Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks As Friday rolls around Reg readers can start to contemplate pressing the Shut Down button for the working week. And to amuse you, as the moment at which you can make that magic click draws near, we always offer a fresh installment of On Call – our reader-contributed column of tech support tasks that went in interesting …
I had a problem where Windows had hung so I couldn't use the restart option on the start menu
Every time I pressed the power button it just did a fast start and resumed into the broken state
even holiding down the power button for 4 seconds didn't work because the system had successfully hibernated before the 4 seconds was up
the laptop battery wasn't removable so I couldn't pull the power
IIRC I ended going into the bios setup screen and leaving it there until the battery died. then I could finally get a cold start
Policy / GPO with:
Task, run at statup, as local system, powercfg.exe /h off
Kills hiberfil.sys along the way for machines with "only" 120 GB SSD. Yes, they still exist, and are actually big enough for most office usage. For Windows 7 it was not big enough, since Windows 7 did not, by default, have an automated cleanmgr.exe /AUTOCLEAN task. That came with Windows 8.
"Oh you just change [registry key obtained through commerce with Satan involving the slow painful murder of an entire kindergarten class] and it's all fixed!!!" [1]
And people complain about UNIX's bullshit with arcane command lines.
[1] "Anakin killed all the younglings!" - Yes, was Windows Vista that made Darth Vader.
"I think we all agree that Dante was foreshadowing Microsoft's existence!"
Dante severely underestimated what hell truly is, but the nine circles can be modernized.
1. First Circle: (Limbo) Compatibility Issues
2. Second Circle (Lust): Malware and Viruses
3. Third Circle (Gluttony): Resource Exhaustion
4. Fourth Circle (Greed): Licensing and Activation Issues
5. Fifth Circle (Wrath): System Crashes and Blue Screens
6. Sixth Circle (Heresy): Unsupported Systems
7. Seventh Circle (Violence): Data Loss
8. Eighth Circle (Fraud): Phishing and Scams
9. Ninth Circle (Treachery): System Betrayals
We turn it off ny default on every machine we supply. The very first windows 8 "fault" I met was wireless adapter seeing a network and not being able to connect to it, restarting fixed it, shutdown didn't. Disabling fast boot fixed it for good. Still seeing those issues today. So first and current faults still fast boot related after all these years...
What annoyed me the most (aside from the likes of Adobe et al not being aware of its problems), was that Microsoft would re-enable it on every major update to Windows 8 and through to the first couple of releases of W10. I knew that within a couple of weeks of those updates rolling out, customers would start phoning me. It's MY setting Microsoft, I turned it off for a reason, leave it alone thankyouverymuch.
Part of me still thinks it was Microsoft's embarrassment at the popularity of the "Turn if off and turn it on again" cliché that led to this policy. To this day, it's one of the first settings I check on my own system when I do a fresh install or get one of the major Windows updates.
Fast start has definitely caused us some headaches, not least because it precisely reverses the instructions given to users for decades.
Before fast start:
"Restart" doesn't always really reset the machine (some old machines kept the memory powered, so an error in memory could remain across reboots), so you have to turn it all the way off, wait 5 seconds, then turn it back on.
After fast start:
"Shutdown" doesn't actually reset the machine, so you have to pick "Restart".
Grr! MS "fixing" things that weren't broken in the first place!
Another of the many things "Fast startup" breaks is Wake On Lan - at least on machines with particular Intel LAN adaptors.
Took me bloody ages to find that f***er....
The power state "Fast startup" puts the machine into kills power to the NIC totally. No power, no Wake On Lan,. Which when managing remote estates of machines is a royal f***ing pain.,
I noticed on my old Lenovo X220 that when fast startup is on and you do a shutdown it behaves like it's hibernating - I.E. it beeps and the power light flashes. Then it turns off as normal. When it boots back up again it seems to do a quicker BIOS check (probably controlled by a UEFI setting) and this doesn't give the opportunity to "interrupt normal startup by pressing the ThinkVantage button" or whatever (I.E. you couldn't get into the BIOS)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if other manufacturers had more restrictive UEFI/BIOS routines around "hibernation" which are falsely triggered by fast startup (although you'd have thought they would have worked with Microsoft to recognise the difference between the two better).
