (which I really didn’t want to do because again, sometimes they leave me wondering how they have jobs) and an idea struck me to check the IP configuration settings to see something. There’s a check box in the advanced DNS settings that says “Register DNS,” that by some means became unchecked. Checked the box and apply and suddenly everything is working again.
As a teenager I built my first pc and forgot about spacings for the motherboard. I had a meltdown but one day I put my motherboard onto cardboard and called it a day. Until last summer when I realised what a stupidity I done
Lesson learned, don’t forget about spacings
First “real” gaming PC back when I was a kid. Ordered one online to get it delivered. PC kept crashing ingame time after time.. Was at my wits end.. Finally called support (which took a few days I’m ashamed to admit, I was – and am – way too stubborn :D), turns out I simply had to remove the protective foam inside the pc case….
Cache. Always cache.
Recently actually. Computer kept BSOD’ing on me after about 15 minutes of uptime. Even when reinstalling Windows it would BSOD. I was going insane, nearly threw the damn thing out after a week of troubleshooting. A helpful poster here suggested I test my RAM, and it turned out I had a bum module. Easy peasy, replaced all my RAM chips.
BSOD in recovery the next morning. Made a new boot media. Same problem. Guessed maybe it was the drive. Replaced that too, same problem. Thought “ain’t no way I’m this unlucky, might as well see.” Turned out the new RAM I bought also had a bum module in it straight from the factory.
2 weeks of struggles on that one. 3rd time was the charm on that RAM.
Sticker on cpu cooler. Built a lot if pcs and this still happens to me some times.
I wanted to set up a NVME RAID0 as the primary OS drive. I know it’s not the best thing to do, just wanted to tinker around and see some of the high benchmark numbers. I am already familiar with RAiDs, so I didn’t expect any problems.
So I put the SATA configuration from AHCI to RAID, created an RAiD0 array, but the Array was never visible in the winwows installation. I sideloaded the raid drivers before the installation, but nothing. Tinkered around for hours, days and weeks. Read every manual I could find, lots of tutorials and forum posts. No success. Finally gave up and used the nvmes separately.
Months after that, I randomly recognized there are two settings in my BIOS. Obviously, a NVME drive is not a SATA device. So putting the SATA mode to RAID was not going to help me. There was another setting on the same page, I just should have scrolled down, where I could set the NVME mode to RAID.
Tried it again, worked right away. I felt so dumb.
My display suddenly just started flashing off and on. At first I thought my GPU was dying so I went ahead and troubleshooted my entire rig, removed ram and gpu and tried onboard graphics.
Turns out it wasnt an issue with the rig, it was just the monitor.
Built a new PC last year, couldn’t get it to boot, the Q-code showed a “memory or CPU memory controller error”, I spent hours only to figure out that I wasn’t pushing the second stick of RAM properly in its slot.
my decade old pc stopped giving video after clearing the table under it, but the best part is that it didn’t always do that
it started out slowly, like the screen would go black after few days, then it started to become very common until I couldn’t have it give video anymore no matter what
I removed the gpu to clean it and check if it was something faulty inside , seem like it was all good, went to put it back and …. where’s the little plastic thing that holds the gpu in place on the motherboard ?
put it back with sightly more force than usual and the pc started giving video again after an week in the dark, lucky january I could put the old man to rest and got myself an well deserved upgrade
30+ years working in IT and USB super-position still mystifies me to this date.
All my usb devices started disconnecting on my new build, growing increasingly frequent until I couldn’t go more than a few minutes without everything disconnecting and reconnecting.
Turns out it was some power draw problem caused by the internal usb devices in my system, solved by a powered internal usb hub so they were getting power directly from the psu instead of the mobo. Finding the thread that lead me to that solution took months.
Fifa’s career mode is my chill out game. When I got my, far from slow, PC and found it couldn’t open an EA game I thought wtf
Turns out my issue is the same issue as everyone else and the EA app is dog shit.
PC at work was lagging dramatically. Huge problem, couldn’t figure out what was causing it and I held this thing for weeks.
Turns out, the drive in it was cloned. Multiple times. Because no one wanted to bother putting the software back on it.
So it was lagging out the rear simply due to the massive amount of different computer drivers that were on it.
Almost embarrasing, really… after building my PC, I switched it on for the first time – and the screen remained completely black. Spent a lot of time checking everything again. Spent some time simply waiting for something to show up on the screen (first POST with a new MB+CPU can take a while, maybe?).
I was ready to give up. I switched on my TV to distract myself from the PC issues. And there it was: The BIOS displayed on my TV screen. I had plugged in both DVI for my monitor, and HDMI for my TV. PC decided that default output should be HDMI.
