ATTENTION: Boring story follows, but it’s tech related and makes me feel smart, so, whatever.

So, today is Wednesday, and one of my technicians (T) is out of the office, because he minds the store on Saturday, so, you know, I can totally not have to work on the weekend. He had a few high priority projects on his workbench today, and I decided to go old hat and do some real tech work, instead of super-nifty, totally boring marketing and sales fliers.

One particular computer I worked on was being persnickity. T was having massive issues figuring it out so I cranked on that one first. Basically, during the Windows XP boot process, right when the system would normally initialize all the drivers and bring up the video, the machine would hang. Safe mode, normal mode, VGA mode, no difference. At first, I thought it was a bogus CD-ROM filter driver or something Windows related. On a whim, I tried booting to a WinPE CD, to rule out the customer’s Windows installation. The WinPE CD would not finish booting either.

HARDWARE!!

I started pulling cards, disconnecting cables and all to no avail. I thought to myself, “WTF, is the motherboard bad?” Then, I had an old hat moment. Back in the DOS days, if you had hardware issues, you dorked around in the BIOS setup, for compatibility or port addresses or whatever. I figured “what the heck”, dropped into the BIOS and shut EVERYTHING off. Lo and behold, the machine boots to desktop.

About 10 minutes later, had it pegged down to the USB 2.0 controller.

I had the machine up and running in about an hour. Poor T took almost a whole day with the result of “It doesn’t boot.” Don’t get me wrong, T is a great technician, but he just doesn’t know the old tricks.

Makes me feel smart…