Windows 8 introduced a feature called "fast startup" which essentially when the user presses the "shutdown" button in the start menu logs the user out (closing all their running applications) then hibernates the operating system. In theory this is supposed to make booting up faster because the OS doesn't have to perform processing tasks around loading various bits of itself from disk, running startup routines etc, it can just restore a single contiguous RAM image to the RAM and then carry on from where it left off.
That was the theory anyway - what Microsoft (and the rest of the world) have learned since is that this causes various problems for startup around drivers (which may not be able to handle sudden time jumps or hardware being unpowered whilst they are loaded), various at-boot programs such as AV/system security packages, and other applications which can't handle being hibernated very well.
The "restart" button in the start menu always behaved like a full shutdown (I.E. not hibernating the logged-out OS at all) however this is counter-intuitive as you expect a restart to be just a "shutdown then start up" not a "state reset", which is what the "shut down" component traditionally was.
I remember going round to a secretary for something, and she complained about problems upgrading her software.
She was on release x.y and had been told to delete it, and reinstall from diskettes(shows how long ago this was). The box said release x.z.
I sat with her, and followed the process and it all worked, but at release x.y. Till I looked at the label on the diskette and found they were for release x.y. Someone had put the old diskettes in the new box.
We found the correct diskettes, and it worked first time.
Next time - how someone took Even Longer to install software by toggling the front panel switches of the computer!
Provided you didn't turn it off and back on too quickly! We were external telephone support for a number of these provided by a large insurance company to their consultants.
The Model 50 was notorious for blowing PSUs so the instruction to the user would be something like, "When I tell you to, please turn off the machine and do not turn it back on!" We'd leave a minute between off and on which seemed sufficient.
I got "caught" by a user to diligently copy a stack of diskettes... by using a photocopier.
After she recovered from the ROTFL attack, I explained that it was the easiest way to document which serial numbers (aka licenses) went to which office location (this was in the 1990s, when fax machines were a Thing and digital cameras... weren't)
Quickest Fix : I drove from London to Cornwall to press the turbo button (yes it was a long time ago) on the front of a PC. "Oh, that turbo button !" said the end customer 30 seconds after I arrived. "I was pressing this one." .. Deeply unimpressed when I pointed out that that button said reset on it... ....... The inability to read or listen is the main issue with support over the phone.
I did have a nice pasty before going home.
2nd quickest fix... plugging in the monitor to the mains... but fortunately that was in London.
I imagine we all have had a call like this...
"...of course I plugged it in. I'm not stupid!"
On entering the office
"What's that plug lead hanging down the front of your monitor for?" looks and plugs it in. Computer starts.
..."how the f%%k would I know what that was for? I'm not a computer whiz!"
..."how the f%%k would I know what that was for? I'm not a computer whiz!"
Yeah, and those same people can "troubleshoot" their own TV and HiFi issues at home where they have no one to call, but as soon as the word "computer" comes into the equation, their brains turn off :-)
PC's seem to have infected even the humble amplifier. I have an amp that periodically won't switch on. The fix is to pull the mains lead out the back of the unit for 30 sec and try again. I recently had some time to look at the problem - well documented on line. Changed the Standby setting from 10 mins to Never (oh that dial is a menu button as well, who'd have guessed?), seems ok now touch wood.
Standby on an Amp? Listen up. I want as much power coming out those speakers to turn my living room into Hammersmith Odeon on demand. Put Greta on Standby for such occasions.
Slowest quicknfix for me was an after hours call that took me 3 hours to drive to the site because of Friday traffic at the start of a long weekend.
3 hours, 125kms later, I arrive at the site to look at the receipt printer that the user reported would not power on even after plugging it into another socket...
They showed me what they did, and they really did move the plug to another socket. Unfortunately the power lead was not seated in the adapter.
Plug it in, show the user what I did. Buy some snacks to test the printer.
Climb back in my car, drive 2 hours home. Almost 6 hours of overtime to plug in a printer.
At least the mileage reimbursement was generous, and I accumulated 1.5 days of time in lieu.
