Empirical and symptomatic diagnosis

I’ve been collecting a few Interesting Calls in the last few days.  Friday I took a completely machine-inept and machine-phobic woman at a plant somewhere in Alabama through a full field-strip of a desktop system chasing a no-POST (turned out to be the motherboard), and when we were through and I was dispatching the call, she was bubbling over all about how she was going to go home and tell her husband what she did at work today!  (I have this little sub-specialty in getting techno-fraidy users through complex procedures and out the other side safely.)

Then I had a fun call with the Webmaster for University of Virginia who lives, of all places, in Homer, Alaska, former hometown of  Tom Bodett.  He was having a problem with a GeoMeasure 820 that kept blue-screening on him.  Somebody had tried to set up an onsite service call last week, in blithe ignorance that There Are No Computer Technicians in Alaska and Service Calls Up There Don’t Work.  I reviewed the case, decided the motherboard-and-memory the guy in India had wanted to send wasn’t a bad guess, but was impractical without an available tech to put the motherboard in.  Instead I sent the memory only, which the customer could put in for himself, and told him if that didn’t fix it we’d Figure Something Out about how to replace the motherboard.

This morning he emailed me back, saying he’d replaced part of the memory and it was still blue-screening and what about a motherboard?  I called him back and found that he’d only replaced half the memory I sent him, did some incomplete troubleshooting of his own, and decided the problem must be in the motherboard.  I jollied him into resetting the CMOS, flashing the BIOS, and installing BOTH the memory sticks I’d sent rather than just one.  He did all this, cranked it up, and then . . . “Wow, this is booting up FAST . . . {Windows logon fanfare} . . . hey, it came right up . . . and I didn’t get any blue screens!  Wow, who would have thought you had to replace both memory sticks?  I was sure it was the motherboard.” We left it that he’d run the system for another couple of days, and if nothing else bad happened he’d send back the old memory and we’d all get on with the world.

The Duke of Argyll leaves the light on for you.  Fnord.