Experiences with non-techies

[Jtalk4456]

10 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Ruin his search history! "bbq sauce on tiddies"

I'm both scared to and intrigued to look that up and see what actually exists for that search...

[Jtalk4456]

9 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Ooookay.... I found this gold on iFunny:

[Guest]

Hm my antivirus just found a file on my computer with "Trojan" in the name. And it decided that it should delete it. Well, good thing I have Norton Security lol

[SenKa]

On 2/22/2019 at 10:48 AM, Drak3 said:

No one at my Apple store could tell me how the twin Thunderbolt controllers in the new Mac Mini were configured. Not even the Mac Mini itself could tell me.

The Mac Mini uses a similar config to the MBP. Start from the left, the first 2 ports are on 1 controller, the next 2 are on the other.

[GilmourD]

49 minutes ago, hiitswilliam said:

Hm my antivirus just found a file on my computer with "Trojan" in the name. And it decided that it should delete it. Well, good thing I have Norton Security lol

If Norton could actually detect viruses it would quarantine itself...

[Guest]

My mom walked past me while I was playing a game on my laptop and the fans were spinning crazy as hell because the Acer Nitro 5 has bad cooling. Anyways, she goes, "I thought you got the Solid-State version. That's not supposed to have fans, right?" I guess she was partially correct because I do have an SSD but god I was trying not to laugh. I guess it wasn't that funny anyways

[slashqpbyte]

A few weeks ago I was partnered with someone in lab (community collage), he was complaining his laptop was slow, at this point I casually said "well... do you have anything running in the background?". This is where the fun starts, the pore guy minimizes everything, stares at his desktop for a good 2 minutes, then with confidence tells me "no, nothing in the background". I started to say "task manager" but decided to keep my mouth shut. It took everything I had to keep a straight face that day.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Schnoz said:

l (not even an SSD).

Well, you can't expect schools to have SSDs in their old computers. Good story anyways. I wish I could do that to my school computers lol

[NunoLava1998]

8 hours ago, hiitswilliam said:

Well, you can't expect schools to have SSDs in their old computers. Good story anyways. I wish I could do that to my school computers lol

My school's computers got renewed recently and they all have SSDs, pretty fast ones too.

[wasab]

I tell none techkies to download more ram!!!

[Guest]

4 hours ago, NunoLava1998 said:

My school's computers got renewed recently and they all have SSDs, pretty fast ones too.

Well then lucky you. All of the desktops in my school have hard drives, and we receive Chromebooks which have 16 GB of flash storage.

[GilmourD]

21 hours ago, Schnoz said:

This was from about a year ago. The school computers (running Windows 7) used to be run by a notoriously bad IT department. They were all 2008 Core 2 Duo SFF optiplexes, load with PUPs and malware and were slow as hell (not even an SSD). They ran the original build of Windows 7 (all the surrounding schools had these nice Haswell/Ivy Bridge Optiplexes with dGPUs) except for the teacher computers, which were actually serviced and updated. They kept insisting that those dusty cinderblocks were still very fast, fast enough for our needs, and ignored screenshots of benchmarks I sent to them. Now, every system had the students running on a single admin account on each system because apparently they just plugged in the PCs to set them up and let them be...

 

I found one that was e-wasted later, took it home, and popped it open. I felt like the non-techie then, because based on the amount of dust I have seen in unmaintained school computers, that thing should definitely have been opened outside, 100 feet away from any human civilization. There was some caked brown dust which was already solid, but most of the dust was still in a loose form that coated the (luckily wood, not carpet) floor with disgusting grey/brown stuff that was near impossible to completely vaccuum up because the breeze from the exhaust would blow it around. Finally, I did get it mostly taken care of, and surprise surprise it booted. They e-wasted it because the integrated graphics didn't work anymore but there was an ATi card in it. The dumbfucks didn't even consider plugging it into the perfectly functional graphics card.

 

A couple months later, out of curiosity, somebody received the copy of WannaCry that they got at home. They brought it to school on an old netbook that they didn't want, connected it to the school wifi (which was actually pretty phast), and ran it. I was binge-reading Wikipedia on one of the library bricks computers at the time when this happened. In the span of a few minutes, every single desktop on that network had all their files as .WNCRY extensions. They had to e-waste all the PCs and get new ones. He was never actually found out because no one wanted to report him (not much data was lost because we used Google Docs/sheets), because, well, we have some Ivy Bridge i5 HP PCs that can actually run pirated Minecraft at the details cranked without sounding like a jet engine.

