So far today I’ve seen a lot of retardation. Even more so then most days, and so I’ve decided to share it with people out in Internet land in hopes that it will help make me feel better. Of course the names had to be protected those in question, but anyways here we go.

First up, a fellow got a computer from a police auction. At first when he came in to see if we fix X-Blades I thought he meant Blade Servers the way he was rambling on about a front panel controller that showed temps and fan rpms. He brings it in and its just a crappy gaming case with fans and windows that’s called an XBlade. Still he’s going on about how he went to the company that made it, blah blah blah the long story short is that he wanted a hard drive installed, windows installed, and the front panel display hooked up. I opened the case and noticed that the temp sensors that were running to the hard drive were cut, as was the SATA cable. No biggie, the front panel won’t read the drive temp, but it will still work. So I put the new hard drive he brought in it, were the cops had amputated the previous drive for its role in what ever illegal activity it had participatedin. I assumed it was just a Windows install, and had not tried to turn it on tell this point, after hitting the power button it did not post. Crap. Okay its bad RAM/hardware somewhere. Nope, nothing changed and still no starty. I looked up by the power managment on the board and seen this…

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COOOL!!! Serously, wtf is this? It looks like someone went all Gary Busey on it. Its all scared, a lot of surface mount resistors are MIA as well as a some other important goodies. Also what was going through someones head to when they patched that capacitor in?! I mean really, what the crap is that. Instead of just de-soldering the cap from the board they soldered copper legs to the board, then another capacitor to those? Argh. After further checking the board over, a regulator on the north bridge looked all burnt and cooked, which meant that who ever did this may have cooked more then the board in trying to patch it up. He was more concerned about the crappy front panel thing then the well being of the board when I told him the diagnostic. Sigh.

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