'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem Friday's here again and so, therefore, is On-Call, our weekly dip into absurd tech support tales contributed by readers. This week, meet “Rick” who kicked off his career supporting laptops running Windows 95 and tells us that “One day I had a call from a sales rep who said 'My new laptop computer needs to lose some weight, it' …
38 pounds of luggable (including case, manuals & floppies). At least it had a built-in printer. I still have it. You get attached to the daftest things after a quarter million air-miles together. Link.
It has an MFM controller in the expansion slot, a 20 meg hard drive in one of the floppy bays, and an aftermarket hack that upped the stock 256K of RAM to a more usable768K. I used an external modem. Yes, it still works. Came with Panasonic-labeled MS-DOS 2.2, but it currently boots MS-DOS 3.3 ... It might be hard for some of the younger readers to believe, but a LOT of RealWorld[tm] work was done with such primitive devices.
It might be hard for some of the younger readers to believe, but a LOT of RealWorld[tm] work was done with such primitive devices.
Also shows just how old the "recently invented" idea of the tablet with the detachable keyboard really is. Not at all new.
A 16gb USB stick would've cost somewhere around $3bill at the $/MB of the first HDD I purchased. Not as long involved in computing as you, but my first PC-based machine had a whopping 1mb of RAM, later upgraded to 2. And it oftened seemed you could do more RealWorld work than I can do with a modern machine. El Reg published an article a while back that basically claimed a lot of authors (novels etc) prefer to use basic text editors, becuase all the "bells and whistles" of modern word processors get in the way of real work. Probably why I prefer terminal/CLI for most server-type stuff I do (that and it's an environment I am quite familiar with).
[Yes yes, late I know. FTR my funeral was a few years back...]
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Once worked on an IT project which the business insisted was important so they put their own Project Manager on it instead of one of our regular IT PMs.
After the first meeting the minutes come out containing "scuzzy controller cards"
Nobody had the heart, balls or straight face to correct him.
I suspect that English probably isn't Olivier's first language, so I can understand how he might be a little bemused as to how SCSI => Scuzzy.
Certainly, I've always pronounced it Skizzy myself (or, to be pedantic, a schwa), I think it depends on who you first heard it from, and the normal way to pronounce (or insert) vowel sounds in your main language…
'Sequel Server' is IBM's trade name for their database (and I think Micro-shaft kept the stupid pronunciation).
However, "Es Queue El" is the name of the LANGUAGE, the correct pronunciation of the 'SQL' acronym in names like MySQL and PostgreSQL etc.
Every time I hear 'sequel' I want to *cringe*
The first time I heard it, I was taking an OS/2 class (pre windows 3.0) and talking to the prof about doing data analysis. He was (naturally) recommending LAN Manager and "Sequel Server". I couldn't find ANY reference to "Sequel Server" *ANYWHERE*. Had I known to look up 'SQL Server' I would have found it.
Big mistake for IBM to have pronounced it "that way". It doesn't even describe what it does properly.
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There's never been a period that I've NOT heard SCSI pronounced that way.
Vowel sounds are frequently added to vowel-deficient acronyms to make them pronounceable. I see no reason SCSI should be any different.
Or inconvenient consonants removed. I leave you with the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, pronounced "Spebsqua," which features both. In the same letter, no less.
"There's never been a period that I've NOT heard SCSI pronounced that way."
When Larry Boucher invented SCSI he wanted it to be pronounced "Sek-see". Everyone else on the committee thought that sounded unprofessional and decided it should be "Scuh-zee" instead.
I'm pretty sure that this was the same group which later renamed the seventh planet to "Urectum" because its old name sounded impolite.
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"Rick kindly arranged a new laptop that was actually 1Kg heavier and ran Windows NT. The second part of the fix was to format its hard drive with the NTFS file system"
FTFY
Based on my own experience's with people (all within a short distance of each other) at a certain pharmaceutical company with someone that declined a desktop refresh because he had previously petitioned his boss for a laptop instead.
Request granted......
Except he didn't get a sparkling clean one from the refresh stock (They were all allocated to replace laptops like for like) & got one that was still in scope for support for another year (His howls of complaint were quite amusing to my ears & those of his colleagues as he had been lording it over them for a month over his upgrade), he was shortly after more upset to discover that he couldn't get his desktop refresh as that machine had been reassigned to one that wasn't budgeted for replacement, but had since failed as out of warranty.
