back to article I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

The working week is no game, which is why The Register eases readers into the weekend with a fresh instalment of On Call – our weekly reader-contribute tales recalling the lighter side of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Dan" who told us of his first gig in tech: working in the repair department of a …

  1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

    "My computer has EMS"

    "can you help please?"

    Those who remember know how true that is.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Kevin Johnston

    Ah, Bosses with heart

    While I have had a few in my long working life one stands out. My role was a customer support engineer but I only earned the company money when on-site with a customer so one glorious sunny Friday lunchtime in early summer I was bimbling about in the office doing make-work and he wandered over and commented that a day like this was best spent wandering on the beach. Taking the hint I suggested I should check over my kit so I could be ready for a short-notice call and left. A month or so later I got a call from him on a Saturday morning asking me to fly out to a customer site for three weeks, the flight was the following day but I just said yes and got packed to go. He always treated us with respect and he got respect in return, amazing how that works

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

      My bosses have generally been quite good, but the one that showed support above and beyond was actually the boss at a company that I was sub-contracted out to.

      We'd been working crazy hours. and were all generally stressed out, dog tired and fed up. One afternoon the boss (a very softly spoken Irishman) said, "ah, lads...you're all looking awfully stressed by all of this. Do you want me to sort out a visit to a local <ahem> massage parlour for the lot of you? Great bunch of girls there - do you the world of good. I'm happy to let the company pick up the bill"

      I think we all politely declined

      1. UCAP Silver badge

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

        I've been lucky to have worked for fantastic bosses who I've known for pretty much my entire career. This year has been a bad one for me - diagnosed with prostate cancer, then taken into hospital and put on the critical care list with bladder sepsis, then (after I recovered) having my prostate (plus uninvited guest) removed. Added together I have had over 3 months of sick leave this year. My bosses response to this is to send me a get well card, a very large and very nice bowl of fruit, and to insist that I should not return to wok until I was absolutely ready for it.

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

          I hope you recover quickly and fully.

          1. UCAP Silver badge

            Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

            Thanks for that. It's been a tough 6 months or so, but I'm coming out of the tunnel. Helped a lot by the support I got from my bosses - one thing I did not have to worry about during a stressful period.

        2. The Organ Grinder's Monkey

          Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

          "should not return to wok..."

          Doing IT for a takeaway?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

        I got more support and career development in the NHS than any other place I worked public or private.

        Unfortunately it took me until I was 40 to end up there.

      3. PB90210 Silver badge

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

        "Our reporter made his excuses and left"

        (c) News Of The World

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

        Reminds me of a visit to Japan (about 35 years ago). I went to review the third-party inspection arrangements for a large, ongoing, supply contract and the supplier had offered to give me a tour of all their sites involved (what would have been a couple days of meetings evolved into a fortnight, the first week of which was a tour of Japan's main island). At one site, the plant manager took me out for dinner in the evening - a meal I'll not forget as it was a one-table affair, with all the food cooked in front of us (three: me, the plant manager and their UK rep, who had flown over to be my escort): a starter of abalone and Kobe beef for the entree. But that wasn't the most memorable part of the evening as, from there, we went to a private karaoke bar, where I was invited to duet with a young lady in full geisha gear. Singing a duet was fine, but the invitation to go into a back room to lie down seemed a step too far. I know it wasn't seen as anything unusual in the culture there at the time, and I didn't want to insult my host or the (very attractive) young lady - so I feigned ignorance/innocence until they decided it was getting late (and we had an early start the next morning, to catch the bullet train to Tokyo).

        I still occasionally kick myself - but my employer had strict rules on acceptable hospitality :)

      5. chivo243 Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart

        I had a boss who really new his job. As IT manager he always took ALL the heat for network problems, and never let other bosses breathe down our necks while we fixed the issue. He never lost his cool and knew there was time for a post mortem LATER... I still keep in touch with him.

      6. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

        Re: Ah, Bosses with heart (Icebreaker)

        If I'd been in your situation and had not been seeing anyone at the time, I'd be first to put my hand up to go and break the ice. Then everyone else could partake and not feel "guilty."

        "Well, if Tim's going, I guess I'll go, too ..."

        1. Martin an gof Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: Ah, Bosses with heart (Icebreaker)

          Not wanting to spoil any parties, but that's really not the answer. The fact that everyone was hesitating implies that they're not all young bucks with too much libido and not enough control. What if one of your colleagues was in a relationship, or simply had taller moral hurdles to overcome? Some of you go and leave a few behind? Some of you benefit from <n> quid's worth of non-salary benefits and the others - who have worked just as hard - don't? The boss is left in the awkward position of having to find another way to compensate those workers, or be seen to be a bit of a prat, and the workers left behind become a bit more distanced from those who went because they were "too stuffy". That sort of thing can really wreck a team.

