Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash By Friday, many readers will feel they need a sugar hit to get through the day, which is why The Register tries to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support tales. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Raymond" who in the late …
Talking of Sherlock……….I once witnessed an what looked like an inquisition of sorts going on as a visitor to a company. All the staff of one department, my mate’s department were being called into a meeting room one by one. They would walk out after a few minutes normally looking relieved and the next person would be asked to come in. The mate I was visiting eventually finished in there and we went out for lunch. I innocently enquired what had been going on because it looked like a redundancy set up.
That wasn't it at all he said. They'd noticed that they were having problems with a particular system. They ran a complex report every night using a very high spec office computer at 18:30 and this was automatic. Only problem was several reports spanning a period of weeks were missing and had to be re-run when the first person had gotten in in the morning. This delayed the start of day for several people. After just a few instances of this happening they'd installed a logging program to see who was doing what on that computer. The logs had told them who had logged in and stopped the program running,
They'd found out that it was Employee ‘X’ but had decided to call everybody in, not just him. They revealed to each person in turn that there was a now a monitoring prog on that computer. They asked each employee if if they'd got anything they'd like to mention at this point. None of the rest of the had anything significant just things like burning an copy of a CD etc. all within office hours. Employee ‘X’ on the other hand was sweating profusely and had sung like a canary. He used the machine to play something like Quake or Half Life etc. on as it had the best graphics card the most memory etc. He'd had to hide the game on the hard drive and was playing it after work. However the reports prog was quite memory and processor intensive when running. So he'd shut it down before playing and if his gameplay went beyond 18:30, as it frequently did, no report was run.
Discussions were ongoing as to what punishemnt he'd get.
So true! You learn from epic near-disasters (and actual disasters) that you caused but resolved, particularly if no-one else saw it.
Getting longer in the tooth gives you the opportunity to gain wisdom from other people's mistakes. If you find out about them, that is.
That doesn't happen now. Computers are expensive. Unless I can be convinced that the computer's being troublesome because of a thing I can't fix, it's not time to junk it. If it's still happening when booted to a known clean USB disk, then I'll start to consider that there may be some bigger problem here, and even then I'll open it up and look for an overheating problem first, but this machine would have passed that test quite quickly, indicating that's likely a software problem which I can probably do something about.
"Pharmacists were especially demanding. "One of them treated me to a long diatribe about how a software update required three more keystrokes than before for one task,"
As a pharmacist: relatable. It is a profession that demands such a high level of accuracy and attention to detail, that it tends to attract a certain personality type. Slightly neurotic, some maybe even somewhat on the autism spectrum.
But also highly demanding of themselves, they are the last to catch medication errors (by pharmacy staff, or doctors) and therefore often also demanding of others.
With a wife who is a Pharmacist and Independent Prescriber, a daughter who is a GP and as a Certifiable Software Engineer myself, all requiring a high level of accuracy and attention to detail - how tidy do you think our house is? The Lead Zoo Keeper and Actor/musician daughters are certainly from a different mould (but definitely mine!)
10000000000 time THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^
I am very very detail focused when I work. [But cannot type :)].
I will check things over and over before hitting the 'GO' key !!!
I have stopped people before when they have 'quickly solved something' that was NOT solved if you looked closer !!!
I always deliberately slow down starting to type the 'Answer' as I often re-think the solution just before I commit the action.
My Study at home is visually untidy (understatement) BUT I know where everything is !!!
I DO meltdown when my Study is tidied by someone else being 'Helpful' [who shall remain nameless !!!].
Re-arranging things by 'geometric shape' or visual symmetry is NOT HELPFUL !!!
:)
My office was arranged in several piles of paper. The rule was: 1 inch per month. I could always find what I wanted but the clean desk patrol was not happy. We once had a security audit and they checked every box including "passed." They must have been flustered - I found this report card when it surfaced a month later.
"My Study at home is visually untidy (understatement) BUT I know where everything is !!!
You are me and AICM£5 :-)
"I DO meltdown when my Study is tidied by someone else being 'Helpful' [who shall remain nameless !!!].
...and you seem to have my wife there with you too!
(Me: Where's such and such?
Her: In the cupboard.
