Teh Guide

I have recently gotten back into tech support work, and this page is a reference to some things I'm picking up and re-learning.

• It's important to know that even if you fix an error, other errors or issues may remain underneath, and a complete repair may sometimes be less economical than replacement. It might also take more time than the initial error might indicate.
  • For example, in the copier job below, even though the boot disk error was fixed, the formatter board required replacement to get a basic function like printing over the network to work. If this was a less expensive copier, the amount of time to troubleshoot and the cost of replacement parts may not have been worth simply replacing the copier outright.

• Copiers have hard drives and other components on “formatter” boards. These are similar to motherboards in computers.
• One of the first jobs I had after getting back into tech support was an HP cm4540 copier that was first displaying a “boot disk not found” error, and then having network connectivity issues.
  • Initial error was fixed by replacing the boot disk. It's worth noting any SED 2.5“ hard disk would have worked, and did not have to come directly from the manufacturer.
  • The network connectivity issue was very unclear. The NIC was built into the formatter board. It would settle on a manual IP address, but only after a long time. Even though other devices were able to get a DHCP address, the copier would just get stuck on “initializing” for the network status. I was finally able to fix this by replacing the formatter board entirely. $90 replacement part from ebay.