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Can't Anybody Here Fix PCs?
This article is a reprint
from pg. 19 of the April 1998 edition of PC WORLD
(written by Phil Lemmons)
For decades now, many of us have been unable to tell whether
the mechanic in an automobile repair shop is telling us the
truth about what our cars need. No doubt in the days of the
horse-drawn carriage, many owners couldn't be sure if they
were getting straight information from the livery stable folks
about what their horses needed. Now we face the same problem
with our PCs.
When the screen behaves strangely, is the graphics card at
fault? Could the problem be a loose cable between the monitor
and the card? Could it be the software driver? Is the card
properly seated in the PCI slot? Is the system board talking
correctly to the PCI slots? Is the BIOS configured the right
way to handle graphics memory? Is Windows 95 getting along
well with the BIOS, the driver, and the application that shows
the screen disturbance? Many of us have learned through trial
and error to reinstall drivers and to check cables and the
seating of cards before trying anything else. But the people
who can go further, wielding logic probes, oscilloscopes,
and specialized diagnostic programs, are likelier to be computer
designers than ordinary computer users.
The Death of a Robot
Intractable and mysterious malfunctions are the downside
of the PC's "open" standard. This standard permits
hundreds of different add-on cards and thousands of different
applications to work together - much of the time. But when
things go wrong and we can't get our work done, panic sets
in. Is the culprit a hardware failure or something more ephemeral?
Your workplace may employ specialists to diagnose and fix
PCs. But many businesses must turn to outsiders for help,
and almost everyone must do so when faced with a balky home
PC.
How do we know when to seek professional help? Consider my
plight when half a dozen five-year-old boys were left alone
for hours with one of my PCs. No one ever managed to reconstruct
precisely what happened in that room. My theory is that some
sort of battle raged between five gallant space warriors and
an evil robot with a 90-MHz Pentium instead of a heart. The
Pentium robot lost hands down; it wouldn't boot properly afterward.
An attempt to boot from a start-up disk failed because the
floppy drive had been stuffed with plastic coins. After I
removed them, the PC booted from the floppy drive, but the
hard disk was inaccessible. Even when plugged into two other
machines, the hard disk was unreadable. When the drive started
making a loud sickly click-click-click sound, I threw in the
towel.
Off to buy a new hard disk. Imagine my surprise when the
new hard drive and reinstalled software revealed another problem:
The CD-ROM drive, connected to the secondary channel of the
system board's IDE connector, didn't work. It worked fine
when plugged into the primary channel, but that slowed down
the hard drive. The secondary channel refused to talk to various
other IDE devices as well. Not even reinstalling the Flash
BIOS could restore the secondary IDE channel to health.
Off to buy a new system board. After dismantling the system,
installing the new board, and disconnecting and reconnecting
dozens of devices and cables, I had a working PC again. The
cost: several hundred dollars, plus the skin on my knuckles
and every spare moment of personal time for two weeks.
Reluctance to Seek Help
Why hadn't I simply hauled the machine to a computer repair
service in the first place? For one thing, no warranty should
be expected to cover damage done by a pack of unsupervised
young boys. But beyond that, I expected outside repair to
be expensive and time-consuming, and I felt uncomfortable
not knowing whether the outside diagnosis was correct and
the remedy fairly priced. How could I have known that the
hard drive and system board really needed replacement if I
hadn't put it the time myself?
** Mr. Lemmons then went on to describe the excellent article
in that edition of the magazine about repair rip-offs from
some of the big computer repair chain stores**
Graham's Comments
What Mr. Lemmons was trying to say was that the big computer
stores don't necessarily offer the best service or the best
price. He was lucky. He was able to fix his own computer.
Not everyone has the knowledge to do that and that is why
I started PC Improvements. You can watch me as I work so
you can learn yourself and you will see that I do not rip
anyone off, and that the service is excellent. Give it a
try!
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