User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's weekly trawl through readers' memories of dealing with dim users or dangerous bosses, often at ridiculous times. This week, a pair of sticky situations starting with one sent to us by “Tim”. Tim's tale comes from his first job when he was “fresh faced out of University and on the first …
Well, a lot of 'information ergonomics' is based around size and shape... e.g if this plug is same shape and size as that socket, there's a good chance they go together. Good design will use this to help the user. However, good design, or 'form engineering', was rare in the PC world until the last decade or so.
I still remember the horror of PC cases in the nineties where vendors thought it good idea to adorn a humble stamped-steel case with a curvey beige plastic fascia, which only served to make it awkard to remove floppy disks and USB devices. Not to mention a 'turbo' button that didn't do anything, a camouflaged power button,a Reset button next to the disk eject button...
No. Stew. Recipe follows:
1 elephant
5 rabbits (optional)
cooking oil (I use lard)
enough flour to dredge the meat, seasoned if you like
6 hundredweight onions
4 hundredweight carrots
2 hundredweight celery
50 pounds salt
50 pounds pepper
1 bay leaf (if you leave it out, you'll miss it!)
4-5 barrels good red wine and enough water to cover
Cut the elephant into bite-sized pieces. Dredge in flour, and brown in the oil. While the elephant is browning, dice up the veg. Throw it all into the pot with the elephant. Add the salt & pepper and bay leaf, give it a good stir. When the onions are translucent, add the wine & water and bring to a simmer. It is done when the elephant is tender. If you are serving more than 2500 people, cut up and brown the rabbits with the elephant ... but be careful, most people don't like to find hares in their stew.
Sharp cases were a menace - particularly the ones which would make you bleed simply by picking them up.
Thankfully the local version of Trading Standards agreed they were a health hazard and started cracking down on them after a few complaints. It helped that one of their inspectors got bitten by a case too.
> Cases lined with razor baldes to stop the un-initiated tinkering.
Or the initiated, for that matter. All-metal Dells, especially the servers, were lethal in the early 90s. I recall the case of one server that ended up looking like a butcher shop with my own blood after an especially entertaining tussle...
>Cases lined with razor baldes to stop the un-initiated tinkering. That must be why they were like that
Hehe! A by-product of the cheap manufacturing process - in a single process you can bend a sheet of mild steel and punch holes through it simultaneously. Such parts could be de-burred, but that increases labour costs as a part has to be moved to a different machine. Whilst I have cut my fingers on PC cases (and extruded door latches that are sharply cut extrusions), I was philosophical about it - after all, I had bought the PC after weeks of searching the dead-tree magazines for the most amount of MHz/ MBs etc for my money - so the inexpensive construction (an honest compromise) was my choice as a buyer.
By contrast, no user asked for an arbitrary curved plastic fascia that nothing more than an inconvenient, cack-handed attempt at product differentiation.
A side note on rants:
A fella called Charlie Brooker cut his teeth by ranting about the frustrations of being a PC gamer back in the nineties. In time, he ranted about Shoreditch (Nathan Barley), and then the news and television. Now he has critical acclaim on both sides of the pond for his cautionary series Black Mirror.
(I'd be interested if anyone knows the first time a television was referred to as a 'black mirror'. I know Jony Ive used the term in the nineties, referring to concepts explored for the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (just prior to Jobs' return). Jony Ive thought that CRTs when turned off were just unpleasant black mirrors, and had explored using doors and curtains to hide them. )
Here's a little gem I hunted down one bored afternoon. It caused Concerned Mothers™ to get in quite a flap.
Yeah I remember those cases. The worst cut I ever got was from pushing out one of the blanks for an ISA/VESA slot (before they put a handy cross in them for a screwdriver.
Sliced my finger clean about 1cm down each side. Had to wash the motherboard...
Never did that again.
"pushing out one of the blanks for an ISA/VESA slot"
Ouch, the worst cut I ever got from a case was from the very same thing. I still have a good two centimetre scar on my thumb. On the plus side, that PC accepted my blood sacrifice and was the only one to never give me any trouble for its entire operational lifespan.
