Mate rang me up the other day - his girlfriend's bought a new PC from Dell. "We can't get the broadband to work on the new PC" he says. He had installed the drivers for the broadband modem, set up the Tiscali account ok. After getting him to describe various cables plugged into the back of the case, it transpired that somehow they had got some cables mixed up and had plugged the Broadband modem into the phone port on the internal PCI modem that came with the Dell box! Haha!
Well I have an It friend and he works in a hospital and hes told me horror tech stories but the one that mainly stands to mind is the fact that one day he gets a call from a head doctor asking him to fix his cupholder on his pc as it was brocken and kept spilling his coffe... My friend went over thinking this guy must have customised his case to have cup holders but to his horror he goes and finds a brand new top of the line (then top of the line) pc covered in cofe.... The doc looks at him and ejects the cd-rom tray and says wait for it it wont stay open for more than a min... My friend turned back laughing and told the guy that it wasent a cup holder but a cd-rom drive... Well I dont know but a doctor erning 6figures should know what basic things do on a pc b4 he even conciders being part of the human race.. And as for dust when I worked in my tech department in my HS the library server blew up and we decided to gut the thing and trash it... But when I opened it it was covered in black smut.. every component was completly covered the psu smelled like it had a full fireplace built in it.. When I opened the psu that killed the whole thing I found out the fan must not have been working for at least 6months as the whole circuit board was warped and smoky spot by spot... Well at least the machine had a loooong fruitfull life being that it was a 386 server with a woping 8megs of ram and 1gig hdd space.. The funny thing is that the cpu still worked after that as I teted it just for laughs.... Man they used to built servers tough being that it was probly running non stop for at least 10 years... Btw it was runing some form of unix or something
Heh... I guess my tales can't really compare... My parents are pretty good, computer wise. Unfortunatley, they have a tremendous distrust of most software off the Internet, including such good things as Ad-Aware, Spyware Blaster, and Mozilla. So, every month or so, I get to clean another virus or adware off the machine, which usually means an all-night session. Also, they have the box in a nice, out of the way location under the desk, right up next to the wall. Not to mention that we have a cat, and Mom isn't the best at vacuming regularly. I've replaced the one (80mm) fan already, and the new one is starting to make a lot more noise. It's only been four-ish months.
Lol, all these stories are great. But I still haven't told my dad that VPN is something completely different from broadband internet And he worked for ESA as a software engineer, he did stuff like networking & telemetry for sattelites (spelling?) and the networks on the ground, I'm amazed he finds this so challenging
i have read about about a class for elderly and the instructor was asked what the scroll on a mouse did, and the instructor rolled it and said, i have no idea also a friend who worked at help desk, the telephones are programmed so that every person gets back to the same person if they call again. he got called and the woman told her problem and he told her what to do. after 2 minutes the phone rang again and she said, can you help me because your collegue didn't know anything about the problem. He stays calm and answers here problem in a different way. again some minutes later it's her again, with the same problem and again complaining about his collegues. He calmly said:" this is the third time you call me" she hung up
During some basic computer course, which was mandatory if you want to take any other classes we had this 90 year old cuople, oh man what fun it was that semester, the teacher knew I knew what I was doing, we had such wonderful tests like what does HTML stand for. Anyway I had fun with the old couple I would search for weird porn or viagra ads and have them pop up on their computer, I heard the woman say something like "Ralph what on god's green earth are you doing, thats disgusting Im leaving!" he was like "I dont know what happened" she was like "I always knew you were a naughty old man" The prof came over and shut down the windows, he caught me snickering, after trying to look serious he just started smiling. I would send him links to depends diapers saying we should get this for them, then I popped that site up to the old woman and she was like "Ralph how did they know? we can order this stuff and they will ship it for free" the prof burst out laughing he had to leave the room, I almost did the same thing. As for weird computer problems how about this 1 worms in a freaking computer, a few cut in half by fans! 2 while have the side of a pc open trying to diagnose it the puppy comes in and bites a $1500 video card and rips it out of the machine!!!!! This was some Nvidia quadro card. The guy laughed and shrugged it off even after I told him how much a new one would cost he was like ok order it. (He's loaded) 3 some dumb ass hick had a dirty computer so he brought it out to the driveway and sprayed it down with a damn garden hose! He didnt bring me the machine I just noticed while taking my dog for a walk one day I was like what are you doing! he was like it was dirty, I told him he probably just fried it and sure enough he did. He was like hmm, thats weird. I was like uhh dumbass. There are a few others I cant quite remember at the moment.
Awaiting Dangers Hey guys, I've been reading and surfing bit-tech for 3-4 months, so finally I registered Well I've read many parents/pc's relationships and how frustrating that can be. My mother is the same however whe was not using her pc much, just Microsoft Word. She still has 90MHz Pentium. But I myself with my Stepmother and Father moved from Lithuania to US so now she wants to communicate, so she bought decent PC and ordered internet. I will have to learn to write good tutorials wait for some funny post on this thread.
