Experiences with non-techies

[knexfan100]

My dad (who, in most respects, is very knowledgeable about computers) honestly believes that having too many browser tabs is the source of all my computer issues. My old computer had an issue with its sound and my dad attributed it to me "killing the machine by having too many tabs open." The issue eventually sorted itself out. I just hope he never sees my sister's browser, because she's the kind of person who opens so many tabs that you can't even see the page icons anymore.

 

On any given day with a session manager I would have over 400 tabs "open at once". The thing to keep in mind is that when you restore a session in FireFox: the tabs that are actually loaded are not greyed out.... the rest are kinda just there... I'll scroll left and right in my tabs for what I feel like doing: Left for when I'm alone and right when I'm redditing and shit.... and a bunch of tabs in the middle for actual work... its a great way to hide porn actually, nobody wants to scan that many tabs for what they think I might be doing.

 

Did your dad ever learn that was wrong?

[Atmos]

Alrighty fellas, here's a story fresh off the prints.

 

So, a couple of my friends are not techy people... at all. One of them accidently deleted his wifi-adapter drivers on his laptop a couple years back, and I thought that was hilarious, but today takes the cake.

 

A couple days ago, one of them threw me a text saying "Hey, my computer keeps blue-screening because of a controller."
I thought it was weird, a peripheral shouldn't make you're computer blue screen like that, so responded with "The controller? Or something to do with it"

Got a reply back "The drivers", at this point I was confused. But at the time I was abroad so couldn't exactly do much.

 

I come back today sign into skype and see I've got like 50 new alerts from the guy trying desperately to figure out what was wrong. He had uninstalled the drivers for the controller because it kept blue screening him, but ever since doing that it blue screened every time he plugged in his keyboard or mouse. At this point I was at a loss, perhaps his motherboard was dying or some shit, so I replied back, "What kind of controller is this shit?!" only to get a response in the form of a picture... He uninstalled the drivers for his motherboard's usb controllers... I cannot describe the amount of respect I have for that man. Something that painfully terrible must have been extremely difficult to do, and to be completely honest I have no idea how he managed to not only delete the usb controller drivers, I honestly didn't think such a thing was possible until today.

two hours, and one updated list of motherboard drivers later his computer is working again.

 

Never again shall I simply assume when someone says "Controller" they're talking about a peripheral, from now on I'm just going to assume they managed to do the impossible and delete something far... far more important. Still not even sure how he managed it.

 

EDIT:: OH, I also now realize the importance of a ps2 keyboard... word's cannot describe the difficulty presented when attempting to install drivers without the use of a traditional keyboard/mouse...

[Stuff_]

I've recently been having awful experiences with people that believe they understand tech, mainly coding, PC's in general, and all that, but really they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

 

I can't take it. There are plenty of them on LTT forums as well.

[RustyZombie]

Given that there is no real need for optical drives, using them as cup holders doesn't seem too strange.

 

Some of us older people have a fair number of CD's and such from before downloading became a practical solution.  And to get some music in a lossless or uncompressed format, CD is still the only option.

 

But yeah, its utility is diminished, and it won't be long before they are obsolete.

[vanished]

Some of us older people have a fair number of CD's and such from before downloading became a practical solution.  And to get some music in a lossless or uncompressed format, CD is still the only option.

 

But yeah, its utility is diminished, and it won't be long before they are obsolete.

I don't know, I feel like game sizes have scaled pretty well with download speeds.  sure, 15 years ago, downloading at 1 mbyte per second would have been really fast, but then, games were also like 1 or 2 CDs, which is ~1.5 GB  The fact they're like 60 GB now, if anything, is a higher ratio of game size to typical download speed than it was back then

[DigitalHermit]

I don't know, I feel like game sizes have scaled pretty well with download speeds.  sure, 15 years ago, downloading at 1 mbyte per second would have been really fast, but then, games were also like 1 or 2 CDs, which is ~1.5 GB  The fact they're like 60 GB now, if anything, is a higher ratio of game size to typical download speed than it was back then

try downloading 60GB on a 3mbps 10GB daily capped line...

#thirdworldproblems

[RustyZombie]

I don't know, I feel like game sizes have scaled pretty well with download speeds.  sure, 15 years ago, downloading at 1 mbyte per second would have been really fast, but then, games were also like 1 or 2 CDs, which is ~1.5 GB  The fact they're like 60 GB now, if anything, is a higher ratio of game size to typical download speed than it was back then

 

I wasn't talking about games or internet speeds specifically, just saying some of us have CD's from when they were the most practical way to get music, and you need something to rip them.

[vanished]

try downloading 60GB on a 3mbps 10GB daily capped line...

#thirdworldproblems

I hope that plan isn't costing too much.  Like, more than $5/month

[vanished]

I wasn't talking about games or internet speeds specifically, just saying some of us have CD's from when they were the most practical way to get music, and you need something to rip them.

true, until you've ripped them all

[DigitalHermit]

I hope that plan isn't costing too much.  Like, more than $5/month

it costs ~30USD per month... and our local counterpart of the FCC still won't change the old regulations of 128kbps as the definition of 'broadband'... probably when the next administration steps up, the new definition will be 3Mbps rather than the 10Mbps uncapped that we're pushing for...

at least the ISPs took initiative and made 2Mbps the minimum plan that you can apply for... but that gets throttled to 384kbps when you get past the cap on one ISP or you get charged extra on the other ISP... oh and it also goes all the way down to dial up speed if you live in a congested area...