OK...

 

As the Systems Administrator for a not-small school system, let me let you know where you've got things right and where you've made some incorrect assumptions.

 

First off, yeah, some IT departments are staffed by morons. The reason I have my job is that the outsourced company my district used to use was basically grifting the district and getting nothing done. When I started in 2015, there were still whitebox PIII-650 machines running Win2K in some classrooms. Teachers didn't have laptops and the kids had absolutely jack. Some of the computer labs did have... OK... computers, but they were still not all that new. It was a tragedy, to be honest. Now, all teachers have laptops, every kid from second grade up has a Chromebook, and everything pretty much works, even if some of the labs are still rocking older computers.

 

Now, as far as the computers you're complaining about... Public school computers aren't built for speed. They're built for productivity. That's not an excuse for them running slower than they were designed for, however. For instance, two labs in the high school right now each have 24 HP Z220s. They were released in 2012. Would I love to replace them? ABSODAMNLUTELY!!! Can I? That depends. As a department we have to request money and we have to compete with other departments' needs or even our own needs. Are the computers running and able to do what they need to do (Office, Intarwebnetz, etc.)? If so, they're moved down on the priority list. Are they dying left and right and really need to be replaced? If there's money, we can make a purchase. If not, we suck it up and Frankenstein shit together to make do.

As far as the admin account... These machines weren't joined to the domain? If not, your IT department is truly stupid because how are they supposed to control these machines through Group Policy Management and push out necessary software through GPOs? For instance, every machine in my district has VLC Media Player, Pearson Testnav (for PARCC testing), Google Backup & Sync (we have G Suite for Education), and other important bits and bobs. It keeps me an my team from having to actually touch each machine individually. That said, we do have a local administrative account on every machine named CleanImage just in case we have domain connectivity issues or networking issues with the particular machine (like the Asus TP300LAs that were disabling their WiFi adapter randomly without any reason), but most of the time I use my network credentials for administrative reasons.

 

And did they really buy new machines instead of re-imaging them? I mean, c'mon... There's stupid and then there's STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID.

 

Now, as far as the machine you got... How the hell did you get it? School districts have to compile a list of every device being recycled and then have that list approved by the Board of Education and THEN it gets picked up by a recycler, which would be an outside company with no real means of selling to the public... So, that sounds kinda hinky.

[GilmourD]

12 hours ago, NunoLava1998 said:

My school's computers got renewed recently and they all have SSDs, pretty fast ones too.

 

8 hours ago, hiitswilliam said:

Well then lucky you. All of the desktops in my school have hard drives, and we receive Chromebooks which have 16 GB of flash storage.

Sadly, everything my department's been budgeted to purchase over the past three years still contains spinning platters, although I did get to squeeze some Crucial MX500s into a supply order last year for some of the higher end machines in the district.

 

As far as the Chromebooks, if your district has G Suite for Education, everything should be getting stored on your Drive, which has unlimited space. If you don't have G Suite... How the heck are they controlling the Chromebooks? I've got 4200 Chromebooks I have to deal with... There's no way I'm not controlling those via some sort of group policy management (not capitalized because it's not the MS Active Directory GPM, which is the proper name).

[Valaris]

Project Manager was jealous that some ressources had HP Spectres laptops so to make his case, decided ALL team ressources (including the devs/designers) needed Spectres.

Great, we all gained touch screens. But we went from an I7-8th gen cpu to a I5-5th gen and downgraded from 16 gigs of ram to 8 gigs. But hey, we looked sharp while everything crashed.

[Bitter]

6 minutes ago, GilmourD said:

Now, as far as the machine you got... How the hell did you get it? School districts have to compile a list of every device being recycled and then have that list approved by the Board of Education and THEN it gets picked up by a recycler, which would be an outside company with no real means of selling to the public... So, that sounds kinda hinky.

I picked up a computer next to the dumpster behind my college that had nothing wrong with it other than being very old and woefully obsolete. On it's hard drive were files from the college containing the resumes of over a hundred people, hired and not hired, with full personal information. SSN, transcripts, written resume, letters of recommendation, relatives, contact information, addresses, etc. Literally everything you'd need to forge their identities was just sitting out next to a dumpster. I didn't just 'take it', no. I asked the janitor who was wheeling out some other trash to the dumpster if I could have it 'yea sure we're just throwing it out anyway, have fun'. Some organizations really are THAT obtuse.

