Experiences with non-techies

[InternetRecluse]

On 1/16/2013 at 9:30 AM, Tr3vor said:

my aunt who is constantly complaining about her slow Pentium 4 computer, and when people tell her to buy a new one already, she says "no its fine."

>complains

>"no wait"

[Crunchy Dragon]

On 8/28/2018 at 8:33 PM, AluminiumTech said:

I'd say that's a bit unfair for the Titan XP . It probably uses less power lmao.

They both draw 250W apparently.

 

Same as my 780.

[Elecric Rocket]

My most recent experience was when my dad was trying to go to the sign out button on Amazon. He tried to use the scroll bar, then I used the scroll wheel and was surprised that that was possible. It hurts me to see people use the scroll bar in that type of situation.

[Phentos]

A few months ago someone from my school came to me with a parts list for a build they wanted me to do for their first ever gaming PC. 

 

It consisted of the following:

• i7 7820X
• Some Gigabyte Z270 motherboard (forgot which exactly)
• 32GB Kingston DDR4-2400 RAM
• A PNY GTX 1080TI
• A 512GB Samsung 960 Pro and a 2TB WD Black HDD.
• An Insignia 520W PSU that he bought with a Best Buy gift card. 

Yea let all that sink in for a minute. 

 

Worst thing is that he had already blown a nice fat chunk of his student loan on those parts but haven't received them quite yet when he approached me. He raised a huge argument and stormed off when I told him to get refunds on some of his parts. I just let him go, as you can't fix stupid.

[D13H4RD]

49 minutes ago, Phentos said:

A few months ago someone from my school came to me with a parts list for a build they wanted me to do for their first ever gaming PC. 

 

It consisted of the following:

• i7 7820X
• Some Gigabyte Z270 motherboard (forgot which exactly)
• 32GB Kingston DDR4-2400 RAM
• A PNY GTX 1080TI
• A 512GB Samsung 960 Pro and a 2TB WD Black HDD.
• An Insignia 520W PSU that he bought with a Best Buy gift card. 

Yea let all that sink in for a minute. 

 

Worst thing is that he had already blown a nice fat chunk of his student loan on those parts but haven't received them quite yet when he approached me. He raised a huge argument and stormed off when I told him to get refunds on some of his parts. I just let him go, as you can't fix stupid.

That's....way too much for a starter build, especially for someone who is still on a student loan. 

 

I get wanting the best, but you should also factor in how much you would want to spend and what you're gaming on and for. If you want to play games at UHD resolution or want to crank up the settings on Cyberpunk 2077, then a 1080 Ti is fair game. 

 

But if all you do is play Dota or Counter Strike or any game that frankly isn't very demanding, go for an RX 580 or GTX 1060. They're more than capable for 1080p gaming with high settings. 

 

And his CPU. Wouldn't a 8700K or 2700X be a better deal anyway? 

 

He doesn't need 32GB of memory for gaming. 16GB is more than adequate 

 

Does he need all that storage? 

[Phentos]

1 minute ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

That's....way too much for a starter build, especially for someone who is still on a student loan. 

 

I get wanting the best, but you should also factor in how much you would want to spend and what you're gaming on and for. If you want to play games at UHD resolution or want to crank up the settings on Cyberpunk 2077, then a 1080 Ti is fair game. 

 

But if all you do is play Dota or Counter Strike or any game that frankly isn't very demanding, go for an RX 580 or GTX 1060. They're more than capable for 1080p gaming with high settings. 

 

And his CPU. Wouldn't a 8700K or 2700X be a better deal anyway? 

 

He doesn't need 32GB of memory for gaming. 16GB is more than adequate 

 

Does he need all that storage? 

Not my problem. I built PCs for people as a supplementary income when I was in school.

 

I asked what games they were wanting to play. He said Fortnite, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Witcher 3, Battlefield V, and AC:Odyssey when it comes out. Made no mention of Cyberpunk 2077 though which is incidentally the only upcoming game I care about (well that and Metro Exodus). He wanted to buy an Acer XB271HU monitor as well.