I travelled to another site once for a unnecessary fix . It wasn't too far but it interrupted my game of Unreal Tournament :D
Armed with a description of fault from helpdesk: "User cannot get email" , I arrived at site and made my way to the one person sized office on the first floor. I poked my head in the door , saw a black screen with a familiar looking bit of text at the top left and said to the guy: "Press eject on the floppy drive , then turn it off and on again"
That's an unusual config. It suggests that your machines are set to boot to USB devices before internal drives, which is atypical and probably not the best choice. Every machine I've used in the past twenty years has required that a USB drive be manually selected to boot to it by default, a default I haven't and don't want to change. One of the major benefits of this is that there isn't much malware which bothers to make external disks bootable infection vectors because, unlike in the age of floppies, the authors know it's not going to be booted to anyway.
Closest I get to that is some OEM laptop motherboards from the factory default to USB boot when being replaced. This is because there are things the tech replacing the board must do, such as setting the locale and serial numbers etc in the firmware using a USB pendrive. But that process them changes the boot order to "normal" afterwards,
Working nights doing tech support in a Uni. Got a call during a period of heavy snow (so the roads around campus were very icy) from a lecturer panicking because he was about to start a lecture and there was no power to the AV system in the room. We had laptop and projector packs we could lend out for emergencies such as this, so I picked one up and struggled to the building next door (where the lecture was). The laptop and projector weren't massively expensive, but were not cheap either, so I was a little concerned I'd drop the pack on the icy road.
Got to the lecture theatre, and looked at the AV system. The lecturer was right. No lights on any of it, so no power. Then I looked at the mains switch on the wall. Someone had helpfully turned it off.
I flicked the swtich, everything sprung to life, and after about 5 minutes of fans wirring up and slowing down (the AV equipment in use did not boot quickly, hence the reason it was usually left powered up, just in standby mode) and the control LCD panel displaying various logos, the AV system was up and running, and the lecturer happy.
I wasn't however, I had to go out into sub zero temperatures and struggle back to the building containing my office, with the portable projector and laptop, which was heavy enough that, TBH, the description "Portable" was debatable. This was the early 2000s. The projectors we had were from the late 90s, and were not small, or light. They were also expensive.
I have been called to "The conference room" more than once to the accompanying overture of "Emergency!! the Big Cheeses are having a big important meeting and suddenly everything has gone dead! right in the middle! "
More than once this has happened .
On all occasions its because they have plugged their laptops into a power socket with the switch in the off position.
Quickest fix: Turning up the brightness that was turned all the way down by giving the monitor a light dusting.
The NorthStar terminals had brightness and contrast buttons the size and depth of a quarter (coin), and only part of the rim was sticking out. So one wipe --> totally dark screen.
Also a common prank done by coworkers which sometimes backfired when the victim called tech support who then called out the hardware support company who then billed them for an out of band "fix". I was that hardware engineer a few times. I'd always glance around the room when announcing to user this would be a chargeable site visit and sometimes noted the head dip down sheepishly. :-)
Sadly I have done that very thing myself. Complaints from my wife that she couldn't connect to the internet, all seemed fine to me. Checking showed that her laptop wasn't connected to WiFi. After much Windows-related investigating (it's always Windows' fault) I eventually logged into the router to check - WiFi was switched off.
My excuse was that I didn't know that the network activity LED on the Fritzbox is also a toggle switch, which I had bumped when putting the vacuum cleaner back in the under-stairs cupboard some hours previously...
I saw "Fast startup" for the bullshit that it is/was when it first appeared. I could not believe that Microsoft has the idea of "Hey lets pretend we shut down when actually we didnt and call it 'fast startup' "
Its ludicrous!
They basically just rewired "shutdown" to go to the same method as "hibernate"
I mean - everybody knows that "Turn it off and on again" is THE key tool / cure / diagnostic in I.T. work . Why would you take that away ? Its deliberate goddam sabotage for gods sake .
Its like taking a roadworkers shovel away , or an electricians voltmeter , in fact its WORSE than that - its like secretly replacing the electrician's voltmeter with a joke one that shows 240v all the time, which you only find aout about when you measure a 12v dc psu.
Remembering this microsoft bullshit has really pissed me off for the day . If peopel wanted their machine to hiberanate they would have pressed hiberante.
ITs goddamn cheating!!
/rant
> They basically just rewired "shutdown" to go to the same method as "hibernate"
Not completely! You programs are closed, you are logged off, all task are reduced to a minimum, and then hibernate. The difference is that full hibernate leaves everything you have opened in the state of "right now", including heavy number crunching tasks in the background. And if you wake it up again it continues right where it left off, without causing data corruption on mentioned crunching tasks. At least on MY machines :D.
