Experiences with non-techies

[Guest]

Woody looks pretty worried. He must be an AMD lover.

[Solrix]

About 2 months ago I went into best buy just to look around and I was checking out the video cards I was already looking at buying the gtx 650 ti boost and they had it in stores granted it was 40$ more than new egg. So one of the people that work at best buy walks up to me and was talking to me about computer stuff and he seemed to know a bit about computers (he built his and was a gamer) and he told me not to buy it in store and go buy it off newegg and save the money. So in the mix of all the negative story's about best buy and other computer dealers I just wanted to throw a good story out there that not all of them are jerks

[brownninja97]

Went to Currys today to look at some laptops for my grandfather. Anyways we start looking around and i see a laptop with an i3 in it and a 256gb ssd and i see a i5 with a 500gb 5400rpm hdd. My father still doesnt value my opinion even thought ive got a small pc business running so he asked  the people there. They say dont get any of them, get a chromebook. I said he downloads a lot fo music at least 300gb worth, they then point me to a "top of the range" £350 chromebook with a massive 80gb hard drive. We got the i3 ssd one in the end but god what a nightmare, also the laptop is in a corsair box for some reason.

[Guest]

My sister came back from her university class today, and she saw that all the girls in the class had pink macbooks and they were ALL using it for facebook....

 

..THEY'RE NOT FACEBOOK MACHINES!

[obsidian1200]

Oh boy, anyone ever have to explain why some DVD drives won't play DVDs out of the box? Some people assume that the drive has the magic ability to put a DVD player program on the machine by just plugging it in, and don't get that those fancy DVD players actually serve a purpose outside of being cheesy and too flashy. I had a customer that just insisted on arguing that it was the drive, but fortunately it was an external drive, so I was able to plug it into a floor model and demonstrate with an old training DVD we had lying around that it could indeed play DVDs.

 

There are actually people out there that insist on using a tablet's camera in place of a scanner 24/7. Not in addition to, but in place of.

 

Then people who want things to be one-click for everything. If you don't want to learn how to use a computer, then don't use one. It's that simple.

[ace2k8]

People thinking they can download RAM....

http://downloadmoreram.com/  LOL just LOL

[Franquiro2110]

Remember when google changed gmail's layout?

 

well I was at my grandma's house when it happened to her account. she oppened her email and the "new layout walkthrough video" popped up (you know... the one with the guy that goes like "hey, I'm gonna show you how to be super productive with your new layout"... if he only knew....).

 

So, I'm in the kitchen and my grandma comes looking for me and goes like

grandma - "fran, fran... THERE'S A GUY IN MY EMAIL!!!!"

me -"what do you mean there's a guy in your email?"

grandma - "I don't know... some guy got into my email and he's talking to me!"

me - "WHAAT!?"

 

so I went to her computer just to find out it was a walkthrough video. (I love her, so I patiently explained what the guy was doing there, the fact that he would not read her mail, and how to shut him up in the future)

 

 

 

and then there's the classic "ohhh you like computers... can you fix my printer?" emm.... it's not installed scenes, which I'm guessing everyone in this forum have gone through.

[TassieTim]

got stuck in a non techie infinite loop atm

have two friends wanting me to build them both a new pc each ,

 

ends up going like this

 

me. ok fine how much you wanna spend ?

them. how much it going to cost ....?

me. how much you wanna spend....?

them. depends , how much it going to cost ....?

me. you want good gaming pc...?

them . yes !

me. how much you want to spend ??

them. how much it going to cost ??

me.thud! thud ! thud!

[Tobi2717]

Watch this and laugh you`r ass off!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_vRQrIx6l8

[Tyranade]

My Mum had a complete fit when she got her new computer because she didn't want Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer > >!

[brownninja97]

A customer came to me and said their dvd drive wasnt working. They were trying to put the disk in upside down. I told what their problem was and then they got very happy once they found out that they didnt need to pay me.