I always assumed that the lethal metal internals were deliberately there to discourage upgrades. They wanted users to buy a more expensive jobby than they needed, with faster (more expensive ) CPU and various extras just so that they could get the bigger hdd or ram that they actually did need, rather than buying a more basic model and sticking the extras in themselves.
They were just the cheapest junk you could find. My sister used to have this "incredibly cute" cat-shaped case that had internals there were seemingly designed to cut and maim the technician. I literally cut myself, badly enough that it bled, several times on the cursed thing.
When we wanted me to upgrade the computer with a new motherboard (and all the trimmings) I made up some excuse about the case not supporting new motherboards and got her one of those Cheiftech/Antec "dragon" style cases that everyone and their mother had back int the day. And now my sister builds her own computers so she can buy all the sharp cases she likes... But she didn't and has a reasonable Lian-Li case.
Modern PCs with on button that is camouflaged into the trim so that a user new to the machine spends several minutes prodding bits of plastic until one of them moves. And only a few years ago a spanking new PC on our desks at work with a DVD tray button at just the right height to get knocked by a user's hand when moving the mouse, so that the tray would shoot out suddenly.
>Modern PCs with on button that is camouflaged into the trim so that a user new to the machine spends several minutes prodding bits of plastic until one of them moves.
Lenovo are guilty of that. And sometime they do something daft, like put a WiFi On/Off switch next to the Power button.
Oh, a bloody stupid laptop of a friends - the WiFi wouldn't work, and I couldn't turn it on in Windows. It eventually turns out that the little blue light on the WiFi Fn Key actually denotes 'Off', and pressing Fn-Key turns it to Orange (On). FFS! What the hell is wrong with "Light = On, No Light = Off?"
My bloody Dell Laptop has a row of unlit media / volume softkeys. The stupid thing? These softkeys light up ONLY when you are touching them. What the hell is that good for? And being softkeys, I can't identify themin the dark by touch. Grr.
It is irritations like these that cause me to attempt to be an advocate for good design. And no, 'design' isn't merely what something looks like.
I had a Sony Vaio once that persistently failed to connect to WiFi. The power switch was a fancy sprung loaded slide to activate job that also released the clamshell lock. It was located right next to the WiFi /Airplane mode on/off slide switch which was about 2mm thick with a tactile surface. There was no Wi/Fi on/off light either, it was a green on-screen display.
Every time the user opened the clamshell, they clicked Airplane mode to on. I would go through a whole load of shitty superstitious mumbo jumbo removing drivers and adding them back and taking them away again and putting them back again... and then miraculously it would work. I had usually rested my thumb on the switch and pushed it back on by accident.
It took about 6 months and 6 visits from the professor in question before I eventually downloaded the manual and decided to read it page by page to see what was going on. Then, THEN, I noticed the little line with a number on the end pointed at the edge of the Vaio, and THEN I decided to look up what Number 7 was, and saw it was "Airplane Mode".
Wifi on/off buttons have to be the most pointless bloody thing to adorn modern laptops. Early Sony computers used to have a sliding switch. It was black, on a black background, and even if you knew it was there, it was hard to find. And easy to accidently slide to "off". Other laptops have a big button to do it. Why?? I'll rephrase that. No I won't. Why?? The laptop is useless without wifi! I can see there would be the odd use-case for turning off wifi, but to make it a key that's prominent, or even not prominent but easily accidentally pressed, such as "FN-2" or something, is just crass. It causes so much frustration among users who quite frankly don't care.
Why?? I'll rephrase that. No I won't. Why?? The laptop is useless without wifi!
Ever tried to use a corporate laptop that tries to contact DC and bunch of other services, before you have had chance to login to VPN to make them available?
Being able to turn wifi off means windows (no, linux is often not an option on corporate machines) will complete login/resume from sleep in few seconds instead of spending several minutes trying to connect somewhere being utterly unresponsive until it finally gives up.
Just because you have no need for it doesn't mean others might not find it very useful or even necessary.
The laptop is useless without wifi! I can see there would be the odd use-case for turning off wifi, but to make it a key that's prominent, or even not prominent but easily accidentally pressed
I raely use my laptop for the internet (the one on my desk does that), but frequently use it for the church Powerpoint and recording meetings. In neither of those do I want it connected - or trying to connect - to the outside world.
