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A senior tech told me to stop chasing BSOD logs and look at the hardware first

Old guy at a shop in Denver watched me spend 30 minutes digging through minidumps on a Dell Optiplex. He just walked over, pulled the RAM stick out, wiped it with an eraser, put it back. Booted fine. Said 'software is just noise until you rule out the physical layer.' Never forgot that. Has anyone else had a simple hardware fix that saved you hours of software troubleshooting?
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2 Comments
iris_jones89
That guy was smart. I spent two hours once trying to fix a computer that kept blue screening in Windows. Turned out the CMOS battery was dead and the BIOS had slowly corrupted itself just from keeping time. A fresh CR2032 and it ran perfect for years. Software logs would have never caught that because they all pointed to some driver issue. Hardware first, every single time.
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harperschmidt
Did you read that piece about how the battery in your router can mess with your whole network too?
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