 

8700K or 2700X would certainly be better deals yes, but you didn't mention the fact that he bought a Z270 motherboard to use with his 7820X! 

 

He was adamant about having the 32GB of memory, even though all he'll do is gaming as you said. He doesn't know how to do any productivity tasks that may require that much RAM. That being said he doesn't know how to do anything but game on a PC...

 

He has a bad porn habit, and university firewalls prevent him from streaming it. 

[D13H4RD]

1 hour ago, Phentos said:

He has a bad porn habit, and university firewalls prevent him from streaming it. 

And apparently bad financial habit too 

[N1NJ4W4RR10R]

On 07/09/2018 at 4:17 PM, Phentos said:

A few months ago someone from my school came to me with a parts list for a build they wanted me to do for their first ever gaming PC. 

 

It consisted of the following:

• i7 7820X
• Some Gigabyte Z270 motherboard (forgot which exactly)
• 32GB Kingston DDR4-2400 RAM
• A PNY GTX 1080TI
• A 512GB Samsung 960 Pro and a 2TB WD Black HDD.
• An Insignia 520W PSU that he bought with a Best Buy gift card. 

Yea let all that sink in for a minute. 

 

Worst thing is that he had already blown a nice fat chunk of his student loan on those parts but haven't received them quite yet when he approached me. He raised a huge argument and stormed off when I told him to get refunds on some of his parts. I just let him go, as you can't fix stupid.

A 520w psu for those components?

 

Why would you cheap out on what is litterally the most important part of your machine, when you've spent obsurd amounts on the rest.

[N1NJ4W4RR10R]

On 29/08/2018 at 10:19 AM, JMSOG said:

On 25/08/2018 at 12:10 AM, DimasRMDO said:

This happened in the past, I just want to show how I felt that day...

Friend 1: "Welp, my laptop doesn't boot to Windows" <- drivers conflict

Friend 2: "My laptop is so slow" <- malware

Friend 3: "Help me install linux" <- self-explanatory

Friend 4: "Uhh can you guide me in installing Arch Linux?" <- this was a pain, one of the hardest >_<

Friend 5: "Uh.... My car is broken, can you help me diagnoseit ? If you can, fix it too maybe??? Pleasee??" <- coolant issue, too late though, the head gasket popped (overheating).

 

Me:

  Reveal hidden contents

I shouldn't have accepted all of them at once.

 

You are mad, lol. 

On 29/08/2018 at 10:19 AM, JMSOG said:

I found out over the weekend that one of my housemates capitalizes letters exclusively with caps lock instead of shift.

 

It's minor, but it killed me.

That is not minor! That is as terrible as using the scroll bar instead of scroll wheel! 

 

On 29/08/2018 at 10:19 AM, JMSOG said:

On 29/08/2018 at 10:27 AM, Crunchy Dragon said:

Even when doing full sentences in all caps SUCH AS THIS PART RIGHT HERE FOR EXAMPLE, I just hold down shift instead of using caps lock.

SUB OPTIMAL TYPING!!!!

On 29/08/2018 at 10:28 AM, avia_tion said:

I have a friend who thinks a GTX 480 has the same Specs as a GTX Titan XP (he knew what a titan was cause he claimed he "had one" and he also had a 480 and he said he "tested them" on Speedtest.net and said he got the same results...


:facepalm:

I...how can you make that mistake?

On 29/08/2018 at 10:32 AM, avia_tion said:

Oh yeah and the same friend of mine said he "built" a pc "by himself" and when I asked the specs. He said "the model is an Alienware."


And no. this is not a lie. I could give you my friends personal skype number and you can see for yourself. he still belives it.

To be fair, he probably meant that customise stuff sites do, allowing you to change the amount of RAM and such.

I hope, lol

 

(This formatting may look weird)

[D13H4RD]

Uhhhhh......

