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Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-17 at 17:04

Internet! Internet! I did a technology!

See, my office computer at work croaked one day. Just up and died, and refused to restart. No beeps, just a sad little whirrr-thnk.

For reasons unrelated to any technical prowess, I got the idea that maybe its CMOS battery needed to be replaced.

I have a trillion of those little coin batteries at home (I use them in my kitchen scale), so I brought one in, and swapped out the CMOS battery.

And ---

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Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-17 at 17:04

No, that didn't fix it. BUT! It brought it to a state where BEEP CODES could be produced!

Some googling of beep codes for my brand of computer told me that this indicated a memory fault.

At this point, I got in touch with IT. (IT were already aware of the issue, but it's final exams season, and I have my own laptop, so it's okay that it wasn't a priority).

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Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-17 at 17:04

Super-super nice IT guy couldn't come over in person, but on Teams chat he walked me through the steps of opening the computer, identifying the RAM sticks, and removing them, one at a time, to see if one was faulty. If so, then removing the faulty one and restarting the computer should fix things.

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Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-17 at 17:04

After removing the first RAM stick, the computer started!

'Oh,' thought I. 'Does this mean we need to replace the faulty RAM stick?'

'Not so fast!' said nice IT guy over TEAMs. 'Try swapping both RAM sticks from black ports to white ports.'

So I did! And the computer started up!

So the problem wasn't even a faulty RAM stick, but a faulty RAM port!

AND I FIXED IT!

I FEEL SO POWERFUL!

(Also very grateful to IT guy, who knew exactly what to do and trusted me to do it myself.)

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Toot

Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-17 at 17:04

(It also didn't hurt that the computer was past due for replacement, and I already had approval in place to get a new one, so it wasn't as if there was any real risk in meddling with its guts.)

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