A crayon drawing almost made me replace a graphics card

Got a call for a PC with weird colored lines all over the display. I was sure the GPU was dying based on the description. Took the whole thing apart to inspect and test the card. When I put it back, the lines were still there but looked kind of waxy. I finally rubbed the screen and realized it was crayon marks from the customer's kid. They had drawn right on the monitor while it was off. I cleaned it with a microfiber cloth and everything was perfect. Felt pretty dumb for not seeing that right away.

2 comments

2 Comments

park.joseph1mo ago

Diagnosed a Picasso instead of a hardware failure.

the_faith1mo agoMost Upvoted

Questioning if this is really a big deal though. Sounds more like someone got creative with their error messages. A Picasso isn't going to crash your whole system, so maybe the real hardware problem got missed?