Me: Which one?
Her: I don't know, have you looked?)
Me: .........
Don't tell me .... 'Hot Desking !!!!'
[The way to 'waste' multiple hours EVERYDAY ... Search for Free Desk, stake claim, find 'Your' wheely set of Drawers (Pod), propel said 'Pod' to Desk, plug-in everything, start-up kit, move papers etc from Drawers to Desk, Get Coffee or drink of choice, try to find where you were up to yesterday, start work .... half an hour later .... its your 1st meeting or it is lunchtime .... It is almost 1 hour to end of play, try to reach logical point in your work, start logically updating all your paperwork and file it 'neatly' in your 'Pod', Tidy desk, cleanly close-down your kit, propel said 'Pod' back to the safe storage area and free up Desk from the booking system.]
:)
Years ago the company I worked for were having a visit from the American corporate C Suite and the instruction went out that all desks, cupboard tops, etc. must be clear, everything must be tidy, etc.
Being IT this was never going to happen - too many bits of kit awaiting me dealing with them and little storage space so my office was tidy but certainly not clear. The CFO wandered in, had a quick look round, and immediately said, "Thank God somebody does some work around here!" We got on quite well after that the few times I met him, even sharing a few beers after a meeting in the States, although he never forgave me for the fact I had a Range Rover* and he hadn't been able to afford one with his bonus.
*An old a fairly beaten up Range Rover, not a brand new one by any means.
Mrs C used to work at a company that believed this, so when the cutback cull hit they targeted one particular individual based on that (unsound) metric. Problem was, that particular individual was very good at his job and also very focused on keeping everything tidy. Week or two after he was "let go because policy" they ran out of stock for producing their main product line (did I forget to mention he was the raw material buyer) and they had to shut the works down until the supplier could expedite delivery (at premium price)...
Moral of the story - judge the person on how well they do the job, not how well they fit your (prejudiced) profiles.
Common areas tidy, except when untidy children have made food - usually not at normal meal times!
Two bedrooms and one of the bathroom (shared by the owners of the two bedrooms) where you can't see the floor for clothes (clean/dirty - no idea) or towels!
Rest of the house spotless.
If you look at the fashion magazines showing how to furnish the room. The book shelves are always ordered, by height, or colour. (or an absence of books) These people clearly do not read their books.
Most people arrange them by author. I've got a row of books for an author by one publisher, plus another book in the series by a different publisher, which is a different size and colour scheme.
As long as it is SOME system it doesn't need to be alphabetic - it needs to be something someone using it (Pepys in this case, presumably, if he wasn't just having a last laugh on everyone in his will) knows.
I used to be a club DJ and we almost exclusively played everything off 12" singles. We had them sorted by beats per minute (with a label with the number written on it stuck on them) not alphabetically by artist or song. That was easier for us - when you're beatmixing you're typically going to want a song that's a few bpm higher or lower than what you're currently playing so you just look in that area either for a specific song or just "lets see what strikes my fancy to play next" (which is a terrific way to discover songs that go together really well that no one would have thought if not for that serendipitous discovery)
The numbers were perhaps a bit arbitrary - when we bought a new single we'd guess the bpm based on beatmixing with another song marked with its bpm so they might have been one or two bpm off the "true" number but it was close enough. But the great part was when we had people visiting us in the booth if they took it upon themselves to try to find some favorite song they wanted us to play they had NO CLUE how to find it. The lack of organization as far as non-DJs meant no one was messing with our music because it would be like someone trying to find something in Pepy's library.
In hand press days, books were of specific sizes, big folios, smaller quartos, then octavos, then duodecimos, than weeny ones. So you would have shelves to take the specific sizes, typically in uniform leather bindings.
If you can fit your books on shelves, you don't have enough books. I have too many for shelves and keep them in boxes that come up to my chest. Each box is numbered and the contents of all the boxes logged. The place looks like a warehouse, and parts appear messy, but I know where everything is.
The messiest person I ever knew was a (superb) GP. I'm surprised her PC still worked as there was about 3" of dust and pet dander for the processor fan to cut through. It's the first time I've felt the need to ask someone if they had a hoover before offering to clean their PC. If AI is any use, it should remind/beg users to give them a clean sometimes. There were crumbs in the bed and life, Jim in the hot tub.
