Experiences with non-techies

[acturisme]

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.

Vsauce covered this very well.  While data stored as electrons is heavier than that stored by magnetic field, fields themselves have mass.  Stronger ones have more mass as even mass-less energy gravitates.  I would argue that because not all of a disk is written to even after it has been formatted that the platter's bits can in fact have 3 states.  A 'one' a 'zero' and a 'null' state with no field.  As you write data, the 'null' fields get written to as a 'one' or 'zero' and both of those states have fields.  Thus adding mass.

http://www.quora.com/Physics/Does-a-magnetic-field-have-mass

[Godlygamer23]

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.

I hate those toys. They're so hard. Can't figure out where the pieces go. ;P

[Godlygamer23]

My sister was installing Firefox on her computer. Sounds pretty easy, right? She put it on the desktop. All of it - every single file that makes Firefox tick. Not just the shortcut. <_<

[machine freak]

Don't know if this really fits here, but I worked for a man once that wanted me to make a Xerox copy of a document before I faxed it to the accountant. Curious, I asked him why. His reply, "So we will still have a copy after it's sent." It took me 20 minutes to explain that the fax wasn't going to actually send our physical copy.

[Night]

Going to help my grandma log into skype on her phone soon. Which shes only going to use when shes at home on Wifi...where she has a laptop. ¯\(°_o)/¯

[Fanatech]

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....

This often happens almost every time I go to best buy(not often) but I dont intervene because I dont want to be that guy, you know that guy. Also there is the fact that I ama very your looking 16 year old and they most likely wouldn't believe what I had to say regarding their future purchase of a bad pc.

[Fanatech]

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

I was going to post this but you beat me to it.

[Fanatech]

Where I live, Craigslist is filled with people claiming that Pentium 4's are capable machines.

The worst part about it is people actually buy these computers thinking they got a good deal lol.

[Matthias2556]

 

HAHAHA. best newegg commercial ever. totally sums up my experiences at best buy.

 

One of my friends dad's had me help him pick out a new laptop, his old dell windows XP just died. we just picked a nice touch screen acer up from costco, with an i5 and 500gb hard drive. He's a really nice guy, and considers me pretty much a genius. the guy at checkout gave him a flyer for tech support, but my friends dad threw it away right in front of the guy. YES! i then helped him transfer his windows mail files. he really likes the touch screen and windows 8.

[MegaDave91]

I always explain to my parents that the speed of their laptops outside the internet has NOTHING to do with the internet itself. They always think the internet is slow.

[Rowlett54]

Here's a simplified version :P

That show is freakin hillarious! 

[Godlygamer23]

This often happens almost every time I go to best buy(not often) but I dont intervene because I dont want to be that guy, you know that guy. Also there is the fact that I ama very your looking 16 year old and they most likely wouldn't believe what I had to say regarding their future purchase of a bad pc.

Using age to determine someone's knowledge I think is rather...illogical to a certain degree. I wouldn't expect a 3 year old to know what a CPU is. But if you look 16, so what? I'm sure there's plenty of smart 16 year olds out there.

[Godlygamer23]

I always explain to my parents that the speed of their laptops outside the internet has NOTHING to do with the internet itself. They always think the internet is slow.

I update software for my mom's laptop a lot. And I updated Firefox the one time. This was when they were changing the default home page for their Google sponsored home page. And also changing the look a bit here and there for the browser. She thought I was doing it - she had no idea that it was Mozilla doing it and that I was just updating Firefox(till I told her).

[olan1225]

I was surpriced when my dad, who isn't bad at computers at all, asks me how you get to the Recycle Bin  <_< He has used windows since Windows 98! 

[AGGELOS_970]

In my school I know a guy who thinks he knows everything about computers and says that thermal paste is glue between the CPU and the cooler ! :blink:

Also says that if the inches of a monitor are more, the more graphics power you need !

[CognitiveZebra]

At work i helped a old guy with some excel-files, this was before I'd gotten my work email, so I handed him the files on a USB-drive. He took the drive and said that he'd take it home and then E-mail it to his work computer.

I tried to keep a straight face as much as I could as I explained to him that the work computer had a USB-port as well. When he finally understood that he didn't have to take the drive home he asked me to save the file to his desktop. I did.

After that he wanted to go to the desktop and check the work I did for him... Instead of just pressing win+D or the button in the bottom right corner, or even minimizing all the windows. He went File --> close (not even pressing the X-button) on all the windows he had open. There where at least 20 of them.

[Guest]

People who don't want to buy a new computer and complain it's slow.

 

 

Yeah no shit.

[Godlygamer23]

In my school I know a guy who thinks he knows everything about computers and says that thermal paste is glue between the CPU and the cooler ! :blink:

Also says that if the inches of a monitor are more, the more graphics power you need !

Thermal paste is *kind of* sticky, but it's certainly no glue. And the second statement is certainly false. *the higher the resolution, the more graphics power you'll need.* Ever try correcting him?

[AGGELOS_970]

Thermal paste is *kind of* sticky, but it's certainly no glue. And the second statement is certainly false. *the higher the resolution, the more graphics power you'll need.* Ever try correcting him?

He is that type of kid who will tell you that he is right and you're completely wrong. You can't correct him.

 

Funny think is that we both are in the same class. COMPUTERS class !

He think he knows everything and he don't even know what thermal paste is! Sometimes I want to punch him in the face. :D

oh.. and another think that I remember he was saying, that HD image don't lose quality if you zoom at it.

[remenomen]

The best one I've experienced is when people call any form of internet "wifi"

This. SO ANNOYING.

[TheArium]

I spent quite some time explaining to one of my friends that not all downloads contain virus at all. And definitely not if you download a piece of software from a known publisher like antivirus software from Avast or AVG. As far as she was concerned, safe software comes from a store on a disk. Internet = virus...

 

Another girl from my school said that she liked the Sims games. I asked her why she hadn't installed the game on her Mac so she could enjoy them, then? Well, apparently because games make the computer run slow.

 

Actually today I had an argument with the same girl. She got very annoyed at me because I hit my elbow on the table where her Mac was standing. She recently learned that HDD's contain moving parts, and she was sure that the vibrations I created in the table would wreck the HDD and destroy her files.

[Jay123]

Here's a simplified version :P

IT Crowd is my favorite series EVER!!! Street Countdown FTW

[Jay123]

My Uncle told me I should use Linux because it has Firefox!

[CanuckBrakePress_Welder]

Cheap and non techie story

 

My buddy had a computer store. Around tax time a guy came in and asked about tax software (early days). He was given a price and off he went.  A few days later he phoned and wanted to know how to install and use the software. My bud helped him as much as he could but then realized he never did purchase the item.  He asked where he had picked it up.  Safeway!, he told him to ask the meat manager question from then on ;o)

[Genecidalic]

I always found it funny when people think your a genious for doing the most basic things like installing ram or a graphics card.

Friend:"I got a new graphics card but my mom wont take me to bestbuy so they can install it."

Me:"Ill do it for free"

*installs*

Friend:"HOLY CRAP YOUR BRILLIANT YOU SHOULDNT EVEN BE IN HIGHSCHOOL"