My old boss told me to always swap the RAM first, and a recent job proved him wrong

I worked at a small shop in Toledo for about five years, and the owner had this rule: 'When you get a no-post, always swap the RAM first, it's the cheapest fix.' I followed that for ages. Then last month, I was on a house call for a gaming rig that wouldn't boot. I did the RAM swap with known-good sticks from my kit, nothing. Spent an hour on it. Out of ideas, I finally pulled the GPU on a hunch. The PCIe slot had a bent pin, probably from a rough upgrade. Straightened it with tweezers, and it posted instantly. That 'cheapest fix' rule cost me and the client extra time. It made me question if we rely too much on old shortcuts instead of proper troubleshooting. Has anyone else had a go-to piece of advice that totally failed them on a specific job?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_rose25d ago

Yeah, @jordan_young is right about routines eating your day.

jordan_young1mo ago

Old rules die hard. My first shop swore by reseating every cable before anything else. Wasted a whole afternoon on a dead PSU once. You get stuck in a routine.

adams.blair1mo ago

That's the tech version of checking if something is plugged in, @jordan_young. It becomes a weird ritual. You'll be reseating RAM for an hour on a machine that just needs a CMOS reset, all because some guy in 2004 had a loose SATA cable one time. The routine just eats your whole day.