[vanished]

it costs ~30USD per month... and our local counterpart of the FCC still won't change the old regulations of 128kbps as the definition of 'broadband'... probably when the next administration steps up, the new definition will be 3Mbps rather than the 10Mbps uncapped that we're pushing for...

at least the ISPs took initiative and made 2Mbps the minimum plan that you can apply for... but that gets throttled to 384kbps when you get past the cap on one ISP or you get charged extra on the other ISP... oh and it also goes all the way down to dial up speed if you live in a congested area...

man, that's bad... whenever I see "kbps" I think back to dial-up, or of the transmission speeds to New Horizons

[RustyZombie]

true, until you've ripped them all

 

Since I already have them, I'm going to hold onto them as stable backups.  All hard drives fail, it's just a matter of when.

[SamTheWelshDragon]

"6GHz stable, on air."

[App4that]

CPE professor, didn't know what "HDMI" was in order to use the campus's projector.

[vanished]

"6GHz stable, on air."

What, outside in Oymyakon Russia?

[Sam Harradine]

About 6/7 years ago my PC started acting weird. I'm pretty sure I had some malware/virus. I had to wait 60 mins for the pop up window to close before I could do anything lol. So I had a look inside the PC to 'fix it' I saw all this 'gunk' on the cpu/heat sink. So, I cleaned. And..... IT WORKED! For about 10 minutes if that. Then it never worked again

[Fgtfv567]

About 6/7 years ago my PC started acting weird. I'm pretty sure I had some malware/virus. I had to wait 60 mins for the pop up window to close before I could do anything lol. So I had a look inside the PC to 'fix it' I saw all this 'gunk' on the cpu/heat sink. So, I cleaned. And..... IT WORKED! For about 10 minutes if that. Then it never worked again

Hey 10 mins is better than having a machine that won't run

[Maximoose]

This (not really non techie, just techies exaggerating):

 

[Coaxialgamer]

This (not really non techie, just techies exaggerating):

 

The main question is : how much does it cost?

[Maximoose]

The main question is : how much does it cost?

 

It doesn't matter, 4 GB of RAM is not a ton of memory.

[Coaxialgamer]

It doesn't matter, 4 GB of RAM is not a ton of memory.

yeah , he is definitly selling it a bit hard , but 4GB is not bad for the average user. What concerned me more was : "workstation" and ddr2 6400

[DirtyDane]

It's fine, but there's like 50 pages where all there is is that argument

i dunno, it seemed like a pretty important topic. what if i have to carry a couple million of those and they have just enough data on them that ... i dont know i was going to be an ass and jokingly start it back up ith a hypothetical... i cant think of anything

[DirtyDane]

Alrighty fellas, here's a story fresh off the prints.

 

So, a couple of my friends are not techy people... at all. One of them accidently deleted his wifi-adapter drivers on his laptop a couple years back, and I thought that was hilarious, but today takes the cake.

 

A couple days ago, one of them threw me a text saying "Hey, my computer keeps blue-screening because of a controller."

I thought it was weird, a peripheral shouldn't make you're computer blue screen like that, so responded with "The controller? Or something to do with it"

Got a reply back "The drivers", at this point I was confused. But at the time I was abroad so couldn't exactly do much.

 

I come back today sign into skype and see I've got like 50 new alerts from the guy trying desperately to figure out what was wrong. He had uninstalled the drivers for the controller because it kept blue screening him, but ever since doing that it blue screened every time he plugged in his keyboard or mouse. At this point I was at a loss, perhaps his motherboard was dying or some shit, so I replied back, "What kind of controller is this shit?!" only to get a response in the form of a picture... He uninstalled the drivers for his motherboard's usb controllers... I cannot describe the amount of respect I have for that man. Something that painfully terrible must have been extremely difficult to do, and to be completely honest I have no idea how he managed to not only delete the usb controller drivers, I honestly didn't think such a thing was possible until today.

two hours, and one updated list of motherboard drivers later his computer is working again.

 

Never again shall I simply assume when someone says "Controller" they're talking about a peripheral, from now on I'm just going to assume they managed to do the impossible and delete something far... far more important. Still not even sure how he managed it.

 

EDIT:: OH, I also now realize the importance of a ps2 keyboard... word's cannot describe the difficulty presented when attempting to install drivers without the use of a traditional keyboard/mouse...

... sir you have my respect

[Belgarathian]

yeah , he is definitly selling it a bit hard , but 4GB is not bad for the average user. What concerned me more was : "workstation" and ddr2 6400

 

I was thinking the same thing... At first I thought it was a typo, and then I looked at my keyboard and came to the grim realisation that the 6400 was intentional. 

[2001jaden]

reading through this has inspired me to go and work at the local computer store. Thank you LTT forum