Jaguar did a similar "update" to the oil pressure gauge to their V12 engine. The indicated oil pressure typically reads quite high at over 75% of the gauge, but also drops low on occasion. This is a all quite normal, nothing to worry about. Except it was the cause of a lot of service calls for the sensor or gauge being reported as faulty. The fix was to swap the variable resistive sensor for a simple pressure switch and a fixed resistor. This pegged the gauge at 50% of its travel to keep the customer happy, no mater the actual pressure, so no better than the already existing low oil pressure light.
Fast start is not as bad as it once was, but still causes havoc from time to time. Though I've come to like using hibernate deliberately.
(you can skip from here of you want to hear things that work well on Win10/11 - and I am not talking about the UI)
Usage here: I am out of the house and got some leftover solar power? PC-on, do some stuff until solar power is out, then hibernate again. To my surprise: ffmpeg.exe decode | SvtAv1EncApp.exe (or rav1e-ch.exe) can take to be interrupted in the middle, 100% CPU load, by hibernate, and continues once power is back without data corruption. Even if > 20 of those tasks run in parallel. Each of them encoding a part of the source video, the best way to fully use an AMD 5950x. Since the internal multithread capabilities of those encoders just tile up the video and therefore hurt compression, quality and still cannot fully utilize that CPU therefore are still slower, cut it is.
It actually does. But if a file gets changed while the PC is in hibernate, it is indeed right to assume something is wrong and a full clean start is done. Example: Put the drive in a different PC, even without knowingly writing something on it, just mounting RW instead of RO.
[edit] Oh, Now I get what you mean. That was an Adobe bug, for not using the "PendingFileRenameOperations" key. Until they were forced to do so sometime 2011 due to FastStart, ignoring that key for over a decade.
Tool to utilize: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pendmoves
I understood the article to mean that it was the Windows 8 upgrade that needed the hard restart before the new Adobe would work.
But you'd think any half thought through "support" script would eventually fall back to the "take off and nuke from orbit" option when every other avenue exhausted.
I don't think so. Windows wouldn't finish installing until it had restarted the correct number of times, and it would manage its own restarts and run the needed ones. I'm pretty sure that what happened was the person installed Windows 8 but was not aware of the fast startup option or how it worked. Then they installed an Adobe product which needed to restart and probably offered to do so at the end of the installation. Probably if they had let it do that, a normal restart would have been executed, hence why Adobe hadn't caught this problem while testing. The user, however, needed to save some work so didn't let the installation restart for them, and they just shut down. Adobe hadn't labeled the need for a full restart, so shutting down and powering on wasn't good enough for them. Therefore, the application didn't work because it still needed a proper restart.
Snap! However I've just built a new laptop for my wife (win10/Office2016 on a modern Lenovo) - she won't abandon Word for LibreOffice so I can't persuade her to go Linux. I've just turned off Fast Boot having read these comments. Thanx for the info!
I had somewhat the other way around. My late wife didn't like any of the versions of Word after Word for Windows 2.0. So when she finally got a machine it wouldn't run on she was willing to convert to OpenOffice. Some other things she used pretty much precluded going to Linux, at least not without more hassle than I was willing to tackle. However, her--by then--old unix skills worked just fine for dealing with a Pi/Linux based "alarm clock".
Despite my push for Linux, SWMBO clung to Windows because it was all nice and familiar. Then we went to help one of her friends set up her new PC. It had the version of Windows where the screen was covered in big squares rather than using the traditional "Start" button (can't remember and don't care which it was*).
SWMBO took one look and we've been Linux with Libre Office ever since.
*But to date it: I think the Ubuntu LTS of the day was 12.04.
I run Linux. Most times, with a new machine, it will boot into Windows, offering no options. So nowadays, with a new computer, I let it start Windows, then I use the `shrink windows partition' option to set it to a minimal size, then turn off Fast Start. On the next boot, I can start the Linux boot medium, and do a regular install. And Windows is still there, in the event that I need it. I never do.
We have a Windows 10 box, running some VMs, where we run update once a month, which we did on Monday night.
