[Techtalk] what is bricking?

Magni Onsoien magnio+lc-techtalk at pvv.ntnu.no
Wed Jan 25 08:40:32 UTC 2012


On 2012-01-24 15:24:59 -0500, Little Girl said:
> Hey there,
> 
> Carla Schroder wrote:
> 
> > I had some capacitors fail on a video card once upon a time. I
> > heard these mysterious small booms from time to time but had no
> > idea what they were. The card didn't fail until the fourth
> > capacitor croaked. Piccies here:
>  
> > 'Linux Works Even When Your PC is Committing Suicide '
> > http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6728/2
> 
> Awesome photo! You know, my son's computer recently committed
> suicide, and there was a pop that we both heard a couple of days
> before the whole thing stopped working. Oddly enough, after the pop
> he was still able to boot successfully for two more days, but there
> was some odd, random (and random is always very, very bad)
> misbehavior with eventual failure to boot at all. We bought him some
> nice new hardware and rebuilt his computer, but there is absolutely
> nothing visibly wrong with his old stuff, even if you use a
> magnifying glass to look. Gremlins... (:

I used to work at a university several years ago, and we had computer
labs with desktop PCs. We had about 150 PCs bought the same summer, and
after 12 months the capcitors on the motherboards started popping. This
mostly lead to random failures and errors, before the PC finally
wouldn't boot, with "error 7".

Less than 24 months after delivery at least 100 of them had failed, and
about the same time the hard disks had also started to fail. Before 
3 years (warranty periode) we had 4 or 5 PCs that had never failed, of 
the rest we had about 120 failed motherboards and 100 failed HDs. 
Worst? The vendor denied any "serial failure" until about 100 mobo
failures (so they were apparently independent and non-related failures). 

Let's say I had an interesting meeting with the new key account manager,
including a live demonstration of how to report failed HDs to them (we
had to run the full diagnostics tool from CD, the quick diagnostics from
BIOS was not enough, so it took about 20-25 minutes per PC).
Someone once described me as "may appear as a bit determined"....

Then they replaced all the remaining motherboards and harddisks.



Magni :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.


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