Workshop

($10–$50) electronic gear rather than replace it. Why spend $100 to fix your $40 Ethernet card? You can
buy two for the price of fixing it. This probably doesn’t make Greenpeace happy, but it sure makes sense
economically.
This is even something you can do yourself. Suppose, for example, you’ve troubleshot a network
application’s problem to a particular workstation, and you’ve ruled out the user login and network files.
You’ve tried to run the Microsoft Exchange client for a user on her workstation, but got a fatal exception
error. You logged her into a couple of other workstations, and she worked fine every time.
Therefore, you know that it’s a hardware problem, but you don’t pass the buck—you’re interested in
finding out what the hardware problem is.
This problem is a good candidate for swapping components. Sometimes it can be obvious what to swap
first—for example, if someone’s Microsoft Word is repainting the screen badly on one workstation, but
not another, you would probably swap the video card first. In this example, it’s hard to say what might be
causing the fatal exception; fatal exceptions are caused by bad operating system components, local
applications, faulty hard drives, bad video cards or drivers, and so on.
While noting whether the problem remains, you swap the following items:
• The hard drive with a “known good” hard drive from a similar PC
• The video card
• RAM DIMMs
• The network card
When you swap the memory, the fatal exception error goes away. Furthermore, when you install this
memory into a known good PC, that PC starts exhibiting the same lockup problem when you run the
network application. It doesn’t matter how the memory is broken—that is, whether it has bad circuitry on
it somewhere or is simply somewhat incompatible with this brand of PC/motherboard. It only matters
that it is broken.
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