By mid morning on Tuesday we were getting numerus reports from people dependent on the various VMs that they were being kicked off but could get stright back in
We looked in and things OK. Looking at the logs, Windows 10 was going to Sleep every 20 mins. So running the latest Windows update re-enabled Sleep function.
Why can't they just leave setting set?
Client had network issue on a PC. "Push the cable back in".
Nope, wouldn't do it. I had a train to catch to get to a medical appointment in London.
Set off, diverted to site, parked up. Walked in, pushed cable back in. Walked out, continued to drive to the station.
Billed call out for being bloody stupid.
Had exactly the same years ago. We specifically asked the customer to unplug the power cable and plug it firmly back in, she said she'd done that, so we then asked her to swap the power cables between the monitor and the computer, she'd already done that too. We warned her that an engineer call out might be chargeable but she insisted we went ahead.
Her boss was not amused to receive a £100+ (over £300 today) bill from IBM for the wasted visit to push the power cable back in.
I've run into that scenario several times. Most recently, it was a 2.5 hour drive to the site, an extra 1mm shove on a patch cord end until it clicked, then the link light came on. I ended up replacing the patch cable anyway, because the clip had taken a set due to having been depressed to the extreme and not allowed to spring back into the latched position. Then, another 2.5 hour drive back to the office.
A pet peeve of mine is when a device's power brick has an IEC22 plug, there's no shelf or other convenient support, so the weight of the power brick was left dangling from the mains cord, resulting in disconnection of the power cord. Velcro's your friend!
I had one the other day where a switch was down in a hotel. The IDF had an electronic keycard door lock that had malfunctioned. There was no physical key, just the electronic lock. We ended up using burglars' tools to get in: a stiff wire fished under the door, bent to be able to snag the lever knob on the inside and let us in. The switch was down because there was no power to either of its redundant power supplies. Both of the power cords were sourced from the same UPS, which was not working. I unplugged the UPS from the wall outlet to verify that the outlet was live (it was), and plugged it back in. It started on its own, and the switch came up. Moreover, there were 4 switches, and 4 UPSes, in that IDF. They were all connected identically, such that the UPS was a single point of failure for its switch. I offered to replug the switches to diversify the power sourcing, but the client said to leave it as it was. I would not be surprised to get another callout to this site.
Same thing with laser printers...
User phones up "my printing is coming out with lines across the page". We'd ask "have you tried a new toner cartridge?" Invariably, they'd answer "yes".
Tech goes on site. Swaps out cheap and nasty refilled cartridge for a new one: printer output is as good as new. Tech sends a bill for an hour's labour, plus the new toner cartridge. It used to happen all the time.
> Why does a software update of a PDF viewer REQUIRE A FULL SYSTEM RESTART IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM?!
It didn't. From the fine article...
"I headed straight over and, having noticed the customer had done his own upgrade to Windows 8, I hit the Restart option, waited for it to boot and then installed the new version of Acrobat."
So the restart was for the Windows upgrade. With that out of the way, the Acrobat install worked fine with no further restart required.
Of course raising questions of why windows didn't have the sense to properly reset itself on shutdown-startup after an upgrade. Although that's probably been a moot point for nearly a decade. (Surprised to realise extended support ended last year. Though would be even more surprised to find out anyone actually wanted extended support for 8.)
Earliest I can remember, anyway :
Age ten, circa mid-1970s. We had a television where the display would occasionally suddenly contract to a horizontal bright line. I learned that slapping the TV on the right-hand side, slightly above mid-height, would restore it, at least for a day or two.
At some point, my mother (who hadn't seen me do it) encountered the problem. I walked over to the computer, put left hand on top of the machine, said "I command the demons that have infested this TV to come out!", slapped it on the appropriate point, and it recovered.
My mother is now 89, and I'm still occasionally called in for technical support (in fact, have to upgrade Xubuntu on her computer sometime soon). We occasionally joke about my charisma [theological sense] with appliances.
A presenter on a TV show I watch at the end of his show says "If you can't see it live set up your DVR". Then adds: "If this isn't a task you thing you can do, ask your 9 year granddaughter and she can usually figure it out" (or words to that effect). I always find this humorous, and probably more true that it should be.
(Not specific quotes, but close).
Yes, I watch the show, it is very informative.
