Experiences with non-techies

[STRMfrmXMN]

When I went to school the computers were these

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe

while I had one of these glorious machines at home

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000

I'm 15. Is that a sand box?

[thekeemo]

Well be glad your school is using iMacs and not our shitty Pentium 4s and 512MB RAM, sometimes 1GB on WIndows 7. Takes 10 minutes to boot to the desktop, then 5 minutes to open a single window in Chrome.

 

Luckily one of the IT guys gave me the BIOS password so I'll be running a persistent copy of Damn Small Linux or something like that. 

egypt:

P3's

pirated heavily skinned malware filled windows xp

256mb ram

beat it

[thekeemo]

That's a fair point actually. I'd rather my school used iMacs purely because I know they'd perform adequately for what we'd use them for compared to the crap they got instead.

we have to use them with the adobe suite

[michaelk12]

Well be glad your school is using iMacs and not our shitty Pentium 4s and 512MB RAM, sometimes 1GB on WIndows 7. Takes 10 minutes to boot to the desktop, then 5 minutes to open a single window in Chrome.

 

Luckily one of the IT guys gave me the BIOS password so I'll be running a persistent copy of Damn Small Linux or something like that. 

Our computers sound like those! It takes 5 minutes to even boot to the login screen. However we're slowly upgrading, my digital media class just got computers with Xeons and Quadros, so we can finally learn Premire.

[jayctech]

we have to use them with the adobe suite

Still seems more appropriate than the computers I had in school so...

[ArticTiger]

I currently contract for an IT service desk of a cruise company. 

 

One day a lady brought a laptop in that was extremely slow and horrible to work with, so I opened it up, and the hinges and parts of the keyboard were completely stuffed with cake and pink cake icing...

 

Took a while to clean out, as I tend to make sure equipment looks usable before returning it. That was one case that stood out. 

[thekeemo]

Still seems more appropriate than the computers I had in school so...

core 2's and 4 gb ram?

[STRMfrmXMN]

egypt:

P3's

pirated heavily skinned malware filled windows xp

256mb ram

beat it

We have an Apple 2 in our comp science lab.

[thekeemo]

We have an Apple 2 in our comp science lab.

you dont actually use it though.. right?

[jayctech]

core 2's and 4 gb ram?

Wasn't particularly techy when I was in school so no clue. Feel as if there'd be no way they have 4gb of ram though. Pretty much all the computers in the main build were upgraded xp machines and we all know how inadequate the minimum xp specs are for modern OS's.

[Guest]

Wasn't particularly techy when I was in school so no clue. Feel as if there'd be no way they have 4gb of ram though. Pretty much all the computers in the main build were upgraded xp machines and we all know how inadequate the minimum xp specs are for modern OS's.

My school is just getting around to upgrading ll the computers to 4gb. Though some teachers got a second monitor before that happened. Priorities people.

[Geekazoid]

Heck! We have 740 pages of 'Experiences with non-techies'. I didn't realise there were so many "experiences".

[Guest]

Heck! We have 740 pages of 'Experiences with non-techies'. I didn't realise there were so many "experiences".

Most of it's off topic though. 

[jayctech]

My school is just getting around to upgrading ll the computers to 4gb. Though some teachers got a second monitor before that happened. Priorities people.

It'd be around 4/5 years ago now but my headteacher at the time got an iPad, fell in love and worked towards getting every teacher in school one.

Before upgrading the former XP machines that'd take 10 minutes to sign on.

[BlazingGunnerFTW]

My school is just getting around to upgrading ll the computers to 4gb. Though some teachers got a second monitor before that happened. Priorities people.

Our PC's are good in our school, with i5's and a GTX 755 (Which isnt that bad).But what I do hate is the "Dell Optiplex Workstation Grade PC's" which have a Core 2 Duo and a extremely low powered quadro. You can imagine low powered quadros in 2006. And then you have Core 2 Duos with no GPU everywhere else, and then i5 haswell ASUS laptops. Then you have the HP mini. Take 5 mins just to get the log in screens, and 15 mins to get through windows and 2 mins just to load 1 tab if chrome. Lags on Microsoft word, but if you have been on that mini before, its not to bad. Just goes to show how imbalanded the school is.

Also, I had my computer on sleep mode, and then I shocked the computer case and then it turned on. My friends started freaking out as if I killed someone. Now they think I am a sourcer or something.

[STRMfrmXMN]

you dont actually use it though.. right?

Lel, no.

[Wooth]

I'm 15. Is that a sand box?

The Apple was a POS in '88 when I started high school but the Amiga was still awesome. My dad had some friends that were in an enthusiast club of sorts and one of them had 3 massive apothecary drawer cabinets outfitted to hold 3/14inch floppies full of pirated software and games with database lists in massive ring binders. I still have fond memories of playing Leisure Suit Larry, Phalanx, Syndicate, D&D, Golf and Original Battle Chess

[STRMfrmXMN]

The Apple was a POS in '88 when I started high school but the Amiga was still awesome. My dad had some friends that were in an enthusiast club of sorts and one of them had 3 massive apothecary drawer cabinets outfitted to hold 3/14inch floppies full of pirated software and games with database lists in massive ring binders. I still have fond memories of playing Leisure Suit Larry, Phalanx, Syndicate, D&D, Golf and Original Battle Chess

I played Veggie Tales on Windows XP and 98 when I was little

[Fgtfv567]

Well be glad your school is using iMacs and not our shitty Pentium 4s and 512MB RAM, sometimes 1GB on WIndows 7. Takes 10 minutes to boot to the desktop, then 5 minutes to open a single window in Chrome.

