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Thread: Grose incompetence

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    Grose incompetence

    I'd never thought I'd live to see the day when something like this happens, but about a day or so ago our head office decides to upgrade the ram in our shop floor PC's (the ones we use to check stock, take customer orders and payments etc), aparantly to make them faster. Has this upgrade made any difference ?? Well no not really, they are just as slow as before.

    Anyway the engineers turn up, armed with lots of RAM and proceed to put the new stuff in. Now there was one vital flaw in how they went about installing the ram. They left the PC's on while doing the upgrade.

    I was totally shocked, surely every engineer knows to turn a PC off before you install new components, but nope, not only did they do this to one PC in our shop, but all of them.

    Hence the title of this thread, total grose incompetence.

  2. #2
    finding nemo staffsMike's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence



    Can't say I've seen that before, what happened?

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    Does he need a reason? Funkstar's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    I'm shocked they still work to be honest!!

    While working in a small indy computer shop while at uni, i do remember removing RAM and other components from our test bench system before switching it off.

    It made Win95 stop working

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    HEXUS.social member 99Flake's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Quote Originally Posted by Funkstar View Post
    It made Win95 stop working
    A slightly out of control sneaze would make Win 95 stop working!

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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Quote Originally Posted by 99Flake View Post
    A slightly out of control sneaze would make Win 95 stop working!
    Qouted for the truth.

    Basically later on in the day we lost connectio to all our systems, we couldn't take any credit cards, we couldn't do any credit agreements. Any form of electronic sale had to be done maulally, so that was writing down credit and debit card numbers and phoning for authorisations, hand writing receipts.

    And what did head office do ? Sheepishly they said "sorry"

    The reason we lost our systems was because one of the engineers has been messing with our router when he had no need to. Twit.

    All that said I'm amazed that they still worked after that, I can't help but think that we weren't the only ones they did that too, I think other stores had the same treatment, hope those engineers get the sack.

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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    I am actually more amazed at the fact that they don't need to disconnect the power cable to open up the machine and put the ram in.
    Well, that depends on where the computer is though.
    Quite suprise to see everyone of them do the same thing though.

    I did a similar job last year and the first thing was to tell everyone to shut down the computers before group of 3 start swapping 100 sticks of SDRAM.

    The shop floor PC doesn't need to be fast at all. Checking stock and ordering put the load on the database server not the shop terminals.
    May be your company planning to upgrade the stock/order system and require the RAM upgrade to be applied first?

    I have had experience though if I don't switch off AC power, sometimes when I push the ram in, the system power-on by itself.
    Given the small power usage the ram use, unlikely you can do any electricial damage to the motherboard for "hot-swapping" ram.

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    Fried Chip Extremist alsenior's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Don't suppose you work for focus do you?

    thats the kind of incompetence we had come to expect from out head office
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    What kind of emergency would need Windows 95? I think you are already in a bad state of emergency when your backup plan is Windows 95.
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Quote Originally Posted by arthurleung View Post
    I am actually more amazed at the fact that they don't need to disconnect the power cable to open up the machine and put the ram in.

    Maybe it's me, but I thought the computer should be plugged in so that the case is grounded, otherwise you're asking for static. Although I'm not sure people remember when static was a 'problem'.

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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Many years ago one of my mates did the same thing to a Dell optiplex at a place we worked. Yanked the RAM with the machine still on, tuned it off, and then back on and it worked fine.
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Quote Originally Posted by Behemoth View Post
    I'd never thought I'd live to see the day when something like this happens, but about a day or so ago our head office decides to upgrade the ram in our shop floor PC's (the ones we use to check stock, take customer orders and payments etc), aparantly to make them faster. Has this upgrade made any difference ?? Well no not really, they are just as slow as before.

    Anyway the engineers turn up, armed with lots of RAM and proceed to put the new stuff in. Now there was one vital flaw in how they went about installing the ram. They left the PC's on while doing the upgrade.

    I was totally shocked, surely every engineer knows to turn a PC off before you install new components, but nope, not only did they do this to one PC in our shop, but all of them.

    Hence the title of this thread, total grose incompetence.
    I know where you work
    What's scary is that these same people are the ones who also deal with customer pc repairs!
    Luckily the guy who did ours seemed fairly competent and had all the right kit for the job.

    As someone stated above, the RAM upgrade in the machines did hardly anything because all the load is on the database server. I wish they'd sort that out, because I'm fed up of the system locking up for 10 minutes when you scan in a USB cable due to the number of packages it's in!
    Also, I wish they'd upgrade the software on the machines, I.E maybe the new version of OpenOffice rather than v1.0!

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    Senior Amoeba iranu's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    I've never thought about this before because I've always been sensible enough to switch the machine off when poking around inside but...

    What would happen if, for example, you had 4 ram slots in a machine and 1 of them was occupied, then you plugged in 2 new sticks say in slots 2 and 4 then removed the original ram whilst the machine was on?

    I'm very surprised that a machine would continue to work even for a few seconds without ram (as in a straight swap).
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    Does he need a reason? Funkstar's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    I can imagine that adding more ram while a PC is on could be coped with, but removing any of the existing modules is going to kill the system.

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    Re: Grose incompetence

    lol

    I have never seen that before. Just as well its low voltage or fireworks. Even so I an shoked (no pun intended) that it didn't kill the memory.
    □ΞVΞ□

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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Quote Originally Posted by Stompy View Post
    I know where you work
    What's scary is that these same people are the ones who also deal with customer pc repairs!
    Luckily the guy who did ours seemed fairly competent and had all the right kit for the job.

    As someone stated above, the RAM upgrade in the machines did hardly anything because all the load is on the database server. I wish they'd sort that out, because I'm fed up of the system locking up for 10 minutes when you scan in a USB cable due to the number of packages it's in!
    Also, I wish they'd upgrade the software on the machines, I.E maybe the new version of OpenOffice rather than v1.0!
    Tell me about it, and it's all because the company we work for are essentially a bunch of cheap skates, if we had a Linux based system the thing would work so much better.

    My biggest gripe really is that we lose connection with our LDC which will either leave a customer order in limbo for days, or screw the whole order up. Why oh why, did they have to be so cheap and put that damn eclipse system in.

    We used to have our own server in store before we changed, but now it's all centralised, so to see whats in stock in my store I have to check with a computer thats miles away to tell me what we have or haven't got.

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    Re: Grose incompetence

    I wouldn't do it on a bog standard PC but on high end equipment you can hot swap RAM, CPU's and so on.

    I had a iffy CPU module in a brand new IBM iSeries a couple of months ago so I pulled the machine forward (it's rack mounted), took the lid off and swapped out the module without even disconnecting the users from the ERP, let alone downing the system.

    Of course there's a huge difference between a €200K iSeries and a bog standard PC but the point I'm trying to make is that you can, on occasion hot swap a lot of components.

    BTW, it's gross, not grose.

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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    Re: Grose incompetence

    Even servers less about 10 grands from HP can do memory hotswap
    Done one of those ram hot-swapping, a.k.a RAIDIMM 1
    However those servers are quite sensitive to non-identical memory and DDR400-3-3-3-8 and 3-4-4-8 wouldn't work together, even though they had the same HP part number.

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