Woman at work had a fault with her phone where it wouldn't charge. I had a battery and cable and there was just nothing happening when it was plugged in. She was in a panic as the charge read 1% and she wanted her photos.
The "techie" (note the scare quotes) at the phone shop told her the phone was duff and sold her a new phone.
I waited until the thing shut itself down, then I plugged it in. The phone began to charge.
I don't know what this is, but I saw it with one of my cheap tablets - sometimes Android loses the plot and just doesn't charge. But a reset (or shutdown) kicks whatever it is back to life. Now I don't expect a shop techie to know these sorts of details without experiencing it themselves, but I'm quite surprised that "try rebooting your phone" wasn't suggested (she told me he never said to do that).
I think some "technical support" are just clueless people reading from a script, and if the problem isn't what's on the script, they're worse than useless.
TBF, the shop's "techie" knows that his/her pay comes directly from the money the shop makes. They cannot be considered to be working in a walk-in's best interest. So if they can assert their "technical" status and declare it pining for the fjords dead, then they have a direct interest in doing so.
Having said that, last year my 4 year old phone stopped charging. It had got worse from requiring the charger's USB plug to be in just the right location, to flat out ... flat. I assumed the little PCB soldered socket had worked loose. Since I now wanted to repurpose it as an Alfred Camera device, I investigated deeper. It turns out the USB socket had filled up with pocket lint. Material that had become tamped down over time and was now completely preventing the charging plug from contacting the connector. A minute with a non-conductive, thin, sharp, implement removed all the fluff and now it works fine!
A minute with a non-conductive, thin, sharp, implement removed all the fluff and now it works fine!...an ordinary wooden match or toothpick. Or, if even that is too thick (many toothpicks and all matches are, I think), whittle it a little thinner with a sharp knife.
Of course I found this out the day after I'd bought a new phone to replace the “dead” one.
There is a circuit controller on many devices for charging that prevents charging when the battery gets too low.
Yeah, un-damn-believeable right? But yet, it exists. Many battery operated tools are the same way. The battery gets too low, and won't charge.
While I know the technical reason, why, it still makes no sense, yet here we are.
Regarding powertools, I once chucked a nearly new dewalt 4Ah battery in the council tip recycling bin because it would not recharge. When it happened to a second battery a month later I did a bit of searching online and found that stripping a bit of twin and earth and using one wire to link the negative terminals of the dead battery and a good battery and then using a second wire to link the positive terminals for just 10 seconds would charge the dead battery enough for it to charge properly in the dewalt charger. I'm still kicking myself for recycling a perfetly good 4Ah battery.
I had this recently with a flat car battery (there is some glitch, I guess a dying relay, that randomly turns on the dipped headlights even when everything is off, car too old to worry about fixing properly, I now typically leave the earth disconnected when I'm not using it). The battery was so flat that none of my "intelligent" chargers would even attempt to charge it because they couldn't detect that they were connected to a battery. I connected a charged booster pack to the battery and this was enough to convince the charger that there was something connected that it could charge.
I had an iPhone with a probable battery age problems. Certain actions, it would suddenly decide it only had 1% battery power, or it even turned off.
I left it quietly running something until it really did run out of power. Then I put it to charge. It was reasonably normal after that. But it still told to get the battery serviced. Is that even a thing on these?
Quickest fix : in the late 90's I was asked to go and look at the laptop of one of our MD's. He'd been in Hong Kong for the past week (on work) and hadn't been able to get any sound from his (Windows 98) laptop for the whole time. This was, of course, urgent.
I won't spoil the story by telling you how I fixed it, though will point out that the laptop in question was (IIRC) a Toshiba Satellite Pro 440. And I'll also point out that on the front edge of said Satellite Pro 400's was a thumbwheel to control the volume.
Quickest fix: Had a call that monitor wasn't working. So I walked to desk, reached behind the monitor and pushed the power cable in.
Annoying stupid fix: There was an NT server that frequently shit itself, and the fix was to switch off on. But this was some time back before useful things like iLO/iDRAC/etc, so I had to go all the way into the office, press the reset button, then go all the way back home. Annoying as that was my last ever night on call at that company.
