Grasping the Intangible
Random images and thoughts of a former TV Field Service Engineer and Computer Repair Technician
Clicking on the above image launches the full size version 1812 x 1080 pixels
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Comet estate car in 1979. For 17 years I visited customers at
home and fixed their TVs, VCRs, stereos and microwave cookers. |
| DCS made me redundant, I was unemployed, went to Microcom & Control Training under a government Training for Work scheme to extend my dole money - then DCS took me back again under the training scheme - training to do my original job but for a greatly reduced wage! My second job with computers was at Blue Chip. I worked for Blue Chip from 1996 to 2000 until the business failed. Across the road at the Drum Brae roundabout was PC World... |  |
Sadly, I've little to remember Microcom Training by - no photos and only that
scanned pearl of wisdom above. I added the underline to highlight the misspelt
'receive' but that's all. I knew more about computers than all the staff
and trainees combined. I remember a Spanish girl called Mayte - and a local
dude who did small removals as well as a really cool in-house 'zine for the
punters, printed on a dot matrix printer.
Control Training was in Broughton Road and the trainer was called Rizal (anagram of Rizla) from Bangladesh. he was pretty good and knew his stuff. We learned programming in C and word processing. There was a trainee called David who was given to washing his feet in the wash hand basins in the toilets. I set up Microsoft Word so that whenever someone typed David it would change to Now wash your feet...
On completing these training courses you were awarded a National Record of Achievment folder. I found some anagrams for 'National Record of Achievment' e.g. 'Nice cover, inane mad-hatter fool.' - 'Afternoon miracle not achieved.' - 'I am the feared loon contrivance.' - 'Fat moron achieved intolerance.' - 'Radioactive floor enhancement.'
Above is Blue Chip as see from across the road from the PC World corner (beside McDonalds). The next picture is of the manager being presented with a well-deserved Investors in People award. Working here was very nice and a totally different world from the World to come. I had lots of bench space and rarely needed to speak to the public - that's what we had a receptionist and a secretary for.
The most difficult part was try to grasp the intangibility of switched mode power supplies and CRT monitors' scanning circutry. All monitors had Cathode Ray Tubes. Flat screen? Expensive laptops only! I paid £1800 for a Sony Vaio with 32MB RAM and Windows 98.
It was possible to repair expensive monitors etc with no manual or circuit diagram. Ray Baker and I could find those dry joints, failed diodes and FETs. It was never 100% success because there would be a dodgy capacitor that would fail after it got hot, or something like that.
That's the carpark (my bike) and Reception. Pictured right is my U-shaped bench arrangement with monitors, power supplies and monitors under repair or test. Anyway the company failed and I had to move on.
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 Me on the left, Ray Baker on the right. |
 Turn of the century prices. |
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I was told that PC Repair Man was based on Brian
Brownhill a former employee. |
PC World
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PC World's advertisement in the
local paper stated Mature applicants welcome which was good because
I was already 56 years old. I went to Portobello Job Centre, did
a fairly basic technical test and was interviewed and got the job.
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These are the three main jobs I had in the Service Industry. All jobs were largely trying to work with stuff that you can't actually grasp - electricity (but you can feel it) and digital data (which is a good thing but a mystery to most). top of this page or go to Home page
Tech Disc front-ends I did at PC World
We used to install Healthcheck software and I created bootable CDs to make these easier for colleagues as not all were qualified technicians.
My Tech Discs would Autorun in Windows, or you could boot PCs with it - in which case you'd have to press Escape to dismiss the warning message and reach the DOS-based menu called by this batch file:
@echo off echo TO START WINDOWS EJECT THIS BOOTABLE CD NOW AND THROW IT AWAY! echo. echo ******* AMATEUR USE MAY MAKE YOUR COMPUTER UNUSABLE ******* echo. echo 1 - F Prot UPDATED Sept 16 2006 (FAT32/16) Check for updates echo 2 - BIOS identify echo 3 - PCI chipset info echo 4 - Ghost 2003 (FAT32/16 for Images, FAT/NTFS disks/CDRs) echo 5 - Norton Disk Doctor (FAT32/16) echo 6 - Registry Check (FAT32/16) echo 7 - Test Internal Speaker echo 8 - Norton Disk Edit (FAT32/16) echo 9 - Picture View (FAT32/16) echo 10 - NTFSDOS Pro - Read & recover NTFS files in DOS7 environment echo (insufficient RAM to run F Prot) echo 11 - Delete Temporary Internet Files (default folder, not XP) echo 12 - BIOS util echo 13 - Wipe CMOS - attempts to reset the BIOS's CMOS memory echo. echo To return to this menu, type menu [Enter] (cd\ if necessary) echo or just m [Enter] echo also Autoruns in Windows (password required)
At that time the healthcheck was originally designed to be installed from a CD that used Windows Autorun. The same method was used by me but if you browsed the disc there were numerous other utilities.
This is a still image from a rendered animation I did. The 50 years experience relates to the combined computer experience of the three technicians, myself, Dave Prummer and Derek Wilson. The animation is below. Like other animations I've done it can loop back to the beginning and run continuously.
These images are all 640 x 480 pixels...
Larger images (of which there are a few) will have clickable thumbnails so that your browser will show them using its default method, unencumbered by the restraints of CSS containers.
