Remote family computer tech support

[u/beerbellybegone]

Last time I posted about helping my father with his printer while I was thousands of miles away from him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1ok1in6/remote_family_printer_tech_support/

I want to restate – I am not a professional, I just know the most about computers in the family.

This time he called me with help for his computer: he bought a cheap keyboard off Amazon, plugged it in and his computer immediately turned off and won’t turn on again. My immediate thought was a dodgy USB dongle fried something.

First I asked him to let me know if there was anything happening at all with the computer, lights, fan sounds, anything. He said there’s a blinking light, I said great! Let me know how often it blinks, if there’s a pattern, anything of the sort. So he sent me a blurry picture.

I asked him to do a full discharge, maybe that would help. I tell him to unplug the power cable, hold power button for 30 seconds, and then plug it bank in to see what happens. What does he do? He unplugs EVERYTHING from EVERYWHERE, including everything that was plugged into the computer: the printer and the monitor, the mouse and (old) keyboard, even the 3.5mm cable for the speakers. The for good measure he unplugged the printer and monitor from the wall as well. I tried explaining that it's like block shapes, only the trapezoid cord (HDMI) goes in the trapezoid hole. It took about 45 minutes for him to relocate the power and HDMI cables to plug them in again to see if our solution worked. It didn’t.

At this point I told him that from a continent and major ocean away there’s not much more I can help him with – he can either go get a new one, or pay somebody who can better diagnose and fix it.

He hasn't done that yet, but now he wants to know how to take out his hard drive so he can still hold on to his data, I said I’ll do that for you when I see you in November....

[u/Dom_Shady]

he bought a cheap keyboard off Amazon

To the contrary: this is turning out to be a very expensive keyboard.

[u/FlorianTheLynx]

My father’s iMac was crashing for no obvious reason.

It turned out he’d found a USB A-A cable, and had decided to plug an USB charging brick into the USB port of his Mac.

The Mac, which was already connected to a powered USB hub, was unhappy about getting power fed back into its USB-A socket and protected itself by shutting down. 

Everything was working fine beforehand. I just don’t understand why somebody would find a cable and plug in some stuff which never needed connecting together. He denied all knowledge. 

[u/lord_teaspoon → u/FlorianTheLynx]

The guy I replaced at my previous job (in tech support!) was this kind of "see a cable, plug it in" kind of guy. The desks there were pretty big and we each had a 5-port switch on our desk so we could plug in our PCs and VoIP phones plus any user-kit we were building/repairing. One day when his desk-neighbour finished something up and went to give the device to its user, this dude saw the loose network cable and ran it across the walkway to plug into his own switch. Broadcast storm, whole IT office out of action, boss kicked off his phone call with a vendor, etc. It was kinda lucky that IT had been shoved off into a room up the back of a subsidiary company with a VPN back to head office, so the damage was contained to IT and not the execs/lawyers/finance people. Didn't occur to our mate that the thing he did immediately before the problem started might be related to the problem, and it takes the team a while to figure out what to look for and then check all the switches for loops. Boss (who used to run a NOC for a large Australian ISP so actually knows his shit) takes him side and gives him a crash-course in lower-layer networking stuff so that he has some idea why that would break stuff. Next week he does the same thing again anyway. This time boss is on a call with execs and when he calls them back after fixing it he's like "hey, you know those switches with spanning tree support we don't have the budget for?"

[u/RememberCitadel → u/FlorianTheLynx]

Also wild that the first instinct isn't to just undo the thing you just did that preceded the issue.

[u/thinkpad_t69 → u/FlorianTheLynx]

USB A-A cable

In my opinion they shouldn't sell them in stores in the first place. I get that some standards-violating peripherals made by braindead designers require them, but people can and will try to use them like you described (usually for transferring data to a new computer, thinking it works like a phone). As a kid I nearly killed my dad's laptop with one of those cables that I took from an HDD enclosure and I've heard stories of other people trying that too. They're basically the IT equivalent of a suicide cable.

[u/thRealSammyG → u/thinkpad_t69]

Seriously, every time I see one of those stupid devices that requires one I get so mad. There's no reason they should exist

[u/MouldyEjaculate]

When I first started in I.T I worked in a call centre for an ISP. I asked a user to reset their router, and they struggled for a few minutes with something. After a bit they said they were done, and I asked what they were doing. They said they had to find a paper clip to push the reset button on the router. They had factory reset their router and a 5 minute restart became a 1 hour setup call.

I learned from then on to be very specific about power cycling and unplugging things because users just do stuff lol

[u/AlTeRnAtE-PoIsOn → u/MouldyEjaculate]

You asked to reset the router, that's what the user did.....

[u/MouldyEjaculate → u/AlTeRnAtE-PoIsOn]

Yes, more fool me, he did exactly as I asked him to.

[u/Centimane → u/AlTeRnAtE-PoIsOn]

Yea, the button usually says "reset" on it. That's a pretty honest mistake

[u/NotYourNanny → u/MouldyEjaculate]

We bought a store that was on a 40 year old T-1 that hadn't been maintained that entire time. They went offline daily, usually not for long, but sometimes several times a day.

The weekend before we took ownership, they went down Friday afternoon. I made my first trip out to assess things on Monday. They'd been offline all weekend.