It's an HP, and the wifi switch is a dedicated button, with associated pilot light (light on = wifi on) well away from anything else.
on/off button is exactly the same size and shape as the Delete button right next to it
I've had more than one of those. I usually pop off the power button, so either I use the normal Linux shutdown command, or if things are completely TITSUP I used a pen or car key to press what's left of the button.
Oh, a bloody stupid laptop of a friends - the WiFi wouldn't work, and I couldn't turn it on in Windows. It eventually turns out that the little blue light on the WiFi Fn Key actually denotes 'Off', and pressing Fn-Key turns it to Orange (On)
And if you are dealing with an HP laptop with wireless....
Blue light = on, orange light = off
For a brief while the Turbo button was my friend. When I upgraded from a 386 to a 486 processor and tried to play Wing Commander the performance with the larger ships was much smoother than with the 386, but it was too sensitive (for me) when flying the little scout ships. Turning Turbo off slowed things down and made it playable.
Turbo buttons should've been called snail buttons.
That is actually a valid point. In non-turbo mode the CPU would be clocked at 4.77 MHz and in turbo mode it would be usually around 8-10MHz. Wasn't just for gamed though. IIRC some ISA cards didn't always play nice with higher clock speeds, which was probably more due to bad implementation by some motherboards.
Ah those wonderful Turbo buttons with a 2 digit 7 segment display that was set just with a jumper board.
I used to (sometimes) wire those via a little homebrew logic to the ISA bus to watch POST codes as the machine was (or not, as often could be the case) coming up.
Given it was not particularly great deal of effort, I was somewhat surprised no case/computer manufacturer never (that I remeber) offered that as an option.
@not that andrew
"what sort of numpty"
Fair play here. I had the same story from a friend, but the user was a senior officer at the Met! But remember how the world was back then. We're probably talking early 1980s. Most of these users had never seen a PC before, and probably got damn all training. They read the instruction that said "Put the disk into the slot on the front of the computer". Okay, there's a long thin slot about the width of the disk and another odd thing with a funny bit of plastic in front of it that's blocking the hole. Looks a bit too wide anyway. I know which slot a lot of people would quite reasonably choose.
"[...] the slot with the recess in the middle and a large lever over it [...]"
The slim 5.25 drives were not so obvious. They had a flat fascia and the eject button didn't protrude until a disk was loaded. See picture below for example.
http://www.recycledgoods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/1000x/af097278c5db4767b0fe9bb92fe21690/c/a/canon-1.2-mb-5.25-slim-13-height-internal-floppy-drive-md5501a-21.10.jpg
Or their chidren. Once, while working at Chinaman Joe's PC Emporium*, we had a computer come back with a 3.5" drive that would not accept disks. We removed the drive from the PC and, just for shits and grins, removed the cover of the drive whereupon we found a grey plastic gear sitting right in the middle of the drive. We were wrong in assuming the gear was a part of the mechanicals that had managed to escape the bonds that held it in place for, as we marveled at the sight, the Chinese guy that assemvbled the computers came by, looked and exclaimed "Rego! My kid pray with those"! We turned the gear over and, sure enough, there was the Lego logo. Put everything back together, tested the drive and charged the customer for allowing his kid to get to close to the computer.
*Names changed to protect the Guilty.
If you're going to imitate a Mickey-Rooney-quality "Asian" accent, get your Rs and Ls right. The Chinese pronounce Ls, the Japanese pronounce Rs. So your "Chinaman" would be Japanese given that sample. But never let accuracy get in the way of an ethnic stereotype.
Not quite the same... But I had a Mac where the floppy disk drive broke. I took it out hoping to get a new one, but that was at a time when floppy disks were on their way out, so I never got a new drive and forgot all about it.
About a year later I was handed a floppy disk that I needed to read. Put it where the floppy disk used to be. Plop! It was gone... Opened the Mac, took the floppy disk out, found someone who could read it and got the contents over the network.
I've absent-mindedly pushed an SD card into the side-mounted optical drive on an iMac more than once.
