
The art of debugging – or how it took me 3 years to fix my PC - Reinmar
https://medium.com/content-uneditable/the-art-of-debugging-or-how-it-took-me-3-years-to-fix-my-pc-23a9f7ec1426
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jabberthemutt
To taint the clickbait, it of course did not take them 3 years:

> I’ve recently been trying to resurrect my old PC. I haven’t used it at all
> over the last 3 years and moved twice in the meantime

~~~
Reinmar
You're right. It took me over 5 years from the moment I assembled this PC to
the moment I found the mistake ;)

Anyway, I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this
for 3 years. But when applied to software (to which this story lead me), I
often hear "it took them 3 years to fix this". It's pretty much the same here.
The bug was there, it caused serious issues (also with other systems), I
applied various random workarounds and I spent a lot of time on it and yet, it
got fixed by an accident much much later.

~~~
perl4ever
What I think is going on here is that such titles are subverting axioms of
conversations that give language meaning normally.

It's perfectly reasonable _in general_ to say it took you 3 years when you
weren't actually working on it all that time. Like, say, if you were talking
to a friend who you tell everything to.

But when it's in a title or headline, it's implicitly presumed to be the most
significant thing about your story to a stranger, thus what makes it notable
and interesting. Given that baseline, one tends to interpret it as meaning you
were working most of the time on it, because that makes it worthy of
attention.

That's why it seems not unexpected to me for a person to feel disappointed and
mislead.

~~~
marviel
I appreciate the sincerity and depth of your analysis. This nicely wraps words
around a concept which I had considered, but never organized well, and
previously never expressed. Nice work

~~~
perl4ever
Well, that was mostly inspired by something known as Grice's Maxims. I read
about them years ago and immediately thought someone should write extensively
on how discourse in reality not only often relies on assuming them, but also
frequently subverts them, cooperatively or maliciously. But I'm too lazy.

~~~
marviel
Even better -- you've now given me a term to research further!

------
canhascodez
I went through something similar building my first PC. I had worked a summer
job just to be able to afford one, researched all the parts obsessively, and
slowly waited for all of the parts to be shipped to rural Alaska. I put the
all of the components in the case, flipped the PSU switch, pressed the power
button, and -- nothing, not even a BIOS screen. Five red LEDs were lit on the
motherboard, indicating a major hardware fault: CPU, motherboard, RAM, or PSU.
Well, there was nothing else for it but to start replacing the parts one by
one to see what was broken. It would take a day or two to get the Return
Merchandise Authorization, and two weeks shipping time in either direction, so
every month or so I would get a new part in to try to get this machine to
work.

That went on for about five months. I was crazed with frustration, and a
growing pile of electronics boxes, tools, and testing devices filled the
corner of my room. I had a collection of components which I was sure were
working: the system at least appeared to boot to BIOS when lying on the
workbench, but when all the parts were hooked up inside the case, we got five
red lights again: major hardware fault. Finally, at the limits of my
frustration, I turned to my brother for aid: "It works on the bench, but not
in the box. I don't know why. You figure it out."

He returned not five minutes later with the widest grin you can imagine. I was
incredulous, and this was a better practical joke than he could ever have
devised. He showed me that having the case's reset button (correctly)
connected to the motherboard caused the error condition. I was so thankful
that I almost didn't want to strangle him!

~~~
seotut2
I've seen situations such as that. Working outside the case, but not in the
case is usually points to a short of the motherboard through the case (of
course, assuming it is wired correctly).

~~~
canhascodez
As I recall, it took me a considerable while to determine that the equipment
worked outside the case. I think I tried replacing the RAM, CPU, and PSU
before doing the mobo, and unless you have an idea that the case itself might
be the issue, well, why would you take the rest of the machine apart? And even
if you suspected a board short, you might easily be misled into thinking that
it was a part of the case touching the mobo inappropriately, and leave the
reset/power leads connected: it's a lot easier to punch the case reset button
than to use the tiny one built into the board. And of course, figuring out
that the system works without the power switch connected is not super useful
in itself: that is something of a necessary component.

I'm just still amazed that he figured it out that quickly; I really didn't
tell him much about what had happened, and I'd hardly had time to leave the
room before he'd solved it. What a jerk :)

------
pjc50
> This is not a story about CPU soldering or whatever hardware engineers find
> sexy

Guess I should dig out my old writeup of blowing up the floppy drive I needed
to boot my PC by dropping a pencil in it, and the ensuing repair..

------
c22
One time I had a tiny magnet inside one of my USB ports. Vexed me for several
minutes.

------
belltaco
The I/O shields behind the PCs don't fit well, can cut you and are really bad
design. Glad that new (premium?) motherboards have them integrated.
[https://laurentschoice.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.j...](https://laurentschoice.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.jpg)

------
sebazzz
I also have a very odd issue which I think has its root in the underlying
firmware. I have an Dell Latitude E6520 notebook with a Intel Core i7 Sandy
Bridge processor. Though I bought this laptop in 2013, it is still fast and
works quite well even with Visual Studio / ReSharper.

Only one thing, it is sluggish as hell. Mouse clicks not responding,
everything feels slow. Except when I undock it from the docking station and
redock it again. Then you feel the fan spinning up, the CPU doing work, and
everything becomes smooth. I checked the clock speed, its the same before and
after docking. There is nothing keeping the CPU busy either. Its like
something is somehow preventing the system from executing efficiently until
the system is re-docked.

The solution? I don't know, I might never find out. I will just keep redocking
my laptop every time I boot Windows.

~~~
jotm
In my experience, the GPU, USB and SATA are the causes of sluggishness without
CPU usage. Not sure what could be the problem with your dock - does it have a
USB 3.0 controller that the laptop does not? eSata? You are 100% sure the CPU
is not being heavily used by anything after first time docking?

~~~
sebazzz
The dock is a standard wide-connector Dell port replicator, with indeed USB,
DVI connections and possibly eSATA. USB 3.0 did not exist back then.

