Experiences with non-techies

[DERPmaster]

Me is dum

so I recently built myself a new pc, and got it up and going, so I borrowed one of my dad’s old monsters, thinking that it would be fine on modern gaming ( it had VGA and DVI, and the a HDMI port that was ancient. So, after about 30 ish minutes of playing kerbal space program 2 ( which is on the list of games most likiely to melt your computer) my monitor shut off, no BSOD, just a loud buzz in the audio. 
 

i turned off and on the computer, checked all my drivers were up to date, found nothing, assumed somthing that it happen only once, and 10 mins later, same thing. 
 

I put my hand on the exhaust of the monitor, and I got a mild burn. 
so in conclusion, do not use a 20 ish year old monitor, with a high power computer, as it will overheat your monitor. 
 

Also, this was the world’s crappiest monitor, it was ever so slightly smaller resulting than 1080p, so I had to do weird get arounds for format. Also the color is awful, and it made you set the gamma value manually, it was that old. 
 

So, we learned, the money is worth it for a new monitor.

A new crappy monitor is way better than an old crappy monitor, remember that.

[Qyygle]

4 hours ago, DERPmaster said:

Me is dum

so I recently built myself a new pc, and got it up and going, so I borrowed one of my dad’s old monsters, thinking that it would be fine on modern gaming ( it had VGA and DVI, and the a HDMI port that was ancient. So, after about 30 ish minutes of playing kerbal space program 2 ( which is on the list of games most likiely to melt your computer) my monitor shut off, no BSOD, just a loud buzz in the audio. 
 

i turned off and on the computer, checked all my drivers were up to date, found nothing, assumed somthing that it happen only once, and 10 mins later, same thing. 
 

I put my hand on the exhaust of the monitor, and I got a mild burn. 
so in conclusion, do not use a 20 ish year old monitor, with a high power computer, as it will overheat your monitor. 
 

Also, this was the world’s crappiest monitor, it was ever so slightly smaller resulting than 1080p, so I had to do weird get arounds for format. Also the color is awful, and it made you set the gamma value manually, it was that old. 
 

So, we learned, the money is worth it for a new monitor.

A new crappy monitor is way better than an old crappy monitor, remember that.

I find it really unlikely the power of your computer had anything to do with the monitor shutting off... The image signal going over an HDMI or DVI isn't different if it's coming from a 20 year old toaster vs. an i9+4090 spec.

It's more likely, not even plugging anything into the monitor and running it for the same amount of time would've shut the monitor off. The old cooling heatsink/setup is just too old/dusty to properly cool the internal backlight/whatever it's using and burning out after being turned on longer than 10 minutes.

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Qyygle said:

I find it really unlikely the power of your computer had anything to do with the monitor shutting off... The image signal going over an HDMI or DVI isn't different if it's coming from a 20 year old toaster vs. an i9+4090 spec.

It's more likely, not even plugging anything into the monitor and running it for the same amount of time would've shut the monitor off. The old cooling heatsink/setup is just too old/dusty to properly cool the internal backlight/whatever it's using and burning out after being turned on longer than 10 minutes.

I believe OP means the exhaust of the computer heated the monitor?

CCFL backlight monitors have OTP built in (or at least most do) since the tubes do indeed get pretty hot. OTP likely just kicked in and shut the display off. Happened to my Cinema Display HD when I put it too close to the exhaust of my Vista machine, actually. 

[Cold Soup]

I was the intern for my high schools IT department because in my area I was the only real "computer guy" (it was very rural and would take 2 weeks for someone to come out to fix anything) and I "fixed" an incredible amount of printers not working, no audio on boards/no display ect. It was a bit annoying but at least i got out of class a lot!

[Bitter]

12 hours ago, Caroline said:

Now that I think about it, an all analogue valve powered monitor would've been sick. ~800W power consumption tho.

That sounds like an X-ray machine waiting to happen LOL

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

That sounds like an X-ray machine waiting to happen LOL

I am imagining the wall behind the user being burned to a crisp except for a human-in-a-chair shaped section of perfectly preserved drywall

[4uffin]

Frustrates me, but also humbles me.

[rivers cuomo from weezer]

My grandfather had always done the bills and my grandma never had done them before until his Alzheimers started to set in so, my grandma bought herself a Chromebook so she could learn to do them. The very next time I came over to her house she told me she had been waiting so I could go through the setup for her. I tried explaining to her that she could just read the prompts and do It herself ,and that was the moment where I had to explain to her how to use a keyboard.

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, rivers cuomo from weezer said:

My grandfather had always done the bills and my grandma never had done them before until his Alzheimers started to set in so, my grandma bought herself a Chromebook so she could learn to do them. The very next time I came over to her house she told me she had been waiting so I could go through the setup for her. I tried explaining to her that she could just read the prompts and do It herself ,and that was the moment where I had to explain to her how to use a keyboard.

