2 Tips to Help Fix Common Hardware Issues

                          

I am pretty sure most computer repairers would agree that the majority of PC issues we come across are self inflicted, often by something the user shouldn’t have done but did, and occasionally by something the user should have done but didn’t. Leaving this aside though, the next weakest link in the chain, in my experience anyway, is presented by the card slots built into motherboards, specifically the RAM slots.

RAM cards themselves are a fairly robust and reliable piece of hardware, problems mostly arise when microscopic particles of dust manage to wend their way down the gap twixt card and slot, thus creating a bad connection. Symptoms are generally zero display accompanied by emitting beep codes, or a fragmented display which sort of resembles a crazy mosaic.

The obvious cure is to clear away whatever is causing the faulty connection, in most cases dust. This is a pretty simple procedure but needs to be done properly in order to achieve any long term success.

Recently I received a call from a friend  whose machine was suffering from the crazy mosaic display. Open arrival at her home the client informed me that she’d been paying a computer tech Rs.500 every 3 months or so to “fix” the problem. It turns out all the computer tech had been doing was removing the RAM cards, giving them a cursory wipe over, and then popping them back into the slots.

This would be a temporary solution at best and had been going on for some four years, which meant the unsuspecting friend paid out in the vicinity of Rs.30000+ total, more than enough to replace the entire machine with a new one. The computer tech in question was either totally incompetent or totally lacking in ethics, I suspect the latter.

The correct method to fix this issue is actually two-step. First, clean the RAM card’s gold contacts using a clean soft cloth or cotton wool bud and isopropyl alcohol (or similar), making sure NOT to touch the contacts with your fingers at any time during the process. The second step is to blow out the slots on the motherboard using a can of compressed air. Performing the first step without cleaning the slots as well is only half a job and will generally only result in a short term solution.