How to fix a computer that “won’t turn on”

“Um… my computer won’t turn on.”

This is the report I get from the other end of the phone, from a student who’s been passed the phone by a teacher.

“It won’t turn on at all?” I ask. This isn’t entirely unlikely; the machines in the lab he’s calling from are old and are from a batch with a known manufacturing flaw that leads the motherboard to pack up at random.

“Oh, er,” comes the reply, “no, it turns on, but I can’t log in.”

“OK,” I reply, quickly realising that the teacher who put him on clearly can’t be bothered with even the simplest diagnostics. “What message does it give you when you try to log in?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what happens?” I venture.

“It says my username or password is incorrect, but I’ve put it in correctly.”

That, my dear moron, is what we call a ‘message’ that appears ‘when you try to log in’. Next step is to check the log on the machine to see if there is anything preventing it from processing an otherwise correct logon. “What number computer are you using?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go and look.”

A few moments silence allow me to put my mic on mute while I bemoan the idiocy of some of our students to LadiesMan. He says he finds my rants entertaining. I hope he does, because he has to suffer them frequently.

“It’s number 12,” comes the eventual reply.

I quickly VNC into the computer and find his username typed in at the logon screen. Instinctively, I click in the username field, and immediately find the problem.

“You’ve typed a space at the end of your username.” I glance down at my keyboard. The last letter of his username is on the top row, so I can only wonder how he hit the space bar by accident.

“Oh…”

‘Oh’ indeed.

VNC

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing and refers to a family of software which allows us to connect to a remote computer’s screen, keyboard, and mouse, via the network and use the computer as if we were actually sitting in front of it. We also tend to use it as a verb; for example:

“I’ll just VNC into the computer…”

…means that I am going to connect to the computer using VNC in order to operate it remotely.

This is extremely useful not only for carrying out maintenance, but also in view-only mode, since it allows us to watch what the user is doing wrong without having to walk halfway across the school, so we can tell them over the phone what an idiot they are instead of having to do it to their face.

Responsibility

There are a few systems in the school that are not our responsibility.

• The ‘Staff Information’ section of the intranet.
• The photocopiers (which are all networked).
• The main phone switchboard (which is computer controlled).

The first of these is designed and maintained by our Deputy Head, who is very IT literate and a reasonably good coder, so we’re happy to let him crack on with the code that ties in with some of the more antiquated MIS systems we’d rather not have to deal with.

The other two are looked after by an external supplier under the supervision of the school’s facilities manager.

They fulfil neither contract with anything resembling competence.

The photocopiers we lease from them are vastly overpriced compared to almost anyone else in the market. We’ve had quotes from Xerox that undercut them. Xerox. They also frequently ignore chronic problems and lie to us about the capabilities of equipment they want to sell us.

The PBX phone system is worse. The voicemail system for the front office regularly locks up, preventing not only the recording of new messages but also losing any old ones that have not yet been played back. We gave up on it years ago and have run a parallel Cisco IP phone system that connects to it. Therein lies the chief problem. When making a call from an IP phone to a PBX phone, or vice-versa, the PBX system will often not hang up the line after the call is finished, leading to a busy signal next time you call that extension.

Bond knows how to clear the problem, even though the system is nothing to do with us. He also knows how to fix it permanently, but can’t do it himself, and the supplier refuses to touch the configuration because they don’t have anyone trained in that part of it. The outrageously poor response times of the supplier has meant that the Head has now devolved responsibility for clearing the problem each time to Bond. At its worst, the problem occurs around 3 times a day.

I can’t quite understand why Bond hasn’t killed someone over it yet, because if I were having to deal with this 3 times a day, there would have been a death by now. Possibly my own.

Do you see this scorch mark?

That’s why your USB stick doesn’t work any more.

The lesson here, I’m afraid, is that if you’re going to save work on a USB stick, buy a higher quality one than the rebranded junk they sell at Boots.

Kudos to the student this belonged to for letting me keep it to take a photo for the blog.

Dear Samsung

I called you about a hardware problem with your NC10 netbook that I’ve been trialling. You almost immediately washed your hands of the problem with the mistaken explanation that it’s a problem with Microsoft’s software. You did so without even looking properly at the issue that I’ve taken the time to carefully document.