Thankfully, Jonny Ive has made that problem a thing of the past by removing the optical drive entirely and hiding the SD slot somewhere round the back amongst a rat's nest of cables. Bloody genius that man.
"You will not believe how many times I have seen this one :)"
Oddly, after over 20 years in this game, I've only seen it once. And that was a nursery (kindergarten for you colonials) where a 3 or 4 year old had pushed a CD in the gap. And that was much more understandable since, for practical reasons the PCs were installed with tray-less, slot-type optical drives.
"And that was a nursery (kindergarten for you colonials) where a 3 or 4 year old... "
Minor American English quibble: if the children were three or four year-olds, then over here it's a "nursery school". Kindergarten is (generally) for five year-olds, the class just before first grade.
Good story though.
"Minor American English quibble: if the children were three or four year-olds, then over here it's a "nursery school". Kindergarten is (generally) for five year-olds, the class just before first grade."
Thanks. AFAIK, nursery school here in the UK is until they start "proper" school, which may be as young as 4 in a reception class, normally 5. That can vary from town to town, but there's nothing in between.
Had a family member with a cheap computer with a razor blade case and the CD Rom drive stopped working. Went round to open the case up and reconnect the cable that had come loose from the motherboard. Had a brainwave whilst opening the case, I needed protection for my hands. So I asked for some Marigolds in the guise of static electric protection for the PC. Got away without any blood loss during that and subsequent visits.
Same family member is having an issue with their Sky box later on that night. There was an issue with the viewing card and nothing was working so call technical support i.e. Me. I said take the card out, power down the box and remove power cable. Then wipe the contacts on the card gently before sticking it back in upside down and powering the box up again. "That won't work" comes the interruption and I said I was happy not to help out in future. "But if it's upside down the card won't be able to be read" So I pointed out that of the two people on the call I was the only person who had engineer in their job title. They followed the instructions and at the end I said take the card out and turn it right side up. "F*ck me it's working!!! How do you know all this stuff?" I referred them to my job description.
Marigold manufactures gloves for a very wide range of uses, from dish washing to surgery to high voltage electrical work.
I've used their products for years, but this is the first place I've ever seen the brand name used as a generic name like "kleenex" or "hoover" ... and I'm not certain it's a good place to even try to use it as a generic name. Was the original poster talking about a throw-away "dime a dozen" latex gloves, or a pair of US$500 lineman's gauntlets? Marigold manufactures both.
You'd think the story about misposted floppies is apocryphal but the reality is that it's happened on multiple occasions - as has the "coffee cup holder" and even the "I can't use my computer" call which turns out to be a power cut (2 instances in my own support staff for the latter)
I've personally encountered (in a previous life) the oft-related story in the TV industry of toddlers posting toast+jam in the front slot of VCRs (which is less damaging than when they put coins in.). The on-call related part of that is that as trainee electronics tech I got the fun jobs like cleaning printing desktop calculators when someone spilled coffee (with what always seemed like 10 sugars) on them and repairing cash registers from busy pubs that had internals swimming in stale beer when the case was opened. (Thankfully my employer used to charge extra for those dirty jobs and paid extra to those doing them too)
Thankfully these days you can just changeout a keyboard and cash registers tend to be IP67 rated in their electronics parts. Desktop printing calculators are long-gone.
Used to work for a company that sold industrial terminals to factories etc. As the YTS trainee, I would get to clean them. So the one from the cement factory would be full of cement dust (try not to get that one wet), the one form the brewery was full of beer smelling brown dust. No one wanted to touch the one from the chicken farm. And unlike your boss, I didn't get extra!
Ditto, but my experience got even nastier in the early/mid 90's. When Iomega brought out the Zip disk there was already a 3.5 M.O. drive on the market for optical storage. Used to get roughly one or 2 call outs per month from graphic design companies where they had stuck a Zip disc into the optical drive or vice versa. Worse than that were said same graphic designers who would try and force a 44Mb Syquest 5.25" disc into a 5.25" M.O. drive, a machine that tended to cost thousands to buy.
they must have used a hammer to jam them into a normal drive or optical drive.
Personally I found them so slow you could almost retype the data in the time it took to save and restore, and also randomly decided some disks were not worth reading even right after writing.
slow, unreliable things...
