What’s The Most Ridiculous Fix You’ve Ever Made?

We’ve all been there—your computer’s falling apart, and you’ve exhausted every normal fix. Resetting? Check. Reinstalling? Check. Sacrificing your firstborn to tech support? Check. But then, out of desperation, you try something really ridiculous, and somehow it works. I once had a computer that thought it’d be fun to send electricity from my power supply straight to my motherboard—soldering them together like they were best friends. Spoiler: That was unfixable. Ask Corporal Punishment he fixed it, took pictures of it, and forbade me to get a new one until I got a power supply that handled power troughs. It was magical.

Oh, and let’s talk about the guy who fixed his dead hard drive by freezing it in a bag of rice. Yes, you read that right. He turned his hard drive into a popsicle and, miracle of miracles, it worked. I guess the tech gods have a weird sense of humor.

Then there’s the endless supply of “genius” solutions out there. Like the brilliant folks who swear waving a spoon over the router somehow fixes Wi-Fi. Or the classic “turn it off and on again” that’s basically the tech world’s version of a magic incantation—why does it work? No one knows, but let’s keep pretending it does.

The truth is, when your computer’s about to explode, sometimes you just have to embrace the chaos. So, what’s the craziest hack you’ve tried? Maybe you slapped some duct tape on your screen and suddenly your software issues disappeared? Or you threw a tantrum loud enough to make Windows 95 obey? Drop your wildest, most ridiculous fix in the comments, and let’s see who can top the absurdity.

 

I once had a misbehaving computer that would all of a sudden run perfectly if I waved a three-pound hammer in its general direction.

 

You just threatened it with violence, and it would start working?

 

Yep. Amazing what a sincerely offered threat of total destruction can accomplish.

 

I'm jealous because when I threaten violence, they just laugh at me. I like to say it's because I'm too cute, but Maury determined THAT was a lie...

 

Don't sweat it: my current Windows 11 notebook just giggles madly at me.

 

Windows 11 everything is hot trash. I won't even let my stuff update; I keep rolling it back.

 

Be that as it may, it's what came on the notebook I bought when I need a cheap computer.

 

Not exactly a computer, but we had a 60" printer where I used to work. Every once in a while, it would just get stupid. Would get a POST error, and not boot. Just unplug it for an hour or so, and it would be good to go for a few months, besides the usual maintenance issues.

I did use to set a sledgehammer against my computer case when having issues. I don't know if it helped, but I felt better!

 

I don't have the pic on me but my dad removed the part to place the hard drive because he thought it was ewaste (I very much expressed that all "ewaste" in the house is to be hoarded in my room) the hdd had no place to rest so it was vertical, standing on an uno card deck until I could find it a proper place to sit.

 

In similar fashion I used to kick my desktop case whenever the thing was acting up. It did work, most of the time.

Silliest fix though.... After having exhausted all other avenues and the pc just not even booting up, I decided to re-seat the BIOS battery. That fixed it. Wasted a whole 6 hours on it before that. Sometimes you've got to start with the little things.

 

Last week I sat down at my friend's computer and tried to update her drivers, her software, her settings, anything I could think of to get the gaming headset her son was using to work "again." having been told it used to work and now it didn't. What they didn't bother to tell me, and I should have checked first but didn't, is that is used to work on another unit. It didn't have the right input for the machine it was now on, so it could only be headphones, or a mic - not both - on the machine it was NOW attached to.

 

The user always seems to fail to provide all of the necessary information.

 

100% and sometimes we forget to check the most obvious things because we assume the person asking for help has more knowledge than they actually have.

 

I have a friend who called not all that long ago who called with a complaint that his printer wasn't powering on. I suggested that he plug it in, so he did and said that it still wasn't working. I had to remind him that there were two ends to the cord. He didn't talk to me for a week.

 

They hate that. They called you for help, because you are clearly all knowing in this regard in their eyes, but all you did was pointed out they have the dumb and need more coffee. They get so spicy about it... some people are STILL not talking to me for things like that.

 

I remember the days when my semi-set response was 'RTFMS', back when I was young. Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

 

I did tech support for Intuit for a couple tax seasons, and I routinely got away with stuff like telling the customer that it a was a biological problem with their software and to return it immediately and either use the online version or contact an in person professional.

 

Snort!

 

Hahaha that is lovely. I'm stealing this.