          Surely there are other things which would be more acceptable? A half day leave, to be taken when wanted, a team dinner at a convenient time (or just then-and-there), an after-hours visit to the local with the tab on the company card - acceptable even to many teetotalers these days when pubs often serve imbibe-able drinks with no alcohol involved.

          Sometimes it's as simple as filling in an "extra hours" timesheet and getting the reward in the paypacket at the end of the month. Probably worth a darned sight more than a visit to the local knocking shop, and certainly both morally and physically safer. Some companies (struggling to think of any right now, but I know there are some) even have official reward schemes which aim to remove these problems.

          Of course, many companies just ignore those of us who put extra hours in to get a project over the finish line. Do it too often and it begins to be taken for granted.

          M.

  3. GlenP Silver badge

    Games

    I can remember when the best test of genuine IBM PC Compatibility was MS Flight Simulator!

    Sadly we were an Apricot dealer so I never persuaded the boss that we needed a copy.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Games

      Apricot... Couldn't those be used as simulated airborne projectiles?

      1. molletts
        Coat

        Re: Games

        They were the pits.

        1. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

          Re: Games

          Groannnn...

    2. Noram

      Re: Games

      The memories.

      My experience of an Apricot was the fun of the Ram upgrade (basically strip half the internal chassis out to fit the add on board over the existing ram), and bodging it to let me hook a cheap CD-rom drive up externally.

      That and the MFM or RLL drive it came with that didn't like it being too cold or too hot, so I had to place the machine in just the right place in the living room in the winter, too close to the window and it wouldn't boot, too close to the fire and it wouldn't boot, but there was a sweet spot where it was reliable. It also taught me to never trust a hard drive and make sure I always had backups on multiple media ;)

      On the plus side it let me experiment and taught me not to fear working inside a computer, so much so that the auction bought 486 I picked up for a friend didn't worry me when I saw an DX4 chip for a fiver and went to install it (no manual, but the motherboard had the settings screen printed).

      1. Andy A

        Re: Games

        Apricot used Rodime hard drives. Often these would fail to spin up on a cold morning but would work OK later on. It turned out that condensation on the platters caused enough surface tension with the head to stall the motor.

        The OFFICIAL work-around was to slap the right-hand side of the box. This caused the heads to bounce, and the platters to start to spin.

        The Apricot's predecessor, the ACT Sirius 1, had a bad batch of hard drives. They had undergone low-level format in a California summer, and were unusable when lower temperatures shrank the platters.

    3. Andrew Scott Bronze badge

      Re: Games

      Dos ain't done till Lotus won't run.

  4. Evil Auditor Silver badge
    Devil

    I didn't have the money to buy an expensive game like that

    Around the time Wing Commander 3 was a thing, I didn't know the concept of buying a game.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      What is this buy? There is only play or not play.

  5. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Happy

    I know for a fact ...

    some of our students want to become software testers, without realizing this does not necessarily mean playing games until they crash. They look so disappointed when we teach them software testing is usually a lot less fun.

    Still, it's a good job when playing games IS part of the job.

    1. Paul Kinsler

      Re: playing games until they crash.

      Do you mean the games crashing, or the players? :-)

      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        Re: playing games until they crash.

        Do you mean the games crashing, or the players? :-)

        Yes.

    2. John Riddoch

      Re: I know for a fact ...

      From what I've heard, playtesting games involves doing every single weird thing you wouldn't expect players to do, so you'd spend hours running round a single level walking along the walls, jumping at odd places and generally trying to test the bounds of the play area to destruction. Very little of it involves actual "playing".

      As for generic software testing, it's the whole "software tester walks into a bar and orders 1 beer, 5 beers, -1 beers, fjioewjiofewj beers, 1.2389028190 beers, etc"

      1. Spazturtle Silver badge

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        "As for generic software testing, it's the whole "software tester walks into a bar and orders 1 beer, 5 beers, -1 beers, fjioewjiofewj beers, 1.2389028190 beers, etc""

        I believe the next line of the joke is "and then a player walks into the bar and orders 2 beers and the bar burns down"

        Trying to force edge cases is helpful but doesn't always work, sometimes you just need to play test the same part of the game 100+ times to see if you find any bugs.

        1. sw guy

          Re: I know for a fact ...

          What I was told is: One person enters the pub and ask for lavatories, and the pub explodes

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        I used to do game testing many, many years ago.

        I'd get a floppy disk in the post for a game that had to be tested. I'd spend a week faffing around with it and then send a report back. I can't remember how much I got paid though (it wasn't a full time job, and it was very sparodic).

