While interviewing a technician candidate in my previous company, my partner and I asked him what was a difficult problem he faced in his work and how he overcame it. He answered that sometimes the PCI interfaces couldn’t be detected by the motherboard, so what he did was clean the contact points of the PCI card with an eraser. Logically of course you’d think that that wasn’t a good thing to do because you could accidentally scratch off the contact points.
Last week however I was encountering some problems with my SDRAM because my computer would reboot unexpectedly. Reviewing the system logs via the Windows Event Viewer the error messages showed that memory could not be “read” thereby pointing to a hardware problem in the RAM. I unsnapped and re-snapped the offending RAM module a couple of times (be sure you are properly grounded when you do this) and still had reboot problems.
So I swapped the 512 MB RAM with a 128 MB module and everything worked out fine, no more reboots. But who would want a PC with only 128Mb RAM? Suddenly remembering what the technician said, I took a trusty Mongol pencil on my desk and gently started scratching on the RAM’s contact points. To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice any difference between the before and after scratching state. But would you believe that 512 MB RAM was working fine afterwards?
Don’t you just love the ingenuity of Pinoys?, try at your own risk though 😀