Experiences with non-techies

[BakugoHero]

Another good one I've dealt with has been attempting to explain to my family that yes they bought an expensive router, no they will not necessarily see any speed increase, especially with my father's 6mbps down 1 up connection 

[grss1982]

AMD processors run hotter than Intel processors and thus are no good.  This was in the Athlon XP to about the C2D days and even persists today.

 

Heard this a lot from non-techie folks who ask me for help in building them a computer and when I bring up AMD, they automatically say: Don't they run hot?

 

ME: .............

[Bananasplit_00]

15 minutes ago, grss1982 said:

AMD processors run hotter than Intel processors and thus are no good.  This was in the Athlon XP to about the C2D days and even persists today.

 

Heard this a lot from non-techie folks who ask me for help in building them a computer and when I bring up AMD, they automatically say: Don't they run hot?

 

ME: .............

FX ran hot too, its not really just from the Athlon XP days

[grss1982]

On 11/14/2018 at 3:11 AM, LutherAmon said:

Used to work at a call center to assist people in logging into accounts. Most days I would spend about 30 minutes trying to explain where the URL or Address Bar on their browser is. The most frustrating experience i've had to date, other than just plain misinformation.

Can relate. Navigation drills help, but some times you just have to treat them like someone who's still in grade school.

 

In my case, my go to line for such an issue: The URL or Address is that spot in Chrome/Firefox/IE where you type the web page or website you want to visit or go to.  You would usually type www first in that spot of Chrome/Firefox/IE.

[Jtalk4456]

On 1/6/2019 at 8:46 PM, Schnoz said:

Yesterday, I successfully put some Conductonaut in my overheating Dell. It's wonderful.

 

Skip this paragraph if you already know how to apply Conductonaut.

For those who don't know, Conductonaut has a high surface tension and its viscosity is like water. An "o"-sized drop was enough for both my CPU and GPU (both are bare dies), since it spreads very thinly. It's also electrically conductive, and will break your device if you put on even a little too much. Most people recommend electrical tape or conformal coating, but I used a clear bitter nail polish that I used to use to stop my nail-biting (spoiler: I stopped later and my nails are short). Works fine for me. I know because a tiny drop spilled on a covered capacitor on the GPU.

 

So a guy in my class is this classic rich white boi. Gives absolutely zero f[advertiser-friendly content]s about his grades, tons of money, no one like him, etc. So he's looking jealously at my laptop and says, "I can do better than that." So he immediately orders a 5-gram tube (way too much) and livestreams it on Instagram at around 5:30. I know he's spoiled to the max, but man, I wish I had all that money lying around.

 

So a bunch of us are watching, knowing he'll probably mess it up like his grades, and spamming the comments, begging him not to do it or at least do some background research. He takes one look at the chat and goes like "y'all know nothin about this Pee Cee Science, watch this pro do it!" So he removes his 240 mm AIO, a cooler master ML240, one I recommended to him. He uses a plain paper towel to wipe off the old stuff "eeeeeew look at this sh!t" (I helped apply the paste because he'd be a royal d!ck to me if I didn't) and cusses me off. Several viewers leave, the rest defend me. That was Kryonaut, by the way. That's a 9700K by the way.

 

Then, he removes the GPU, a 1070 Ti. Using the same plain paper towel method, he scrapes it off as well. 

 

"Ya poor people watching this? Watch this gangsta build dis PEE CEE with style!"

 

Then, no sh!t, he literally uses HALF THE TUBE on the CPU and THE OTHER HALF on the GPU! Suddenly, it's a huge blob of each on the CPU and GPU, and we can't help but cringe and tell him to clean it up. He ignores the chat.

 

He then proceeds to re-mount the AIO and GPU cooler. He also forgot to plug in the GPU power connectors, but not that it matters. The CPU was DRIPPING shiny liquid death onto the GPU, more shiny death was rolling off one of the GPU fans. He surprisingly manages to hook everything up correctly, and is about to press the power button, and goes like, "Dis is the PEE CEE MASTER RACE, BOIS!" and presses the button.