      3. Michael Strorm Silver badge

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        > play testing games [etc]

        Pretty much what heard too. Speaking of which:- Old 'Penny Arcade' on game testing

      4. Marcelo Rodrigues
        Devil

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        "As for generic software testing, it's the whole "software tester walks into a bar and orders 1 beer, 5 beers, -1 beers, fjioewjiofewj beers, 1.2389028190 beers, etc" "

        As long as no client comes in looking for the restroom...

      5. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        The original Infocom H2G2 game lied to players at one point - you had to find and open a door the game insisted wasn’t there…

        1. Someone Else Silver badge

          Re: I know for a fact ...

          A game written by Chat GPT, I wot....

    3. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

      Re: I know for a fact ...

      Software testers do seem to get paid an inordinate amount of money - for just testing stuff!

      its not like they're making the software .

      1. nintendoeats

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        As somebody who writes tests that are the equivalent of taking your code and putting it in the heart of a nuclear reactor, I resent that.

      2. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        Out of luck son. You should have selected an icon.

      3. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: I know for a fact ...

        Software testers do seem to get paid an inordinate amount of money - for just testing stuff!

        its not like they're making the software .

        Well, consider that you wouldn't have to pay software testers that much if the devs would write proper software in the first place.

        Looking at the latest releases from Micros~1, one can clearly see that the devs are incapable of that feat.

        1. nintendoeats

          Re: I know for a fact ...

          How do you know whether the devs have written proper software?

  6. Caver_Dave Silver badge
    Happy

    Best job straight out of University?

    In the days before PC's became widespread, I was writing software for a Set top box, Internet access device.

    We needed to produce a net-nanny filtering system.

    A lot of intelligence went into designing what we thought could isolate most of the crud that was on the Internet at the time, but we needed to test this.

    My boss employed a lad straight out of University to try to access Pron sites all day long. The thinking being that he would have a wide knowledge of suitable test sites!

    He only lasted 3 months before he left to go abroad to be with someone he had met via one of the sites, and we declared the filters good enough.

    During the next few months a little telemetry (only settings and not sites) told us that nearly 90% of people turned off the net nanny!

    Icon as the lad always had one on his face.

    1. Unoriginal Handle

      Re: Best job straight out of University?

      I worked for a (then) major web proxy manufacturer in the early 2000s. We had to get configs from customer appliances, and logs, and the contents were eye opening. Who in their right mind would actively search for some of that stuff!

      And we had to have unfiltered internet access too - "boss, I'm looking at playboy.com because the customer says the adult URL category isn't being filtered properly ..."

      1. Noel Morgan
        Trollface

        Re: Best job straight out of University?

        I always use www.playboy.com to test that webfiltering is working.

        It should be blocked and has less naked flesh than the sidebar on the daily mail homepage.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          I'm shocked you're familiar with the contents of the daily heil's home page.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          I use nkt.net ( or xkcd) Its blocked at my work under the "fun" category. Its quick to load and is a good test if I've bypassed the proxy successfully

          Whats that? you shouldn't be able to bypass your corporate internet filtering just by adjusting your browser settings ?

          IKR ? crazy times.

          1. Korev Silver badge
            Alien

            Re: Best job straight out of University?

            nkt.net doesn't go anyway, did you mean ntk.net which still exists, but sadly hasn't been updated in a very long time.

            I think at one point El Reg sold T shirts through it.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Best job straight out of University?

              Yes indeed , I meant that one .

              Sadly gathering dust for years now

      2. KittenHuffer Silver badge

        Re: Best job straight out of University?

        I remember in the early days of web development the bleeding edge of web functionality was always the Pron sites. So web developers were givien permission to surf those sites at work to learn about the latest developments and flashiest new things.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          .. and I bet you're sticking (sorry) to that excuse ..

          :)

        2. Someone Else Silver badge

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          [...] learn about the latest developments and flashiest new things.

          I saw what you did there...

          Fnar, fnar...

    2. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Best job straight out of University?

      I used to vaguely know a guy who was a graphic designer who couldn't get a job after art school. He ended up doing graphic design for porn mags, apparently the novelty soon wore off.

      Dirty old mac icon -->

      1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

        Re: Best job straight out of University?

        "I only buy 'Massive Hooters Monthly' for the cutting-edge graphic design"?

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          > "I only buy 'Massive Hooters Monthly' for the cutting-edge graphic design"?

          Since when has listening to big, noisy sirens needed graphic design?

          1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

            Re: Best job straight out of University?

            I believe the magazine generally recommendeds *not* actually listening to big, noisy sirens, since doing so has a tendency to entice people towards their doom.

            Instead it tends to focus on their, er, massive hooters, while trying to avoid the strange reality of their bird-like feet.

          2. Roland6 Silver badge

            Re: Best job straight out of University?

