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Comment by DoubleGlazing | Hacker News Reader

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company.

Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense.

Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a/c background noise one of the other admins noticed the PCs in the problem row weren't making any fan noise. A quick investigation revealed that the PSU fans had been blocked with paperclips and bits of paper causing the CPU to overheat.

An older member of staff who was in that row found the PSU fan noise irritating and just decided to take action to stop it. She genuinely didn't realise she was breaking the PCs.

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I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally.

I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and the video card had failed.

I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets recycled.

While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer before it turned off and didn't turn on again, which is whys she brought it in.

Oh, never underestimate people.

On the Pentium Overdrive! days, a guy came to my father's shop complaining that the computer wouldn't turn on. Turns out that he had installed the process in a different orientation "to see if it would go faster". Spoiler alert: it didn't.

Neither the CPU nor the motherboard failed (nor did the fancy overdrive socket). Once the CPU was installed correctly, it worked again.

My 'best' related Best Buy story (well, Future Shop a decade ago, but it is/was the same company) while working in the ConnectPro department (name for Geek Squad at Future Shop, all the same tools and procedures):

A person who had purchased a laptop a few hours prior came back into the store furious because the device shut off and wouldn't turn back on. I pressed the power button and it flashed indicating the battery was dead. I connected the laptop to power and told her it needed to be charged. She then threw a retail tantrum because the salesman had apparently told her it was wireless.

I think this really says more about a lack of basic science education in high school. People plug 1800W space heaters into $4 power strips and cause fires. I think by the time you graduate you should at least be able to understand that watts of electricity are the same thing as heat.

I had a similar mystery, except it was like every 5th or 6th cube and only happened in the winter. Turned out there were floor mounted heating ducts, and certain cubes were placed just right so that the hot air went directly into the PSU.

Some combo of heat, dust, and static caused gunk to accumulate in the fans, and eventually either the PSU or video card would overheat. The escalation usually came in that the monitor was tinted blue or pink.

I must confess that the eleven year old me didn't realize it would be a problem to put a screwdriver through the PSU grid to stop the fan from making noise and that it may have been preventing that musheen from working properly at some point.

Yeah, I am sensible to some sound :/.

The eleven years old me was doing the contrary: starting a crappy/sticky PSU fan with a screwdriver not realizing there was a "slight" risk of electrocution (never got a chock however, I guess I was somewhat aware of the danger).

I'm guilty of this at 14; this was the only way I could get away with late night BBSing since the fan was loud and other folks would be disrupted into halting my modem joy. Only when our EE neighbor saw my rig and sternly told me not to do that did I realize it meant anything at all. sheesh

I had a failing PSU that would shut down after an hour of intensive load. I booked it for RMA and was already packing the thing, when I noticed that a stray piece of plastic was stuck in the fan grill, blocking it. Worked fine ever since.

I've seen a similar accidental case where some internal cable in the PSU had gotten dislodged and was partially in the path of the fan blades, with the repeated contact making a chainsaw-like noise. Luckily it was discovered before the fan cut through the casing on the wire.

Hah, I had a SATA cable jammed into one of my GPU fans. I cursed Sapphire for building such a poor card that failed out of the box.

If you'd kept asking the 5 whys you'd have gotten to the real problem: noisy machines in open offices. You should have thanked the lady who put the paperclips on the fans.

That office was brutally loud. 100 people in a low ceiling office. The a/c was bad, but the plotters the engineering guys used were particularly brutal.

We also had dot matrix printers churning out triplicate documents.

They were lucky, us in IT were technically working illegally due to the noise in our part of the building. So many fans in so many server racks. Plus super cold a/c.

Out of curiosity, what happened to her ?

Nothing. Head if IT had words with her and she acknowledged What she did.

HR also offered her a free hearing assesment. It was a semi-state co so they actually cared for their staff.

> offered her a free hearing assesment

Hmm, doesn't sound like she needed it. Maybe only to figure out if her hearing was better than normal.

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