 

Suddenly, there's an immensely bright light shining out of the tempered glass side panel that fills about half of the camera with Red 255 Green 255 Blue 255. Loud pops, hissing, and grey smoke are billowing out of the case. It probably dripped into the PSU.

 

He's lost all his cool and screaming like a little girl, running for the exquisite bathroom. He's throwing water onto it (a horrible thing to do in an electrical fire). We're all laughing, and he's apparently forgotten about the live stream for a second. And instead of lamenting about the thousands of dollars of electronics he's trashed, he says:

 

"Y'all been lyin to me! That Conductonaut sh!t is trash!" followed by more ranting and swear words. He then flings his burnt, broken rig straight out his huge window, spraying glass all over the adjacent sidewalk.

 

The next day at school was hilarious.

 

THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

that hurt to read

[D13H4RD]

On 1/7/2019 at 9:46 AM, Schnoz said:

*insert hilarious story about dumb rich people with more money than common sense here*

Honestly, you should have recorded the livestream if you haven't.

 

Not only would it be hilarious, but it would also have served as a textbook example of having a lot more money than common sense.

 

In essence, this is Stefan Etienne, only with Conductonaut.

[seon123]

On 1/7/2019 at 2:46 AM, Schnoz said:

So a guy in my class is this classic rich white boi

I have a hard time actually believing someone is quite that stupid. Surely...

[Lady Fitzgerald]

3 hours ago, seon123 said:

I have a hard time actually believing someone is quite that stupid. Surely...

Work retail for a while. You will then have no trouble believing someone can be that stupid.

[seon123]

27 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Work retail for a while. You will then have no trouble believing someone can be that stupid.

Oof

[soldier_ph]

3 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Work retail for a while. You will then have no trouble believing someone can be that stupid.

I'm actually currently looking for a job in retail (Consumer Electronics, obviously) so I can provide you guys with daily "fun" storys of my customers, if I get the job 

[Crunchy Dragon]

33 minutes ago, Pascal... said:

I'm actually currently looking for a job in retail (Consumer Electronics, obviously) so I can provide you guys with daily "fun" storys of my customers, if I get the job 

Best of luck on the job, hope you get some at least entertaining stories.

[soldier_ph]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Best of luck on the job, hope you get some at least entertaining stories.

Thank you very much 

[CarlBar]

On 12/31/2018 at 2:41 PM, Lathlaer said:

So here is one for you, about audio tech - a situation literally from yesterday. No bashing, just humorous accidental disrespect

 

Quick background: my girlfriend is very casual about tech. It's just not her thing. She has no idea what hardware sits in a computer, what is considered high quality and more importantly, how much stuff costs. Now, I don't lie to her about the cost of my hobby but I never volunteer the information. She just never asks and doesn't seem to care. It's fine since I have no idea how much the stuff she buys costs as well.

 

Main event: the evening. I'm playing with some music while she goes to the bathroom and suddenly she opens the door and says this to me:

 

"You know, your headphones leak sound so much that not only did I hear your music from the bathroom, I was also able to tell that you were listening to Lindsey Stirling"

 

I look at her sheepishly and turn the volume knob down - admittedly, she was out of town for a couple of days for holidays so being the only one in the apartment, I was listening to my music liberally and perhaps on the louder side. It's entirely possible that it was too loud. Also, I started the track before I put my headphones on so it's possibly she picked it up louder than it really was supposed to be.

 

But she is not done.

 

"Maybe you should consider changing those crappy headphones for something better that will not leak sound?"

 

And there I was, mouth ajar, looking at my $4000 MSRP Focals, looking at my GF, torn between telling her the truth about what kind of gear this is and just suffering in silence. Ultimately, she didn't give me any chance to respond because she went back to the bathroom and later we didn't bring that up at all

 

Apparently I will have to explain the difference between closed and open headphones because she is genuinely convinced that because she can hear my music it must mean that my headphones are poor quality.

 

To be fair i only recently discovered about this and i consider myself quite tech literate. Rule 1 of tech support. There will be dumby simple shit you don't know.

 

On 12/31/2018 at 3:54 PM, Godlygamer23 said:

I've had Phenom II CPUs and one Core i5 750 CPU.

 

P4 era Celeron 1.7Ghz was the oldest i owned, and early pentium 3 was the oldest in the household.