            > Since when has listening to big, noisy sirens needed graphic design?

            That’s the difference between a (printed) mazagine and a website…

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Best job straight out of University?

          A bird site? OvO

    3. Emir Al Weeq

      Re: Best job straight out of University?

      Many years back, I was working with a mobile network configuration team (aka databuild) during a major network change. It was decreed that we determine the top ten (or whatever: it was a long time ago) websites that our customers use and, after the change, spend some time ensuring that they are all accessible and usable.

      This was in the days before social media was much of a thing so the test list contained a sizeable number of pr0n sites. Not being one of the main team, I was not asked to help; but as testing jobs go, it sounded like one of more interesting.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Best job straight out of University?

      I may have broken the filter in Surf Controller (about 20 years ago) when on a training course at the HQ.

      They asked us to try and get through the pron filters.

      Since they primarily just checked for the amount of flesh tone on show, I went for sites when the flesh was not showing.

      They were surprised when it took me about 30 seconds to show them a site that you should not show to your Mother...

      We quickly went for a tea break while the trainer reported to the developers.

  7. Antony Shepherd

    Crafting config.sys files to make different things work was a real skill. DR-DOS made that a lot simpler by allowing you to set up a boot menu for all the different settings you need for different games and Windows.

    Wing Commander 3 was the one with the video clips featuring Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell slumming it, right?

    1. Jay 2

      I recall setting up something similar in MS-DOS 6.22 to load whichever strange combination of settings for sound card/joystick, CD-ROM, network and who knows what else in order to play specific games.

      1. ShortLegs

        Config.sys joys

        Ph yes, the joys of hand-editing and tweaking config.sys, re-ording the sequence of device drivers, to get the highest free RAM below 640Kb

        And then runing QEMM386 against the same original config.sys, man vs machine!

        The joys of a 286 PS/2 and 2mb of expanded RAM.

        And (unrelated) making autoexec.bat sit up and make coffee with juficious use of ansi esc sequences, nested manus. There was an awesome book, Advanced DOS Batch File Programming, Dan Gookin. My bible at the time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Config.sys joys

          I just had to add the occasional Turbo Pascal hack here and there, but batch files were an example of keep it simple, stupid in MSDOS.

          Fun times :)

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Config.sys joys

            still used.

            I have one to open all the stuff I'll need for the day after I boot my machine up

        2. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Config.sys joys

          Ugh. QEMM. Not a pleasant memory.

          We had 486 machines at one job for schematic capture (Viewlogic) and they would crash reliably if you opened a second page or had too much circuitry on one page. I tolerated this for a few weeks, then started thinking about alternatives. We did have ONE Unix machine with Viewlogic on it, but it was located in the lab, not the best place for deep thought.

          However, at the time, I was just getting into Linux and the X windowing system, and the thought of adding a second Linux HDD to my work machine and using it to run an X terminal off the Unix machine entered my mind. This was easily done, and now I had a PC, as an X display, running Viewlogic off the Unix machine...which did NOT crash if I opened too many pages. Nor, as a bonus, did my 486 crash any more, QEMM being out of the picture, since I was running the much more stable Linux.

          Since I had added a second HDD, the original Windows install was untouched and could be booted into as normal for email, etc.

          The boss was not as perceptive, he seemed displeased that I had messed with the corporate hardware, but acknowledged that I was getting my work done, and left me alone.

        3. mdubash

          Re: Config.sys joys

          Spent days doing that, reboot, tweak more, reboot... So sad that DESQview never went anywhere.

        4. Solviva

          Re: Config.sys joys

          Or be lazy and forgo the use of an MDA which then let you get base memory something above 700 kB.

          Ahh the days of holding old PCBs stacked full of soldered RAM chips over the gas stove to desolder them, then popping them in iSA memory expansion boards to get I think 4 MB or maybe even 8 MB of very slow memory. Used these in a 486 when Win NT (4 I think) refused to installed as there wasn't enough memory (I guess I had 4 MB total in SIMMs), so lobbed these cards in and it passed the memory check only to take about a day to install thanks to the fine performance of this old RAM :)

          NT worked fine with 4 MB after removing these...

      2. J. Cook Silver badge
        Pint

        I did something similar for [RedactedCo] after a couple years and at least one promotion, only that It was a "select what machine I'm booting on" to load the correct network drivers, log into the local site's domain controller, and pull down the appropriate windows XP image for that machine. And I managed to cram it all on a single 1.44 Mb disk, with some assistance from a network share for the "connect to the site's image server and image the machine" portion.

        I've long since left that role, but that was one of the more interesting tasks I was given.

        (We've long since moved on to the joys of PXE boot and leveraging SCCM and the deployment tools for bootstrapping new machines.)

