There is a middle aged guy that lives across the road from us and he is fairly good friends of ours. About two weeks ago he comes into my store and complains that his new version of encyclopedia Britannica (the one on the DVD) is not working. Knowing that there was zero chance of the disk being faulty I asked him what kind of errors it was giving, where he responded “it just wont play, I put it in and it doesn’t do anything” After about 2 min of questions we finally worked out that he was trying to shove his DVD version of Britannica into his CD burner. This story gets better though. I sold him a new internal DVD reader with the implicit instructions that I would be around that evening to put it in for him. True enough when I get home I wonder over to his place to find his wife going nuts at him, and him leaning sheepishly over his disassembled computer case. I walk over to find the funniest stuff up I have seen in a while. He had obviously got home and decided to have a crack at it himself, with disastrous results. The silly instruction book had explained how to unplug the power and take the side off the case and then went on to say: “unplug ALL cables from the pre-existing drives” Following those instructions to the letter he unplugged the molex and ide cable from the CD burner and both hdds. However then he started noticing other objects that had little latches on them. I don’t know why but he then pulled up the ram and worst of all the cpu assembly. So anyway I get over there to find his 2.8 ghz P4 lying on the desk, most of the pins bent out of shape, with the heat sink and fan lying next to it, as well as 1gb of ram lying on the desk. Trying not to cry/piss my laughing, I had to explain to them that they had in actual fact totally ruined their CPU and Ram and they would need a new computer. Al least their CD burner and new DVD drive still worked!!!! Needless to say, he was in the bad book that week with his wife
So he removed the RAM - did he actually wreck it? I would doubt it. Did you try and bend the CPU pins back? Just because some pins are bent, the CPU is often salvagable, but if it's too severe - bad luck! And he would not need a new computer - just CPU and possibly RAM replacement - NOT a new computer. But i guess you're a computer salesman after all.
Bent CPU pins are horrible to bend back in my experience and break off easily. Ram sounds like it might be alright. Did he pry the processor itself out or did he actually destroy the socket itself? This is why people should need some kind of license to work on these things.
oh dear.......you got to feel sorry for the guys wreking the most expensive parts of his comp because he probably couldn't swallow his pride and wait for Endoxus to come over. it sounds from the decription like the cpu socket has become slightly 'removed' from the board or he just took the cpu cooler mount off the board and pulled the processor out either way its a good giggle
It was a "bit of a giggle" for me. it was so commical how he had just ripped these components out, without having any knowledge of what they were. to answer the questions. the cpu pins were bent and yes i did bend them back but it never did come back to life. the ram was ok and i reused it in his new machine. so yes, i rebuilt him a machine with a new mobo, and cpu (he had damaged the mobo with his bashing about). the ram, hdds, cd, dvd and sound card were alright though so i guess it wasnt a complete disaster, however this machine was only 4-6 months old and his wife was MEGA annoyed. oh yeh, i'm only a computer salesman while getting through a computer engineering degree (degree needs money!!!!!!!)
this guy is great, my dad once totaled his old p3 by hovering the dust out of case with a 1400w hover and thrahed the **** out of it
Uh...First, did you just go digging for a thread to bring back up? This thread is like 6 months old... Second, how on earth was he ripping him off? He sold him a DVD drive and told the guy he would come install it himself, and then the guy took it upon himself to try to replace it himself, tearing his motherboard apart and destroying his processor in the process. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Spot the person who doesn't understand UK date format - Skylined's comment was on 01-06-05 (i.e. 1 June 2005) and the thread was started on 11-05-05 (i.e. 11 May 2005 or, if you prefer, Guy Fawkes Night, 5 months in the future!) However, I agree with your second point. Ripping him off would have been telling him it was all ruined and making him buy new drives, RAM etc. Doesn't sound like the bloke would have had the sense to know any better and Endoxus could have made a big commission on a big sale and, perhaps, got a gig of second hand RAM and some drives off the back of it. On a different note, who buys a new PC in 2005 without a DVD-ROM drive in it? In fact, I would have thought you'd be hard pressed to buy a PC without a DVD burner in it these days, especially as it's not exactly low spec - 2.8GHz + 1GB RAM - not bleeding edge but certainly not bargain basement.
Well the topic was like the 7th one down on the front page and as ^^ he stated, learn how different dates work. He explained to them, that they needed a new computer because the cpu and the ram (which i doubt was even broken) had bust? Are you certain, you do?
*giggle* - (Zephyr has 1891 posts and doesn't understand europe date formats?) Sorry. In the military, they had a great one - today would be 21JUN05 - the month was always in letters so there was no way people could get confused. For coding, the one I always use is biggest to smallest like this: 2005-06-21 13:21:36 - that way you can always sort sort and get them to show up in an order that makes sense.
Actually, large parts of europe uses the "real" date format, i.e. yy-mm-dd or yyyy-mm-dd, wich is the only way to write if you want to be able to sort dates without special scripts. The way the date is presented here (by default) is the way i have been told is the american format.
Nope - standard in US is mm/dd/yy (or yyyy) No good reason for it except that that is the way we do it.
I'm still puzzled why there isn't an option for date format in the user control panel. AFAIK vB supports it, and I know several others do (phpBB even lets you do any php date() format you like). I still have to think for a while about when the post is, because I spend so much time at bit that I forget how it works in america too....hmygodineedalife:
That's classic... There used to be a site that had a listing of experiences like this. Like people sticking floppy discs in their cdrom drives..
Of course I understand it!!! Psha, how dare you challenge me?! ok, yes. It does confuse me, because vB changes all the timestamps for you, but not the date? Just got twisted around Considering my occupation and my experience, I should certainly hope I have at least an entry-level understanding of computers.... If you would have continued reading on the page, you would have noticed that he reused all of the still-working parts.
