In my early (and a little more than zealous) days as a computer tech, a friendly, middle-aged Boer lady from my neighbourhood (let’s call her Mrs. Marilyn Greenveldt) called on me to fix her Dell PC. A quick diagnosis showed that I needed to replace the memory module, which I did. And as it has always been my policy/practice to go the extra mile,…
I even added a new hard drive at hardly any cost. Well all that was good, and Mrs. Greenveldt appreciated it. There was just one problem that resulted from this: I couldn’t close the system unit (some of you call it the CPU), even after trying for over 30 minutes. For reasons best known to themselves, Dell had decided/chosen to make this particular model so complicated you had to be a hybrid civil/mechanical engineer and architect with 4 years masonry experience, to figure out how the cover closed. (I’m sorry I’m unable to say what model it was, so I can’t advise you not to buy it. This is not to defend Dell Computers, but simply because I was so frustrated that I didn’t even care to remember what model it might have been.) Back to my ‘closing the cover’ conundrum, what was worse was that the power button was on the very cover that was refusing to close. With that said, I sincerely hope that Dell have not made another model like that one because if I’m intelligent (and I think I am), then there must be lots of system units with open covers worldwide, unless their owners had hours to waste trying to close a poorly architected system unit cover. Anyway, the long and short of my story is that Mrs. Greenveldt has not used her PC for the past 6 years because opening it meant it could never be closed, and the power button could not be pressed. So basically, fixing it made it unusable… Odd, right? Yes, odd, because when you fix a PC, it’s supposed to end up better than it was, not to mention, it should be usable.
Let me know in the Comments section below if you have ever attempted to fix a problem and only made it worse, or even fixed the problem and introduced another in the process.