 

On 12/31/2018 at 5:50 PM, NIneEyeRon said:

I recall helping a guy (with two PHDs) with an issue where his PC was only typing weird characters.

 

I went up to his desk, moved his textbook off the shift and CTRL keys and fixed his issue.

 

I think we've all made a similar "fail basic look for silly stuff" test before.

 

On 1/1/2019 at 12:58 PM, Lathlaer said:

I haven't seen it, it's very nice. I really like the "Take Flight" track beause it has some parts where you feel like the music is drilling into your skull, esp. on good headphones,

 

Keep meaning to look into more of her stuff, only thing i have ATM is a ripped from youtube copy of her Dragon Age Inquisition cover. Would happily pay for a clean copy with no sound effects from the dragon or a crowd in the background but can;t seem to find it anywhere. And yes i know i'm probably busy committing a perfect example of the story type of this thread.

 

On 1/2/2019 at 5:18 AM, Schnoz said:

I wonder if SSDs are popular for a reason?

 

Also, anyone who searched up "HDD vs SSD" for 3.14159265359793238462643383279 seconds would know.

 

"I has an iphon i very techy"

 

 

On 1/2/2019 at 9:00 PM, iLostMyXbox21 said:

I can relate, one of my friends asked me to come look at his new pc he built because his CPU wouldn’t fit right, so I looked at it and he was trying to put an AMD cpu in an INTEL motherboard

 

he also tried to use laptop ram on the desktop motherboard 

 

I've got a cousin i recently built a computer for, and he was just as clueless, but at least he knew he was clueless and asked me to spec out and put together for him, (did the assembly with him there. He had some fun reactions to things).

 

On 1/2/2019 at 10:29 PM, thachad098 said:

this conversation happened between my mom and me just before christmas. she was doing some last minute shopping and asked me for a recommendation for my uncle. he like to take pictures and goes on a trip at least once every 3 months and already has a dslr so i told my mom to get him the ryze tello as it is relatively cheap that captures fairly decent pictures/videos. i then told her that he would only need a mobile phone to connect with it via wifi. then my mom thought it was a great idea because they will have a trip back to the philippines and would be perfect to capture aerial shots but she is worried that it might not work there because the place they are going to does not have wifi. i then told my mom that it does not matter because the phone will directly connect to the drone via wifi. she then reiterated that the place is a bit remote with no/poor internet. this went on for probably 5-10mins before my mom understood that wifi and internet are totally different things. i had to use a bluetooth pairing analogy which thank god i had just explained to her a few weeks before.

 

My stepdad is kinda the reverse, he has a lot of trouble understanding when somthing is stored internet side. Like his e-mail. He tends to thin everything is a program running on his hardware. That said even if he dosen;t remember what you told him, if you go "it'll be fine [insert more talk here]" he accepts the expert opinion, he's also ok when he throws me a curveball i can;t figure the answer out to, (a lot of it is ipad stuff and i'm not super great with those).

[Matsozetex]

When I was young I used to play modded Minecraft on my old laptop. The laptop was having issues playing the game, I googled for an hour and realised the model of laptop has only 2GB of RAM.

 

I asked my father, who works in IT to upgrade the memory, he put in a 4GB SD card.

 

Placebo effect worked for 60 seconds and resorted to playing AoE2. Good times.

[Jtalk4456]

16 minutes ago, Matsozetex said:

When I was young I used to play modded Minecraft on my old laptop. The laptop was having issues playing the game, I googled for an hour and realised the model of laptop has only 2GB of RAM.

 

I asked my father, who works in IT to upgrade the memory, he put in a 4GB SD card.

 

Placebo effect worked for 60 seconds and resorted to playing AoE2. Good times.

you should get back into it now. (with more than 2gb ram)

[Guest]

My grandfather comes immediately to mind... 

right around the time i bought myself an fist gen i7 i had a little stroke of luck with money and decided on getting him one too. he was already quite 'experienced' with using a computer for his photo and video editing hobby.

to make a long story short... In the years to come i had at least 6 months a year i was there every wkend unbugging/ reïnstalling / figuring out what the hell went wrong this time.
The most unimiginable errors all happend on that silly machine of his, always starting with a phonecall where he started with, i don't know what happenend this time but i just moved the mouse ………..   

