Experiences with non-techies

[LapX]

My mom wanted to buy some below 100$ headphones for my little sister, I know she will wan't a more beautiful than great sounding headphone. We tried some, I made my mom listen to a cheaply made 60$ Headphones saying it was shit, she took a 25$ one, thinking it was the same and was gonna buy it. I shouted at her saying that she shouldn't buy it because it was a waste of money.

Today I was at Futureshop looking for some headphones (again for my sister). I was listening to the sennheiser's momentum to try them out than a salesmen pointed me to some beats... I said to him that I would never buy them because they're shit, he walked away. (Just saying that he seems to be making a lot more money by selling me beats so he isn't interested of spending his time with me further) I loled.

[Samdb]

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, is would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

It actually stays the same weight, the read/write arm cuts a put into the disk and the bits of platter that were on the disk are somewhere in the rest of the drive.

[Minjon]

One of the new kids last year, in the same year level as me (9), had done a research project and presented it to the class.

The project was on why consoles are better than pc's.

During his brief presentation, the outline for consoles being better was that the consoles had faster internets, which made "call of duty" run faster.

Then he went on to say that the internets on pc were so slow that it couldn't even handle "call of duty" and just plain didn't work.

I laughed at him so hard I was given detention

(╯°□°）╯︵ â”»â”â”»

[hasan.intisar97]

"Will this mouse pad be compatible with my computer?"

[ixi_your_face]

My aunt refuses to get a PC because she thinks you need the internet for the computer to work.

[mgsstar]

Blue screening means that the system is broken and you won't be able to fix it. lol

[TheIceCreamMan]

K, cool

[DigiKing]

This is basically a conversation that I had with my friend;

Me: Why are you using internet explorer? (IE 6)

Him: Because it is awsome!

Me: Why do you like it?

Him:Because it is fast!

Me: You do realize that firefox is a lot better in every way, right?

Him: No, firefox sucks I used it and it was slow. (keep in mind this is the guy who has a computer but no internet anywhere but the library...)

Me: I don't know how it was slow for you but it is definitely faster for almost everybody else.

After that the conversation pretty much ended, and he started to talk to another person trying to tell him that a core 2 duo is faster than an i7, but that is different story.

woah...

[DigiKing]

I had a friend that bought a Dell computer to try and game on. <- A fail in it's self... And after installing Battlefield he realized it wasn't ever going to play with acceptable frame rates. So he rang me up asking 'what's wrong with my computer? it wont run the game'. I just suggested to buy a new graphics card, common practice right?, a couple days passed by before he rang again and asked 'WTF, you don't know what you're talking about... it still will not play'. I went over to investigate. He had bought a GTX 670! (Still using the garbage retail computer, dual core, 2 gigs of ram) Not making any remark to the bottlenecked computer I looked at the IO shield, he was still using the integrated graphics... /facepalm He is still using VGA cables on a 1080p monitor too.

These people should be publicly flogged for their negligence.

[Tommy]

Hehe. Know that double click thing pretty well.

I remember back in after-school-club (Direct translation from danish (atleast what we called it)) when people played racing games on the playstation 1, and they sat and turned the controller. Motion controls, now with 100% less motion control.

Sounds dumb, but use WD-40 to try get the stain off your screen - keeps my TV clan when my cousins come around

[James_AJ]

Mom dropped an ancient external drive (which had all my valued SNES ROM Hacks I made) which turned out to be alive even after dropping from 1.5m height to wooden floor. And guess what she did? She plugged in to her pc, clicked some buttons randomly as windows showed up (as she says..) and that just reformatted the whole drive and I was like 'NOOOO WHYYY'

[Carter]

I have a sort of funny story:

My grandad has a laptop and doesn't really know much about computers (only how to go on the Internet and to play steam games). He had norton on it that kept telling him to backup his hdd, so ha called up my auntie to sort it out for him. It turns out that what she actually did was somehow tell norton to back up his c:/ drive, to the c:/ drive! When I highlighted this to her, explaining that it was completely pointless, she just shrugged and told me he had plenty of space... Crazy!