Lucky for me my dad is not as bad. But he has no patients when it come to tech so I generally have to hold his hand. If my mom dies before him he's screwed because my mom pays a lot of bills thru the banks website and my dad has no clue. 

[Coding2bLazy]

"I work in IT, but not that IT" is a phrase I say frequently before I have to explain that I develop software solutions that automate complex tasks that humans generally do begrudgingly, aka "Robotic Process Automation" or "RPA". When I try to explain that they need "Deskside Support" to help them update on their PC, I get blank stares. I do know how to help, but if I help once, they start tracking you down. 

[BrandonLatzig]

Does it count as Nontech if I had to help my sister (who is barely older than me and is a nurse) figure out why her switch was never working
She..never had the dock plugged in, so it just...didn't charge at all

[BrandonLatzig]

21 hours ago, Caroline said:

And it's just a vidyagaem. Thanks, Nintendo.

hehe, if my sister had a network switch and didn't plug it in, I would of just given up

[Tanaz]

An older lady (around 63-64) from my building gave me a list of numbers to put in her phone's phonebook (some cheap xiaomi android phone) and then she got mad at me because she gave me an old list of numbers and I should've somehow known that they were wrong and outdated. Basically was expecting that I would have a phonebook in my brain?!

Another instance with the same lady is me spending an entire evening showing her how to use her phone and her not remembering it at all.

You might think it's dementia but...it's actually alcoholism. Lady drinks 2 big juggs of beer every night.

[WhitetailAni]

On 7/28/2023 at 4:30 PM, da na said:

I believe OP means the exhaust of the computer heated the monitor?

CCFL backlight monitors have OTP built in (or at least most do) since the tubes do indeed get pretty hot. OTP likely just kicked in and shut the display off. Happened to my Cinema Display HD when I put it too close to the exhaust of my Vista machine, actually. 

Yeah, an el cheapo VGA only monitor I have has something similar... except it has no overheating protection. So it'll work for awhile and then it will overheat and the image will glitch out and look like someone's using it as a medium for black magic.

[Donut417]

31 minutes ago, Tanaz said:

2 big juggs of beer every night.

My dads ex cowoker used to drink like a 6 pack of beer every day. My dad use to tell me the stupid shit this guy used to do at work, btw they worked in a tool and die shop which means machines were used and it could have gone bad. The guy in question also had gout really bad. 

[da na]

Being on student leadership and helping people move into their dorms this weekend brought to mind my favorite tech support story ever. I am not sure if I ever told it here, but it's a gem. 

 

This was late last year, maybe November? I am sitting in my dorm room, watching a Vinesauce stream I believe, when I hear a knock at my door. A tall man asks in a thick French accent, "You know computer, right? It has the problem. Come."
I follow him to another room and open the door to find eight shirtless guys sitting in a circle around an Acer prebuilt with the side panel removed. I believe they must have performed some demonic ritual to summon this computer. One of the guys tells me that the lights come on, but nothing happens on screen. Sure enough, that is exactly what was going on. I figured the RAM had gotten wiggled loose during their summoning so I removed the sticks, blew out the slots and reinstalled them. 

Pretty basic issue and solution, but the scenario was quite funny. Keep in mind that these are very small rooms, it is hard to fit four people comfortably so eight was pretty funny to see.

[Xiee]

This was something I experienced back in college.

 

Our neighbor, a good friend of my mom, said that her computer was so slow. I did some troubleshooting and it was indeed loading to a crawl. It was running on WIndows 7 Home. When you clicked on the start button, there would be like a delay of 7-8 seconds before it showed the start menu. I had a bootable rescue CD at the time and the first thing I did was scan the hard drive for viruses. Lo and behold it had a crapton of viruses/malware. Managed to clean it but after booting back to Windows, I started getting BSODs. Thankfully I got into Safe Mode and did a system restore from there. I was able to get back into windows normally and checked folders and installed apps. Removed spam/spyware programs and the like. Then I noticed an oddly named folder that was in the program files folder. Clicked into the folder and I found hundreds of images and videos of "pr0n". Someone was clearly a bad boy. Now my neighbor didn't have any sons, she had 2 young daughters in elementary school so I assumed that this might have been downloaded by her husband. Lol.

Didn't tell her I found the "pr0n" but I deleted them all and just told her I managed to clean her PC from viruses and the like and told her to invest in a good anti-virus.

[Bitter]

16 minutes ago, da na said:

Being on student leadership and helping people move into their dorms this weekend brought to mind my favorite tech support story ever. I am not sure if I ever told it here, but it's a gem. 

 

This was late last year, maybe November? I am sitting in my dorm room, watching a Vinesauce stream I believe, when I hear a knock at my door. A tall man asks in a thick French accent, "You know computer, right? It has the problem. Come."
I follow him to another room and open the door to find eight shirtless guys sitting in a circle around an Acer prebuilt with the side panel removed. I believe they must have performed some demonic ritual to summon this computer. One of the guys tells me that the lights come on, but nothing happens on screen. Sure enough, that is exactly what was going on. I figured the RAM had gotten wiggled loose during their summoning so I removed the sticks, blew out the slots and reinstalled them. 