[JRzoid2]

Well I have "know how" and techy...That doesn't mean everything should be fix or Maintained....Plenty of things design as such to be used and simply thrown away....

[Matsozetex]

2 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

you should get back into it now. (with more than 2gb ram)

Yeah I've dabbled back into modded minecraft, too bad my bud is a Minecraft purist (Basically hates all tech/tech-magic mods except for old industrial craft). Also hates SkyBlock 

[Jtalk4456]

4 minutes ago, Matsozetex said:

Yeah I've dabbled back into modded minecraft, too bad my bud is a Minecraft purist (Basically hates all tech/tech-magic mods except for old industrial craft). Also hates SkyBlock 

i'm not a big fan of skyblock either to be honest. All you do is build up cobble and walk to land that generates past the skyblock, then it's a normal game again. And if you intend to stay on the skyblock, you're limited with materials to decorate with. I do love modded though. I enjoy the tech a lot more than the magic, but I like ddoors and twilight forest alot. the rest I'm not too concerned with

[Sprawlie]

I've spent the last 30 minutes trying to explain really difficultly, to the marketing manager that it is NOT the IT teams responsibility to do their excel documents for them. And if they don't know what they're doing than it's not an IT problem.

 

"but Excel is software and runs on the computer, so therefore if something doesn't work as expected, it's IT's problem to fix".

 

no, your lack of knowledge on how to use excel, is NOT IT's problem

 

[Sprawlie]

On 1/3/2019 at 11:11 AM, grss1982 said:

AMD processors run hotter than Intel processors and thus are no good.  This was in the Athlon XP to about the C2D days and even persists today.

 

Heard this a lot from non-techie folks who ask me for help in building them a computer and when I bring up AMD, they automatically say: Don't they run hot?

 

ME: .............

 

The problem with AMD back in the XP and earlier days was lack of thermal protections in the CPU. if they overheated, they would fry themselves. Around this time, Intel introduced thermal protections that would throttle/shut off if overheating.

 

this is likely where the argument was made about AMD running hot. 

 

I myself had first hand (as in 2nd degree burns on my fingers) because of and AMD 1400 XP that had it's CPU fan stop suddenly, which resulted in a completely fried CPU and motherboard.

 

fan started making some noise, figured I'd just go buy a new one. Went to the store, came back. Computer looked like it was off. opened it up. Fan wasn't spinning, no lights. 

 

So I reached in to unclip the heatblock. unfortunately, the computer itself was still "on", but had fried the CPU and was continuing to generate heat directly into the block of metal. With no fan to dissapate it, the block of metal had become extremely hot.

 

me reaching in and grabbing it, resulted in 2nd degree burns on my finger tips. A dead CPU and Dead motherboard.

 

 

[Drak3]

2 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

i'm not a big fan of skyblock either to be honest. All you do is build up cobble and walk to land that generates past the skyblock, then it's a normal game again. And if you intend to stay on the skyblock, you're limited with materials to decorate with. I do love modded though. I enjoy the tech a lot more than the magic, but I like ddoors and twilight forest alot. the rest I'm not too concerned with

I like FTB Skyfactory 3 because it's a genuine void world with a dirt block and a tree.

[Jtalk4456]

57 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

I like FTB Skyfactory 3 because it's a genuine void world with a dirt block and a tree.

didn't know that was an option. I still don't want to be that limited on resources. the only thing you can have is dirt cobble wood and water, and leaves technically

doesn't that get boring?

[Drak3]

Just now, Jtalk4456 said:

didn't know that was an option. I still don't want to be that limited on resources. the only thing you can have is dirt cobble wood and water, and leaves technically

doesn't that get boring?

Sky Factory is a bit different, in that every block is still craftable. You just have to use the correct combination of wood, dirt, and leaves to make metals, stone, etc.

[Jtalk4456]

3 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Sky Factory is a bit different, in that every block is still craftable. You just have to use the correct combination of wood, dirt, and leaves to make metals, stone, etc.

interesting... even industrial craft and other mods?