Experiences with non-techies

[Ash_Kechummm]

11 hours ago, Lord Bloobus said:

I think windows launched an update that made more android apps executable on windows, so maybe take a look at running them from there perhaps.

i looked it up, but apparently it needs a smartphone to run the app and then uses screen mirroring to show it on the PC, so it doesn't help at all

[tkitch]

Work gave me a new problem today.  Told me a screen broke.

 

Well, they weren't wrong.  The display was in 3 separate pieces, and the LCD was laying on the table outside of the plastic body entirely.

 

Haven't seen THAT before.

[Mitko_DSV]

5 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

i looked it up, but apparently it needs a smartphone to run the app and then uses screen mirroring to show it on the PC, so it doesn't help at all

I use NoxPlayer to run android apps on Windows. Runs pretty well even on my laptops (HP EliteBook 8470p, specs in sig).

[Lord Bloobus]

They're trying, but I enjoy their efforts. Changed display settings for fix, issue was the projector had changed from fullscreen to not fullscreen

[Rauten]

Oh my, I didn't even know this thread existed!

A couple weeks ago I got a phone call from a user that couldn't connect to our corporate VPN - sounds like he's never had to work remotely before (weird in the current circumstances, but ok...) so I try to guide him:

Quote

 

"Ok, let's do this; please click on the Windows key in your laptop"

".... My laptop has that? What is that? Where is it?"

 

Please kill me.

 

FYI, the guy has been with the company for over 10 years and the company has been using nothing but Windows laptops for the users for at least that long.

[PlayerLorenzo]

Usually, my mom's macbook is filled with thousands of "coupon checker" extensions in her chrome browser, and then she wonders why her computer is so slow. Oh, and my sister's iMac? That thing also is slow as a snail due to the numerous applications she leaves open, and one time, I found that she had those toolbars about free games that hijacked your search engine in her iMac. So I instantly reset the browser in my sister's iMac, and told her to not double click on anything that seems too good to be true. 

[Ash_Kechummm]

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

Oh my, I didn't even know this thread existed!

A couple weeks ago I got a phone call from a user that couldn't connect to our corporate VPN - sounds like he's never had to work remotely before (weird in the current circumstances, but ok...) so I try to guide him:

Please kill me.

 

FYI, the guy has been with the company for over 10 years and the company has been using nothing but Windows laptops for the users for at least that long.

When you explained it to him, what did he say? I assume he must've used the key at least once, but would've called it something different

[CreativeName642]

On 1/16/2013 at 1:16 PM, Salmiakbal said:

You can though

http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

You know, I genuinely used to think this was possible before i got into computers and had someone explain it to me.

[Belac F]

K so i work in retail selling laptops and printers. A few of the most common things to come up are: 

 

1. Old person reads slowly off a piece of paper "It needs to have an eyecore 3, 8 emm bee of ram, and windows vista" because they looked at the requirement  for some ancient software.

 

2. "YOU DONT UNDERSTAND. I WANT A CHEAP LAPTOP. THIS IS NOT CHEAP!" As I show them a 450 CAD laptop

 

3. "I dont need these features, Im just looking for a work laptop." (A laptop with an i5 is on sale for cheaper than one with an i3, but they insist on going with the i3 because they dont need the i5)

 

4. "Im looking for a new hard drive".  I show them the hard drives, and after like 5 min of talking I realize they mean a computer

 

 

 

 

[da na]

My mom called me on the phone one day in a panic because "her tab got big and she can't fix it". She had put Chrome in fullscreen.

[CreativeName642]

On 2/23/2021 at 10:28 PM, tkitch said:

Work gave me a new problem today.  Told me a screen broke.

 

Well, they weren't wrong.  The display was in 3 separate pieces, and the LCD was laying on the table outside of the plastic body entirely.

 

Haven't seen THAT before.

A simple restart should fix that one.

[CreativeName642]

On 1/29/2021 at 9:53 PM, Sixel said:

My mother is the least tech-savvy person I know.  Couldn't tell you the difference between a web browser and a search engine.  Tech is too far above her head so she just hates it, but she has to use it sometimes.  One of the more recent things she had me help her with was to highlight text in google slides (which she forgot how to do, because she has highlighted things in the past).  What she was doing to get around that? She was making text boxes, filling them with color, and lowering the opacity.  Individually.  Because she only copy pastes when it comes to text unless prompted to by someone else.  And no, nothing was aligned properly.
I love her, but showing her things can be exhausting, because she really doesn't listen to explanations of how things work.