Or the guy that decided to jump the queue & get one ordered from another branch of the business (Head Office) & got annoyed when my group didn't have access to support\fix it locally.
Another queue jumper requested a higher spec machine transfer from a department closure (he got it) only to discover 3 weeks later after also lording it over with co-workers when I replaced all their machines.
"Wheres mine?"
"Ohhh Your old one was removed from the refresh project as out of project scope as you requested it be removed for disposal\transfer of assets, your now current machine will be replaced next year".
"Can I have my old one back to get the refresh?"
"Sorry wiped & decomissioned & on the pile, the replacement has been re-allocated to a machine that was due to be replaced, but the budget wasn't there to do so unless a upgrade wasn't required due to natural wastage"
A year later he was finally crowing about his new machine again, only to discover that the desktop replacement was of pretty much the same spec, but the chipset & software build now used a generic driver for the IDE controller instead of a specific (NT) one & that it was obviously slower in performance by comparison (Based on build & boot times).
We had a similar thing a few years ago in another Pharma. Every summer we'd get a batch of summer students who obviously needed a computer. Our PC team had none of the existing laptops in stock (Dell D620 I think), but then some new shiney black ones (E6300?) arrived which went straight to the students. Cue pissed off senior managers getting rather annoyed that they had older laptops (even they were just as fast).
This fuss was nothing compared to when iPhones came into use and suddenly the Blackberries they'd used became "useless" overnight or even kept throwing themselves onto the floor...
When a company I worked for were closing the plant, and making many redundancies, we came up with a formula based on age and residual value for whether someone could retain their laptop. Strangely my Dell D620 *just* fell the right side of the line.
One manager thought he'd be clever though and demanded a brand new laptop, "For all the extra work involved in the closure!" We granted the request and duly reallocated the old one to someone at the alternative plant.
When his redundancy was confirmed we requested the return of the laptop as it fell well outside the retention level. He tried stalling for a few weeks until we finally threatened him with a visit from the police as we'd be reporting him for theft (we knew full well they would consider it a civil matter, he didn't). If he hadn't tried it on he could have kept the old, perfectly good, machine.
Glen
I should think there are several pages of story / comments possible on laptop / smartphone envy.
But the move from BlackBerry to iPhone was particularly polarising.
But 3 out of my 24 smartphone users insisted on staying with BlackBerry.
They all liked their BlackBerry Passports... lots...
Or the guy that decided to jump the queue & get one ordered from another branch of the business (Head Office) & got annoyed when my group didn't have access to support\fix it locally.
I love the "I bought it, so you must support it" users. "I understand that your new Macbook was expensive, and I'd like to congratulate you on the excellent taste of your personal electronics purchase decision. Unfortunately, our VPN solution does not support remote access to the corporate network for Apple computers."
Begging forgiveness is often easier than asking permission, but not always.
Oh god yes, that was a constant pain at a place I used to work in my Hell-desk days.
Compounded by a specific P.A. who always used to try and get her own way by claiming the job/shiny/"urgent priority fix" was for the C-level bods she worked for to jump the queue.
Well, she got her unsupported MacBook in the end, and I walked off whistling with policy firmly on my side.
Had a similar situation at a former employer.
The sales weasels went out and bought MacBooks and expected IT to support them.
They were not too happy when it came time to support them.
Our CIO's reply was short, and forceful: "FUCK YOU!!! I told you that we do not support Macs, and if you go out and bring your own, you are on your own." It was even sweeter when they complained to the CEO, who supported our CIO.
Many a sales weasel was pissed off; but they were warned.
When they work with us they get as much assistance as we can provide. Should they ever actually bother to ask why the answer to a request is a firm no rather than immediately try to circumvent it then they'll generally find that many of us are somewhat sympathetic. If they choose not to listen or nag anyway that would be when we become a touch irritable. That and continuously expecting us to deliver miracles on projects where we're told a week before launch what it is they require of us and it's going to take significantly longer than to set up may explain a modicum of dislike for the coloured pencil office.