It's a psychological thing unfortunately. People convince themselves that "I don't understand technology" so they don't bother to learn anything about it. This is reinforced by the fact that once people learn how to do a thing one way they stick to it, and as long as it keeps working that way (and keeps working) they never have to deviate, so their usual daily routine doesn't require them to learn anything about how the technology works.
Once it breaks however (or the manufacturer removes a feature or moves it) they become totally lost and can't work out how to recover because they've only ever known the one way of doing whatever they're trying to do. So their brain sort of just "shuts down" and they panic because they haven't seen this behaviour (or lack thereof) before.
It's the similar sort of thing as a road closure - I'm sure most police officers who have had to stand on a police cordon for a closed road can tell you that 95% of people who try and drive down the closed road have very similar responses to being stopped/challenged - "I always come this way" or "I live just down there" or "I don't know how to get around this closure".
The Client (otherwise known as very bright world leader professor at some university) turned up in person at the it help desk and said “my computer won’t boot. I would have called but as we have no power the phones don’t work”. I was about to reply when the penny dropped.
Okay. Genuinely. I don’t understand what the appeal of Windows is anymore. I started using it when Windows 3.0 came out, I grew out of it when I discovered A/UX. Windows seems to me to be an antipattern in computing. Now if it works for you then that’s great - keep using it - but that suggests to me that you probably aren’t a ‘real’ IT professional. It’s a toy. It might even be a useful toy. But it isn’t as useful as a real OS.
So what is a real OS? Quick test to see if your OS is real. The terminal shell is something like bash or zsh (take your pick - you have a choice) and it comes with tools like ls, vi, emacs, less and so forth.
Ah, so my Windows installation was not a real OS. But then I installed git for Windows, including its bash environment with all of those except emacs which I could also install, and now it is.
Is this really the level of argument you can go to? The name of the file list command is important?
I think the point being made is that these tools don't come with Windows, and building on Windows with Microsoft's tools isn't as straightforward as it would be with Linux. Windows is a bit backwards in the 21st Century. Like using a horse and cart - quaint, but not the best tool for the job.
And yet it's got the largest OS market share for desktop/laptop computing in the world (yes I know Android and iPhone have it beat for overall OS on everything).
Windows is a standard, like it or not. They know they dominate the market which is why they can keep making random changes which the community doesn't like - remind you of any Linux projects (*cough* GNOME *cough* SystemD *cough*)?
Personally I administer Linux in my day job. I'm a *NIX fan. But I can accept that Windows has a very good desktop environment which most people know how to drive for their daily needs.
It's a case of using the right tool for the right job, pure and simple.
I once worked for a Telco/ISP.
Walked in one morning and several screens were displaying a "no signal" message. My so called manager was in a panic and was on hold to tech support saying "we have to get this problem fixed".
I sat at one of the machines displaying the message and got it up and running. When the manager asked me how I fixed it I went into smug mode and said "I turned the computer on".
She quickly terminated the call with tech support.
Many I.T. specialists roles in Technical Support have now been superceded by Administrative Support.
One of my customers decided to go with Creative Cloud. Exactly two years later I get a call from them "Can you remember which one of our employees signed up for this service?" You can guess the reason.
I suppose if they renamed it thus Microsoft would have to translate it to all the languages they ahem support.
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"What's the fastest fix you've ever effected?"
Blimey O'Reilly oh soo many over the years. Maybe best not to embarrass too many of my past or present customers on here, and perhaps thankfully too busy in semi-retirement to write the book I've muttered about compiling all these years.
A bunch of PFYs in the SAP Basis team all quit for twice the money and the boss parachuted me into the role as I had developed in ABAP once.
They were complaining about support package updates taking 3+ hours, so I hauled up the process monitoring transaction code and pointed out both Batch Processes were busy and there was queueing (a little red # showing how many batch jobs were waiting). "Perhaps if you switched some of your Dialog Processes to Batch Processes, it wouldn't queue and would run faster"? 40 mins later, update job was done. (took all of 20 seconds for the analysis)
There is a way to permanently fix this;
Disable hibernation under ACPI settings in BIOS. The entire option for fast startup will disappear, and windows won't even bother to make a hibernation file. This is of course, persistent across all updates and installations of Windows (unless you reset the CMOS).
On many laptops this menu is hidden, however these days runtime EFI patching can get you the fully unlocked setup for most brands of bios and laptop.
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