My 90 year old great grandfather cna do that. I feel so bad for you.

[da na]

19 minutes ago, CreativeName642 said:

My 90 year old great grandfather cna do that. I feel so bad for you.

People at my school have done equally dumb things... like trying to use the - key on a TI-30X IIS calculator to indicate a negative and wondering why they got syntax errors every time...

[Rauten]

14 hours ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

When you explained it to him, what did he say? I assume he must've used the key at least once, but would've called it something different

No, he was still pretty darn clueless.
And to finish it all off with style, it turned out he HAD worked remotely before. As in, in the same damn week. As in, he already had the VPN software open and he just needed to click "connect" and provide credentials.

 

Why the hell are these people allowed near computers...

[FakeATF]

On 12/1/2020 at 9:53 AM, FakeKGB said:

I just did 10th grade course selection and saw this:
Digital Electronics

It's mandatory because of the program I'm in...

Oh no...

A long while ago I did a "Coding" class in school. 

 

It was Scratch for the first Semester kids, and Unity/Gamemaker for the second semester kids. The first semester was laughably easy, but the second semester was fun, though. I learned the basics of GML... And promptly forgot all of it when the class ended.

 

A shame, because I made a pretty cool flamethrower.

[da na]

OK, so our school provides 2013 macbook airs (which are bad enough) we're talkin dual core 1ghz i3. So a few years ago my friend decided it would be a great idea to shove as many paper clips as possible in the hinge. Needless to say, he shorted it and murdered the whole machine.

[WkdPaul]

16 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

OK, so our school provides 2013 macbook airs (which are bad enough) we're talkin dual core 1ghz i3. So a few years ago my friend decided it would be a great idea to shove as many paper clips as possible in the hinge. Needless to say, he shorted it and murdered the whole machine.

... that's not "experience with non-techies", it's destruction of property. People that do this should get the bill for the replacement.

[CT854]

On 3/1/2021 at 12:35 PM, Belac F said:

4. "Im looking for a new hard drive".  I show them the hard drives, and after like 5 min of talking I realize they mean a computer

 

I'm honestly curious as to where this came from.  When did people start calling their towers a "hard drive" or "CPU"?  I called it a CPU until I was tech-savvy enough to know better but that's just because my mom always called it that.

[da na]

23 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

... that's not "experience with non-techies", it's destruction of property. People that do this should get the bill for the replacement.

yup, he did. School made im pay $890 for that piece of crap. 

[Belac F]

35 minutes ago, CT854 said:

 

I'm honestly curious as to where this came from.  When did people start calling their towers a "hard drive" or "CPU"?  I called it a CPU until I was tech-savvy enough to know better but that's just because my mom always called it that.

Its mostly older people. they refer to desktops as hard drives instead of desktops or towers. Im not sure why tbh

[da na]

so this happened this morning... not quite "non-techie" but still some hardware porn. One of my ssds had been corrupted when Windows was updating when our power went out, I didn't have a HDD caddy, went to my school IT departmet cause they had one. We plugged in the SSD to the caddy and the whole computer promptly shut down (a mac) and would not boot until we removed the drive... Think that one's dead

(my computer and the school's one are fine, the ssd wasn't that nice but still is unfortunate that it died)

[da na]

Oh and another one! one of my friends sent me a link on Amazon to this like $180 USD mini pc and said
"would this be good for gaming"

it had like a dual core pentium and 2gb of ram and like a 64gig emmc SSD...

[Arika]

2 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Those are  the types of PCs that can occasionally  struggle playing the Run command

Fixed

[da na]

22 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Those are  the types of PCs that can occasionally  struggle playing Run 3...

Those are the types of PCs that would've had acceptable specs for an office system in 1998...

[Rauten]

11 hours ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Those are the types of PCs that would've had acceptable specs for an office system in 1998...

The hell are you talking about? Dual cores didn't even exist back then! Pentium 2 was the best Intel had!

No, I'm not old, you're old! GET OFF MAH F#*{?"@ING LAWN!!!