Why, oh why, do computers cause so much frustration? I’ve been building, fixing and breaking computers since I was 14. You would think by now that I would be fairly inured to all their faults. But no, it still gets on my goat when a computer fails. Especially when I have to fix it. To give you an example, a friend dropped off his pc last weekend for me to have a look at. The computer would power on, but would keep restarting. A couple of diagnostics later and the problem seemed to be a damaged cluster on the hard-drive. Fixed the cluster and the computer starts properly.
Then the fun part. I find 3 or 4 different viruses and trojans on the system, so I set about removing them and getting the OS back to normal. As I’m updating anti-virus programs etc., the system shuts down. No blue screen, no errors, just powers off. The system seems to be running ok otherwise. Maybe it’s a heat problem. Check the BIOS and the CPU is at 80 degrees C. Way too hot. I take off the heatsink & fan and find that the thermal paste and come of the CPU. The heatsink looks a bit burned, so it looks like this has been ongoing for a while.
Considering that the system is working ok until the CPU is stressed, chances are that there is no major damage done. I head down to my local PC shop to pick up some thermal paste. No paste, (not much of a pc shop, but there you go, my frustration is already bulding), so I pick up a new fan instead. Pop in the fan and gues what? Nothing happens. Power light comes on, but nothing else. No display, no lights on the keyboard. What have I done? Chances are that I may have damaged the mainboard when putting in the new heatsink. But I can’t be sure because there’s no beeping from the system, there’s no display and the system just locks up on boot. This is fantastic start to the day.
So back to my original question: why are computers so frustrating? No matter how much you understand and know about computers, they are fundamentally a black box. You have no idea what is going in and you have no idea what is going on in there. When your car breaks down, at least you can poke around and make a visual inspection of all the vital parts. While you can see all the parts in a computer, you have absolutely no idea if a particular part is working correctly or not. It’s a black box, and it’s not giving anything away. You know something is wrong, but you can’t see why it is going wrong.
Depending on how much time you’ve spent working with computers, you may or may not have some idea of where to start, but in the end it’s just an educated guess. And you could still be barking up the wrong tree. And several fruitless hours later, you’re still no closer to the answer, and you are really frustrated. And all the while that beige box is sitting on your desk. Doing nothing. And getting away with it.
Tags: computer, cpu, frustration, problems, repair, Technology, whatithink