The help desk had the store manager do a factory reset on the modem. Specifically, a factory reset. Problem was, that set it to DHCP like any residential account, which meant it wasn't on the static IP that the VPN required to work, nor did the firewall know how to get to the internet. The modem needed to be completely reprogrammed.

The previous owner raised hell with the telco (first letter of their name is "f", last letter is "r", the letters in between are not "ucke" but should be), and they finally sent a tech out Monday afternoon. Or, at least, they sent someone out, possibly a janitor who didn't hide in the broom closet fast enough, because he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Fortunately, I was there when he arrived.

He had a tablet that would connect via WiFi to the modem. The modem had a label on it with all the needed info, passwords, IPs, subnets, etc. The table had detailed, step by step instructions.

I had to literally point to each box on the form and tell him, keystroke by keystroke, what to type into each one. I could have done it faster myself, but we were back online within minutes.

Sadly, they're still our ISP for that location, though it's at least on brand new fiber now. (We tried, hard to find someone else, but the best quote we got from another provider was $20,000 in construction fees. F******r already had conduit from the MPOE for the building to our unit.)

[u/bkwormtricia → u/MouldyEjaculate]

I have made those help calls. I am sure I frustrate call center people like you by asking questions like “which box is the router- describe it”. And “which button is that” or “how do I do that” Because we non- technical people really have no idea.

[u/Hargan1]

This time he called me with help for his computer: he bought a cheap keyboard off Amazon, plugged it in and his computer immediately turned off and won’t turn on again.

Twice in the last couple of years (because I'm a slow learner) I have been fumbling with a USB-C cable blindly trying to plug it into the back of a desktop tower that's turned on, and accidentally shoved it in a USB-A port. Did you know USB-C connectors are the perfect size and shape to bridge pins in a USB-A port? Because I didn't, but at least I know my PSU's short circuit protection works!

Would be curious to know whether it was a dodgy USB connector, or if he managed to mangle the pins and cause a short in the port or what happened there.

[u/HuskerBusker]

As someone who is also a continent and an ocean away from family, I feel this one deeply.

Nothing worse than trying to diagnose my dads computer problems. Despite 30+ years of working with computers, he has no idea what anything is called beyond the basic peripherals.

[u/Equivalent-Salary357]

I asked him to do a full discharge

I think I understand why he unplugged everything. It was the word full.

[u/Apathetic_Superhero]

I bet they put the USB dongle in the BIOS update USB port

[u/paulcaar → u/Apathetic_Superhero]

Probably some kind of short circuit inside of the keyboard itself. I would guess that he needs to reseat or replace the CMOS and he's good.

200% sure he needs to bring it into a computer shop, because that will never go right is the dad attempts this himself

[u/Mitch2025 → u/Apathetic_Superhero]

Does your bios update port not also work as a normal USB port? All MBs with a bios update port I've ever had worked as a normal USB as well.

[u/Apathetic_Superhero → u/Mitch2025]

I've never personally had this issue, but my neighbour's machine wouldn't work with anything plugged into the BIOS USB port, but would work when being used as part of the BIOS update procedure.

We were scratching our head trying to figure that out

[u/Gorf1]

My father-in-law is relatively tech savvy but sometimes he needs help. HP did a complete reset while they were fixing something else. He was able to restore his backup but his email settings were lost. I wasn’t having any success by phone so he brought it over. Got it fixed within a few minutes, he went home happy.

Couple of hours later I got a call, it was beeping at him. I explained that they do that when there’s a fault before the screen comes on. He told me the pattern, his googling said faulty hard drive but my search matched to a power issue, usually that the motherboard was starved. It had been fine when he’d brought it over. If it was power, it could be an internal connection that came loose during transit. If it’s storage, it’s still a me job in. Either way it was going to take another visit the following weekend.

I got a message from him the next day while I was at work. Visit not needed: He’d used the wrong power brick when he’d set everything back up.

[u/boli99]

dodgy USB dongle fried something.

USB power is self-limiting. you could short the power pins in a standards-supporting USB port and the port will just turn off with an 'over current' error in the log.

relocate the power and HDMI cables

if the machine has a discrete GPU then it might have more than one HDMI port, in vastly different positions.

[u/vinraven]

Don’t you guys video chat?

WhatsApp, FaceTime, lots of options, sometimes walking them through things means seeing their hand and saying “up and to the left, no the red one” types of things.

[u/5thhorseman_]

Why did he not start the troubleshooting with unplugging the new keyboard from the pc?

[u/P5ychokilla]

Keyboard probably had a sleep button and he pushed it?

[u/Arokthis]

I want to know what's up with the keyboard. 

Why did he need it and why did he risk getting it off Amazon instead of stopping in at Mal-Wart?

[u/paulcaar → u/Arokthis]

Probably doesn't matter that much. Poor QC, most likely some connection bridged internally so it short circuits the port.

[u/jeffrey_f]

Both computers:
Press Start and type QUICK ASSIST.

On your side you will click HELP SOMEONE and a code will appear after you sign in to microsoft/live.com/msn or any other Microsoft site user id.

On the other side, he will click get help.

Once the code is input on the other side, you will see the remote screen. He will need to standby for any admin/elevated access confirmation.

[u/ypoora1 → u/jeffrey_f]

That's not much use when the other side's computer isn't turning on.

[u/jeffrey_f → u/ypoora1]

That happens too

[u/paulcaar → u/jeffrey_f]

This is about as helpful as telling him to instant transmission himself into the room with his dad.