The above picture is based on a still from an animation I did - shown below.
Not so much plagiarism in the above image as homage to a hilarious satire on the old Bush administration.
Haven't seen one of these Macs in a while. Glad to see the demise of CRTs. If you've ever tried to set up purity and dynamic convergence you'll know why. Oh, and there's that 25 kilovolts too... Picture from the Onion website.
Things did take some time back then but it's got much worse since. Please Wait. OMG!
One of my favourite piss-takes of a Windows dialogue box featured above.
I think the guy above was called Bob...
A festive effort from 2002. Santa has eschewed reindeer in favour of internal combustion.
Have a nice dump.
An arresting image.
No matter, I'll just start it all over again from the beginning.
Vista's uncannily accurate time prediction: 86 years to copy less than a DVD's worth!
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One of the first animations I did with a PC World theme. On the globe it says A World of a Difference at Kinnaird Park - obviously a play on words related to PC World. It also says We love computers, which helps when working with the things, whether it's using them creatively or for other purposes.
<cogitate>
More and more, computers are part of our lives. In just a few short years the home computer has changed from being a specialist item into something few people can function without. Convergence is a term bandied about as the home computer evolved into a home entertainment system and much more.
PC service technicians are well aware of the trend for people to store their lives on their hard disk. Tech guys spend ever more time and effort trying to reunite computer users with their data, whether it be photos of family and friends, holiday snaps, important documents or a vast collection of movies or music.
Most people can't get to grips with something so nebulous as computer data or software. Many have blind faith that the photos they've transferred onto the PC will always be there.
One of the worst computers to rescue data from is the family PC with several users - especially if they're teenagers or naive 20-somethings. A typical scenario is that there's, say, 4 users but a dozen user accounts because people have screwed up their original user accounts with careless use of dodgy file sharing. Some of them will think it's really cool to misspell their name with upper and lower case characters and symbols from Character Map.
So in the Documents and Settings folder or equivalent, there will be lots of folders with users' names and in these folders there will be data to be recovered, or there may be nothing at all except Windows defaults and sample picture and music etc. But you've got to look to see. And you've got to look in the various users' Desktop folders to see if they've saved a few gigabytes there.
Poking around in other people's photos and music collections is mostly mundane and boring but can be quite stressful for technicians who are trying to navigate around complicated folder structures and decide what's valuable data and what's not, only to be interrupted by a customer at the counter who's bought the wrong ink cartridge.
At PC World we never explored customers' hard disks for fun or amusement. We've seen it all before and it's boring and predictable, apart from which there are too many tasks demanding our attention. In my case it's all in the past tense since I retired in July 2009.
If a PC fails to boot into Windows then the user is likely to panic if they haven't backed up all their stuff, thinking it may be gone forever, in a puff of logic - as Douglas Adams might say. There really is no excuse for not having duplicate copies on an external hard disk or flash drive or remote backup service. Why not buy a flash drive for next to nothing, bung your important stuff on it and give it to a friend or family member? Then you'll still have your stuff even if your house burns down.
Data Recovery and Data Retrieval may appear to be much the same thing, but the former may be free of further charge if a service agreement is active - whereas the latter may be always chargeable. Data Recovery implies a corrupt file structure which an in-store IBAS system running Linux could repair. The license provided by OnTrack and other licensing agreements made this the official method for recovering data.
There's an abundance of free software out there to retrieve and recover data but it's not licensed to be used in a corporate environment. My favourite bootable disc was my customised version of Ultimate Boot CD. I've seen magazine cover discs with ISOs so readers could burn a bootable Linux CD with CDRW software included. The resultant CD, only 28MB of files, would allow the user to browse files on a broken Windows system and save pictures and music etc to a CDR.
The thing is, lots of PC users haven't thought of the obvious things like having a look at the big selection of computer magazines in the shops. For some, it's a moment of divine inspiration (or something) when you swivel round an Eclipse screen and show them the wonders of Google. They've had a problem but never thought of looking for the answer online. Instead, they drove miles and queued up at the PC Clinic counter.
<cogitate/>
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Here's a variation of the PC World animation. This time the globe has a reflective surface. Like the other animations it can play continuously if the player supports it.
Click here to see my preferred journey to work! Innocence
More random images dredged up from my files:
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It's been said that TINY stands for Tough, It's Now Yours. |
Packard Bell's finest! |
Time computers may once have been on your side... |
Click for
large version 1083 x 1476 pixels |
£5000 for a 386 PC with 80MB hard disk! |
<cogitate>
Recently, whilst poking about in old emails, I came across one from Sun, 28 Nov 1999 which had a link to an ancient website of mine back in the days of dialup with no broadband. This reminded me of this: Computer Operating Systems are so vast these days that there's code they're frightened to remove because they don't know how long it's been there, or what it actually does, or who wrote the program code.
Why does it remind me of that? Because my last-century website is still hosted somewhere on an Easynet server, even although I quite them years ago!
<cogitate/>
YouTube is closing down for tonight. Please remember to shut down your computer. Click Play button to initiate sequence.
Reinstalling Windows Words and chords for ukelele, music is George Formby's When I'm Cleaning Windows.
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Miscellany Page 1 or Page
2 or check out them dirty PCs