I've been on the receiving end of this as the user. Last year my workstation was replaced with a considerably less powerful (but no less expensive) laptop. IT spun some insulting BS about it being a big upgrade and weren't much interested in the truth of the matter. Also universal USB docks rather than docking stations were provided so, over the matter of a mere $100, the laptop's expensive GPU sits idle.
I don't take work home with me so the whole exercise has been a waste of everyone's time, the only measurable outcome being that data processing work now takes longer. Frontline IT certainly wasn't responsible for the decision making, but the attitude towards real end user concerns was poor.
So it goes both ways.
My (non IT literate) brother was once trying to save a picture to a floppy disk on my my Amiga. "The file is too big" he complained, after dragging the picture icon over the floppy drive icon. "How big is it?" I asked. "About this big" he replied earnestly, holding his thumb and finger about an inch apart..... (sigh...)
In fairness, I suspect the reporter was just rusty on the details; File Manager in Win3x seems to behave broadly in the manner described (notwithstanding the incorrectly oriented slash in the story -- tsk tsk).
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/winnt31.png
Although it's not abundantly clear from the screenshot if it's telling you the filesystem format, or the admin simply labelled the drive "FAT" -- and my first hand memory of such things is far too hazy now.
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I remember the time when I was 10 years old and I discovered compression on Windows 98. The moment when I thought I could fit massive files on to a 1.44MB floppy disk when it was actually 16MB! I was so so happy, showing off to my teacher about this great new thing I found.
Then I come in to school the one day with said 16MB on a 1.44MB floppy with my school project on it, ready to print it off at school.... where is it? I can't see it? But I definately put it on there! I got shouted at for not bringing it in, even though I contested it to say I had. I went home, put the floppy in my computer and there it was! So it was definately on there.
I go back the next day, back to the teacher with the floppy disk and told her that its definately on there but the computer in the class is broken as it wouldn't find it. She took the disk and said she'd ask another teacher what the problem is.
Well didn't I feel silly when the other teacher asked what I had done, told him about the compression, and he said that it would only show on my computer at home, and I vaugely remember something about them not being able to configure the class computer to work with it.
So I went back home, split the file in half (as it was over 1.44MB) and came back in the next day with my work on two floppy disks.
And, to recap: I was 10.
From my experience, they don't like smart arses, the class goody two shoes etc etc
Ok, so I went to a school where you got a beating if you did your homework. If that didn't work, then the bullies threatened to throw you out of a 2nd floor window. Money for your school lunch could pay off the bullies though..
But hey man, it was the 1960's and have some weed. Peace and all that.
"From my experience, they don't like smart arses, the class goody two shoes etc etc"
One teacher took an instant dislike to me when she found out she'd taught one of my aunties... The one that threw her down a flight of stairs and broke her leg about 25 years earlier.
Icon, because that's what she saw me as for the rest of my time there.
@wolfetone
Did they have macs at school or something?
I vaguely recall a geometry issue where you needed the original machine to read a disc but don't remember a disc compression that only worked with the original hardware. A bit useless as an offsite backup or file transfer as you mention.
Doublespace? Stacker? MSDOS V6.x? All very common back in the day. Not to mention that higher density 1.6MB per floppy format MS used on Win95 distribution floppies ... all 20 of them IIRC.
Also drives were often poorly made meaning that floppies wouldn't read reliably between machines anyway - or at least that's how it seemed back then.
Nurse! Pass my commode ...
"I seem to remember the compression system in MSDOS 6.2? came, and went away, and then came back again under a different name with different OS versions due to copyright/patent problems."
IIRC, they basically stole and integrated the compression system from Stacker, got caught and had to go back and write their own.
I clearly remember a "compression" tool kicking about, back in the day, that would simply hide the file on your hard disc and leave a pointer to it. Totally bloody useless, and I knew a few folk (definitely older than 10, and computer-literate enough to know better) who believed they'd just packed loads of DooM WADs onto a floppy.
Wasn't part of Windows (it was a 3rd-party practical joke), but it was out there.
Edit: I also remember reports of people "compressing" all their files to floppy and then finding a hidden folder full of "crap" on their C: drive, deleting it, and losing the lot...
This comment makes me feel so old. A 10-year old kid using Windows 98 at school. I'd already been in industry for over a decade before Windows 98 became a thing. When I was at school it was all BBC Model Bs...after a while we got them connected with Econet and then were were able to access the single Winchester disk.