Academics are notorious for having stuff everywhere, but knowing where every single slip of paper is. They are not paid enough for a big enough house, but have loads of stuff and projects to track.
The people I've met that have clutter everywhere, tend to be interesting people with lots happening. If you are interested in things, you tend to accumulate stuff. I really don't get the minimalist thing.
I'm also a big fan of having lots of pockets. I fill all of them too.
"(I) keep them (books) in boxes that come up to my chest. Each box is numbered and the contents of all the boxes logged"
You're my clone! I've got 1700 in my "books" spreadsheet with 12 columns of information, in 37 boxes, sorted by box, with macros to sort by author or publisher, and 400 maps in my "maps" spreadsheet, naturally sorted by mapping scale. :)
And I've still got hundreds of books in the bookcases that I haven't catalogued yet, I only did the ones stored in boxes as I was putting them into boxes in order to be able to find them without being able to just glance at the shelves.
"The books in Samuel Pepys' library in Magdalene College Cambridge are ordered by size."
Thank you for that "fun fact". That's how my hardbacks are shelved and it winds up my wife no end. Now I have a good excuse other than "it looks nice" :-)
"The books in Samuel Pepys' library in Magdalene College Cambridge are ordered by size. Apparently Pepys left strict instructions that this should be done."
By coincidence, some random bloke on the Internet (youtube in this case, lost buildings of Newcastle) and he just mentioned the old, now "lost" library and made a comment that libraries back then commonly shelved books by size because it looked nicer :-)
Not sure if most people organise by author entirely.
Ours (different peoples books on bookshelves) sorted by approximate subject area and then by Author or sometimes Subject (e.g. a book on Dali by Dawn Ades, would be under D for Dali, as although she is well known in her field, the "Art section" of bookshelves is mainly organised on the artist name*)
So very much like a library, by subject, and then by author.
* Though some of the books are big, so separate shelves for the more oversized (generally image heavy ones), so often have to check the "normal" height shelves & the "oversize"** shelves to check.
**Though our oversize is not as oversize as some peoples as sadly do not have e.g. an original elephant folio size copy of Audubon's Birds of America*** (though have been able to leaf / look through one many years ago, the Portland copy at Welbeck, before it was flogged for big money as it was on the tax exempt artworks list so us plebs had right to see it after jumping through hoops to get a visit organised & approved)
*** To add to complications, in our subject based shelving approach, our non original, non elephant but still quite big Audubon copy, is shelved in the wildlife -> birds oversize area rather than the art oversize area
Beat me to it...
Yes, it was Foyles of Charing Cross Rd. The computer dept was sorted by publisher... Microsoft here, Mcgraw Hill over there...
You took your book to the desk, you got a receipt, you took the receipt to the cash desk to pay, you returned to the desk with your stamped receipt and collected your book in a plain brown wrapper
It appears the practice wasn't Y2K compliant and was modernised after Christina Foyle died in 1999
In Blackwells in Oxford, the mathematical tome entitled 'The Atlas of Finite Groups' was originally located in the Geography section.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Atlas-of-Finite-Groups-by-John-H-Conway-J-G-Thackray/9780198531999
See also
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Atlas-of-Finite-Groups-by-Robert-Curtis-Robert-Wilson-London-Mathematical-Society/9780521575874
You need to be flogged, burned, drawn & quartered just as a 'start' !!!! <jk>
Books ... real dead-tree style information storage are SPECIAL ... never throw them away ... give them to someone who appreciates 'BOOKS' !!!
The feel, smell, the covers and the bindings are 'Wonderful' .....
The information inside is 'ALSO' of use !!!
I like books and treat them as works of art ... made by artisans through the ages ... never write/deface them or break the spines to make them 'lay flat or other abuses !!!'
Digital data is ephemeral and too easily lost ... either because of accidents, deletion or media formats becoming old/out of date.
I am old fashioned and still like books, for which I do not apologise !!!
A library is still a place of joy for me !!!
P.S.
I have and collect CD's & LP's. I like to 'OWN' my music and like to have music that has been recorded contemporaneously with the artist.