      3. TSM

        Same, for me it was mostly CD or not and sound card emulation modes - the mouse stuff on my system could be reconfigured live and didn't need config.sys support. I had five or six combinations in all, one of them being for booting into Windows.

        Kind of nice not to have to reboot the machine to switch from one game to another, isn't it? (Although rebooting into DOS didn't take very long.)

    2. dharmOS

      Works fine in 2024 on DOSBoX-X

      Yes, it is the game with Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and Thomas Wilson (Biff from Back to the Future Trilogy).

      I recently purchased the game from GOG.com and tortured my WinARM box using ARM64 compiled DOSBox-X. It runs like a dream, never crashes and no MemMaker needed in DOSBOX-X, with plenty of free RAM below the 640KB barrier, and presumably 8-16MB available above.

      I had only a 386DX40 when it was released, so no hope of playing it then. It is almost too easy now... :o)

    3. anothercynic Silver badge

      MS-DOS 6.0 and later introduced boot menus in config.sys. There was a way to get MS-DOS setup to run some stuff that generated two files that were pretty accurate. You could take what files had been generated and then munge them with other configs to get a multi-config setup that worked for a *lot* of ways of doing things.

      Of course, most people didn't know this because they didn't get the DOS manual(s) with the PC they bought. I got the MS-DOS 5.0 box (with disks and manual) and the same for the MS-DOS 6.0 upgrade, and I spent weeks studying the manuals and intricacies, so EMM386 and HIMEM's occasional bad interactions didn't scare me. For DoubleSpace (DriveSpace) with Windows on 4MB RAM, you did have to make HIMEM and EMM386 play nice...

  8. Duffaboy
    Thumb Up

    Loved that game.

    Never crashed on me

  9. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    In the early 80s we used to play adventure games at lunchtime. One of the games was annoyingly difficult because the burning branch went out after a set number of goes, and there didn't seem to be enough goes to do what needed doing to get out of the darkness before it went out. So we did a memory dump, did a move that didn't do anything then dumped the memory again and compared them. We found the bytes that decreased by one, did a few more tests to confirm which was the branch, then set it to FF.

    Can't remember the name of the game - it was a Colossal-Cave type. The aim was to collect jewels and you ended up wandering around on the face of a giant statue.

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Today I use CheatEngine for such things. Works quite well!

  10. Martin-R

    Flight Simulator and Solitaire

    Were both frequently played in my office in the early 90s - they were genuinely really good ways to stress test the stuff we were developing at the time :-)

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Flight Simulator and Solitaire

      I'm old enough to remember when winning at Solitaire made your computer crawl...

      Grey beard icon -->

      1. TSM

        Re: Flight Simulator and Solitaire

        Best scores I ever got at Solitaire of that era were when the computer was printing a lengthy document at the same time. Ending animation was a tad slower than usual though :D

    2. David Hicklin Silver badge

      Re: Flight Simulator and Solitaire

      Snipes was fun on the Novell network at lunchtimes as well

  11. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    mem386 and himem!

    and then a mem / c ( just from muscle memory ) to see how much of your memory was eaten by essential utitlity software like the cdrom drive driver

    1. mdubash

      I recall my first encounter with networking: IBM Token Ring. The drivers for that were so huge that you had to choose whether to join the network or run Word Perfect - my writing weapon of choice at the time (1987).

      There didn't seem to be any EMM stuff around to help, then, either

  12. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    Curently chasing a similar situation in CounterStrike 2 - which manages to blue screen and reboot a Windows 11 machine.

    I didnt think that was possible these days.

    1. Kevin Johnston
      Joke

      I think Windows 11 machines will do any number of odd things given half a chance

    2. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      > I didnt think that was possible these days.

      Intel LAN drivers, even for Servers, can. NVidia drivers can. The latter so bad that you have to turn the computer off and back on, since a restart, even with the reset button, does not clean the f'up state of the GFX card.

    3. tiggity Silver badge

      @Prst. V.Jeltz

      My work W11 machine just had a BSOD and then rebooted, no games running on that just lots of dreary work related stuff (Visual Studio, IIS, SQL Server, docker, RDP, teams, outlook etc.) .. and all the corporate extra performance / resource killers such as inventory, threat / malware detection etc. software. So does get a lot of hammer. Games not required for BSOD in Win 11.

      1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

        Yeah, but still not clear whether it was W11's fault unless you check the culprit with Nirsoft Bluescreenview. Albeit the minidump may contain the wrong .sys listed instead of the actual culprit, the chance it shows the real culprit is high.

        Usually: Run the manufacturers auto-update tool which should get the newest tested driver, BIOS and firmwares combination, may fix your BSOD. If you have a laptop with a dock of the same manufacturer run it with the dock plugged in, quite often the docking stations get firmware updates too.