Worked somewhere where they had specialist keyboards for the software packages they used. One day I get a call from one user saying that the software is kaput as it doesn't respond to some keyboard commands. There had been an update to the software recently but I thought it odd that only one user was affected. Visiting his desk I realised that this bloke was a bit of a slob, there were wrappers everywhere. The specialist keyboard had large 5cmx5cm keys instead of regular keys but was actually just outputting the certain key combinations usually involving the control key. He demonstrated that the software wasn't working by pressing three of the keys and nothing happened.
The company charged a bit for these things and so it sucked that one had failed. So I plugged in a regular keyboard and tried the troubled key combinations which worked fine. I put in a replacement specialist keyboard and took the other one back to investigate. Upon opening the keyboard up I discovered that there was a wooden lollypop stick that had some how gotten in underneath the keys. The three keys that didn't work had that sticky wood preventing the keys from working. Weirdly he must have done something special to get it under there as we couldn't replicate what he'd done.
"But they couldn't find the key with the legend "any"."
The "any" key? That's the space bar. Manufactures stopped putting a label on it because, as the most used key on the keyboard, the label would wear off and they'd have to replace the key. Not labeling became the standard, and now you have the keyboard you see in front of you.
I had to have used that 50 times when I worked at the help desk for the big TLA. I got to the point where I could tell if a user was going to have issues with pressing "any key" and would just tell them to hit the space bar. Or "W". Why "W"? Why, so it will Work!
I worked as a service engineer for a company that resold RS/6000 and SUN Microsystems. One of the strings that the service department also had was a "walk-in" PC clinic for local experiencing problems with their personal computers.
Quite why it came to me I don't know because I was working on E6500's and E10000s back then, but I was asked to take a look at an old IBM PS/2 system that a guy had dropped in saying that it kept randomly crashing, powering off, and was also making a funny noise. It didn't take me long to work out why when I saw the machine. I lifted the lid and saw that not only was it caked with lint and all manner of fluff and dust, but that that dust and fluff was effectively hard baked to every single component by a disgusting thick layer of treacle-like nicotine tar.
Thankfully, after we had all almost been sick at the smell and sight of it, the service manager called it out as a health hazard and refused to allow me to work on it.
I still have a model M from one of those ancient PS/2s. A good soaking of denture cleaner removed 20 years of gunk from it.
I used to think that if the zombie apocalypse comes, my model M would be a good weapon for fighting off imps. However a co-worker recently got an anodized aluminium case for a mechanical keyboard. Thing weighs 10 pounds and would be about as effective as Gordon Freeman's crowbar.
A friend worked at home with the PC next to an open window overlooking a dusty country road. She also had two large dogs who moulted their long coats for the summer. She was also a chain smoker.
Needless to say doing an upgrade on her PC was definitely unhealthy. Communication could be difficult too. The open window caught the full impact of international flights with their undercarriage down as they approached the runaway about 1 mile distant.
She also had the novel problem of burning out modems. In the end a spark arrester solved that problem - presumably lightning induced.
I worked at a plant that baked fuller's earth into cat litter and oil&grease absorbent.
We had 3 CompuPro S-100 machines networked together (which should tell you how long ago this was)
A regular monthly maintenance chore was dumping fine white silt out of the S-100 boxes and 8" floppy drives.
Literally the first thing I thought about when I read the title:
I work for a large organisation and a number of years ago we used two form authentication to log users on, ie they presented a “smart card” to a smart card reader (a seperate device attached via USB cable) and then typed a password in when prompted.
As with any large setup we had a small pool of regular customers, those special individuals who always pushed the boundaries of ineptitude.
One day one of our regulars contacted us…they had lost their smart card inside the PC. Almost fearing what I would discover I went up to see them. What I found was that after 2 years of routinely inserting the smart card into it’s reader each morning, on this particular day the user had decided to feed the smart card into the PC's floppy disk drive. And of course, just to make sure it worked they shoved it in as far as they could...
A few minutes with a dental probe (don’t ask) and a blob of blu tac retrieved the card. But to this day I cannot forget their blasé attitude, it was as if it was the most natural mistake in the world to make….
