Personal Tech

Casual IT team learns that building bespoke PCs can be a false economy

ON CALL 你好 Nǐ hǎo, dear reader, and welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of translating technical trauma while delivering transcendent tech support.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department.

"It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer," he told On Call. "We were a very casual IT group; nothing in the way of any formal policies or standards for anything at all. If someone needed a new PC, we just ordered parts and assembled them ourselves."

The department's PC fleet therefore had a diverse gene pool, with no two machines possessing the same bill of materials.

"This was fine by me – I enjoyed building them and it never really caused any issues that I couldn't handle," Jackson told On Call. "Until one day we got a panicked support call from one of the secretaries who claimed that her PC just rebooted and then started talking to her."

Jackson and his colleagues didn't believe a word of it until the secretary stopped talking and placed her phone next to the talking PC.

"I could clearly hear a muffled voice repeating a message of some sort," Jackson told On Call.

There was nothing for it but to visit the PC, which he found hung in the middle of a Power-On Self-Test, flashing an alphanumeric error code and unmistakably playing a voice through its internal speaker.

In Chinese!

Jackson rebooted the machine and it ended up in the same state, reciting the same message. Chinese isn't a language in which Jackson is fluent, so he had no idea what the PC was trying to tell him.

"After poking around in the BIOS, I found the culprit," Jackson revealed. "This particular model of motherboard had a 'talking error BIOS' whereby certain POST codes triggered the playback of a friendly, spoken error message, with Chinese set as the default language."

Jackson found the relevant BIOS settings, changed the default language to English, and the next time he rebooted the machine it helpfully let him know: "Your floppy drive may not be connected properly."

In his mail to On Call, Jackson hypothesized that the PC's CMOS battery died, so the BIOS was unable to access its stored settings and reverted to factory settings that assumed the presence of a nonexistent second floppy drive.

"It triggered a feature I didn't even know the motherboard had!" Jackson told On Call.

Have you found yourself flummoxed by a feature you didn't know about? If so, click here to send On Call an email – we'll assume that's a feature you know well – so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®