Pretty basic issue and solution, but the scenario was quite funny. Keep in mind that these are very small rooms, it is hard to fit four people comfortably so eight was pretty funny to see.

So these men are now your heralds and you're their deity, correct?

[Herbzy]

I had the most mind blowing moment when I explained to my grandmother that "Google" was both a web browser and a search engine. To her they were literally the same thing. For years when I have been telling her to Google stuff she has been closing Firefox (the browser I had installed on her machine) and opening Chrome to do the search. She didn't know she could just go to google.com in Firefox to do the search.

I can't say I really blame her but it was an eye opening moment. You never know what people don't know. Its knowledge that I take for granted.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I've outlined that one time where I've been promoted and granted a deputy here:

 

Well it's been a few months. He's been doing his job ok, but today I had another instance of something happening where I just had to shake my head.

 

As a bit of background: I work for a local government. And since we need to access both state and federal government databases, I'm in charge of setting up accounts and managing and requesting user permissions. This stuff only gets relevant a few times per year, basically whenever someone new is hired or someone leaves. The process to do so is documented fairly extensively, to the point where I'd expect nobody who looks at the documentation filled with screenshots highlighting every single field to populate and button to press would fail to accomplish the task. It's his first time doing it unsupervised (he did it a few months ago for a group of new hires with me looking over his shoulder). 

 

The process is generally set up as follows: You use one web app to set up the user account, which automatically generates their IDs and whatnot. After that, you use a different web app to set the appropriate user permissions. Lastly, you head over to a third web app to request access to the 200-odd databases we could ask to access, of which we only use 4.  There's more to do after that, but this is the basic process of creating a user and giving them access to what they need.

 

He called me over during that last step for some clarification, because the name of one of the databases has changed a bit and there have been 3 new ones added with similar names. I understand the confusion, cleared it up and made a note to update the documentation accordingly. But I offhandedly also asked him, if he made certain that the permissions were set at step 2 of the process, because otherwise the request would fail.

 

We open up the second web app, he looks up the new employee by the automatically generated login ID and what pops up? His own name. I'm a bit confused, since he shouldn't be looking up his own login ID anyway and it's weird that it showed his name in app two and the new employee's name in app three under the same login ID. So I ask him to go back to step one, that first web app and look up the account with that login ID. He put in all the info of the new employee alright, so I didn't understand why his name was popping up in the second web app. But something caught my eye. The first web app is used again at a later stage to also link the certificate that gets issued as part of a way later step in the overall process back to this account. A brand new account shouldn't have any certificates attached to it. I then looked at the creation date of that account which was about half a year ago and put 2 and 2 together: This guy overwrote his own user account profile with the name and email address of the new employee. 

 

 

So, uh, I guess we'll try this again together. I just hope reverting the changes didn't break anything, otherwise, I'm gonna have some exciting phone calls to make with the guys from federal IT.

[Bitter]

People can always break things in new and unforseen ways.

[joey7597]

I work at a retail store and sometimes I help out in electronics. A guest will ask me a question for example "does this wireless charger work with my phone or does it need magsafe?". Then I explain to them the qi wireless charging and how its standardized and all modern phones supporting wireless charging will work with any wireless charger he can find in the isle........He just stares at me for a good 10 seconds and then asks again "will this wireless charger work?"...........After that I stopped wasting my breath explaining things to these people. I just give them simple yes or not. It not necessarily because they are dumb, I think its more like they do not really care.

[Bitter]

2 hours ago, joey7597 said:

It not necessarily because they are dumb, I think its more like they do not really care.

Correct. They don't care how it works , just that it works. I like to know how it works so when it doesn't work I can figure out why it doesn't work. There's still a lot of tech that's over my head but I at least make an effort especially if the person explaining is knowledgeable and enthusiastic to explain it. I find myself in the trap of having to explain FROM THE BEGINNING and going back way too far.

[Ayrick]

5 hours ago, joey7597 said:

I work at a retail store and sometimes I help out in electronics. A guest will ask me a question for example "does this wireless charger work with my phone or does it need magsafe?". Then I explain to them the qi wireless charging and how its standardized and all modern phones supporting wireless charging will work with any wireless charger he can find in the isle........He just stares at me for a good 10 seconds and then asks again "will this wireless charger work?"...........After that I stopped wasting my breath explaining things to these people. I just give them simple yes or not. It not necessarily because they are dumb, I think its more like they do not really care.

I get this a lot, you try to teach them to fish, but in the end they cant be bothered. 

[DannyBoi1]

My friend has discovered that a higher voltage from an american outlet does not supply more power.

 

I think we are all aware what DOES happen when the voltage is changed though, so, fill in the story yourself, it’s better that way.