The old recording techniques / quality is part of the enjoyment.
I will accept 'GOOD' transfers to CD from LP's etc BUT do not like the constant 'upgrading' of old recordings by processing them to so called 'Digital' quality IF it changes the feel and character of the original performance.
Sometimes the original with all the 'faults' is BETTER !!!!
:)
Not just the Pepys library. The main Cambridge University library also arranges books on shelves in size order.
It does mean that to find any particular book, you need first to navigate the library's indexing system (admittedly much easier to do since it went online).
Back in the day, when I was a student, I got my University Library card, and made the mistake of showing up in a red sweater when I had the photo taken. The background was also red, so my undergraduate Library card showed a disembodied head.
Our screwups mostly don't kill people.
It's really pretty difficult for that to happen.
With a pharmacist, not so much.
And IT/software developers have done a REALLY shitty job of helping them do their jobs. The computer systems pharmacists have to use are TERRIBLE for the most part, software and hardware. The case in this article? A game small enough to be hidden slowed the computer down enough to be noticeable? That computer was ANCIENT JUNK, and should have been replaced years earlier.
As far as I'm concerned, that trainee was a piece of shit for going after the game instead of pushing for a new machine. Made corporate happy by making a pharmacist's job that much more of a miserable slog because now they couldn't blow off steam during breaks.
As a graybeard, I'd have pushed for a new computer, and leaving the old one in place but put it outside the firewall as a recreation computer - it's in a break room. I don't do pharmacies, but I'm about to start proactively recommending we do just that with old systems getting replaced in the medical offices I work with - move one or two to the break area, put them outside the firewall, and saying "have fun, do whatever you want on these - they're unsupported, so don't break them, it's on you now."
Quote
"Our screwups mostly don't kill people."
guess you've never done flight control software
Even down here with the robots, screw ups can be.... errr whats the word... exciting...... for all the wrong reasons. low flying lumps of metal anyone? or a nice fire because someone typed 1.0 instead of 0.1
In software creation I'd take an OCD laden perfectionist over any 9 other so called normal people... hell long enough creating software and you turn into a OCD laden perfectionist anyway.
guess you've never done flight control software
Or medical...
See the following posts about the Therac-25. While I wasn't involved with that (thank Ghod!), I have done my share of medical device programming. You keep that in the back of your mind with every line of code you write.
"Our screwups mostly don't kill people" writes a self-described "graybeard" who never heard of the Therac-25.
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25>:
"The Therac-25 was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which some patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors (also known as race conditions), it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury."
(Flame icon in recognition of the "mostly harmless" Therac.)
"They said "mostly". What fraction of software does Therac-25 represent?"
A small fraction. A vanishingly small fraction. Would YOU like to visit the victims' survivors and explain that their bereavements are statistically insignificant? Would YOU like to visit the families of drivers and bystanders killed or maimed by "Full Self-Driving" cars and tell them everything's fine because Ms. PacMan never hurt anyone? Or for a less gruesome example with far more victims, would YOU like to comfort the former owners of gone-with-the-hack cryptocurrency with "Hey--You've got your health; who needs money?" Back to one of those wars in Iraq: Would YOU like to explain to the victims of a non-intercepted SCUD that the systematic clock drift in the Patriot(?) missile systems was just a minor flaw?
Software in and of itself isn't perilous (maybe AI is, but I'm not qualified to judge). But software is written to be used, and the use context can be almost arbitrarily dangerous. That, in fact, was a root of the Therac disaster: A bit of code that had been used in lots and lots of devices and "hardly ever" made trouble suddenly found itself in control of a potentially lethal ray gun, and then the inadequacy of "mostly harmless" was tragically exposed. But you're right: "most" of the patients got the right treatments, and only a trifling few were killed and maimed.
I don't get your logic, at least this part:
Basis: The case in this article? A game small enough to be hidden slowed the computer down enough to be noticeable?
Conclusion: That computer was ANCIENT JUNK, and should have been replaced years earlier.
