Yesterday I was working on a job which started off as a simple task, became a complicated affair and then turned out to be quite  straightforward after all. Primarily though, it was good reminder that things are not always what they first appear to be...

When I arrived at the customer’s house the job was to replace their very old PC with a slightly newer one their son had given them from an office clear out. OK so It wasn’t the latest multi-cored gaming leviathan but it was going to be quite suitable for their needs: infrequent web-surfing and some word-processing. The other issue to be dealt with was that their dial-up internet would not connect. This was an odd problem because whichever ISP one chose, it would not accept the user name and password supplied. However I wasn’t concerned about that yet since the new machine with its new modem might well fix this anyway.

I was assured that the new machine worked perfectly except the hard-drive had been removed so I swapped the old drive in and started to install Windows XP. This appeared to go fine and all was well until we got online. The new PC/modem combination did indeed solve the dial-up issue but each time we tried a Google search, Internet Explorer crashed. Application Log revealed an issue with a dll file. Rebooting made no difference. Trying to re-register the dll caused an error. Rather than just copy over a new dll I surmised that this might not be the only bad file so ran System File Checker (SFC). This worked as normal, asked for the XP disk and then crashed about a quarter of the way through. This happened at exactly the same point the next try. The quick job was looking like turning lengthy, as the most logical step, in my opinion, was to reinstall or at least repair-install Windows. After all, we’d not installed any other programs. I capped the price at this point so the customer was not paying for Windows to install again on a old PC which can take nearly an hour. Normally I take these jobs away and return them and charge a fixed fee which is much lower than the time taken but this person wanted the PC done immediately.

Windows has a handy repair function which essentially copies system files from the install disk over the ones in the Windows directory, amongst other things. Since this looked to be bad files this sort of problem is a candidate for this function. Also it is a fair bit quicker than a complete reinstall. But the file copying came up with several files which would not copy over. Why was it the same files each time? Was my disk scratched? Was their old CD-ROM drive faulty? Was the problem something to do with their old hard-drive….this didn’t seem likely but just in case I ran a quick surface check and no problems arose.

I was just starting to get out my external usb drive with a different copy of XP to eliminate some of the potential problems when I had a stroke of luck – the PC crashed with a BSOD  (blue screen of death). This is not normally a cause of celebration but this was as it took my thinking onto a different path. The error and dump did not indicate anything to do with bad CDs or drives or files not copying over. This looked far more like a memory problem. Memtest confirmed a bad memory stick was involved and this was swapped out with a known good one. All the problems went away. This time the file copying went perfectly. Windows was repaired, and we could use Google with no crash. Problem solved. Happy customer. Happy technician.

So I guess the moral of the story is things are not always how their appear. The symptoms pointed to corrupt files caused by bad copying of the files. The files were indeed corrupted but the disks and drives were fine. Bad RAM was the cause. I still don’t 100% understand why the file copying failed at the same file each time so if any fellow techs can enlighten me I would welcome your comments.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, using Memtest at the start would have saved time. However you cannot routinely test all major components at the start of each on-site job. Running a full memory and disk test can take hours. This is fine for a workshop pick-up and return job as you can let them run in the background whilst doing other things. But when it’s the customer’s time you are using you have to diagnose using the symptoms on display.