IT Venting, Let It Out!

Off Topic
#1

So there went my afternoon. I work with my mother in a printing company. She asked me at 12:30PM to see if I could get her computer running faster. I go about clearing cookies, temp file, and un-needed files from her machine. I then run a malware scan, all clear! Great, a reboot and this puppy should be running good.

WRONG, now the system won’t even post. Shit! Did delete something? Nope, the power supply chose to pop a casing off a capacitor and short itself. WTF how am I this lucky. Run to Fry’s buy a power supply, guess what it is the wrong form factor to work in the PC case. Run to Tanners and grab an old school ATX power supply. Boom the machine post. Tell my Mom just hook it back up and you should be good.

WRONG, Now the machine loads to just before the windows login screen and everything goes black. Shit! Did I delete something earlier??? Nope, My mother figure that the monitor needed to be hooked up as both VGA and DVI at the same time.

All is fixed now, but I have to of lost years off my life with the frustration.

7 Likes
#2

I feel your pain. I have one of those :stuck_out_tongue: Tech support to mom. It takes all three of the geeks in our family to keep my mom able to look at Facebook and do her bill pay. Sometimes it is hardware on her ancient computer we’re bubblegum and baling wiring because it’s really just an internet box for her. Often it’s software. Scratch that. End-user issues :slight_smile:

She kinda freaked when yahoo news changed the layout of their homepage. Because that’s the Internet, ya know. She still navigates the Internet by putting in URLs in the Google search box and wonders why it come up with thousands of hits.

Most recent was “email isn’t working” and I ultimately walked her through recreating a tragically missing desktop shortcut via phone while I was driving in traffic. Gold star to me. And she lives next door so I’m the buffer for simple crap unless it needs to go up Tier II Support (my husband or brother).

Her hard drive sounds REALLY unhealthy and moribund. I’m waiting for the day that dies. Oh joy. :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
#3

My mother-in-law is my PC support challenge. She’s 86 and wants me to explain everything I’m doing to her computer to her while I’m doing it. She doesn’t understand most of what I tell her, but she insists I tell her everything. Try explaining IMAP and POP3 mail servers to an 86 year old computer novice. She gets a million spam emails and opens most of them, because she thinks people are trying to communicate with her. I’ve told her about scams, spam, malware, ransomware, phishing attacks etc but she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. But when things stop working I get a call. I didn’t do anything it just stopped working she says. When I open the email she has 9999+ emails from spammers, most of which have been opened and none of which have been deleted. She gets maybe 15 genuine emails a day, but many times that in spam.

She’s bought stuff she didn’t need, made donations to organizations she doesn’t even recognize and who knows how many catalogs etc she receives all because of this spam.

Thankfully my wife, the CPA in the family, has control of her finances for the most part and is constantly warning her against scams. She still has her Discover card, though.

She called yesterday very frustrated because her email hadn’t received any mail since May 5th. I determined it was AT&T’s POP3 server which was failing. I tried to setup my computer with att.net email (really Yahoo email) and had the same problem on my computer when I tried to connect MS Outlook to ATT POP3. I switched it to IMAP and the problem was subsequently resolved, but it took a couple of hours of TEAMVIEWER time to get everything working.

Who knows what the next issue will be. She’s already clamoring for a faster computer because her’s is slow. I’ve cleaned so may toolbars, useless software apps she didn’t really want and background services from her machine over the years that I’m sure the issue with her performance is the crap she has inadvertently loaded on it, I’m just not ready to tackle it if she’s not willing to keep it from happening again.

And like you Nick I’m sure it will consume the better part of a day to clean up. Her last laptop just gave up the ghost because of hardware issues and she just bought another one. (I have the old one but I haven’t had time to try to rehabilitate it) Now she thinks any problem means she needs a new one.

Thanks for sharing the story. How about other DMS makers, do y’alll have similar stories?

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#4

I’m no fan of Apple these days, but seriously iPads are a wonderful thing for users like these.

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#5

Pretty easy to re-cap the PS, btw. :slight_smile:

#6

These issues are exactly why I bought mom a name-brand computer with a warranty and service through that company.

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#7

In case my mom reads DMS Talk: I already told you, send that camera back and try the other one. Quit asking!

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#8
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#9

Well, I was up all night replacing border routers attached to long haul links. Is it venting if I admit I had fun? I love working on big routers. Far and away my favorite equipment to work on is the same stuff I started on. For me, PC’s came later, and never really turned me on the way the IP gear does.

1 Like
#10

I dumped ATT email for hotmail some years ago, ATT kept having problem s
and I got a lot of spam and I kept having issues, Most of them went
away with the ATT email account, A friend had the same problem and when
she got rid of the ATT email a lot of problem
went with it

Hotmail even seems to notice what reoccurring email I never open and
it send them to the spam folder, I jut have to remember
to look them for things like the Fry s daily discout code if I need it

Last summer, my hubby almost about 2 K n an on line ‘secret shopper’
scam, We were lucky, I had spent the night at DMS so he had to wait until after
hi bank notified him that the checks he had deposited had bounce, Neither of
realized at that time that he had had a small stroke,

#11

You sound sort of like my best friend, She was a main fram programmer
and she still longs for DOS. Hates Windows because it take up to much
computer power!

#12

Look at Deep Freeze.

Do a fresh install of the basic software. Deep Freeze then “locks” that configuration. Any reboot takes it back to the “locked” configuration. Easy peazy.

Generally, you need 2 partitions, otherwise any save data goes away too.

2 Likes
#13

@Diplomat - Neat suggestion at $45. I think I have a better one.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Simple, easy, free. Run pretty much any OS. Set it to run fullscreen at startup running a virtual environment that is indistinguishable from native, create and assign partitions, does everything deep freeze does.

It also enables you to divide resources up. For example, you can create a computer with an 8 core processor, 2 SSD’s, 2 GPU’s, plug in 2 mice and 2 keyboards. You can then assign 4 cores per virtual machine, 1 SSD each, and 1 GPU, mouse and keyboard each. Instant LAN party, 2 gamers 1 box.

Linustechtips did something similar, had 8 ssd’s, 8 AMD R9 Nano gpu’s, 8 monitors, etc, and split up a 16 core processor to give a pair of cores, an ssd and a high end gpu to 8 users at once off of one box. I intend to do something like this from now on for my personal computers - a single high-end machine with a couple cores split off for the HTPC.

#14

Linux is the answer! Always.

1 Like