How much resource a game uses is not correlated with how easy it is to hide. By your statement, my best guess is that you decided it must have been small enough as in disk usage to hide, but disk usage has no effect on RAM or CPU usage once it's executed, which is the more likely cause behind slow performance, and could have been solved by simply showing people how to terminate it when they weren't playing it. That is if they even used disk usage to try to find it, which actually wouldn't be that easy. By the late 2000s, relatively large disks were available and somewhat common. Windows updates could use plenty of that, so a game could easily be a gigabyte or two and not showed up in a cursory search, and it probably could have been twenty gigabytes and not caused a disk full problem because this computer probably didn't generate lots of data in its normal job. If the disk usage guess is wrong, what made you conclude that being able to hide a program means it won't tax a computer?
Your suggestion about the reaction isn't clearly correct either. There are reasons not to have gaming computers at workplaces. Some jobs don't apply and have nonproductive downtime when playing a game is justifiable, although in those cases it's more common for employees to be allowed to bring in their own gaming hardware rather than using the employer's hardware for that. Other jobs don't have that time and have a normal reason to not approve of employees playing games instead of doing what they are employed to do. I'm not sure which one this is, but the reaction suggests that maybe it was the latter.
"three more keystrokes than before for one task,"
As a pharmacist: relatable.
Yes, but also relatable to many people who use a computer for almost anything. If those extra keystrokes are carried out 100's or 1000's per day, that time mounts up
It's one of the biggest problems with Windows auto-updates. Things change, and almost always take more key presses/mouse clicks than previously in the name of "efficiency"
The pharmacy desk was always positioned well back in the store.
On most of my urgent repair calls I knew the cause as soon as I entered the front door of the store.
There would be a smell like you get if someone left a pot of coffee on the burner over night.
Yet another coffee spill into the keyboard of the Lear Siegler ADM-1 in the Pharmacy.
Over and over again.
The Queen of crime writing, Dame Agatha herself was an apothecary making up prescriptions before standard doses were invented. She was apparently horrified when decimal SI units were mandated for use, taking over from the familiar grains etc. It was much easier to get a decimal point in the wrong place and kill someone with an over or under dose than with the old system of pounds, ounces, grains scruples etc.
"It divides a pound into 12 ounces, an ounce into 8 drachms, and a drachm into 3 scruples of 20 grains each."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apothecaries%27_system
Actually a valid reason for a non-decimal based measurements system. I wonder how many have died of a misplaced decimal point?
I would imagine that drawers in a general access area should not be considered limited access unless marked as such and/or secured. The fact that it could be opened and contained candy wrappers and soda cans indicates that it was neither, so the only one(s) that should have been carpeted were those installing the gaming software and dumping their rubbish in a drawer rather than the bin
That's now. A company I used to work at, way back when pron arrived every other line at a time, the same computer used to set up maintenance events for a global telecom was used for perusing the Pink Pantherette. The guy was eventually walked out for it when his boss stopped in one night to see how he was doing and saw why he was so keen to "pull" all-nighters. These days they'll have HR reps airdopped on your location to invite you to a meeting from which you won't return rn for much milder stuff.
Yes ... Assumptions BUT not unrealistic and NOT WILD Guesswork.
1. IF you are consuming Soda & Candy in a 'Break room' WHY hide the detritus ... Put it in the Bin which should be in a Break room. !!!
2. Yes ... you do Eat & Drink at your desk, IF allowed by the Company, BUT this was NOT someones desk.
3. The room was an occasional Training Room when NOT used as a Break Room. No reason for it to be treated like someones desk as per (2.) !!!
4. You hide it if you don't want it to be seen AND cannot/will not move from your position by the PC.
5. What endeavour typically requires you to NOT move from your location, by a PC, including when you are consuming Soda & Candies in a Break Room.
4. Easy guess is some form of Gaming. Typical scenario if you have kids at home and the clues then add up.
Apologies IF you are a TIDY Gamer and NEVER eat/drink at the PC ....
:)
It is a lot of assumptions, but it followed the scientific method:
Hypothesis: This might mean that people have been gaming on this computer.
Experiment: Is there a game on this computer?
Result: Yes, there is.
It would have worked the same way if the hypothesis was proven false. Only if the hypothesis was considered true without an attempt to prove it would that have been a problem.
"(Note: It was a Break room ....)"
