• NoIWontPickaName@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    My brother needed more ram for a computer I gave him, so I gave him some more and told him to put it in the extra slot on the board.

    He called me and told me it wasn’t working at all now, so I went over after work.

    I have absolutely no clue how, to all of my knowledge it should have been impossible.

    He had put the ram in backward and managed to get the clips to lock in.

    l

    • 20hzservers@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Something I’ve realised is that a lot of people when starting a task they’ve never done, don’t realise that fact and attempt to start and finish it all in one go anyways, rather than before starting realising you have no expertise and searching the web for “How to do: X” for more complex tasks this can be unsuccessful, but for simple tasks like installing computer parts people just wing it first time for some reason. 🤷‍♂️

      • carl_dungeon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Listen, I figured out how to do this at age 10 in 1994 before Google existed. It’s not fucking hard, OP’s guy must have been hammering those square pegs into round holes too. Some people just don’t have any common sense or problem solving capability.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think your assessment is correct. My experience in multiple fields has taught me that if a random user encounters difficulty in performing a task, their reaction will never be to stop, take a step back, and reassess. Rather, it will be to continue to try doing whatever they were doing but just use more force, and then declare the device or tool a “piece of shit” when it breaks.

    • OrekiWoof
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      1 year ago

      I managed to plug the 4pin CPU_POWER cable into two corresponding ports. As in 2 pins from one port and two from the other, since they make up an 8pin port.

      Surprisingly it was working but crashing randomly every half an hour.

      These ports are shaped so that this is impossible, but I managed to do it anyway.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Those connectors are keyed, but only to prevent you from installing them backwards or rotated 90 degrees, and not from doing what you did. The “tombstone” shaped pins will fit in the square holes, but not vise versa.

        Offsetting it by 1 pin side to side won’t result in the loss of any smoke, because you will observe the wire colors and that all of the pins on the top edge are 12v positive and all the pins on the bottom edge are ground. You got away with what you got away with because you merely delivered insufficient current to the board, but not the wrong voltage or wrong polarity to the wrong place.

      • mozingo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Partly because people replace phones more often than computers, (to upgrade, or because the screen breaks, etc) so they stop using the device before the RAM fails. But also the RAM they use in portable devices was made specifically for the device and integrated directly into the mainboard. There’s less points of failure and compatibility is never an issue. Since desktop RAM can be replaced and upgraded, it’s not as big of a deal if it fails, you can just swap it out with a new stick. Whereas it would brick the whole device if mobile ram fails, so quality standards are much higher.

        • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not to mention the differences between a soldered interface with the chip directly on the main board designed to basically be permanent, versus a simple contact interface and daughter board designed to be removable, thus adding additional points of failure.

          • umbrella
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            1 year ago

            thats correct if you consider how often you can “fix” ram by simply cleaning it.

            • Which I had to do to fix a mystery hard-reboot-without-warning issue I had just a couple of months ago. Connectors, especially dinky edge connectors on sensitive high-frequency components, are the weak point of most PC hardware.