When things go awry, here are a few of the stranger solutions that actually work (sometimes)
1 The Whack
Although this practice probably isn’t as effective as it was in the days of CRT monitors and TVs, it’s still the case that if your tech isn’t working and you’ve tried everything else, you might as well try giving it a slap. Why this sometimes works is a mystery, but even if it doesn’t, it offers the added bonus of giving you a way to vent your frustration. Just remember, if you’re using the whack technique, try not to hit anything that might break off, and don’t blame us if it does.
2 The Restart
The classic ‘turn off and on again’, basically. If you’ve been using a PC for a while, errors can creep in, so it makes sense that restarting the OS could help remedy those problems. Why, though, does this work with things like modems and routers? If your internet has been functioning just fine all day or even all week, why, without any direct intervention from you, does it just stop working? We’re honestly not sure, but as long as it works, we’re not sure we care too much.
3 The Reseat
Because desktop PCs are modular, it’s important that the components are inserted correctly, so a good connection can be made between them and the motherboard. That’s fair enough, and it figures that if a graphics card, for example, isn’t inserted properly, it likely won’t work, and you’ll suffer all kinds of problems. The reseat, of course, is the fix, but how did the component even get loose in the first place? We suspect supernatural forces might be at work, but it’s also possible that gravity could be involved.
4 The Dust Blow
Although this does sometimes work with PC parts, it’s more of a cartridge media solution. Anyone who owned a cartridge-based games console will know that every so often games would refuse to load until you took them out of the system and blew into them, before putting them back in the machine. Again, we have to wonder how the dust got in there when the cartridge was inserted, but it did work. The only problem with this fix was trying not to cover your games in saliva, which oddly enough, they didn’t seem to like.
5 The Press Everything
This is particularly handy if you’ve lost the user guide for a piece of hardware and you have no idea how it functions, but it can also work in other situations. For example, if your phone or computer has frozen up and the usual things like Ctrl+Alt+Del don’t work, attempting to press every single button you can reach with ten fingers and ten toes might well be just the solution you’re looking for. Of course, you might also make things worse, so again, please don’t blame us.