Computer Follies

WarAdvocat · Post by **WarAdvocat** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 6:45 am

I swear, before being allowed to operate a computer...you should be obligated to pass an exam on basic computer knowledge...

One of the girls at work has a computer at home that's running slowly, and asked me to take a look at it. I figure it's probably virused, so I am all prepared to run the restore disks and get some easy nice guy points.

I get the thing (an HP pavilion) home and start it up. It takes forever to load windows (It literally sat on the HP screen startup screen for 2-3 minutes or more), but it finally loads Windows. I start poking around though, and it's running fine. It was actually pretty snappy for a piece of crap 750 MHZ Duron running a 5-year-old install of WinME.

With 56 megs of RAM...

of course the freaking thing runs slow... heh.

I haven't even scanned it for virii at this point, I spent the whole night snickering. Every time I walked by that computer <snicker>.

Pun · Post by **Pun** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 6:51 am

Plebeian · Post by **Plebeian** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 7:49 am

*unwraps a Snickers*

Or wait, you meant the other kind, right.....

56MB of RAM, those were the days. The computer I used for the first half of my college career (before my 333MHz iMac with 512MB) had 48MB. But it was a 16MHz 68030-based Mac, so what do you expect, it was about 8 years old at the time.

You do really wonder why she started complaining about it now. Should've been like that forever, unless of course some of the RAM blew up. Maybe it's got a whole 96MB in sticks, but 40MB of chips fell off or got zapped by aliens or something.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 12:55 pm

I sneer at your 56Megs! mY FIRST pc HAD 8 Kilobytes of RAM.

To this day; the fastest booting PC I've ever owned. The OS was on an 8KB ROM!

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 2:11 pm

Just today I had to go over to one of the computers because she had 4 toolbar thingies loaded up in Internet Explorer and was complaining to me about it. When I asked her which one does she use she goes I dont know, but hit back a couple of times to point out the search bar at the top of the MSN homepage. When I asked how or why she installed all of those toolbars she gave me another I dont know. So I disabled them and she goes ahh much better.

And thats the story of the 3+ years ive been working at that place.

The worst part is the idiot boss does not pay me enough for the random IT crap that I do over there. Thank God for my second job at Motorola...

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 6:30 pm

these are the same idiots the forward aol chain letters and have pr0n dialers on their systems!

WarAdvocat · Post by **WarAdvocat** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 8:16 pm

Heh not a virus in sight guys.

So anyhow, at work today I got to discussing the computer with her. She said not only is it slow, but the sound doesn't work.

Big Surprise... I just hooked up a pair of speakers and it seems to be working fine...I wonder what happened there? Did the adapter come unplugged? Or the speakers? Or maybe it was in the wrong jack? LOL.

I'm gonna drop some old SDRAM I have laying around in it and include pictures of how to hook it back up...

WarAdvocat · Post by **WarAdvocat** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 1:11 pm

Well I finally figured out why the "sound doesn't work". There's an SB live AND onboard sound.. the onboard is disabled.

LOL easiest fix...ever.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 4:25 pm

Nope, not quite the easiest fix ever...
Real phone conversation:
"It isn't working."
"Did you push the power switch?"
"No."
"Push the power switch"
"Ok its working now! Thanks."
"Buh bye" <click>

Top Gun · Post by **Top Gun** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 4:44 pm

Speaking of computer stories...

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 10:34 pm

Heh, I had a similar experience.

This weekend while I was camping at the NACO/Thousand Trails camp outside of Hohenwald, TN, I got volunteered to fix a computer for a family member. She complained about her gateway kicking her off every now and then while she was on the internet. I figured it would be a simple fix. Little did I know that this would turn into a day and a half affair. This machine is an AMD classic 850Mhz (thats Slot-A for those of you not in the know) with 64MB of RAM running XP Home. This machine had NEVER been defragged and apparently never been cleaned in six years. To top it all off, the previous owner was a smoker and smoked near the computer. She had taken it to Best Buy to have it cleaned for $35, but apparently the morons failed to notice the severely clogged fans. The processor fan was so clogged that it failed to turn at all. So I took it outside (I'm not cleaning something like that in a house....) and cleaned off the fans. That fixed the restart issue, however when I scanned the machine for anything out of the order. I found 40 copies of CoolWebSearch. Not instances, COPIES. No wonder the damn thing was so slow (on-top of the lack of memory). I didn't have any internet access where I was (I took it with me) so I had to nuke them manually. (Where I was staying was back in the woods where there wasn't even cell service so I couldn't use the laptop to get online.) All I had to work with was the standard windows tools, and oudated (as in out of the box w/o any updates) Adaware 1.06 and Spybot 1.3. What a pain in the ass that was. After I got it clean, I let it defrag (which took a couple hours), cleaned up what I could, slapped SP2 on it and took it back. I showed her how to update windows, how to use and update both spybot and adaware, and how to defrag the machine. I also introduced her to Firefox, so she hopefully won't get bit by IE security flaws. Next time I'm up there, I'll throw in some spare dimms so she won't be stuck with such a slow machine. I did all of this.....FOR FREE. So, thats how my weekend went.

Thenior · Post by **Thenior** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 11:11 am

Wanna work on my File Server Linux problems for free please?

Richard Cranium · Post by **Richard Cranium** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 11:36 am

all for the love of computers!

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:29 pm

Thenior wrote:Wanna work on my File Server Linux problems for free please?

Ha ha.

The only reason why I did that for free was because she's family, and has no source of income. Otherwise that would've been a minimum of $100.

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 11:05 pm

I had a client flag me down in the hallway last week adn ask me to look at her laptop. She said it would start but shutdown right away. She also said it was plugged in. So I take a look, and try it once, the laptop starts, but shutsdown right away. I then reach over and turned on the powerbar (laughing hard inside). The battery was dead so it couldn't boot by itself.