 

There used to be thread dedicated to my nonsense years ago. This would be in it, no doubt.

"I'm afraid it's a biological problem with the software for which I am unqualified to assist. Please contact the appropriate professional to seek help."

 

That is a very polite way to tell them to go away. Did you ever catch flak for it? Or have anyone catch on?

 

Nope, I got away with it repeatedly. I sat in the cubicle next to my boss, and he figured out I was smarter than he was by day 2, and would have everyone come ask me for help on top of having to maintain phone metrics, and I think it wasn't until like the last week that he finally figured it out, put his face in his hand, tried not to laugh, and said you gotta stop doing that. Which didn't sound like a no, to me...

See, I was having these people write out registry string in notepad and convert it to reg files which 100% fixed the program they were making billions of dollars on as a faulty release candidate. I was getting yelled at all day, so the people who were smart enough to write out the code string, we did that, and the people not smart enough to understand that restarting your computer does not mean turning the monitor on and off, had biological problems between the keyboard and the chair. I was in and outsources call center, I didn't care either way. It was seasonal, garbage money, but I was a single mom. You do what you gotta do!

One guy said he would get me a hot tub in heaven, so I mean...

 

I sincerely hope he follows through!

 

i had a sore foot, a plantar fascitis and i turned off WIFI to just use the ethernet and pain went away-i thought i could die
a doctor wouldnt tell you these things

 

no fixes just ruins, like reversing board power wires in a 386 and frying the computer

i took out a tiny wifi thing on desktop and computer started at least-its about the size of a nickel-goes in usb

 

I always watch my HDD operation light to see if it busy, & Task Manager Internet traffic display.
- did not have specialist knowledge about computers.
Problem arises:
Years ago when XP came out, I logged into various websites every day.
-Then one day my computer seems to hang/extremely slow, luckily I saw my HDD 100% busy...Let it go, then after half an hour decided it going in circles full blast nowhere....I forced shutdown. Restarted it, problem gone, no problems.
-Then after two days it happened again. It took me three days to figure out it was New York Times cookie causing the problem.
I the found the cookie file but could not delete, Cut it, or rename it on HDD.

Idea:
-After another day or two I got an idea and it worked.
-I put small stiffy drive in its slot, and I could cut and past the cookie file off my HDD and onto the stiffy drive.
I experienced the same on the stiffy, could not delete it.

Selution=Remove stiffy, cut it into pieces and thrown the problem literally in the rubbish drum, collected by municipality, off my property.
-Did not used New York Times for 6 months, after that never happened again.

 

What’s The Most Ridiculous Fix You’ve Ever Made?

I know this is an old thread but I think it's important so I'll mention it. I’m not sure if this is the most ridiculous fix I’ve ever made but it’s the BEST fix and the most important one. I found this on YouTube by a guy who goes by the name of Rich and his YouTube channel is called “CyberCPU Tech”. He has a video that he has named “Easily fix broken Windows files now with System File Checker”. It’s probably not what you think. It’s not just the “sfc /scannow” but something else entirely. Watch the whole video if this first part bores you skip to the middle of the video. The whole video is only 15 minutes but it saved me from having to reinstall windows many times and is the best advice I ever got for repairing windows. If you do NOT understand the following command, then you have to watch this video. Here is the command (on my computer anyway). Yours will be different depending on what directories you have set up.

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth /source:G:\sources\install.wim

This is how I restored my broken Windows 11 computer with a brand new Windows 11 ISO download directly from Microsoft and by double clicking the Windows 11 ISO it mounts the ISO into a virtual DVD drive. This will repair the broken or corrupted files that sfc /scannow was trying to retrieve but could successfully retrieve because they were corrupted . Maybe I didn’t explain it the correct way and that is why I strongly suggest that everyone watches this video because I didn’t know what this man taught me and I thought I was pretty computer savvy.

Do yourself a favor and watch this video. It’s probably the most productive 15 minutes of your life. No joke.

Here is the video URL:

 

Hilarious! Who knew?

 

I have had to recently pull off my CPU socket and replace it.

 

My computer botched a Blizzard media update and got stuck in a repair loop. It wouldn't run said repair, even from external media, and it looked like I was going to have to wipe the thing to make it run. Was able to rewrite the registry from the BIOS and now it's just fine. But dammit that was a pain in the ass.