Not a design problem, more of an engineer problem. Many years ago, I was a lowly bench technician, but was allowed to go into the field with the network engineers from time to time to gain real world experience. The engineer had already built the server and pre-installed Netware - the client was cheap, so it was just a desktop with a NIC and SCSI controller whacked into the expansion slots, with the appropriate drives stuffed into the "drive bays". Should have been a matter of just going out there, plugging in the half-dozen or so various cables, and poking the power button. How this experience was giving me any experience, I don't know, but I was instructed to go with him for the installation.
So, we arrive, haul the thing in, assign all the plugs to the correct receptacle...and nothing. Not even the power supply fan. After the required foul language at very low volume, we set about figuring the problem. I spin out the screws and open the case. The expansion slot covers that the engineer had removed to install the NIC and controller had simply been laid inside the case, loose. They had then slid around and wedged between the motherboard and the case, and were shorting the whole thing out. Removed them, and everything came up as intended. Oops.
Several years ago, a colleague brought to me a PC that he'd built for himself - I'd acquired a reputation within the company of being someone who'd fix/upgrade PCs for little more than some chocolate or cider in recompense.
Anyway, this PC had two problems:
1) it wouldn't power on, at all, and
2) the chassis was faulty - must be, because the ATX I/O shield wouldn't line up with the rear aperture and couldn't be installed.
Some of you can maybe see where this is going.
The owner had carefully assembled the PC, but - seeing no need for the small brass standoffs - had methodically screwed the motherboard straight to the base plane of the chassis. So of course it was shorting out in about a hundred places.
I removed it, and re-installed it with the appropriate standoffs - and, mirabile dictu, it fired straight up, right as rain.
As a bonus, I was suddenly able to install the I/O shield at the same time. Funny, that.
But what was even funnier is that the person in question worked for our IT department in a quite senior helpdesk services role. Obviously a software guy and not hardware!
Yeah he should have been a little more proactive beyond simply changing the password to something that didn't use the B or N keys. If that were one of my staff, I'd laugh about it and then be like, "But seriously, do a more complete job next time."
Especially since the user is just immediately going to open another ticket about a broken keyboard, that the tech or his colleagues are going to have to address.
"Helpful young fellow. Too much trouble/money to just swap out a keyboard?"
Maybe it was a long enough ago that keyboards were still expensive and accessible enough to be repairable and he was leaving the user with the self-inflicted damage which s/he should have been aware of to then log as a new call when s/he realised what was happening when typing in a document. Back then it was often a disciplinary offence to eat or drink at or near your computer. More recent experience, especially with some expensive laptop repairs tells me it still should be!
My first support job in IT required that keyboards be taken apart and cleaned rather than tossed in the bin and issue a new one due to cost. It was cheaper to spend two hours opening it up and cleaning it than to replace it. I had total disbelief as to the stuff I found in them... chicken bones (yes bones... small ones however), new and interesting civilizations growing them, the usual donut cookie/biscuit crumbs, etc. Then there was the post-it note with a phone number that a marketing droid had folded up and shoved it under the Enter/Return key when his wife showed up at that office one day.
SWMBO and I are gamers.
Have had numerous computers, and usually used them fairly hard. When our eldest was about 4 or so (... late 90's) we were engaged in a lan match when her computer started displaying rather weirded out images and then powering off. After the third event, we gave up in frustration and she wandered off with a friend to go to a cinema show.
I spent about an hour or so checking drivers, config options etc. And finally opened up the case. (recall that our *eldest* was 4, middle here would have been 2) and found, sitting nicely on the back side of her ATI video card, a chocolate chip cookie. Essentially until the video card was under heavy load, an inert object in context of the machine. Under load, the cookie oozed chocolate in liquid form....
(the back side of the case was exposed to the living room due to the orientation of the desk - and I'd left off one of the slot covers ... silly me.)
When she got back I told her that her video problem was due to cookies on her machine. {at the time she was taking a web development course. The look I got was priceless}
A friend complained that her relatively new PC was intermittently powering itself off and she was getting desperate. So she put it in the car and paid me a Sunday visit. Set it up and waited - and sure enough after a while it suddenly powered down.
