Can we talk about that customer who "fixed" their own PC first?

Had a guy bring in a Dell desktop last week, said it wouldn't boot. I opened it up and found he'd jammed a 120mm fan in there with zip ties, but wired it straight into the power supply with some speaker wire. The whole thing smelled like burnt plastic. He told me he watched a YouTube video and figured he could save money. I spent an hour untangling that mess and replacing a fried motherboard. He stood there and argued that his fix was fine and I was just upselling him. Charged him $80 for the diagnostic and he left mad. Has anyone else dealt with customers who watch one tutorial and think they know better than someone who does this every day?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliver7191mo ago

Dude, $80 for a diagnostic feels like a steal honestly. I gotta say though, 120mm fans usually run on 12 volts but a lot of them actually pull more like 0.2 or 0.3 amps. Speaker wire can handle that just fine for a short run, but if he used like 18 gauge or thinner it might have been okay on its own. The real problem is he probably tapped into the wrong pins on the power supply. Those cheap PSUs have different rails and you gotta know which one is 12v and which is ground. If he accidentally hit a 5v rail or something it would fry the fan controller, not the motherboard. But yeah, Ive had a guy try to replace a CMOS battery with a coin cell from a toy car. People watch one video and think theyre experts, its wild.

juliahall1mo ago

Reading that reminded me of a video I saw on driver issues, and @oliver719 is right about the PSU pins being the real trap.