Ohhh I had a good one, sorry for my english.
Some keys on my laptop keyboard aren’t working after cleaning, proceed to troubleshooting it, bought 2 replacement keyboards because it’s hard to find the same exact model, disassemble the laptop completely but stop before disassembling the keyboard because you need to break the plastic pins that are securing the keyboard to the main body, had given up then proceed to reassemble it and cleaning it again sideways and from the outside furiously, it works, WTF… I don’t know what I do but probably the keyboard is dirty and cleaning it sideways helps loosen up the dirt that is stuck inside the keyboard and fix it.
One day, one of my hard drives randomly stopped reading. Then, then other 2 wouldn’t read, and the computer wouldn’t boot. Thought something relating to the pcie control or ram on the motherboard was failing. Stated disassembling the computer, and thought I would have to replace the motherboard (and consequently the processor and cooler.) As I took it apart and was troubleshooting, it turned out one of the ARGB headers was interfering with the hard drives. I stopped using that header, and it’s worked fine since.
My 200mm case fan quit working out of nowhere a few weeks ago. Everything on the computer was only about 6 months old and the fan was fine the day before, but whatever, stuff breaks. I was already planning on driving to go visit family and would pass by a microcenter on the way back, so I just bought a new one. I had to cut corners off of the new square-bodied fan to make it fit into the round space that I needed it to occupy, but I eventually got it mounted and put the computer back together. The new fan wasn’t spinning. I took the front of the case off and it immediately started spinning. It turns out that my son had just pushed on the front of the computer hard enough that it had bent slightly and was pressing on the center of the fan. The first fan probably wasn’t even broken.
My GPU in my first custom build (RX 560 4gb) overheated quite a lot and crashed often. Uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, did software updates, thought its faulty… turns out the 20$ chinesium case didnt offer enough airflow. After opening the case on one side it never overheated again.
Reminds me when I worked with repairing and building PC. I got a call from an old person that had the issue his mouse was not moving as it should he tried to explain it and I tried to help for what 30min. It was like his mouse was inverted right when he moves up the pointer moves down and so on.
Well the issue was he was holding the damn mouse wrong around the buttons at the front of his mouse was in his palm instead of his finger tips that wrong way.
In my 20 years of working with PC´s I never feels so dumb my entire life I could not think of something such simple.
my room was the furthest away from the wifi router. me being so unaware of my surroundings (even in my own room), i completely did not realise that my room has an ethernet port (i mistook it for a tv port). i went to buy a wifi usb dongle (1st mistake) and it did improve very slightly but still bad. bought a wifi extender and it improved slightly but didnt help in fps games where i need consistent ping which the extender isnt giving.
drove me absolute batshit insane that i wanted to sell my pc as a whole and downgrade to a laptop since i cant even make use of my pc. walked to the back of pc and was about to unplug everything where i looked closer at the supposed “tv port” and found out it is in fact, a ethernet port. almost lost my shit at how stupid i was. upgraded my pc since then and have perfect internet since then.
I am on Linux. I couldn’t enable MangoHub with my games from GOG. Turned out I was using an outdated version of Proton.
Coding in Java
Solution: code in something else
fuzzy text in application GUI’s and web browser windows. Took me a while to work out it was the antialiasing setting in my nvidia control panel that was applying itself globally to everything.
Printer not printing. I fucking hate printers. Simple driver reinstall fixed it lol
Not pc related. But you said tech issue so…
Working industrial help desk job. Mechanic couldn’t run a machine because the safety doors acted like they were open.
I asked if he used same part from book. A single sided magnetic switch 4 wire conductor. He would only get voltage on his switch from two wires only. Told him multiple times switch was wrong or was bad as when the magnet interacts with door it should “close the switch” and activate all 4 wires with 24 volts.
Argued with me for days saying it’s software it’s software it’s software. I go through the motions because the “customer is always right” and I reinstall windows NT 4.0 all his software specific to the machine. Still same issue. Man is cursing my name at this point as they are losing 100,000 dollars an hour now with no production from this machine.
We send out a “free” technician and dispatch me. I go out there and they used the wrong switch. A double sided magnetic switch. It looked the same. It the part # is different.
Long story short he used the wrong part and cost his company 5 million dollars of down time over a week because he was too stubborn to listen to me over the phone. Then I had to fly out and fix his machine in 15 minutes. Most frustrating thing ever. People are so stubborn sometimes.
Work pc was super slow on everything, even as simple as shutting down. Turns out someone plugged a usb dock with a usb c interface into my gpu for some reason, so it’s constantly draining power and slowing it down. why..