Part 1: The Call | Part 2: The Onsite Repair

IT Neighbour onsite repair

The Call

Call time: 15 Minutes

Customer called into IT Neighbour reporting that their system was intermittently powering off. Over a period of 2-3 minutes the customer was asked a set of questions designed to diagnose the issue. Upon further questioning the issue was the final straw in a series of problems. Notably :-

• Noisy fan
• slow system
• System somtimes locked up.
• poweroffs were sudden and unexplained.

: 1 Minute 45 Seconds into call.

Customer was asked if anything has been changed with the machine or the environment it was in.

• Problems started not long after they renovated a room.
• Customer inspected the chassis and found evidence of dust on the outer chassis.

5 Mintes 15 Seconds into call.

Customer inspected the Bios & found CPU temp running at 94°C (201 fahrenheit)

Customer was advised to inspect the inside of the system for additional dust buildup & clean this using the air pump. Customer declined citing lack of confidence at this point the customer opted to use IT Neighbours onsite services. Since the customer spent the time troubleshooting the issue over the phone, a price could be agreed up front saving the customer the cost of an onsite diagnostic engineer. (Saving £60)

The Onsite Repair

Issue: Suspected thermal cooling failure on a desktop system.

Attend customer's residence to confirm fault & repair issue.

Inspecting the system

Now at this stage we could have attacked the fan assembly with compressed air however the dust alone shouldn't cause such a high temperature & like I said "clumpy matter".

Time to unbolt the heatsink assembly.

With the heatsink assembly in hand its time to get a good look at the whole chebang.

Mud- a mixture of dust, sand, grease & animal hairs. Yum!

The Prime suspect.

After some cleaning, polishing, thermal pasting, heatsink alignment, assembly tightening & proper ducting we seem to have resolved all problems.

Machine was given a standard tweak prior to completing the job

Our engineer unchecked the automatic restart option in windows which gives users half a chance to capture any error messages in case the shutdown is software related.

Voila Job done - for now - our garauntee means we need to keep an eye on it for 30 Days.

Chris Tierney

Your IT Neighbour. :)

18/09/09