 

[Pickles von Brine]

A while ago I had a customer come into the shop with a MacBook Pro 15 retina and said she wanted to take out the wifi and bluetooth cards because she thought someone was hacking her. The way she KNEW someone was hacking her was by going into console and looking for anything saying "connecting to server" or has server in the log. Uh... You know the icons on a Mac use an icon service that creates its own internal server that does a loopback... Or well a bunch of services do that on OSX... 

 

This lady even had her phone covered in aluminum foil... She kept coming in over the course of a couple of weeks and I finally convinced her that everything she thought was going on is not. I also told her if she really wanted to get to the bottom of it was to send it off to a company that specialized in forensics and it would cost a lot of money. I also told her most hackers DON'T CARE about a single individual and will try to target a mass of people. 

 

Yeah dealing with loonies man. Absolute loonies. 

 

We also had another lady that would come in and she swore someone was also hacking her system because icons would disappear or something would change on her desktop. Well, that was not the case. The lady was a senior, had paranoid dementia. Rather sad but caused a lot of trouble. We got to a point where we told her we cannot help her and she immediately started saying that the company I worked for and the police were in cohoots to get her and we ended up having to call the police. 

 

Later we found out she had called the police daily because things would be moved in her house. Turns out her dementia led to her forgetting what she did and the paranoia set in and she thought someone was in her home. 

 

Really sad... but really hard to deal with. 

[Jtalk4456]

On 9/29/2018 at 1:27 AM, Lord Xeb said:

This lady even had her phone covered in aluminum foil... She kept coming in over the course of a couple of weeks and I finally convinced her that everything she thought was going on is not. I also told her if she really wanted to get to the bottom of it was to send it off to a company that specialized in forensics and it would cost a lot of money. I also told her most hackers DON'T CARE about a single individual and will try to target a mass of people. 

When someone has a webcam cover on their laptop, and you start to wonder if you should bother. Then you remember you bought a desktop and don't have to worry about mics and cameras unless i buy and plug it in myself

[soldier_ph]

When you grab a shared PC from the Classroom and login to your Quizlet using your Google account and you notice that the last person who used the Computer hasn't loged out of its Google account and your hand starts to slowly move to your forehead...

 

 

[Jtalk4456]

11 minutes ago, Pascal... said:

When you grab a shared PC from the Classroom and login to your Quizlet using your Google account and you notice that the last person who used the Computer hasn't loged out of its Google account and your hand starts to slowly move to your forehead...

 

 

and your mouse slowly starts to move to their account settings... I mean to the sign out button!

[GilmourD]

On 10/1/2018 at 8:42 AM, Jtalk4456 said:

When someone has a webcam cover on their laptop, and you start to wonder if you should bother. Then you remember you bought a desktop and don't have to worry about mics and cameras unless i buy and plug it in myself

Where I work all the employees cover their webcams because they think IT is watching them. That notion of IT as an entity and me being in IT are two separate ideas, nevermind the fact that the ENTIRE DEPARTMENT is just me and my boss. I ask them if they think I have enough time to watch them or even give a flying fuck. LOL

Also, the craptastic Asus TP300L laptops the previous department head bought (not part of the reason he was fired) use the webcam as the light sensor for automatic screen brightness. That gets screwed up when they cover the webcams and they complain that the screen is too dark.

[Tosa]

I worked at an electronics store once. Well, I wasn't employed by them, and they didn't pay my wage... Well, long story, not important. I got paid, just not by them. I didn't have to be there to get paid.

Anyway, I didn't talk to customers, because fuck that, I'm not a people person, so I mainly worked on preparing customers' PCs for them (if they paid for having their PC prepared for them) and fixing problems for customers that had some subscription thingy for, well, getting help with their PCs and stuff.

 

This one guy apparently turned up every week or so with a bunch of bloatware on his PC. And we had to reinstall Windows, every time, because he got every single piece of bloatware you could possibly get on your machine. Including some modified version of Chromium that refused to uninstall. So, we had to reinstall Windows every time he showed up. He was apparently a regular before I got there, even.

 

One day, he had apparently written a complaint to the boss guy, and accused us of installing this bloatware on his PC.

