Computer Hard Wear : It Takes a Lot to Keep a Good PC Down, Technicians Say
After three years as a computer repair technician, Ali Neihat thought he knew just about every abuse a personal computer could suffer: the Coke on the keyboard, the nail file in the floppy disk and the zapped power supplies.
Then he found the marijuana cigarette butt stuffed inside the floppy disk drive.
“I never really figured out why it was there,” chuckled Neihat, who has a repair shop in Anaheim. “But once it got there, the system just stopped.” Although it cost the hapless owner a fair piece of change, Neihat eventually was able to get the computer up and running again.
The workaday wear and tear inflicted on PCs--including the spilled coffee, flying cigarette ashes, dripping sandwiches and other indignities these machines suffer as the faithful servants of corporate America--has made PC repair an estimated $5-billion-a-year industry.
And despite their billing as precision instruments with mysterious inner workings and temperamental outbursts, personal computers are remarkably resilient and almost always can be nursed back to health--for a price. A PC simply will take a lot of abuse before biting its last bit.
“We can usually fix just about anything,” Neihat said.
Perhaps nowhere is the repair work more challenging than at the 62-story First Interstate Bank building in downtown Los Angeles, the scene of a devastating fire last month.
A team of 140 technicians is sorting through the hundreds of personal computers in the building belonging to the bank and other tenants, assessing and repairing the damage. The prognosis, team leader Larry Wood reported, is encouraging.
“They’re hardy devices,” said Wood. “In some ways they’re sort of like those watches that could ‘take a licking and keep on ticking.’ ” Most machines and their data, he said, appear to have escaped the heat, smoke, soot and steam in remarkably good shape.
Of course, there’s little left of any PCs on the four floors gutted by the blaze. But the machines on the floors above and below the actual fire, Wood said, appear to be worth the expensive and time-consuming rescue efforts currently under way.
“The general rule is that if the plastic casing has been deformed by the heat, which starts happening at 250 degrees, then reliability starts to fail,” Wood said. “Most of the other stuff (soot, steam), we can deal with.”
The First Interstate cleanup team is using special solvents to remove the soot from inside the PCs. Data disks have been freeze-dried and vacuum packed to protect their contents. And strong de-greasers will be used to clean the plastic cases.
“We can generally fix the problems we’re given,” said Dan Haste, owner of Dr. Micro Service Co. in Pasadena. “Of course, sometimes the price is more than the system’s worth, especially if it’s one of the cheaper home computers.”
According to Haste and other repair technicians, the worst damage a computer can suffer typically is caused by an unsuspecting user who touches the machine or screen while charged with static electricity. “It just zaps the computer,” Neihat said. “It can wipe out not only what’s on the screen but several chips inside the box,” scrambling the computer’s internal instructions.
A serious zapping could result in a repair bill of $1,500 or more to replace the computer’s central electronic system. However, technicians say the solution is a simple “grounding” device, either a three-pronged plug in the wall, or an anti-static pad under the machine.
Another source of serious damage, the repair technicians say, is the overconfident owner who thinks he can either fix his own problems or customize a PC without professional assistance.
Neihat recalls one owner of a brand-new machine who decided to open the back of the PC and insert an accessory board. However, the owner neglected to turn off the power to the machine and when he accidentally dropped a screwdriver into it, the power supply lines shorted. The result: a $200 bill to fix a new machine.
“Do-it-yourselfers can make a minor problem a terminal one for the computer,” Neihat said.
Nevertheless, most of the problems repair technicians see are relatively minor.
Spilled soda pop, coffee and lunches generally affect just the keyboard, which can be cleaned, or in the worst case, replaced, usually for less than $300. “Keyboards are a fairly painless fix,” said Phil Kohler, president of Icon Computer, in Culver City and Anaheim.
And the overwhelming majority of the problems are preventable.
Take, for instance, the case of the double-floppy insertion. Any number of users insert a floppy disk (a flat plastic platter used to hold data or a computer program) into the machine, forgetting that they already have a disk in there. The mistake can wipe out the disk drive (which reads the information on the platter) and cost as much as $200 to repair.
Or, there was the time the Post-it note found its way into the disk drive. It seems an owner put one of those yellow “stick ‘em” reminders on the disk and failed to remove it before inserting the disk into the drive. When the disk came out, the note didn’t--until the owner paid.