[BoomLiam]

Worked at a computer repair shop for a week for experience, at least 4 people came in during that week with a virus, claiming that they have no idea what happened. Seriously, they don't even try to hide the fact that they have downloaded child porn which is where they got the viruses from. It's quite funny because when the customer comes in, you just 'know' but they still hide it

[Tyranade]

Worked at a computer repair shop for a week for experience, at least 4 people came in during that week with a virus, claiming that they have no idea what happened. Seriously, they don't even try to hide the fact that they have downloaded child porn which is where they got the viruses from. It's quite funny because when the customer comes in, you just 'know' but they still hide it

 

I hope you reported that to the police .

 

Also another one would be, Teaching my mother to Copy And Paste, HOW HARD CAN IT BE!!!! It took me a total of 8 hours over a damned month V_V!

[BoomLiam]

Oh, and my mum tried to put the DVD into the video tape player. I'm never going to let her forget that moment

[BoomLiam]

I hope you reported that to the police .

 

Also another one would be, Teaching my mother to Copy And Paste, HOW HARD CAN IT BE!!!! It took me a total of 8 hours over a damned month V_V!

I talked about this to the owner of the shop, but as it is an independent business as long as they get the money which they charge to remove the virus, they don't really care who or what the person is up to. A lot of business unfortunately comes from that kind of area, people would much rather get rid of it through an independent business rather than through a company which will prosecute. It's wrong, I know (and for jobs like that we did charge a lot for it, even though it's very simple to remove it) but business is business...

 

Also teaching my mum to Copy and Paste was a painfully long task too But now she knows, I hate seeing people right click copy, right click paste but I think teaching her CTRL+C and CTRL+V is a bit too much for her

[Tyranade]

I talked about this to the owner of the shop, but as it is an independent business as long as they get the money which they charge to remove the virus, they don't really care who or what the person is up to. A lot of business unfortunately comes from that kind of area, people would much rather get rid of it through an independent business rather than through a company which will prosecute. It's wrong, I know (and for jobs like that we did charge a lot for it, even though it's very simple to remove it) but business is business...

 

Also teaching my mum to Copy and Paste was a painfully long task too But now she knows, I hate seeing people right click copy, right click paste but I think teaching her CTRL+C and CTRL+V is a bit too much for her

 

Ah okay well I wouldn't wanna work there : P. I've seen what the effects of that stuff can do first hand from the kids I work with.

 

Anywho yeah my Mum she still has to ask me what to Copy and Where to past it but she has got the hang of the process of Copying a file and Pasting it she just still needs to be told what file and where to Past it. XP!

 

I tried teaching her CTRL+C, CTRL+V but I gave up and almost broke down into tears aha!

[Virgule]

Back in the 9th grade 2 other buddies of mine and myself started our own school project. Our project was to dismantle a computer, make our own case, and assemble the computer inside the case we built ourselves. For the longest time a friend of mine had been saying that he knows pretty much everything about computers. Turns out he didn't know anything, but i'll get back to that.

I went to a very cheap-ass school, so there were always trouble with the infrastructure there, so as you probably guessed the computers at the school crashed all the time. Also note that all of the computers were "hooked up" for lack of a better term to ONE Server. This was a big school with around 200+ computers all hooked up to this one server. (Recipe for disaster). Since all of the computers were connected to the same server that would mean that if there was one single error on the server, then all of the 200+ computers at my school would simply not work.

These computers all went down the drain atleast twice a week making them completely and utter useless. And everytime the system went down the teachers always asked this friend of mine that thought he knew everything about computers. Let's call him Bob to make it easier to follow. Anyways, The teachers would always have Bob look at the computers, and tell them what was wrong. Ofcourse he didn't know what he was talking about, so he said the following: "Yeah, mhm, okay. Yes it seems that you have gotten a network system error inside the processor, it will be back up in an hour". Yes, that is ACTUALLY what he said, let that sink in for a moment. Oh, I totally forgot; The time he said that it was a "Network system error inside the processor". the teachers were trying to figure out why there was no sound from the speakers. Turns out the audiojack was not plugged in.