  13. sweh

    The opposite

    Back in the early 90s (in my first job), I convinced my boss to play games (OK, OK, Solitaire)...

    This was early in Windows days (3.1?) and he came into my office with a new laptop and a copy of windows and office and told me to get it working. OK, no problem. Install..install..install..lots of floppy swaps later...

    I took the machine into his office and showed him it working.

    "Great, now how do I learn how to use this?"

    Thinking furiously, I made up some bullshit on the spot. "There's these games <here>. I recommend playing Solitaire. It sounds silly but it will get you used to basic functions like moving the mouse accurately, clicking, drag'n'drop and so on". He looked skeptical, but agreed to try.

    Two days later he came back into my office and slapped me on the back and said "That game you told me to play? It worked! Thank you"

    1. -maniax-

      Re: The opposite

      I heard tell that Solitaire was included specifically for the reason you used it as it provided an (enjoyable) way to learn all the basic mouse uses

      1. David Nash

        Re: The opposite

        I heard it was MineSweeper. Same idea. Great little game!

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: The opposite

          Reversi was the game originally supplied as "mouse trainers". Solitaire was added in to 3.0 and then Minesweeper came later in 3.1 and replaced Reversi.

    2. Rob Daglish

      Re: The opposite

      I did this with quite a few people - they weren't used to mouse based interaction, but understood Solitaire... as you say it got them clicking, dragging and dropping like a treat!

  14. Luiz Abdala
    Pint

    I would ask for your opinion...

    ...If my PC version of GTA was constantly crashing after I disabled memory overclock.

    Windows loaded fully stable, but barely loading the single player version caused THIRTEEN different blue screens of death, until I decided to kill AMD DOCP / XMP profiles.

    It then spent 18 hours straight without a single crash.

    Best 18 hours I had after the memory upgrade.

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Re: I would ask for your opinion...

      Oh, that is a classical mainboard + memory brand failure. The mainboard for settings timing that don't work, memory for having non functional timing in it's ROM. Is it, per change, G.Skill RAM?

      1. Luiz Abdala
        Boffin

        Re: I would ask for your opinion...

        Asus mobo with 2x 16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance memory.

        Considering the mobo was almost literally off a bargain bin, I'm not angry at overclock failure at this point. But it was definitely the motherboard that was not up to overclocking specs.

        1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

          Re: I would ask for your opinion...

          I avoid Corsair due to some experience with their "Quality". RAM only when they use their own chips. Crucial (aka Micron), Samsung, Hynix, and a few others. But many, like G.Skill and Crucial, don't produce their own chips, and you have no way of knowing beforehand. So at that point I'd more likely to say that Corsair put too optimistic timings in their RAM.

          1. mirachu Bronze badge

            Re: I would ask for your opinion...

            I wouldn't know, I have a small pile of Vengeance LPX and the only problems I've had were installation errors (not enough force) and crashes from fooling around with timings. Zero problems when running at promised speeds (fastest DDR4-3200, faster memory isn't really worth it and there's really no guarantee memory controller, mobo and memory play well together).

    2. 9Rune5

      Re: I would ask for your opinion...

      If the memory upgrade entailed filling up more banks then you often will not be able to go full speed.

      Memtest86+ should be able to detect problems.

  15. pfb201

    Brings back memories

    This story just reminds me of the amount of time we had to spend in memmaker in DOS tweaking physical and virtual memory for different applications. Also remember manually tweaking config files when the setup utilities for DOS games never set the right sound card or you needed to play about with it until it worked properly.

    Those were both simpler and much more complicated times.

    1. BenDwire Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: Brings back memories

      Arrgh! Memmaker Twitch. Shudder.

      Years of therapy had erased that from my mind, and now it's back, curse you!

  16. Steve Kerr

    Doooom!

    back in the day I remember people playing mutliplayer nertwork Doom as a means of testing network stability! if your network could stand up to that then it was working pretty good for the the day!

    1. Is It Me

      Re: Doooom!

      Surprised I had to scroll this far down to get to this.

      Set up with cheats so everyone had the chaingun and could keep topping up ammo, if a while of everyone running around constantly shooting each other with that and it was probably OK

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The working week is no game"

    Isn't it though? Always navigating the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies of manglement decisions. So many dead ends to rush into and riddles to unravel.