Which usually have bins, often more than one, so it seems odd to "hide" the waste in the drawers. But then I sometimes work in offices and some office staff act as though they either live in pig-sties or feel they are "too important" to clean their own mess when at work.
If I'm not mistaken, unless the game was actually running in the background, how would it affect performance?
Mere presence in the file system shouldn't do anything other than take up space.
Given the environment, I assume this PC was running a Microsoft OS of one vintage or another and I haven't had a Microsoft-based machine on my desk since the latter days of DOS1, so please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing something obvious.
Please help me out here.
_____________
1 Really. Microsoft-free since the late 1980s.
You're not missing anything, this story is entirely made up like all of the stories presented like this. Not that it matters what I do, as anyone can claim anything, but as a Senior IT Specialist nothing about this stupid scenario tracks.
No, having a game installed with some ports open while not running will not affect anything, and the very first thing these supposed "grey beards" would have done is a simple netstat command to see if any odd activity is going out or coming in through anything other than the default ports. I'm so tired of these stupid "stories" clearly designed to illicit an emotional response from dumb readers who don't know any better.
Having submitted some "news" to a news site in the past, it's quite interesting to read the resulting story based on the submission. Accurate in all the details, but embellished fleshed out to fill the article space, possibly, if a diligent journo, with added research. It's made me ready news stories differently, especially if the story is by a journo I've not previously read before.
I have to say ..... Nope !!!!
You obviously have not experienced software being installed on a machine which had a FIXED standard build.
Simply by installing something that was not part of that standard build COULD change the way the PC ran.
I have seen this when certain standard files have been changed .... typically these are dll's that are part of the libraries that the 'official' software uses.
These changes can mean that software can malfunction because the libraries are incorrect.
This is not un-common, it is the reason why you build/test standard builds and why all work PC's in a company or Dept tend to be identical.
You can prove that the 'official' software runs and passes all standard tests with a specific build and consequently 'Lock it down'.
This used to happen a lot when people could install software because drives/usb ports etc were able to be accessed.
The scenario described is totally possible, particularly if the pharmacy was not technically aware !!!
I have seen PC's/Software malfunction because someone decided to install something without permission and 'BROKE' the build.
This COULD break something, in the background, that prevented the official software from working as intended ... this can include slow or intermittent running of software.
(Software crashing & recovering over & over without error messages)
This would be seen as the PC being 'SLOW' ....
All these things I have seen and not just on PC's !!!!!
:)
Of course, some facts or the entire thing here might be made up, but the story isn't implausible. Some computer games loaded themselves at startup or kept a program running after they closed in order to make the process of starting to play them faster because a lot of the resources had been loaded. These assumed that the user would return to them quickly enough to justify doing that, but it could use up lots of RAM. Networked games might also host a server, which would use other resources depending on who might use the server. That would be really easy to change, but not everyone knew they should do that.
And to the first reply to your question, it's also not implausible that it wouldn't have been easy to track down. Does this pharmacy sound like they had a lot of admins on standby to fix this? A lot of small businesses I've seen have exactly zero people who know what netstat does, let alone how to use it properly. For that matter, I've known an IT company whose primary business was serving such organizations and not all of their tech staff knew what netstat does. Some did and would use it when necessary, but for people whose primary task was explaining how not to break things, it wasn't considered required knowledge. Even to get there, we'd have to jump from "this computer is slow" to "the problem is something running on the network", which is not the most likely cause. I wouldn't find it at all surprising if they did things like defragment the hard drive or scan for malware in the hope that that would be the cause, only to find that it was still slow afterward.
Not exactly weird but my boss complained that his laptop had suddenly started misbehaving. I did ask if he could think of any events that might have triggered the problem but he was adamant there hadn't been anything. The bent and battered 9-pin D connector on the back (I did say it was some years ago) and the scratching told a different story - it didn't need much deduction to realise it had clearly been dropped onto a hard surface but as he was the boss I couldn't call him out on it.
Back when iphone development was still a thing; a new model came out and purely coincidently two days later one of our rather senior managers lost his phone. Clearly we smelt a rat and asked him for the number from the Police report; so he said he'd take another look at home. I'm sure you'll all be shocked to know it turned up...
