Never Dismiss the Absurd

[RoyGBiv]

This is a new one on me.

A few weeks ago, I built a system for a co-worker. It had good parts, good software as far as Windoze goes, and I spent a lot of time with it to make sure the case was arranged well, had proper ventilation, good connections, etc. I even held it for two days to run stress tests on it to make sure it wouldn't blow up the first time he tried to do something out of the ordinary. When I delivered it, it was in very good shape, and for about 24 hours, he was quite happy.

Then one day at work, he came to me and said, "My computer is doing something weird. I'll be sitting there just web browsing or something, and it reboots all by itself." I didn't like the sound of it already. "Random" re-boots while web browsing are not an unknown phenomenon to me and are not caused by anything good. I went through a series of questions to figure out what he'd done to it in terms of installing software since he'd had it. Nothing unusual. I asked stupid questions to make sure he hadn't done something like get annoyed at the sound of the case fan and remove it. (Encountered someone who did that once.) Asked if it was in an area where it could get airflow. All sounded well, so I scheduled a time to go out to his house and look into it.

To make what could be a very long story a bit shorter, I spent way too much time looking into every obscure thing I could imagine that might be causing this. All hardware checked out. Location was fine. Software seemed fine. Websites browsed weren't unusual. I ran memory test, CPU tests, exchanged parts, re-installed certain pieces of software after totally removing them, to the point of editing the registry. And the weird part was, I never witnessed it do one of those reboots. I decided to leave, let him do his normal routine, and see if I'd accidentally fixed whatever the problem was. I'd barely walked in the door when the phone rang with him on the other end, telling me it did it again.

I was beside myself. I had no clue what was causing this, and I'd been through everything, absolutely everything ... well, except one thing.

I decided to go back out to his house because I knew it would drive me crazy thinking about it. I even packed up my spare machine to let him use while I took his home to mess with it some more, replacing the motherboard if necessary because I had about decided that was the only thing it could be. When I got there, I decided to sit down with it and just do what he had been doing, using his browser history to go to the same sites, and see if I could reproduce the problem. His home page was some audio discussion forum, so I typed in www.google.c ... reboot. I didn't even finish typing in the address, and I felt something, warm and furry, on my foot. I looked down and saw a cat staring back at me, a cat that had apparently spent the entire time I was out there before hiding and checking me out to see if I was okay. After deciding I was, he came to mark me and snuggle with my leg.

And that leg was right next to the tower, and when the cat turned, his head butted up against the front of it, engaging the over-sized reset button on the front of the thing.

A cat.

I opened the case, yanked the reset wire off the lead, closed it, and went home.

[Berserker]

1. Thanks for the

laugh RGB. Now thats a great tech story.

[qanda]

2. That story is hilarious

Thanks for the laugh.

[landdaddy]

3. Oversized reset?

What brand case is that? Good one!

[RoyGBiv]

5. This one ...

The silver triangles on either side of the X are the reset button and power button. They're bigger than they seem in the picture, and note that there is no raised edge around them to prevent accidentally hitting them. They're also pretty loose.

It's a Rosewill and pretty generic, but not a bad case. He picked it out. Had a crap power supply, so I put a good one in it, yet another reason I was clueless about the reboots.

[FormerDittoHead]

4. In case you hadn't heard of this very similar story...

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/specials/usersupport/0,39026162,39148143,00.htm

"Arriving at a private home to fix what was described as the erratic behavior of the family PC, I tried to question the owner as to exactly what was happening. 'Well, the only thing I know for sure,' she said, 'is that every time our dog starts barking at the neighbor's cat, the computer goes crazy.' It took me a few minutes to shake off the stupid look I must have had on my face and start the troubleshooting. I avoided asking any more questions fearing the answers would be as strange as that last one. About a half hour into the job, the monitor started flickering and the system hung up. Almost immediately, I heard the barking of a dog and had a hard time coping mentally with what was happening. At this point, the lady entered the room and said, 'yes, that's what it does'.

"I was about to pack it in and for the first time give up when her husband came in and said, 'it's a good thing we have that electric fence or that cat would be a goner by now.' After making some inquiries, I discovered that when the dog spotted the cat, it would run to the edge of the property and activate the electric fence, which was controlled by a transmitter that was very conveniently located on the corner of the desk, beside the computer."

[RC]

6. Putting the computer on the floor is a very bad location.

It fills up with dust, especially with carpet. And with pets around, loads of hair. Leads to a shortened computer life.