The old televisions. Used to be able to get a better signal by sticking a paper clip in the back; and then taking another paper clip and bending it so it can connect to the first while gripping a butterknife

“Power off, then on again.” This was after a mystifying issue where the printer would do the invoice format and backgrounds, but refuse to print the text, and had a seasoned copier tech stumped. Still scratching my head on that one.

An ice tray to cold down a router.

I changed ISP, the new one told me that it would take like a week to send me the credentials to use my own ADSL router 🙄, in the meantime I had to use the cheap-ass one they provided.

The new service crashed like after five minutes of use, after some some back and force with the technical support unsuccessfully I notice that the router was extremely hot when the connection crashed and normal when it started to work again.

It has not any cooling system, and being in the middle of the summer didn’t help either.

So…. I tried to put an ice tray from the freezer on the router and it worked. To be “safe” I put a plastic bag between them to avoid any condensation dripping onto the device.

I have a pixel 8 and had a faulty screen caused by poorly installed latches that held down the screen. Slapping above the power button seemed to fix it for about 20 minutes.

In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.

A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn’t care.

Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I stared using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.

When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said “hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!” And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.

The look on my manager’s face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must’ve looked like to him. “Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!” Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn’t possible to explain it a way that didn’t sound crazy.

In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.

Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.

Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked

Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.

This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.

After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.

Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.

Idk what it was till today , don’t forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn’t just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.

Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like “what’d you do‽ It’s working!”. Definitely a fix I wasn’t expecting.

Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn’t get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it’s been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn’t crash any more.

I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days off VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is massive wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.

So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.

When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.

Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn’t crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.

I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.

Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I’m still confused as to why that worked.

I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.

My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out