<sigh>
We saw a computer when I was at school. We went on a school trip to this company that had a very large room filled with machinery, that all eventually ejected a pinched paper tape that was taken into a side room and run through a machine that printed the contents out on paper.
#WhenIWereALad
"a teletype and an acoustic coupler that allowed us access to the mainframe at the local polytechnic."
That sounds like what my school had too. It was upgraded for my last few years there, there was a govt. scheme that gave us a classroom with 10 RM 480Z machines and a shared hard drive. Must have been about 5Mb between us all, I reckon.
"When I was at school it was all BBC Model Bs"
Now I feel old too! When I was at school, we had ancient 5-hole punch machines and had to send the tapes out to be run and get the printouts back. Because there was only one collection/delivery per week, it took two weeks to find you made a typo! By the time A levels came around, we got our very first Commodore PET 2001, calculator-style keyboard and a whole 8KB of RAM and built-in cassette deck for storage.
In between those two highlights, we got a teletype + acoustic modem, but had to stay back after school for "live" use to use it after 6pm because the phone calls were too expensive during "peak" times. Batch files were allowed to be run during the day, but only by the teacher, students being limited to punching the tapes offline only,
Commodore PET machine code programmers will remember the indispensible handbook by the unforgettable Raeto West. I was SO grateful that the 6502 IEEE488 routines were hardcoded.
And the books is still freely available online https://ia601709.us.archive.org/20/items/Programming_The_PET_CBM_197x_West_Raeto/Programming_The_PET_CBM_197x_West,_Raeto.pdf
When I were at school lad we 'ad to get t'druids to put up our code on t'new 10 megalith machine at Stonehenge, and then wait 6 months for the messenger to bring the results back to our cave. Also it were ruinously expensive in virgins, so we were only allowed to use it once a decade. And that's when there wasn't a bug in the code, or the messenger got eaten by a sabretoothed tiger.
Young people today...
AAh, econet :)
Was fun the year we found that
a) you logged your device in to the network
b) your network ID was how that was identified
c) you could POKE a new network ID on to your machine
d) nothing checked or verified the new address as long as no conflicts
So, the game went like this. Person A goes to sysadmin to "check their quota". He logs in to his operator account. Person B distracts sysadmin. Person C checks network addresses, switches his network address to the operator, and grants larger quotas to A,B and C.
Was all fun and games until we realized we allocated 400MB space on a 80MB disk.Then we got BUSTED :/
"This comment makes me feel so old. A 10-year old kid using Windows 98 at school. I'd already been in industry for over a decade before Windows 98 became a thing. When I was at school it was all BBC Model Bs"
When I was at school, you had to demonstrate a certain level of proficiency before you were allowed to have upgraded hardware.
Because my handwriting was poor, it was quite a while before I was allowed to upgrade from a fountain pen to a ballpoint.
(True story.)
When I was at school, you had to demonstrate a certain level of proficiency before you were allowed to have upgraded hardware.Because my handwriting was poor, it was quite a while before I was allowed to upgrade from a fountain pen to a ballpoint.
NZ School system, circa 1980? Was about then I eventually got the same upgrade, last in my class I think. My handwriting hasn't changed much since then either!
My first computer came with a doublespace-compressed drive (unknown to me as a naive 15yr old), complete with DOS 6.22 & WFW 3.11 + Office. One day after saving my pocket money, I returned home with a boxed copy of Ultimate Doom, and couldn't wait to play it. I think it needed 15mb or so disk space, and my machine proclaimed that I had 25mb free space on my 250mb drive.
Lo, Doom would not install, complaining about lack of disk space. I set about making a boot disk, and on firing the machine up with it, found a huge file called drvspace.bin or something similar, that was 115mb.
Feeling proud of myself, I deleted the file, installed Doom, and played away.
The next morning, switching on the machine to discover "Non-system disk or disk error" still haunts me to this day :-)
I remember the time when I was 10 years old and I discovered compression on Windows 98
Thanks for making me feel old!
When *I* was 10, I was crushed to discover that the BASIC program I had written at home on our brand new Commodore 64 and saved to a 5.25" floppy was not readable on the school Computer Club's Apple IIe.