Anyways I got really off-track here. My friends and I were assembling the computer into the case that we had built ourselves. When suddenly Bob came by. My friends and I were kind of annoyed at Bob, so we asked him "which one of these components is the motherboard"? I bet anyone here on the forum would be able to point out which component in a computer was the motherboard, right? Bob pointed at the HDD, of course we all laughed, because this was proof that he knows nothing about computers, and was just spewing bullshit all the time. After we all calmed ourselves down, I said: "well surely you know this is the graphics card, right? (I pointed at the CPU). Bob said: "Yes ofcourse, how dumb do you think I am? That's when I almost broke out in tears laughing.

---

Since that event he stopped claiming he knew everything about computers and was an "IT-Guru". Anyways, my buddies and I delivered in our assignment, and got ourselves an A.

Cheers!

 

Bob was ahead of his time.

[Guest]

Bob was ahead of his time.

Integrated graphics much.

[Virgule]

My mom got her initiation with computers by working for the government and using one at the office. She must have done really procedural stuff because I quickly noticed she didn't know anything about the functionality of a computer.

 

When she was thinking of buying her first home laptop, long after I bought my first computers, I sat her down and talked about the options with her and showed her what my desktop, and to the extent, her future laptop could do. I gave her an overall view of how to find data on the computer, logical ways of storing files not to have to look for anything, what are programs, why you shouldn't install anything without knowing what it is, ... I kind of knew she was beginning to understand these things. One day, she comes home all smiles and she tells me she bought a macbook. I then repeat to her that we talked about mac vs non-mac, that non-mac computers could do anything a mac computer can do and more, that you just have to know what you are doing and that you then ensure you are functioning exactly the way you want to. But she went for the "easy, functions out of the box, simple, stylish, ..." fuzz that mac techies are trained to use on clueless individuals.

 

An hour later, it starts. She asks me over every minute or so to explain to her how to open her photos, find that file she wants, where did the application go, ... So I have to figure out the stuff on the spot, which granted is pretty easy, but I'm always thinking : "Man, this thing is booooooring, and why can't I also do this I can do with my desktop ?". 

 

So yeah time goes by and she calls me one time a few years back and asks : " Do I have gmail on my laptop ?". Then I knew she didn't learn anything. All she did was wander around in a world of limited functionality that don't even teach you what's the implication of what you do. I also noticed that when she wanted to reinstall the OS and wanted to backup everything. I had to go through all the HDD in order to gather photos, documents, movies, what have you, here and there, in places you wouldn't know personal files would be stored, ... It was a mess, and had the speed to show.

 

But yea, we all went through that phase. The difference is some people don't want to make the same mistakes again and/or want or have the patience to try and understand what they don't.

 

I still remember when she brought our first computer at home, an old computer her job gave her. I played with it a lot until I wanted to install swat 3 and deleted tons of system files to make space on the HDD. Still ashamed of that to this day...

[SkilledRebuilds]

Integrated graphics much.

Way back then....doubt it.

[ultimatemythbuster]

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.

Let me just say that there are non-tech people that can not be helped.

[AbidingDude]

dumb tumblr girls calling gif files jifs

[WoodenMarker]

dumb tumblr girls calling gif files jifs

That's the official way of pronouncing it announced by the man who invented the GIF.

[AbidingDude]

That's the official way of pronouncing it announced by the man who invented the GIF.

 

I was not aware of this, Still though

If you called it a jif most people would look at you like your a retard or something

[WoodenMarker]

I was not aware of this, Still though

If you called it a jif most people would look at you like your a retard or something

It's commonly accepted to pronounce it either way since everyone mispronouncing it.

It's like how people say "there's" when they mean "there are".