User Unboxed A PC So Badly It 'broke' And Only A Nail File Could Fix It

On Call Welcome to a fresh instalment of On-Call, The Register’s reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of tech support triumph, and we try to retell them in an amusing fashion.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Harriet," who shared a tale from the mid-1990s when she worked as a software trainer and technical writer.

"My boss believed in making the most of everyone's talents and had noticed that I was fairly adept at hardware as well as software," Harriet told On Call. That attitude meant that the boss decided Harriet was ready to handle a tech support job.

"I was told a computer was behaving very strangely – constantly beeping and scrolling through its bootup process – so she sent me to have a look."

When Harriet arrived, she found an office that smelled of fresh paint and had enough mess lying about that she concluded staff had only just moved in from another facility and were yet to finish unpacking.

"As I sat down to look at the broken computer, I saw another machine out of its case," she told On Call. "It had no protective wrapping and looked as if it had been simply shoved into the box wherever it would fit."

To diagnose the broken box, Harriet asked who had packed up the old office. The user Harriet had been sent to help said they did it themselves.

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"That told me everything I needed to know," Harriet told On Call. "I turned off the suffering machine, took a nail file out of my handbag, and pried the ENTER key out of the keyboard frame, where it had got wedged due to rough handling."

As readers will know, some computers will open their BIOS settings menu when the ENTER key is pressed during startup. The stuck ENTER key on this machine had therefore interrupted Windows startup and thrown the machine into a doom loop.

Harriet turned the computer on again and everything was fine.

She reported her success to the boss, who agreed with her suggestion that Harriet should inspect the other computers in the office.

"After that, word came down from on high that the IT department had to deal with all relocations of computer equipment," Harriet told On Call.

Have you fixed tech with an unlikely tool? Be like Harriet and send On Call an email so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®