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"32 Gb USB key"
These days we generally call that a 4GB USB key. Very few people measire in bits...
Apart from the entire comms industry. With all these mock stories of paper tape and 8" floppies it's easy to forget that the real mark of a noob is to assume that a byte must somehow invariably be eight bits long.
The 8-bit byte is only a defacto standard, do try to read for content. See: ISO/IEC 2382:2015
You say "Grandad" like it's an insult. I feel sorry for you.
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"Microsoft's Windows 10 F' C U NT S due this November, the S 'Terry's Soul- from the heart' version is optional, allowing you to get a free upgrade to Windows 10 F' C U NT for a limited time"
(Fall' Creators Update New Technology 'Soul' Edition)
Microsoft Marketing is useless, we all know that, but with all the abuse they get - there is no need for subliminal messages back.
There's even an Insiders Edition...
"Not the originator I guess but surely one of the main sources that popularised the "heavy files" thing?"
My favourite Dibert strip in that vein remains the one where he has the PHB crawling around on his hands and knees in his office all afternoon looking for the token that fell out of the token ring network...
Back when token ring first came in, our company unfortunately decided to standardize on it before the many bugs had been worked out of it. Most of the time it simply didn't work.
We got round this by having a 1.44Mb floppy with 'TOKEN' written on it in large letters, and skimming it around the office to whoever needed it. Not the fastest transfer protocol, but a lot quicker than waiting for the network to come up.
I used to send back laptops back from repair *lighter* than they came in.
Mainly due to the detritus emptied out from under the keyboard, inside the fan, between the touchpad buttons.... in fact, every slot, gap or crevice in the casing would often be rammed with crumbs, dead skin, flakes of pastry, small dead insects (or sometimes, large live insects) which quite frankly made a bloody mess of my work area and made me wonder about the state of the customer's house - bearing in mind this was the early 2000s so a mid-spec laptop was still the best part of £600+
Two notable points from that. I once had a recurring customer who every few weeks would get a no-power fault on his Sony FX series laptop. The first couple of times I semi stripped it, powered it up and it worked fine. Put it back together, still working. Returned it only to see it again some time later with the same fault.
Eventually worked out that the plunger under the touchpad, which turned the power off when the lid was closed and the latch went through a hole, was jammed down with biscuit crumbs. Taking it apart dislodged the crumbs, until next time a mid morning snack was scoffed over the laptop and more crumbs fell down the hole and were compacted into place when the lid was shut. The first "cookie error" experienced, most likely.
Another colleague had a new one torn for simply writing on a job sheet "keyboard fault due to food debris. Suggest user buys a plate"
"made me wonder about the state of the customer's house"
I was once sent to an off-site workers house to upgrade his VPN and AV stuff (remote access not allowed, his own kit and anyway remote access was still a new thing). Took one look at it and said I needed more stuff from the car. Said "stuff" being a clean keyboard not gone brown/grey with tab ash and sticky nicotine which I was afraid to touch without a full biohazard suit!
Once had a call passed from the Help-Desk concerning a "Squirrel" error. I thought about contacting Rentakill or the local council's Parks Department, but passed the call instead to the DBAs.
Had another call about a "Norton 12" error on one of our servers. Knowing their software hadn't been ported to AIX, I decided to contact the user. The actual issue was a "nought and 12" error message, but said with a very broad Black Country accent.
I have a few
One of our technicians, was told by his Mom that when ever he wants to visit her, he must always wash his hands before coming over because she doesn't want to be infected with the Virus that he works with..
Another staff, was working in the computer lab with a sensitive document, Calls support in panic and states that the document was appearing on all the computers, when a tech arrived, they kindly pointed out that staff confused the excel shortcut with the sensitive document...
Another staff, calls support complaining that the icons get large and that she cannot scroll up and down on websites, when told to test Ctrl + mouse scroll, there is silent and states that everything is fine now, it turns out there was a pilled of papers on the desk and it was covering Ctrl key...
A friend call support because her computer wasn't working, tech support tell my friend to make sure the computer its plug in, my friend checks that the computer is power is plug in and that the power cable in plug in to the wall, after a bit more troubleshooting, the tech tells my friend to replace the power cable at the point my friend notices that the power cable was crewed in the middle by her dog...
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