Experiences with non-techies

[greenroost1445]

more than once i have had a few people i know ring me saying that there computer is broke can i fix it and the first question i ask them is "did you press the power button?" theres a long pause and then i hear oh its fixed thanks

another thing that always happens is someone gets me to show them something on the computer and as im half way through showing them they say this is to confussing do it for me but i never do i always tell them "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime"

​am i the only one who finds it frustrating when someone who clearly does not know about computers contradics you and just wont admit there wrong and when people just do stupid stuff like ask me why google chrome wont start when they are only doing 1 click not 2

p.s everybody that i talk about in this reply is in the age group of 14-20 in no way are any of these people old

Rant Over! ;)

I'm so sad that people of my generations are soooooo ridiculously ignorant...

[Chivpcgamer]

Ok so not really tech oriented as such but my grandfather got his hair cut because he was going on the radio haha

[joelthezombie15]

I was talking to my sisters (Tech God boyfriend) about graphics cards. and so i told him that the build i was working onwas going to have a Gtx 680. and he told me oh no that is a overpriced piece of crap annd that i should get 1 amd 5500 and it will out preform a 680 any day. so as if that isnt dumb enough later im talikg to him as to why he preferes AMD over Nvidia and hes giving me all these reasons and i told him that one of the positives for nvidia is physx and so he tells me that AMD has physx to and that it works better on AMD than Nvidia. and at that i now just ignore him and let him thinks what he wants.

[Agons]

I sold a mother board online once, it was a workstaion grade but since i upgraded my cpu to the new intel socket with a 2700k, i didnt need it anymore. I get an email saying it doesn't work. I say okay send it back ill see if it was a old bios problem that i can fix. I get it back, i kid you not it looked like he freaking punched the shit out of the socket pins! some where torn out! wtf?? sadly i sold it though amazon, which mean when i told him he purposely broke it and ill send it back he went to amazon who forced me to give him a refund. never again will i sell on amazon.

[ZombifiedPyro]

I sold a mother board online once, it was a workstaion grade but since i upgraded my cpu to the new intel socket with a 2700k, i didnt need it anymore. I get an email saying it doesn't work. I say okay send it back ill see if it was a old bios problem that i can fix. I get it back, i kid you not it looked like he freaking punched the shit out of the socket pins! some where torn out! wtf?? sadly i sold it though amazon, which mean when i told him he purposely broke it and ill send it back he went to amazon who forced me to give him a refund. never again will i sell on amazon.

That sucks. I bet he was trolling you.

[xkronusx]

I've had people try to argue that:

you need to let lithium batteries drain fully because it's good for them

macs are good

AMD's processors are faster because they have more GHz

You need a 750 watt PSU for a single graphics card

seagate hard drives are unreliable

western digital hard drives are unreliable

80+ platinum power supplies are worth it in Ontario (6 cents per KWH here)

the Asrock extreme4 is a good motherboard

lol

Ever use a western digital caviar blue? lmao failure rate is so amazing that i told my buddy not to buy one just because its cheap don't mean its good.

Drive failed literally within the week he purchased it; not saying they are not reliable, but i can see how people think they are not.

Love hearing how someones $1500 facebook machine (mac) is a good product, then hearing how their unheard of band uses garage studio or whatever the hell their audio editing program is so much better then what you could use on a windows machine.

Also when did every phone store tell all their customers its a "good idea" to let them drain their batteries? Every good programmer on rootzwiki says the same, it damages the cells. I tend to agree with the people who can program the device rather then the guy behind the counter who's credentials are he passed high school tells me.

[Agons]

I sold a mother board online once, it was a workstaion grade but since i upgraded my cpu to the new intel socket with a 2700k, i didnt need it anymore. I get an email saying it doesn't work. I say okay send it back ill see if it was a old bios problem that i can fix. I get it back, i kid you not it looked like he freaking punched the shit out of the socket pins! some where torn out! wtf?? sadly i sold it though amazon, which mean when i told him he purposely broke it and ill send it back he went to amazon who forced me to give him a refund. never again will i sell on amazon.

he had to be, cost me 20+ bucks for stupid shipping, never again.

[Deleon.David]

I was talking to my sisters (Tech God boyfriend) about graphics cards. and so i told him that the build i was working onwas going to have a Gtx 680. and he told me oh no that is a overpriced piece of crap annd that i should get 1 amd 5500 and it will out preform a 680 any day. so as if that isnt dumb enough later im talikg to him as to why he preferes AMD over Nvidia and hes giving me all these reasons and i told him that one of the positives for nvidia is physx and so he tells me that AMD has physx to and that it works better on AMD than Nvidia. and at that i now just ignore him and let him thinks what he wants.

but the part where he said that 5500 will perform as well as a 680... frustrated me a bit

[TechTheWorld]

When you ask someone "What kind of computer do you have?" and they say " I have a windows 8 computer".....