Opened it up to reveal an almost pristine insides. Then I accidentally brushed my hand against he cpu heatsink - ouch! The problem was then obvious - a unsecured wire was stopping the cpu fan from rotating. Re-routing the wire then showed that the fan was dead from being stalled for months.
As the shops were all closed it was a case of rummaging in the spares box. Luckily the fan was only held by screws into the heatsink fin gaps - so a jury rig of a slightly bigger diameter fan was secured with only two screws. Apparently it then worked perfectly for the life of the PC.
On the nice Mac All-in-one (really nice by the way) the power button is nicely hidden on the BACK of the one piece display/CPU/etc. When I first started, I had to ask where it was as it is not even visible from the front of the machine. Luckily I did that before the person showing me the office had walked out the door. Said button is nicely disguised and hard to see unless you are looking directly at the back of the machine, which is difficult when it is close to a wall.
Oh, well...
I despise Apple desktop design.
It's clearly only for looking at, not for using.
The keyboard and mouse that come with them are almost unusable, and charging the mouse is ridiculous!
Yes, I also wasted 20min trying to figure out how to turn it on. Why hide the power button? TVs have put them on the edge for decades.
A fat-fingered friend of mine only uses Apple keyboards on his PC. He wishes their wireless version had a number pad though. YMMV.
Whilst the Apple mouse can't be used whilst charging, mice go for weeks or months on a charge and give plenty of warning of low battery, so I'm not sure why a user would need to charge the mouse whilst using it.
The decision to put the SD card reader on the back of iMacs is a bit daft.
The 'cheesegrater' Mac Pro was one of the easiest to service desktops ever made.
They used to be good. The "cheesegrater" desktop was indeed very good.
The current keyboards are poor laptop ones. No feel, too small and so many keys missing.
Charging the mouse means flipping it upside down or resting it on the charge cable.
There's no indication of charge level whatsoever - when is it fully charged? The paired Mac will warn you if it's nearly flat if it's running, but there's no other indication at all.
There was also the time that I was stuck repairing an eMachine (A terrible, low end, cheap machine that (barely) ran windows 98se, let alone XP which some ignoramus slapped on it) which had a _destroyed_ USB port.
Apparently, someone tried plugging in a USB device on the back port, and it wouldn't fit. Not content with turning the USB cable over, they just rammed the thing in, breaking the connector in such a way that it shorted the portion of the chip the circuit traces ran to.
There was exactly *two* usb ports on the entire machine to begin with- one in front, one in the back. (the one in the back was the trashed one).
Ironicly enough, the thing still had the display sticker plastered on the front of the case proudly proclaiming that would "never need to be upgraded!". (Primarily because you _couldn't_ upgrade it, and they were cheap enough that you tossed it and bought a Real Computer afterwards.)
As a young engineer, many years ago, working for a large computer company, a number of us went on a training course on a newly released server; For a laugh one of our number decided to create a new banner message in the boot prom (along with a little loop so it only appeared every third boot, to make it appear a little random) reading 'Jason <redacted> sucks hard cocks for cash'. How we laughed.
The following week the system was used for customer rather than internal training.
Said Jason was subsequently dragged in front of management, where he had to patiently explain, that if he had in fact done it, he would not have put his own name on the message.
I've been known to use Sellotape and fine tweezers to extract SIM cards from phones when some eejit tried putting the wrong card in.
Amazingly it worked!
Also: repairing printers, reseating memory chips, fixing printer cartridges.. it is really really handy.
Not to mention Sellotape + Russian zrzsg plastic graphite = homemade graphene, this won a certain
Prof. Geim a Nobel back in the day!
It also works well as an EL dielectric for a while at least, and is just the thing (tm) for insulating PCBs when trying to install tiny modwires or rework tracks for some hack or other.
Kaptop tape is even better and has been even used in production for this very purpose.
Needed a new charging port, which I was unable to fit, not having a fine enough soldering iron.
Another fault? I thought it odd there seemed to be writing inside the microSD slot. Yup, the repair kiosk numpty had somehow managed to replace the back with the mSD still in the slot. Which was now pretty much buggered. I managed to rescue about 2.5 jpegs from it.
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