Wayback Wednesday: There are no crazy troubleshooting ideas

It’s the mid-1990s, and this pilot fish is in charge of repairs for a computer store. “Most of my duties involved run-of-the-mill things like hard drive failures or memory upgrades,” he says.

But a new system comes back into the shop after just two days because the mouse won’t work.

Fish puts the PC on the bench and starts with the easiest possibility: He replaces the mouse. It doesn’t work, and the original mouse works fine on a known-good system.

He puts in a new card with a serial port and tries the mouse. No luck. He checks the Windows settings. They look fine. He starts replacing components, one by one: memory chips, video card, modem, sound card, floppy drive, hard drive, CPU and finally the motherboard.

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