Troubleshooting Guide #1

Good day and welcome back to my "home away from home" webpage.

Today's topic is taken from our textbook and deals with troubleshooting of problem computers. I just happen to own one of these "devices", so I tried the experiment for this topic on that computer.

The scenario for this is as follows: Customer wants to know if the computer will boot and start without a keyboard connected.

I diligently googled it and found all sorts of Yes and no’s, Will it beep? Yes or no.

So, I went home and took “Old Smokey”, disconnected the keyboard, put a video recorder in front of it, and hit the power button. Well…the video I was going to show you has to be hooked to Utube and I'm not quite ready for that. So I'll tell you what happened. The screen came on, all the sounds were correct, and nothing appeared to be wrong. The mouse didn't work and of course the keyboard didn't. I could have connected a PS2 keyboard and got the computer workable, but having a workable keyboard, I just plugged it back in and went on my merry way.

After I was convinced that the machine was alright, and had the recorder turned off, the computer went all to pieces. Now understand that Patsy Cline performed the song much better. And made money, too. Anyway, the computer started running real slow, the screen froze, the mouse refused to work, in general, nothing was cooperating with anything – if you know what I mean.

So, I threatened it with extinction, a big brick, and nothing seemed to work. I tried restarting it, going into “Safe Mode”, restarting it again …

Finally I pulled all power from the entire system, waited for about ten minutes and returned power to the system. When I restarted the computer, guess what! The computer started up and ran just fine the rest of the night.

Now please be kind to me as I have no idea what caused this. What would make the system work slow or how it got fixed.

Am I curious enough to try to duplicate this? ABSOLUTELY NOT! No burning desire to ever mess with this thing again.

With that last comment – you all have a very nice fun filled day.