I was aware it was possible to do, but I can now personally confirm that it is possible to straighten bent pins on a CPU socket. With magnifying glasses and a hooked dental pick.
I did not need that shit in my life this week.
LOL, me in my early 20s would do that quite often. Mostly working at a computer store, before getting into a real IT career.
I didn’t even need those tools, just a straight screwdriver. You had to be really gentle to get the pins straight enough to go back into the socket.
It’s been awfully stormy in Michigan this summer. It’s really odd, this is usually Spring weather. Between that and the wildfires we’ve had very few days where you can go outside.
In MN, we had a hot dry June and a slightly wetter, cooler, more spring-like July. We still need more rain. Mom Nature is really unhappy and it shows.
Sockets don’t have pins. Sockets have openings into which pins can be inserted.
I don’t know what you fixed, but it wasn’t “… straighten bent pins on a CPU socket”
I assume they were bent pins on a CPU so that it would fit in the socket.
It’s difficult to do but very possible.
Oh yeah. Straightening pins is simple enough, although it requires a steady hand and a good magnifier. But that’s not what he said. I’m just picking on his terminology, not his workmanship.
Well it’s nothing I had seen before, but the pins were certainly on the socket itself.
The back of the CPU is smooth and has round, gold contact points, not pins. Socket LGA 1151.
Whoa. Color me completely wrong and confused. Sorry to have impugned your experience. Thanks for the polite correction.
A pin-based CPU socket. I guess I’m more out of touch than I’d realized.
My go to solution was putting a debit card between the rows/columns and lightly rocking side to side with a small screwdriver for the pins bent too far over.
Me too, and I’ve been doing PC hardware for many years.
My career has definitely been more software-focused though in recent years.
You know folks are gonna push that sumbitch in. I would.
We had another bad storm today. About 40,000 people were still without power from Tuesday’s storm. Another 20,000 were added today including my niece who had just gotten her power back yesterday. My lights flickered some which made me anxious but thankfully they held. Thanks for the birthday present power gods. Fortunately the high temp today was only 80. I can’t remember it ever being that cool on my birthday. It’s usually near 100.
Those of us in the southwest with 110 degree temperatures and no rain in sight (despite being in monsoon season), politely request that the stealth bragging about rain please stop.
Can I still stealth brag about the wet carpet in the rain-facing bedroom that had the windows open? 
Oh, and thanks to @LSLGuy and @Atamasama for the Microsoft Edge recommendation. I’m currently switching between the two and have Edge configured to my preferences so it looks almost exactly like Firefox, which causes me problems when I assume it actually is, and the the shortcuts work differently. I hate change. 
If I was in charge of the universe, once things reached a certain point to my satisfaction, nothing would ever change.
Amen to that.
Back to LGA1151s …
Back in Ye Olden Tymes of electricity, male & female plugs / sockets were simple. Nowadays they’re not.
That thing is a “socket” = female at the macro level where the ceramic CPU module “plugs” = male into the mechanical carrier. And one level down the socket is full of pins = male that poke into the CPU module’s connecting pads forming mini-dents = female in the CPU modules. So the male/female-ness relationship is going the other way.
How many layers deep does this alternating convention get in various electronic devices? Are there sockets containing plugs that in turn contain sockets that themselves contain plugs? And if we’re going to use the terms male/female, or plug/socket, which level is the one that determines the label? The biggest / outermost or what?
You probably also thought that back in the flip-phone & XP days. If I magically teleported you back there you’d be begging to return to modernity within a day, tops.
It’s sooo easy to forget all the ways change is good and rather frictionless, and focus on the few sticking points that piss one off. The problem of course is different people have different lists of which change points piss them off.
I hope it gets better by you!
I’m sorry if I’ve been grouchy; these stitches are getting to me and I’m in more pain than I expected.
Please allow me to take issue with this unbridled optimism. I forgive you because I know you’re just a young lad who’s not even retired yet! Consider these to be Words of Wisdom from a cranky old fart – not meant to be taken completely seriously, these Words of Wisdom, but containing nonetheless a kernel of truth. And I’ll do it using precisely the examples you gave.
It would be silly to claim that everything was better in the past, as this is objectively not true. Instead I subscribe to the theory of peak optimality: that things improve until they are optimum, and then continuing change makes them shitty again. They will be shitty in different ways, but shitty nonetheless. This could also be called the theory of post-optimum shittiness.
Let’s take your example of the flip phone. I had one – a species of Motorola Razr. I loved it. It was so small when folded that it easily fit in my pocket, and did everything I needed. Today I have a “smart phone” because that’s all that my carrier offers. It’s bigger, more delicate, more prone to unintended behaviours because of its complexity, and offers me no useful features. I remind today’s kiddies that “phone” is short for “telephone”, not for “pocket computer”. Cell phones are great and very useful, but in making them “smart”, Steve Jobs unleashed a plague upon the world. I had to abandon my beloved flip phone when my carrier upgraded their network. They called that “progress”.
Windows XP, you say? XP was the first consumer-friendly OS from Microsoft that integrated the rock-solid NT kernel with consumer features like games and entertainment. Prior to that Windows 9x would crash regularly, especially when gaming, because it was really just a pretend OS that was hardly more than a DOS extension. XP was a real OS and I loved it because it did everything yet was as stable as its famous predecessor, Windows NT. Literally the best of both worlds.
I continued using XP well past end of support, because there was no reason to “upgrade”. Vista was a complete disaster that I mercifully managed to avoid. The only reason I had to stop using XP was that the world unnecessarily chose to move on and broke things that otherwise would still have been just fine, specifically, root security certificates expired, and newer versions of Microsoft’s .NET framework required by some apps were no longer supported. I like Windows 7 but only because it fixed those problems, and not for much else. Windows 7 is also notable because Microsoft did something unusual – instead of padding it with features that no one wanted or needed, they somewhat went back in time, and rejigged it to be more efficient than Vista and with less obnoxious “security”.
So yes, please take me back to the days of my flip phone and XP. That was peak optimality. I challenge anyone to name any significant genuinely useful new feature in any subsequent Microsoft OS that XP didn’t have.
Your own industry is another example. We currently have a thread where folks are discussing the good old days of flying, where you weren’t being nickel-and-dimed to death for everything from checked baggage to meals, where kids could visit the cockpit and get little souvenirs, where there were no “disruptive passengers”, where you didn’t have to show up at the airport hours before your flight and then get strip-searched before you were allowed to board. Who wouldn’t want to go back in time to when flying was actually fun instead of a miserable chore? But one wouldn’t want to go back too far. Flying today is incredibly safe but it was less so in the early days of the jet age. One wants that point of peak optimality – say late 90s to 2000, before everything went to shit post-9/11.
I fear that the previous post might unfairly cast me as being too hard on the Modern World, so I will concede at least one thing to it: the speed, reliability, and ubiquity of the internet. I can sit here in my dressing gown and with a few keystrokes cause almost any imaginable product to appear on my front porch in a few days. I can do all my banking. I can file my taxes – a thing that used to be a miserable chore involving lots of paper, a calculator, and then a process of physical mailing. A few months ago I renewed both my driver’s license and my health card for a further five years just by sitting in front of the computer and typing some stuff. I can access just about any information known to man, and I can chat with a remarkably human-like artificial intelligence. So to all of that, respect! It’s amazing.
However, since this is all working so well, my theory of peak optimality (or maybe I should have called it “peak utility”) suggests that some scammer or hacker will eventually do something so bad that some of these functions will become more limited or more onerous. And then we will look back on this period as “the good old days”. And this, boys and girls, is how “progress” works: things get better until they’re as good as they can be, and then they turn shitty.