Imagine, if you will, that you worked in a company without an IT staff… and the people who help you when you’re having issue have to drive an hour or so to get to you. Ouch, right? Now what if you have a few power outages/surges right in a row and no one at your place of business had bought a UPS for any PC? Add in the fact that suddenly after two of these outages a PC that handles important orders goes down (BSOD’s) and that no management is there that day (vacation) and you have yourself a problem, right?
Well, this situation happened to Jess just days ago. Now, as you all know, I’m in IT, so the first thing she thought to do is call me. She told me the BSOD, and we determined that there was a 99% chance it was a memory error. She then talks to the lady who’s having the issue and they agree they’d like me to come down and check it. Now, I’m a nice guy, so I use my lunch break to come test their system. I burn a copy of MemTest86+ and I go down there. Just seconds into the first test the system starts kicking out errors left and right, beautiful. She had two sticks of RAM in there so I take one out, run the full test, it’s good… I then swap it into the other mem slot to make sure it’s not the Mother Board… nope, still fine. I run one last test with the “bad” stick and it starts tossing errors. Great, she blew a stick of RAM.
I explain the results, tell her she needs to buy another, give her advice, etc. She’s happy, she can work, everyone’s happy. Wonderful. Fast forward to yesterday… the management is back and they’ve decided that it’s impossible for a power outage/surge to blow out RAM… I’m obviously trying to screw them over! One of the big wigs there decides that she will test the memory herself by putting it in a system and booting Windows a few times. Awesome test! I have no idea what they think I was trying to do:
Step 1. Lie about RAM.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!!
Seriously… there’s just no pleasing some people!