[rainbrodash666]

oh, oh I have a good one, my sisters "tech master" boyfriend said that minecraft is a huge virus and that it is a problem on their laptop, (it is installed so my niece can play on my server) he says that the connection to my server in installing viruses and keeps uninstalling minecraft, but he never even looks twice at the limewire they use to get music and videos. and they don't even run any antivirus, they uninstalled the free version of avg I put on their laptop because it was a virus too according to him.

[TechFan@ic]

oh, oh I have a good one, my sisters "tech master" boyfriend said that minecraft is a huge virus and that it is a problem on their laptop, (it is installed so my niece can play on my server) he says that the connection to my server in installing viruses and keeps uninstalling minecraft, but he never even looks twice at the limewire they use to get music and videos. and they don't even run any antivirus, they uninstalled the free version of avg I put on their laptop because it was a virus too according to him.

This is actually horrible.

[Sardis]

A young friend of mine, who doesn't have much money, is slowly upgrading his rig so I decided that I would give him my old 8800GTX, which is still a beast for how old it is, until he could afford a new card. Anyway I ran this card in a few different systems over the years and it's been a champion and a couple of months after I gave it to him I asked him how it was going and he said that it doesn't work anymore... I remembered that he had a low watt PSU, around 450 watts and he eventually revealed that the PSU only had one six pin PCI-e power cable so he used a single molex to PCI-e adaptor... I told him that was why it broke because molex is never designed to handle the kind of load like PCI-e but he still insists that I gave him a dodgy graphics card. :/

Also I know a lot of people have horror stories with trying to teach their mothers various things on the computer. I'm a very patient person and not very emotional at all but I've been almost frustrated to the point of tears just trying to explain some of the simplest things to her. I don't know whether it's just because she's from an older generation but she finds it impossible to just sit quietly and watch what I do and copy what I do, she has to start drama over how she doesn't understand and we never explain it properly... in the middle of me explaining it to her... sigh thank goodness I've moved to a different city but I feel bad for my dad now hahaha

[SubTract]

Salmiakbal commented

January 16 '13, 01:16 PM

You can though

http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

LMAO! that is awesome. never seen that before. I gotta send that to a couple ppl.

I just thought it was funny that its "New" 4gb of DDR2 and that the pic is 4 sticks and it clearly says 2x2GB sticks :D

[Trommenissen]

hmm experiences with non techies?

well i helped my grandmother find a new laptop for her. When we got the new computer home to her i helped her setting it up and showed her the most important stuff. Later that week she ,called me and told me to "come fix the cup holder" on her computer and then hang up. I figured she was just confused or something considering that she is 76. So i walked to her, when i came in and she showed me her computer, it turned out that she had been using her cd drive for a cup holder for her coffee, she had then managed to spill the coffee over the laptop.

long story short, don't buy your grandmother a computer with a cd drive, it can end badly.

[SubTract]

I thought this was pretty funny. Saw it on a website and had to screenshot it.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]n1952[/ATTACH]

Pretty sure he is a troll his username is fwitt...

[SubTract]

My little brother the other day came up to me while doing research on both YouTube and New Egg for my new build. This is the conversation that followed.

Him: What are you looking at.

Me: Computer stuff.

Him: Why?

Me: Because all the computers that I have now a slow (true, both my Mac's have huge bottlenecks)

Him: There slow, because you bloat them

Me: ......

I have no idea what he ment by that but still, when has the amount of data on a mechanical harddrive affect the speed of said drive?

Technically it does affect performance. Normally due to the fact there is no place left for a page or swap file. seek times can also increase with more data though normally very minor difference. Linux and I'd assume Mac OS use a Swap partition so you shouldn't fill it up.

[SubTract]

I actually do have a story now I'm thinking about it.. Let me sum it up

A coworker of mine (I work at a supermarket) sees himself as a tech fanatic. Once he was talking about a build he wanted to do.

He started talking about getting all top tier Asus ROG stuff, 7970's, H100 (at the time).. All massively overpriced stuff. And.. four 250GB harddrives in a Raid 0.