Wow, it makes my PC look lightning fast with its 54 second (with password) boot up time and how unresponsive it is right after boot up

[STRMfrmXMN]

Wow, it makes my PC look lightning fast with its 54 second (with password) boot up time and how unresponsive it is right after boot up

We have some faster PCs around but the library PCs are those slow ones. We have Sandy Bridge Pentium desktops in another lab and an iMac lab downstairs that is always booked. Recently we;ve employed a couple of carts of Chromebooks - good ones with 4GB RAM.

[Emerald3]

Fixing my foster mothers internet explorer and then downloading chrome and telling her to use that And then getting told every future problem with the computer was because of and I quote the chrome thingie u installed one time she actually blamed the computers psu dying on me downloading web browser and I asked her once why she didn't just uninstall it if it was causing so many problems and no response was given I laughed to hard

[ericssin]

I once worked on a computers rooms for students, one of my jobs was burn cds for them, mainly documents they had to hand to teachers or some free audio files we had stored, this was back when floppy disks were slowly dying. So one day a couple of students come and ask me: 'Can you burn an audio CD?' I said 'sure', then they hand me a floppy disk I though it was weird then I said to my self maybe it's a 1 min mp3, which was quite possible, so I put the disk on the drive open it and I find myself staring at a bunch of "CDA" files, I had to explain them what those files were.

[DevilsDemons]

Oh Christ I know all too many in my case @_@ But I'll mention only two!

So back in Christmas me and my dad were buying a high end PC that we saved up for after 2 years. Originally it was to be my own PC however I cannot put it anywhere in my room as I shared a room so it stayed in the living room. Because of this to keep in it living room I'd have to make accounts for everyone else on the PC as the agreement. So, I happen to see my dad use it from time to time too. I installed everything that was needed though, like Google Chrome, Steam etc, but everytime I see my dad on it I look at him with eyes of shame because he's using IE... And yet for some reason he is impressed at the "speed" of IE ¬w¬ So 2 weeks later it was my birthday, and then my dad was talking to my friends about the PC talking about the speed of using it on IE and I'm like everytime he says browser I say "As long as it's not internet explorer" each time. My friends kept giggling and I giggled with them.

Another moment is when my Science teacher asked me for help. She had a supply (substitute) teacher in the lesson before her's and the settings changed (I'll say which settings at the end). She also has OCD so she didn't like the change and I happened to come into the lesson a tad late and she was like "There you are! Fix this for me please someone's messed with it!". Being the computer obsessed child that I am, I asked what was wrong. I looked at it... Well I facepalmed. The settings that were changed were the second monitor settings (because school uses projectors in each room) and the resolution settings... I explained to her what's wrong and she didn't even know what resolution is, and I'm like in my head "You are required to use a computer in school for each of your lessons! You'd think you would know how to work computer settings cause school should have went over this during your teacher training!" Though I didn't know what was actually shown in teacher training, but it was my ICT class, that's just a class no child my age should be forced to do with such peers...

[Ertman]

If this was 10 years ago, maybe I'd agree. But right now, in 2015 if you have a job where you need to use a computer daily and don't know how to do something as simple as connect to wifi (considering all the smart devices around) then as far as I'm concerned you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer.

 

Also - showing people how to do something which they should know how to do doesn't tick us off. We just get annoyed because we know they won't remember and will ask again in a month which overall is worse because we:

• waste more time explaining it to them
• get our hopes up that they'll actually learn how to use their equipment

Interesting. There is still a significant portion of the population that can't do this, and yet they are employed. Do we know when the Professor's employment began, what if it was 10 years ago? So you would rather an institution go with a less qualified PhD professor, so long as they know how to connect to wifi?

I agree if they are hiring new PhD lecturers then it would be odd that they couldn't connect to a wifi network, but if they have the skills for the position, then maybe getting them to learn some of these computing basics is a better solution.

[jayctech]

Interesting. There is still a significant portion of the population that can't do this, and yet they are employed. Do we know when the Professor's employment began, what if it was 10 years ago? So you would rather an institution go with a less qualified PhD professor, so long as they know how to connect to wifi?

I agree if they are hiring new PhD lecturers then it would be odd that they couldn't connect to a wifi network, but if they have the skills for the position, then maybe getting them to learn some of these computing basics is a better solution.

Yes because as far as I'm concerned he isn't more qualified than someone that can connect to wifi, of course, not specifically because of such a trivial reason.

 

Science is a constantly evolving subject, likewise the way we learn and teach must constantly evolve too. Computers are now standard equipment for all scientists for various reasons and fundamental tasks that are uniform across all platforms and occupations (e.g. connect to wifi) should not, in 2015, be a new experience and if someone can't perform such tasks then they frankly do not know how to use their equipment properly (and safely). As a result, as a student I cannot have faith in the teachings of such a professor who is incapable of evolving as his subject does.

 

TL;DR version: there are greater implications than just "he doesn't know how to use a computer"