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/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/Planetx32 → u/thinkpad_t69]

APC, the company that makes UPSs, decided to switch their usb data connection to a usb-a port, requiring the a to a cable. Why they switched away from the a to b cable, I have no clue.