So I asked him why would you do that? Raid 0 is a stupid raid, just get one big fast drive and a SSD for boot and stuff, much more reliable that way. But he didn't move one bit.

Some time after that we we're having a break and we started talking computer again. I asked him why he wants to go AMD in stead if Nvidia for a GPU. He replied: ''No, Nvidia cards are made by Intel, and I dislike Intel!''. I told him Intel only makes integrated graphics and not discrete ones and that Nvidia and Intel are in no way affiliated, but he wouldn't change his mind.

After that he started talking about coolers. He said he had a H100 once before. ''Yeah, that thing is so nice the temps of my CPU we're lower than the temperature of my room!''

I tried to teach him a small lesson in physics on why that would be entirely impossible, but he kept yammering about.

One time after that he started talking about thermal compound and how he always spreads it over the entire CPU instead of a single blob in the mid. I tried to tell him why that method is shit, to which he replied ''I always do that and I have the lowest temps of all my friends!'' (Obviously made up).

Usually I don't care if people believe things that aren't optimal/true/good in any way, but this guy was so immensely dense it was unbelievable, and a complete tool too. Every word you tried to throw at him just bounced off.

he may of had his H100 Rad mounted in a freezer :S

[SubTract]

At work today. Had to try to explain to a lady ...data...like....just the whole ....everything...

What data is, how it travels, how its measured, what its called, GB's bigger than MB's.

Just about every one asks "how long will X amount of data last" "How much can I do with X amount of data" My answer is always...errrrrrr I cant tell you exactly. So they insist on giving me examples. "How many movies can I download?"....... I think these people are lucky im the one explaining this stuff to them. Otherwise they would never even begin to grasp it.

Agreed one of the worst questions ever.

[Snickerzz]

To my good friends, I am God of computing.

My friend's mom actually paid me 50 bucks to fix their loose cable, thrice.

Many don't believe me when I told them I built a PC.

I should never have mentioned the term 'hardware porn' among them.

Some think I have no life and no future.

To most adults, I am a spoilt brat.

Same here, honestly if you look at a few youtube videos its pretty damn easy xD just adult legos is all

[SubTract]

occasionally i like going into my local pc world and watch there sales team sell low end pc's at inflated prices and listen to the patter they use to sell em...

then when they go to get there payment plans or some other bits and bobs, i walk over and tell em to look on the web for better hardware at the same or lesser price...

reason?... because it sickens me to see people deliberately being ripped of because they dont know the difference between a gts 450 and a gtx 680. 1 guy was gonna pay £145 for a cheap end gfx card which retailed elsewhere for £79.99 (gts 650) thinking it was cool because he had just been told it had 2 gigs of vram. i pointed out that the vram has little to do with overall performance and he needs to know how many cuda cores the card has. i then pointed him to a cheaper 660 gtx from ebuyer only 1 gig. he walked away happy but the salesman wasnt. i got escorted out the shop and told not to return lol....

ROFL. I suppose they're probably a 1366x768 screen. They might actually run games. People who buy this sort of stuff should just buy a console. Its so sad to say but its true.

[SubTract]

I had an old lady (about 70ish) come in looking for a new laptop.

She started to tell me that she was going to overclock her laptop like she had done with her current Vista laptop.

She "Has a friend overseas that showed her how to do it" Apparently its "Really easy and all you have to do it open the root of your computer and change the administrator file"

It has a "little box that asks you how fast you want your CPU" her vista laptop is running at 15GHz.

I literally face-palmed in front of her. I had to get someone else to finish serving her as I couldn't keep my composure.

[Wauthar]

Mom dropped an ancient external drive (which had all my valued SNES ROM Hacks I made) which turned out to be alive even after dropping from 1.5m height to wooden floor. And guess what she did? She plugged in to her pc, clicked some buttons randomly as windows showed up (as she says..) and that just reformatted the whole drive and I was like 'NOOOO WHYYY'

I am quite surprised that she managed to plug it in.