Be advised that I am also trialling other manufacturers’ products.

What’s more, those manufacturers had the same problem with their kit, but unlike you they actually care and had already issued fixes for their products in the form of a BIOS update (thus demonstrating it is not Microsoft’s problem), which is why I suggested to your support monkey that the problem needed a BIOS update to resolve it.

You may well have made the decision that you’re not going to support what I’m trying to do because you’re not aiming for my market. However, when we make a £45,000 order for netbooks later this year, the experience I have with you now will greatly determine whether I do business with you in the future. The tragedy is that your netbook is actually quite good, but you are seriously letting yourself down by having morons in your support department.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Delayed reaction

I had a truly awesome confession today. A double confession in fact.

We were called into a lesson this morning where about half the laptops in the room were not connecting to the wireless network. After about 5 minutes of getting nowhere with the problem, it became apparent the symptoms were not making an awful lot of sense. The teacher was valiantly carrying on with the lesson while Overshare and I scratched our heads a lot, but became slowly aware that the IT content of their lesson was not to be. Towards the end, the teacher came over to commiserate with us.

And then came the confession.

“Yeah… the same thing happened with these machines last Thursday.”

Now, by ‘last Thursday’, what he actually meant was ‘the Thursday before half-term’. Half-term being the sort of time when we have plenty of time in our schedule to diagnose problems like this without disrupting a lesson.

It only got worse from then. After the bell went, and I was leaving the classroom with one of the offending laptops, came the second confession.

“Oh I don’t know if this is related, but…”

I suddenly found myself concentrating on not cringing.

“… there’s no power to any of the equipment in the office next door…”

Let’s solve everything with Technology #2

IT professionals, especially in schools, are frequently asked to address problems that are not technical in nature, but that management have decided are best handled with a technical solution.

Today’s instalment is one of my favourite examples of this:

“Students are playing games on the internet during my lesson! Why don’t you block all the games sites?”

Why indeed. Well, you see, its because as fast as we block them, new ones appear. Forgive me if I don’t want to get into a never-ending game of cat and mouse. How about you exercise some classroom control instead? Didn’t you do teacher training to learn this stuff? You wouldn’t ask me to stop them playing cards at the back of the room, would you?

Smoke machine

For several years, I had a couple of brand new, boxed CD drives sitting on a shelf in my office. Yes, CD drives, not DVD. They were once white, but more recently beige. They were completely useless.

Until today, when I finally needed one for a short project. I pulled it out of it’s plastic wrapping, hooked it up, and powered on.

There was a prompt ‘BANG’, followed by some smoke, and an expletive.

It’s not very often that a piece of electronics explodes, but capacitors do occasionally surprise us with their propensity for pyrotechnics.

Everyone hates HP

Of the top ten search terms to have led people to my blog in the last week, seven of them have been the following (in this order):

• bloated hp driver
• hp ******* driver
• hp printer stuck in mirror image
• hp server ****
• ******* hp driver
• i ******* hate hp
• i ******* hate my hp

While it’s great to see the anger, since I also hate HP, I can also offer some help for those with their HP printer stuck in mirror-image mode. First, check that the Mirror Image box is not ticked in Printing Preferences (it’s on the Finishing tab under Orientation). If it’s clear, I would suggest going to the Printing Shortcuts tab, selecting a shortcut other than Factory Defaults, then selecting Factory Defaults again.

The Confession

“Oh, here it comes!”

This is a phrase that you might often hear us utter about 4 minutes after someone arrives with a problem. In they will slope, broken laptop in hand, with an ‘it just done broke’ story. We’ll tinker for a few minutes while the user projects an aura of serene confusion over what could have gone wrong, when suddenly something changes.

The guilt kicks in.

“Oh,” says our visitor, “I did this thing that might have had something to do with it…”

…and then it comes. Mid-diagnosis confessions are quite common. Just as we are about to zero in on the problem, the user will panic and suddenly confess that a few days ago they stuffed a banana into the DVD drive and attempted to cook it using the laser, and that their problem with the screen spurting smoke every time they open Word started just after that.

Curiously, staff are more likely to crack then students. I’m not sure whether this means the students are more ignorant of their own mistakes, or just better at covering them up.