What now? I don't know what my colleague might have done previously, but I highly doubt he installed anything the customer didn't explicitly ask for, and more than a couple of times, I was the one doing the reinstalling, with a USB I had prepared with of an ISO file I downloaded freshly from Microsoft's webpage, and I even went out of my way to remove Candy Crush! I've also watched my colleague reinstall Windows on this guy's PC, and I can testify that no shady business was going on. No sneaky installing Ask toolbar in such a way that it would magically appear a couple days later. All he got was Windows 10 and a couple of legit programs he asked us to install.

 

The bullshit this guy pulled would be the same as accusing the mechanic of doing some voodoo shit that gives your car's bumper a dent while you're driving it. Nooo, you didn't drive it into a street lamp! The mechanic made the dent a week before the dent was even there!

[jitterysushi21]

I work at software management place and I  had I call come in with a lady and her pc wouldn’t turn on and I went through the normal process is the pc plunged in is the psu turned on and I asked is the power board plugged in she said yes so I drove 4 HOURS to find out the bloody power is plugged into itself !!!

[AskTJ]

Did you get paid well?

[jitterysushi21]

Not enough for the service I give

[Teddy07]

There is a special thread for this:

 

btw. You might want to edit your topic title because there is a spelling error

[Supportsneedlove]

On 8/29/2018 at 2:27 AM, Crunchy Dragon said:

Even when doing full sentences in all caps SUCH AS THIS PART RIGHT HERE FOR EXAMPLE, I just hold down shift instead of using caps lock.

Capslock is only really useful when you have to write numbers and capitalized letters. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

8 hours ago, Supportsneedlove said:

Capslock is only really useful when you have to write numbers and capitalized letters. 

Pfft even then I just use shift.

[Jtalk4456]

15 hours ago, Tosa said:

I worked at an electronics store once. Well, I wasn't employed by them, and they didn't pay my wage... Well, long story, not important. I got paid, just not by them. I didn't have to be there to get paid.

Anyway, I didn't talk to customers, because fuck that, I'm not a people person, so I mainly worked on preparing customers' PCs for them (if they paid for having their PC prepared for them) and fixing problems for customers that had some subscription thingy for, well, getting help with their PCs and stuff.

 

This one guy apparently turned up every week or so with a bunch of bloatware on his PC. And we had to reinstall Windows, every time, because he got every single piece of bloatware you could possibly get on your machine. Including some modified version of Chromium that refused to uninstall. So, we had to reinstall Windows every time he showed up. He was apparently a regular before I got there, even.

 

One day, he had apparently written a complaint to the boss guy, and accused us of installing this bloatware on his PC.

What now? I don't know what my colleague might have done previously, but I highly doubt he installed anything the customer didn't explicitly ask for, and more than a couple of times, I was the one doing the reinstalling, with a USB I had prepared with of an ISO file I downloaded freshly from Microsoft's webpage, and I even went out of my way to remove Candy Crush! I've also watched my colleague reinstall Windows on this guy's PC, and I can testify that no shady business was going on. No sneaky installing Ask toolbar in such a way that it would magically appear a couple days later. All he got was Windows 10 and a couple of legit programs he asked us to install.

 

The bullshit this guy pulled would be the same as accusing the mechanic of doing some voodoo shit that gives your car's bumper a dent while you're driving it. Nooo, you didn't drive it into a street lamp! The mechanic made the dent a week before the dent was even there!

did the store not have people check and sign for their computers??

[Tosa]

1 hour ago, Jtalk4456 said:

did the store not have people check and sign for their computers??

Not sure who'd be tasked with doing that. Apart from the salesmen, we were two guys, including me, and I wasn't really employed. On a busy day, we didn't exactly have the time to double and triple check each other's work.

[Jtalk4456]

36 minutes ago, Tosa said:

Not sure who'd be tasked with doing that. Apart from the salesmen, we were two guys, including me, and I wasn't really employed. On a busy day, we didn't exactly have the time to double and triple check each other's work.

when i worked at staples we had the customer turn on and use the device and make sure it was fixed, then they signed that it was properly fixed with no issues before they took it back out of the store