Cube Wars

This little unit is what we affectionately call a cube. It is a poor excuse of a computer that they use in one of the labs at work. I admit the idea of the silly things is kinda cool. It's small. It only takes up a few inches of space on a desk. The rats nest of cables that seem to be growing out of these things is terrible but other than that the idea in and of itself is kinda cool. On the flip side something that doesn't work isn't worth having. These little buggers are a pain in my butt. Last month I worked on these good for nothing suckers almost everyday. One day I was considering whether a hacksaw, sledgehammer, or death by fire would be appropriate for one of these miserable contraptions when I had an apostrophe (epiphany). Lightning struck my brain (and it didn't hurt). I got to looking at the thing and realized: How much power is this thing getting? It's using the equivalent of a laptop power supply. I look at the power cable to find that it's getting 65 watts of power. Ok. I start doing the math of the many things plugged into it demanding power verses the power it is able to give. The answer was very much in the negative numbers.

So with a stroke of genius I was able to recommend getting some powered USB hubs for the 5,000 watts of power needed (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's really not that far off as to what demands verses ability to provide was). They got the things I plugged them in and heard nothing more for about a month.

So yesterday I get an email wanting me to come look at the silly thing again because it's not working. I put it off a few hours just delaying the inevitable, but I eventually go and look at the thing. It doesn't work? That is an NSS (No $#!+ Sherlock!) statement! When I get there the monitor is unplugged, almost everything is unplugged, and the external hard drive (because the internal one wasn't big enough for windows) containing windows was unplugged. Gee I wonder why the worthless thing doesn't turn on?! I plug everything back in and away it went. Everything worked. These are scientists using the computer but I definitely wouldn't recommend they try and diagnose their own IT problems. Today I get to add MORE things to the silly cubes. (4 printers to be precise.) They do have the powered USB ports so it shouldn't be a problem anymore.