Ehehe, joined just yesterday, so I can share my stories with ya all... This happened to a friend of mine: Every time he said "Dad, you have to buy a new laptop...", his dad answered back "No, son, this one is enough for my work and the school...". Ok, I guess he had a point. 450Mhz AMD and Win98 is enough to run Microsoft Word 2000. Just a few days ago, his dad brought home a file from Word 2003, and as he tried to open it, it gave an error... Same happened for all the Excel files... He said, "son, come here and install me the Office 2003", to which my friend replied "It's useless, it doesn't run on Windows 98". His dad freaked out and threw his sci-calc right at the screen, breaking it... Next day he went to the shop and bought a Sony Vaio. As soon as he arrived home, he told my friend "what about now, isn't this a good machine?" It was my friend's turn to freak out: "GOD DAMMIT, NOW I HAVE A SCREEN-LESS LAPTOP!!!!" There goes some $300 to fix his LCD screen
A few years ago one of the guys at work took a laptop with him to hospital – keep him occupied before and after an operation We got a call from him to say the mouse was going in the opposite direction Bit of head scratching and stabbing in the dark and he found the solution himself – he was holding the mouse the wrong way. Only excuse was the laptop was on a table and the mouse on his lap under the table. One of my colleagues refuses to use his computer. He used to have a desktop calendar resting against the glass of the 15” monitor but now has a 17” CRT and he wants to downgrade
Here's Linus pronouncing Linux. If anyone should know it would be him right? clicky clicky Now, for my third post I would like to make a complete a#@ of myself. I know quite a bit about computers, both hardware and software. I work as a network administrator as well as the db coordinator/admin for my company (a well known online university). But this goes to show you that even the best among us have moments.... Last weekend I was having connectivity problems with my broadband (Comcast), so I began to troubleshoot it myself. I did all the normal stuff like turning it off, flushing the capacitors, uninstall, reinstall, etc. etc. After about 20 minutes of this I gave up and called Comcast tech support. There was a message on their phone system saying they were having troubles in my neighborhood and I should call back later. The problem persisted for about 5 hours, so I called back and stayed on the line until a tech person answered. She explained that they had been increasing the network from a 3mbit system to a 4 mbit, but they had finished about three hours ago. Then, she's going through all the troubleshooting steps with me again, including reseting my account. Finally she asks me what lights are on the external modem. I look, then feel like the biggest retard ever to operate a computer. When I went through all my initial self-troubleshooting, I turned off the modem and forgot to turn it back on.
being the techy kinda sucks sometimes. I work for the It department at my school and people always bitch at me when **** doesnt work. but anyway my funny story My dad is not the most tech savvy person. I left the computer on one night with the monitor on when i stayed at a friends house. so he calls my cellphone asking me how to turn it off. and i tell him to take the mouse and click on the start button. So he picked up the mouse and started tapping on the monitor (i know this cause i asked him when i got home). and hes like it doesnt work. so i tell him to just hit the power button because i didnt want to deal with it. and he couldnt find it(my case has a door on it) so by now hes mad and just hangs up on me. i get home and to turn it off he unplugged the power strip
I just got one from my dad, Well he was tring to make his homepage in firefox msn.com. Well he would go to tools options and type in msn.com then press use default. He came into my room asking what was wrong. After seeing what he did it took me two seconds to tell him to hit apply. Now my dad is acualy a pritty ok computer guy but he is rough around the edges...real rough.
Hmm, right now, I can only think of one funny computer story, involving my grampa. My uncle had given my grandparents his old computer, and my grampa one day just decided he wanted to use it to play online games. So we went through and taught him all the basics, and he was going fine for a while, until one day he called for us to come help him. When we went to check up on him, he was considerably upset, and he muttered something as he pointed to the computer. We checked the computer screen to see what had happened, we found out he had gotten the error message that says "This program has performed an illegal operation.." and he thought the cops were going to come after him, because he thought he had done something illegal online. One thing I was shocked to find out about cases, fans in particular. I had opened up my case one day for cleaning, when I noticed there was a bunch of hair being pulled through the bottom of the case. Tracing it back to the source, the fan in my case door, I gave it a tug, and out came a long clump of my discarded hair that had been sucked in. I spent the next hour cleaning out as much as I could, and it still has hair inside places I can't get into. Since then, I've kept my hair very short and changed my fan to a nice blue lit one.
This one I laughed a long time... My friendgot his parents to get him a computer. So his parents did it. I went over there to install all programs etc. And my friend said that He had opened the side, to see how it looked. So I wondered where are the processor fan, memory card, and graphic card. I asked him, and he said this; "Well, our old computer didnt had this components, so I took them away, and throw thne to the bin... Luckily, the parts were still on bin, and i putted them back...
Not as funny as the ones above, but my dad's computer at work apparently had loads of spyware/viruses on it, and he was there when the IT tech lady took it off. I asked him if he knew what virus he had got: he said "erm... I think it was called Spybot Search and Destroy"! I then said that that was infact to get rid of spyware, and amazingly he said "Oh, yeah. It was called a tracking cookie". Impressive hey? ch424
I believe it's pronounced 'cash' but other uses i.e. for 'weapons cache' it would be pronounced 'kash-ey'. In an English accent pronouncing it 'kash-ey' just sounds wierd.
My Mum isn't too bad with computers but she seems to have a real difficulty when it comes to email. The number of times she has typed in an email address into IE and then complained that its not working is just unbelievable, no matter how many times I tell her she just can't grasp it. She also has a habit of typing www. at the start of an email address e.g. www.email@email.com.
Have you ever heard the beeb call something a weapons kash-ey? http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/c/c0008800.html
