My old boss told me to never trust a 'no power' diagnosis at face value

He said that about 4 years ago when I was still new at the shop in Tacoma. I had a gaming laptop come in with a dead motherboard, or so I thought. The customer said it just wouldn't turn on. I was ready to quote a full board replacement, which would have been over $400. My boss, Gary, made me check the DC-in barrel jack with a multimeter first. Sure enough, it was reading fine, but he had me wiggle the cord while watching the meter. The voltage dropped to zero with a tiny movement. The solder joints on the jack's board connector were cracked. A $0.02 reflow job later and the thing booted right up. It's saved me from ordering so many wrong parts since then. Has anyone else had a simple piece of advice that completely changed your diagnostic routine?

2 comments

2 Comments

casey26118d ago

Oh man, that's a solid one. My version was "always check the cheap stuff first." Had a desktop with constant blue screens. Everyone was pointing at the RAM or the drive. Boss told me to swap the CMOS battery before anything else. A three dollar fix. The corrupted BIOS time was causing all sorts of weird memory errors.

barbara_butler18d ago

Ha, that advice would have saved me a ton of time last month. I was totally convinced a monitor was toast, ready to sell the guy a new one. My coworker walks by, asks if I tried a different power cable. I felt like a total genius... not. It was just the cable. I swear the simplest stuff trips me up the most.