Clueless Field Service - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

8 Jun 1998

A few months ago, PC World did a similar thing, only they made real
hardware problems. Cutting the IDE cable on some machines, and
rearranging RAM in others (so the SIMMS were no longer paired). Noone
solved this. Better yet, the next issue, they published a letter
saying that these were clearly artificial problems, and I quote,
"IDE cables just don't fail". The guy said that a tech would never
think to look at it.

BTW, do you train service techs?
...

 Allison

Actually I agree with you.  I put the following problem in front of  some
...
 techs at TRW who did dos PC's as part of some
in-house training.

I wrote a program that did a cold boot.   I attached it to the
ANSI.SYS driver.  I gave this PC to them to fix.

I watched them swap memory, power supply, motherboard, hard disk  controller
...
 and such for an hour.

After they got tired... I closed the floppy door an a write protected
MS-DOS 3.3 floppy and it booted.

They never once looked at a software problem.  I guess doing mini  systems
...
 taught me something.

Bill

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