The correct way to handle such bosses is to take along the item in question to them, start talking about cases where people have dropped or bumped things doing damage, subtely (but not so subtle they dont notice), tapping the obviously damaged areas. Talk about the normal process for such damages. And only then start talking about their new computer.
They now know that you know what really happened, but that you will play ball. This time, at least.
Admittedly, this only works if your at a certain level in the food chain. AND you should always make sure your boss knows about this, so that should the manager decide to become a repeat offender, then someone higher up can make the call of what to do with them...
I can think of a few ways a game could cause it to be slow.
When not running, it could be because it's taking up a lot of disk space or there were system config changes (uninstalling fixing the problem means it wasn't config)
When running, CPU/RAM/etc as well
Any greybeard who didn't check disk space, free ram, and cpu usage - when trying to figure out why a system is slow - should have retired long ago
"When not running, it could be because it's taking up a lot of disk space or there were system config changes (uninstalling fixing the problem means it wasn't config)
Possible. I've seen games install to a directory with very large numbers of files and add that to the start of the DOS PATH variable. That could make MS-DOS take longer to find the executable you need now. Not sure how much extra time, but maybe enough to be noticeable. I've also seen DOS games that add extra sound or CD device drivers and put the path to the CD at the start of the PATH variable too. That would certainly cause delays when searching the path for an executable, but not sure how or what could make the rest of the system slow down, except possibly by loading dos extenders or other stuff in the Himem areas leaving less base memory of the rest of the system.
Back in the early 1990's, my lunchtime Doom sessions with my design team caused the entire factory network to slow down to a crawl. The BOFH took a while to work out that it was us causing all the problems (made worse as we were in a separate building) but rather than get all stroppy with us, he simply bought a network switch which constrained the IPX traffic to our local subnet. He was a good guy, and we got along just fine after that.
In our workplace, a laboratory, the network was Token Ring. But we used a really long serial cable and slid one of the PCs along the bench a foot or two to get it to reach.
as an older (and wiser?) head, I look back on the indiscretions of my youth and think myself lucky I got away with it.
The IT team of an office I worked in 20+ years ago were chosen because they weren't much good at performing the office's core activities. Unfortunately their IT skills were equally poor, so I was part of an unofficial IT team that the staff preferred to use.
Once I saw one "graybeard" backing up a database on a Windows 95 PC ( 20+ years ago remember) with the intention of transferring it to a Windows 98 machine. Took him a couple of hours doing something I knew wouldn't work. I transferred the database the next day in a few minutes via a serial cable I'd brought from home.
Another time all four were discussing an error message they didn't seem to understand as I happened to be passing. I ejected the floppy disk and pressed the any key without breaking step (20+years ago remember).
20 years ago, Windows 98 wasn't even a teenager and still in widespread use. And not surprising that that people were still migrating from Win'95 to 98. Bear in mid the next "upgrade" for most was not W2000, but WinMe, which most tried to put off and/or never do. XP was released within the rough time frame the OP mentioned, but for some that meant buying a new PC to support it, and this is industry we are talking about, not known at the time for upgrading on a whim to the bleeding edge, what with many still being in a mndset of PCs being an expensive capital expenditure and wanting to sweat the assets :-)
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Every year, at my kids primary school, we had this presentation by the teacher on what would be the year's objectives, what activities were planned, what were the contact numbers, etc. Being on my 3rd kid there, I already knew it by heart, but whatever, dates or activities might change, so I went. Before the meeting/presentation started, the teacher was visibly struggling with the computer that would be used. As I was apparently the only "IT savvy" parent there, I was "volunteered" to try and fix the presentation. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, the powerpoint app kept closing randomly, or the window moving around without any sense. So I ended up having to sit by the computer, in charge of reopening powerpoint or just moving the window back to full screen when needed.
As the presentation started, it finally dawned on me that it wasn't being projected - the whiteboard was a new, electronic one, working as a screen mirroring the pc. That is when I got up, and telling the teacher not to mind me, went up to the whiteboard, and moved away the collar with paper butterflies that was hanging on the top right corner of the whiteboard, and was getting thrown against it semi-randomly, by the air pushed by an oscilating floor fan...
Issue solved.
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