[ixi_your_face]

If only building one was as hard as a lot of people think.

 

Oh my god. You have no idea how much i have to explain to people that it's literally putting the thing in the thing.

[fishymamba]

amd does support physx

 

No, their GPUs cant run Physx, the physx tasks get handed to the CPU.

[Jimbo]

PhysX is an Nvidia proprietery technology that uses the GPU for calculating PhysICS. AMD GPUs are certainly capable of the same calculations, they just can't use PhysX.

[Liam-Wabbit]

I don't have a problem with non-techies, till they ring for the 11th time to fix something :( Usually software.

Non-techies first PC, is usually an old one, that can just barely run the internet and they'll expect it to play something like Farcry 3 lol. 
I carry around cards for pc classes at the college and say if you want me to fix your pc for the 5th time,
I'll have to charge (sorry song popping into my head there lol)

 

http://youtu.be/u8wm-ykUnlQ
 

[Night]

Lady puts Nano-sim in a regular size adapter into her BlackBerry and then complains that she was never informed it was the wrong size.

I tried to explain to her as politely as possible that a booklet shouldnt have to tell you you're an idiot.

You should have to do one of these before you can buy a cellphone.
 

[pcman2000]

May I introduce you to http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport

[acturisme]

My mom calls the internet "google" because it's her homepage :D Also if she wants to go to a site she firstly types it into google, then clicks on the search result, in stead of just typing youtube.com or w/e in the URL bar :D

This!  A thousand times this!  WHYYY?  Url's ppl.  They are still valid.

[acturisme]

Not really, A HDD read and writes from a magnetic plate so it's not getting heavier with more data as it does not add more mass to the platters.

Actually you are.  By writing to the drive you are going from a state of disorder to a state of order.  In order to do that you must put energy into the system.  In this case magnetic energy.  Since e=mc^2 by adding energy you are adding a small amount of mass.

[acturisme]

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.

LOL I call troll.

[acturisme]

These people should be publicly flogged for their negligence.

The ones who should be flogged are the ones who sell a 3' cable for $50.

[Godlygamer23]

If any one ever goes to that site they should have all of their internets taken away.

Oops. jk. Well I did go to the website, but not because I believe it. :P

[Glenwing]

Actually you are.  By writing to the drive you are going from a state of disorder to a state of order.  In order to do that you must put energy into the system.  In this case magnetic energy.  Since e=mc^2 by adding energy you are adding a small amount of mass.

That's incorrect actually.  You're not going from a state of disorder to a state of order in the sense that you're talking about.  You're rearranging the polarity of the magnetic bits on the disk from one sequence to another sequence, one sequence just happens to mean something different to the computer than a "blank" sequence (All 0's).  No energy is being added except the mechanical energy required to move the read head, and that is returned as heat and motion.

 

EDIT: Furthermore if you're saying that a written hard disk is in an "ordered" state and a blank one is in "disorder" and everything tends toward entropy, so logically maintaining a hard disks data would require energy to be input to keep it in an "ordered" state, and therefore you would have to say that if a hard disk was disconnected from power for a long time, the data values it held would eventually disappear with no energy to maintain their state.  Fortunately this is not how it works.

[acturisme]

That's incorrect actually.  You're not going from a state of disorder to a state of order in the sense that you're talking about.  You're rearranging the polarity of the magnetic bits on the disk from one sequence to another sequence, one sequence just happens to mean something different to the computer than a "blank" sequence (All 0's).  No energy is being added except the mechanical energy required to move the read head, and that is returned as heat and motion.

While your definition of random in the sense that human information is no less random than random information is technically correct, you are still adding energy to the system. If it takes 5 watts of energy to CHANGE that information then that goes into the system.  

[Godlygamer23]

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...^^

I don't think adding information to a hard drive makes it heavier, but it does happen to flash based storage devices. (very very very little weight though)

[PCBudgetSolutions]

Guys, try to keep things friendly here if you can!

[Glenwing]

While your definition of random in the sense that human information is no less random than random information is technically correct, you are still adding energy to the system. If it takes 5 watts of energy to CHANGE that information then that goes into the system.  

The energy isn't stored in the hard disk though.  If you move your pencil from one side of the desk to the other, that requires energy, but that doesn't mean the energy is now part of the pencil system and the mass of the pencil has increased, or that there is energy in the pencil that can be removed to make it zoom back over to the other side.  The energy a hard drive consumes is used for the motion of the read head, and in waste heat of course.