Turning it off and turning it on again works on just about anything.
NASA boffins seem to have rung up the IT Crowd when it came to advice for fixing the computer on the Hubble Space Telescope.
The computer, which was recently installed, was a refurbished PC which was built as a back-up before Hubble was launched.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the computer started playing up seriously and sending silly signals to the observatory's main computer. It then tried to stick all the science instruments in safe mode, but the instruments did not respond.
Boffins worked out that the computer was neither receiving nor forwarding commands. So they tried turning it off and turning on again. Any IT Hell Desk droid could have read that from a script, of course.
Magically that worked, and the operators on the ground were able to order the science instruments into safe mode. It turned out that the computer was okay after all and was just cracking a sad.
Computer boffins are still trying to understand the malfunction, but they seem to have forgotten that computers in the 1990s didn't have to have any explanations for playing up with such antics.
theinquirer.net (c) 2009 Incisive Media
Issue: 107 | December, 2009