Spent 45 minutes troubleshooting a loose DisplayPort cable

I was chasing a weird flickering issue on a customer's gaming rig yesterday. Checked drivers, swapped graphics cards, even re-seated the RAM before I realized the DisplayPort cable was just barely not clicked in all the way. Anybody else waste half a day on something that simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lee18d ago

Marking cables before plugging them in saved me on this exact problem. Little bits of colored electrical tape on both ends of every cable, matching colors to the ports. Costs like three bucks and takes ten minutes, but it stops you from chasing ghosts when you're swapping stuff around. Also started keeping a cheap continuity tester in my bag - thirty seconds to verify a cable works instead of twenty minutes of driver hunting. I've been burned by bad cables enough times that I just don't trust anything anymore, even brand new out of the box. Half my shop time now is just ruling out the dumb stuff before I touch any settings.

markc8418d ago

I mean, idk maybe it's just me but isn't that kind of what you get paid to check first? It's literally the first thing I do before I even boot anything up. Half the time if you wiggle the cable and the monitor flickers you've already found your problem without swapping anything.