Comment by IgorPartola
9 years ago
I once helped a coworker fix her not working keyboard in a fun way. Her computer was working fine, and her keyboard worked with any other computer, but not with her own. She tried all the usual things except one: I told her to unplug the computer and actually wait 30 seconds, not just power cycle it.
My theory is that the USB hub had a bad capacitor or some such which needed to discharge fully before communication on that port could happen. Funny thing is that she worked in tech support and would give this advice to others all the time.
Usually that sort of request is made in tech support not because the action is more useful, but because users are clueless or will outright lie about power cycling. Asking something unusual like this gives you better odds that they will actually do it, rather than, say, power cycling their monitor, or pretending to power cycle because they're terminally lazy.
Of course. But apparently once in N times it does something.
Right. I didn't mean to imply it would always be useless, just explain why someone who works tech support might not follow their own troubleshooting steps to the letter in this case.