Three hours to fix a loose power connector

Spent half a Tuesday tracking down a random shutdown on a Dell Optiplex. Turns out the 24-pin ATX connector was just barely loose, reseated it and it fired right up. Anyone else waste way too long on stuff that simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel5931mo ago

Last month I killed a whole afternoon on a PC that just needed the RAM reseated.

margaretm231mo ago

My buddy Dave spent 3 hours reinstalling Windows on a machine that just had a loose power cable. I legit don't understand how people miss the simple stuff first. RAM seating is like step one for any no-post situation. You must be building PCs while half asleep or something. It's not that serious just pop the sticks out and put em back in. Takes 30 seconds tops.

joelwells1mo ago

Margaret's buddy Dave clearly didn't waste that time - he just learned a hard lesson about checking the basics first. @daniel593 you should never feel bad about chasing down a RAM reseat issue, because nine times out of ten it's the last thing you check that fixes the problem. Isn't part of the fun of building PCs just the detective work of figuring out what's actually wrong?