A guy at wourk found out that I knew my sh1t so all of a sudden I'm his computer guy... He just showed up with it and asked me to take a look at it... Well, I told him that I do that stuff for people routinely so I sorta asked for that. He keeps asking me how much I'll charge him so he's willing to pay me something but that's not the problem:
I take it home, find out that I have no password or restore disc (There were a bunch of Dell discs, but no restore disc) and I can't log in to the *real* Administrator account because it's Home Edition. I couldn't really do anything more than asses that he needed more memory than the 128MB it shipped with. I popped open the side-panel and took a look at the memory module to confirm the type/speed. I noticed that the clips wouldn't budge because the module was glued it! No biggie. I could still see the label... Micron CL2.5 DDR266. I had barely touched the clips before determining that it was glued in, but just in case I pushed the memory from the top to make sure it was still firmly seated (It didn't budge). I told him the next day that I couldn't log in to see if I could clean up his system nor could I backup/restore his PC, but I HAD determined that he needed more memory (The system only had 128MB w/ XP Home). I had the PC ready to give back to him with absolutely nothing done to it IF he didn't want to share his password with me and couldn't get the restore disc. He left work early and I was left with the PC. Over the weekend while I was at my other job, I was reminded that you COULD log in as Administrator from Safe Mode and that was all I really needed to do to remove Spyware and crap. I was there all weekend, so I could only ask my twin brother to do it and give up some other computer work of his own. He reported that the system would not even turn on! It was a very uncomfortable weekend at my other job where I was panicing trying to figure out what was wrong before I had to give it back Monday morning. I determined pretty quickly that touching the glued-in memory had probably created a bad connection (Glue bits and what not) or ESD had fried it. Either way, with it being glued in there was no way to confirm that by trying other memory because it was freakin' glued in! What the Hell was Dell thinking?! 30hrs later, my brother had gotten the glue covered module out. Sure enough, there was glue all over the contacts and in the socket. No other memory would work in that socket but putting memory of our own in the other socket correctly proved that Dell is retarded. I can't just give this guy my memory, but I dread telling the guy that his computer died before I even did anything to it. If only he hadn't left early he would have gotten my print-out stating what I needed and that nothing had been done but he needed more memory (I was very professional ).
I'll be seeing him in an hour. Screw Dell. Did they not expect glue to cause a problem when the memory dies? Did they not even realize that the glue could be 100% responsible for killing the memory AND prevent an easy fix?! I'm vigorously scraping glue off the contacts with my fingernail while SP2 installs. Maybe it still works, but more likely if ESD didn't kill it in the first place all this man-handling and glue scraping has (Rubbing glue bits off with my static-inducing shirt!). Not only that, but now he will be getting rid of one module for another when he upgrades and that is NOT COOL because I could be blamed.
I take it home, find out that I have no password or restore disc (There were a bunch of Dell discs, but no restore disc) and I can't log in to the *real* Administrator account because it's Home Edition. I couldn't really do anything more than asses that he needed more memory than the 128MB it shipped with. I popped open the side-panel and took a look at the memory module to confirm the type/speed. I noticed that the clips wouldn't budge because the module was glued it! No biggie. I could still see the label... Micron CL2.5 DDR266. I had barely touched the clips before determining that it was glued in, but just in case I pushed the memory from the top to make sure it was still firmly seated (It didn't budge). I told him the next day that I couldn't log in to see if I could clean up his system nor could I backup/restore his PC, but I HAD determined that he needed more memory (The system only had 128MB w/ XP Home). I had the PC ready to give back to him with absolutely nothing done to it IF he didn't want to share his password with me and couldn't get the restore disc. He left work early and I was left with the PC. Over the weekend while I was at my other job, I was reminded that you COULD log in as Administrator from Safe Mode and that was all I really needed to do to remove Spyware and crap. I was there all weekend, so I could only ask my twin brother to do it and give up some other computer work of his own. He reported that the system would not even turn on! It was a very uncomfortable weekend at my other job where I was panicing trying to figure out what was wrong before I had to give it back Monday morning. I determined pretty quickly that touching the glued-in memory had probably created a bad connection (Glue bits and what not) or ESD had fried it. Either way, with it being glued in there was no way to confirm that by trying other memory because it was freakin' glued in! What the Hell was Dell thinking?! 30hrs later, my brother had gotten the glue covered module out. Sure enough, there was glue all over the contacts and in the socket. No other memory would work in that socket but putting memory of our own in the other socket correctly proved that Dell is retarded. I can't just give this guy my memory, but I dread telling the guy that his computer died before I even did anything to it. If only he hadn't left early he would have gotten my print-out stating what I needed and that nothing had been done but he needed more memory (I was very professional ).
I'll be seeing him in an hour. Screw Dell. Did they not expect glue to cause a problem when the memory dies? Did they not even realize that the glue could be 100% responsible for killing the memory AND prevent an easy fix?! I'm vigorously scraping glue off the contacts with my fingernail while SP2 installs. Maybe it still works, but more likely if ESD didn't kill it in the first place all this man-handling and glue scraping has (Rubbing glue bits off with my static-inducing shirt!). Not only that, but now he will be getting rid of one module for another when he upgrades and that is NOT COOL because I could be blamed.