  18. aerogems Silver badge
    Angel

    Had a similar job once, back when the white unibody MacBooks were still in service and they had a nasty issue with the display panel which would cause it to fade to white and become unresponsive. Someone sent in a machine with that issue, and usually it'd fall over during the diagnostic testing, but this one didn't. So, I broke my general rule of not poking around in the customer's files (because if it were my system, I wouldn't want someone doing it to me) and found a copy of some movies like Rocky 3 and The King's Speech. So, I got to sit around and watch those legitimately claiming I was testing the machine waiting for the issue to occur. Which, it never did as I recall. That was the only customer who ever managed to call me (I worked in a repair depot) and IIRC, I had some old store stock unit that couldn't be resold for one reason or another, so got the approval to just swap the display panel with it. Fortunately, that was one of the few major components Apple didn't serialize (at least not that the repair tech had to put into GSX) so it wouldn't cause issues if the "replacement" panel was also bad.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah, memories...

    Ah yes, trying to get the memory settings exactly right to run specific games. I remember it well...

    I seem to recall that most of my memory issues were solved using QEMM (the ol' Quarterdeck product), which removed the need to use HIMEM and EMM386 altogether, and worked better with the MSDOS6 multi-config option than native MSDOS6 when optimising memory.

  20. Blackjack Silver badge

    I wasn't rich as a kid in the 90s so the stuff in my PC was mostly free things I got from PC magazines and shareware.

    Weird that working at a computer shop he didn't just copy shareware to take home as that was legal.

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Morally and in some cases practically, shareware still has to be paid for... I missed, does our poorly paid hero actually have a PC at home?

      Correction - he's a student with credit card debt. And a car. And the price of the game is given as the reason not to buy it - not the matter of having enough of a PC to run it.

      Presumably he has access to computers in college. But not for that.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. TSM

          "Morally and in some cases practically", as per the comment you're responding to.

          Most shareware products were licensed on the basis that you would pay for them if you continued to use them after a certain amount of time - though of course most people did not. Hence the proliferation of "part 1 is free, pay to get parts 2-N" model, which provided an incentive to pay.

          1. Blackjack Silver badge

            We are talking about shareware games here, those usually only had a few of the game levels and that's was it, once you beat those your had to buy the full game for the rest if you wanted more.

            Of course some games were so hard or had so much content on the shareware levels alone you could get months worth of fun on those.

            I specifically remember a level in the shareware version of War Wind (You can nowadays get the game for free on Gog) that you could keep playing for hours. Same for the shareware version of Conquest of the new world.

        2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

          No - and you can read about this in Wikipedia.

          I think I avoided using shareware when I couldn't afford even the reasonable registration price - and at work it was difficult to convince a boss, "Why should we pay for it if we got it free?"

          An exception is touch-screen keyboard software, "FITALY", that I use for disability - and that stops working after two weeks unless paid for. And then, the boss and a BOFH type don't see an issue with un-installing and then re-installing software every two weeks to defeat the copyright. However, my employer did actually pay for my "FITALY" to use at work.

          Unfortunately it seems that its main programmer died early. The software still is versatile and useful.

  21. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

    An old friend worked for a company and his boss let him set up a sever for Wolfenstein, then BF1942 & the Desert Combat mod, and also Wolfenstein Enemy territory... this was just outside of the fiewall so wouldn't clash with anything on the company network.

    Turned out to be good for the company in the end.

    We ran into an issue where the server would stutter for a second on a regular basis... after a lot of investigation both internally and externally. BT found some misconfigured equipment at the exchange, fixed it and the problem went away.

    It also happened to fix an issue they'd been trying to identify with random transactions failing on checkout... the boss of that little company was happy for the game servers to remain up for our amusement.

  22. gnasher729 Silver badge

    Spent some time working graphics device drivers. Sometimes the bug was that some frame of a game in level 7 didn’t display correctly. Most of us had no chance reproducing these bugs. Lucky enough we had one guy capable of going through these levels.

    Worse was a bug in the display of a software installer (the installer itself worked fine). You had _one_ chance of debugging it. After that you had to restore from some backup to run the installer again. Took hours.

  23. Marshalltown
    Pint

    The good old days

    I had the two pirated BASICA chips and PC DOS (IBM"S variety of MS DOS) on one of my systems. I tested dB III and IV data sets for out of range entries a lot. Once a consultant returned data where he had merged four fields into a single field "because it was really just one field." They weren't. It took an hour to undo his work in order to merge the critical fields with our database. I explained that the format was specified by a university museum, worked with _their_ cataloging system and that we were deducting my time from his bill, since nothing in the agreement included permission to futz with data formats, and worse, types. I did not buy him a beer.

  24. Bebu
    Windows

    Bit of a worry...

    this story and last weeks seem to have unleashed an epidemic of decent bosses and managers. :)

    I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the manager offered the whole overworked team a treat at the local horizontal relaxation facilty - except I would have fallen off the wall laughing.