[GilmourD]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

I picked up a computer next to the dumpster behind my college that had nothing wrong with it other than being very old and woefully obsolete. On it's hard drive were files from the college containing the resumes of over a hundred people, hired and not hired, with full personal information. SSN, transcripts, written resume, letters of recommendation, relatives, contact information, addresses, etc. Literally everything you'd need to forge their identities was just sitting out next to a dumpster. I didn't just 'take it', no. I asked the janitor who was wheeling out some other trash to the dumpster if I could have it 'yea sure we're just throwing it out anyway, have fun'. Some organizations really are THAT obtuse.

That's actually against the law. There's policies and procedures against that for reasons.

[Bitter]

Just now, GilmourD said:

That's actually against the law. There's policies and procedures against that for reasons.

This was over 15 years ago, it may not have been illegal then, unwise yes. I've got a few systems here which still have the state or hospital property tags on them, neither had any information in them. The hospital one I found next to the dumpster where I used to live, the drive probably wasn't the original drive in it but I can't be 100% sure. I didn't find anything weird, just a crappy old Windows install choked up with garbage that I wiped. The state one I bought as a bare bone system with no drive/CPU/RAM so no worries there.

[CarlBar]

17 hours ago, GilmourD said:

s far as the admin account... These machines weren't joined to the domain? If not, your IT department is truly stupid because how are they supposed to control these machines through Group Policy Management and push out necessary software through GPOs?

 

You missed the part where he mentioned they where running release era win 7. They were never updated in any way based on that. Basically buy, plugin, setup, leave for life till they die.

[GilmourD]

55 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

You missed the part where he mentioned they where running release era win 7. They were never updated in any way based on that. Basically buy, plugin, setup, leave for life till they die.

I've still got some machines running Win7 so what's that matter? My point is that it's a school system and kids do stupid things. We have student accounts set up to restrict certain things, like changing the wallpaper. Before my previous boss made that change to GPM there were way too many times were the wallpaper was a bunch of penises.

 

Also, it takes three minutes to join a domain but a lot more time to undo damage that some kids can do.

[Drak3]

On 2/27/2019 at 6:08 PM, SenpaiKaplan said:

The Mac Mini uses a similar config to the MBP. Start from the left, the first 2 ports are on 1 controller, the next 2 are on the other.

That doesn't tell me anything about how the controllers themselves are configured.

 

And if I know that it's a set of twin controllers, looking at the back and doing some basic math will tell me what you just told me.

[Mad153]

I would say people who follow 2009 yt videos on "how to speed up your pc".

DiSaBlE CuRsoR shaDoWs.

 

More FPS than using  "legit" anti virus software.

[Askejm]

On 1/16/2013 at 8:12 AM, nillas12 said:

Thought it would be fun to make a topic about, all of our experiences with all the people, who doesn't really understand all the tech.

Note: Don't make this too harsh on them. You need to help them, not yell at them.

I'll go first:

So my mom has a daycare. And one day I am sitting on the floor with my laptop. And one of the kids, with real dirty hands come and put his hand on the screen. Guess he thought it was a touch screen. Still haven't gotten it off, and it was 3 months ago.

My grandmother is scared of getting rid of the computer, because she thinks it will cut the power to her house.

When I was little and knew nothing about tech I told my dad I wanted to upgrade my pc and what to do. He told me RAM would help (he didn't know much either don't blame him). So I bought 16GB of RAM when 2GB was a standard (gaming pcs were starting to get 4gb). Rip

[Bitter]

I remember my dad installing extra RAM into one of our first computers so my games would play better, it really did help out a lot going from 8MB to 40MB with a 32MB stick. 40MB for Windows 95 was a lot.

[Ashleyyyy]

my brother was convinced his laptop was better than my dad's MacBook because his is a gaming laptop and my dad's MacBook is well, a Mac. 

 

I had to explain to him that his laptop:

6700HQ

GTX 960M

8GB RAM

 

is slower than my dad's Mac:

8850H

Radeon Pro 560X

16GB RAM

 

and he didn't believe me.  

[RoseLuck462]

I always have to explain the difference between the HDD and the RAM to my Dad, lol