    I suppose its the thought that counts. Working in Eire might have hidden benefits. :)

    Must have been a while ago as teams now tend to be bit more diverse in that department. :)

    At Uni I remember a bloke, on his 18th birthday was dropped by his classmates, with a handful of cash at such a facility. Much later he told us he waited inside for 30 minutes, split the cash with the lady and left slightly wealthier with virtue intact. Innocent yes. Naive not. ;)

  25. Grogan Silver badge

    Absolutely, I used to love jobs where I was going because someone was having trouble with a game. Solve problem, sit and play games with the customer for a while.

    My favourite was probably an old man, in his 80's. This was back in the Windows Millennium days. He called me for a "consultation" (oooh, buzzwords) because he was convinced that he needed more memory because his Train Simulator game was freezing up (actually just hitching, freezing was his word). He already had 384M which was almost too much for a crappy Win9x OS like WinME (vcache mechanism sucked, moreover, at 512 RAM you could get blue screens if you didn't limit it).

    He didn't even want me to touch his computer, but I convinced him that in 10 minutes we'd have his game working and it won't cost him a dime, if we upgrade Nvidia drivers and DirectX runtimes. So I did, and it did. I sat with him for quite a while, watching scenery go by and him tooting the whistle with a big smile on his face.

    I think I just charged $30 for the visit back then, but my biggest payment was that boyish smile on his face while he was playing his Train Simulator game :-)

    P.S. Of course, other fun times were fitting someone up with a new graphics card and then testing it with them.

  26. david 12 Silver badge

    "Memory Registers"

    Someone who's spent a chunk of his schooling or career working on large-register-set or or RISC processors rather than 80x86.

  27. Hans 1
    Angel

    In the early 2000's, I was tech support for SGI Visual Workstations, Diablo II was used to test the graphics performance. I had 4 or 8GB of RAM on these things with Windows NT. When the boss came around, I would say I am testing the graphics. I was waiting for calls, when a call arrived, I would switch to our app and die in the game. Fun times.

    1. Aldnus

      I remeber in the early 90s having to do security night shifts at SGI in theale. the day shoft used to get the noce jobs of testing equipment by playing games for the company as it was cheaper to the security staff to do it than thier engineers.

      I will add it was nigh on impossible to get on the day shift ,I was stuck up the road at DEC park in Reading. Was only a fill since being made redundant thankfully

  28. Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward Silver badge
    Trollface

    Kilrathi

    Here, kitty, kitty.

  29. PeteFromSomewhere

    If only it were games

    Back in the days of the Solaris 32-bit to 64-bit transition, I had horribly tight deadlines, as head of the distributed systems team at a regional oil and gas explorer, due to a very big seismic data analysis project.

    I had a datacentre recently filled with Sun servers with Fujitsu SCSI RAID storage arrays with rebadged host SCSI cards that were randomly crashing, corrupting filesystems, trashing files in hard to identify ways, and all this in the days before ZFS. The vendors were of course finger pointing at each other and the clock was ticking.

    We realised that the thing that sometimes, but reliably sometimes, crashed the boxes was ... doing an Oracle install. So I automated the Jumpstart for about 40 of the systems to do a clean OS install. Then do the Oracle install, and then report success, and start the process again. The boxes that failed didn't and a watchdog script emailed me as well as CCing my old Uni email account over the newly installed ISDN E1 internet link. If it was after hours, I'd run 5km to the office (I was fitter then!). I hand-noted the console errors into a journal.

    About 4 weeks into this regime, I'd been working 28 days straight, and discovered the joys of working on Saturdays and Sundays - no distractions! - but getting well and truly sick of the process. Analysis of the console crash text was getting somewhere, the Sun (esp?) drivers were the probable cause, now we were into Monte Carlo testing of config options and continuing to complain to Sun and Fujitsu account managers every work day.

    Building security noticed that I was in constantly, and barred me. The board negotiated a deferred beginning to my enforced home-time of another week.

    Finally on the same day that Sun advised us that they'd identified a regression in the 64-bit ethernet (?maybe?) drivers, that we could fix by configuring them to run in 32-bit mode, we found a memory mapping in the bottom 2Gb of memory that gave us non-crashing boxes.

    I wish I'd spent that time playing games.

  30. Aldnus

    Same idea with new tech for me

    For a few years in the Early 2000s till 2010 I was the hardware introduction engineer for a large MOD project and therefore every new piece of equipment except servers and network components came through me for selection and testing before being passed to Integration and Test

    Screens Mice keyboards and PC's where the best as the best way to test this kit was to literally play games as well as office applications.

    You'd be surprised how much equipment would fail screen refreshes and memory issues when under stress and slow refresh rates to a crawl. At this time we where also playing with full 3D graphics using screens which didn't require the silly glasses , that was fun with flight simulators in high terrain areas. on a 40 inch LCD on my desk.

    Ahh those where the days

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like