Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.
He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.
I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.
That’s exactly what it’s for. If you use it commercially without paying winrar will come for you, but as a personal use case it’s just ad ware. You get the product, and deal with their ad every boot. You could pay for it, but it probably the least annoying ad on the internet right now.
I remember hearing that they have gone for companies before, but that was a while ago and, ya know, just something I read that may or may not be particularly accurate.
I occasionally get texts offering to buy a house I used to live in. Which was in a state 800 miles from where I’m living now. Which I lived in for six months almost 30 years ago. And in which I just rented an apartment, the unit of which is part of the address they include in the text message. For bonus points, this house was torn down years ago.
“Hi so to save us some time I’ve restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one…”
It helps too. I lost internet, did two full reboots of the modem and router. Nothing. Called support. He walked me through the process of rebooting the modem and router. It worked that time.
My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples’ Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.
The number of times I’ve had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I’m on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious…
They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn’t really save anything. I’ve had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.
They don’t need to, they already use overprovisioning for bandwidth.
It’s only in rare cases where the backend is so old and limited that it only supports a specific maximum number of active clients that they do that, and I’ve only heard about it in rural areas and similar places
I spent months trying to tell my ISP that their side of a DHCP transaction wasn’t giving me my IPv6 address, being so specific as to send them the exact offending packets but it wasn’t until I took my entire network apart, unboxed their shitbox router and plugged that in that they would believe me.
One day my MIL’s Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.
They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said “Let’s connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works.”
Dude looked at me like I had two heads. “It doesn’t work like that.”
I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac’s public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.
Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.
If I had a nickel for every time I was troubleshooting with a friend and discovered they thought turning the monitor off and on again was “rebooting the computer” I’d be depressingly wealthy.
*Shuts the laptop lid and opens it.
“Ok! It’s restarted”
IT person: “Well that was certainly quick. Are you sure you restarted it?”
Person: *Feels smug about how they were able to restart quicker than most people.
Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I’m not new to Linux, I’ve been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.
Installing arch itself wasn’t that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn’t recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn’t want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.
I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn’t install dhcpcd and I don’t know how to use network manager! No internet, great!
In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when… The boot menu didn’t recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?
“Oh it doesn’t appear… Wait, what’s this? No boot partition found? Oh crap…”
Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they’re called. I deleted GRUB.
Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and… It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.
Usually, I would’ve installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.
I don’t know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)
I like to imagine an IT person telling someone that story to see whether they understand it or get a stroke, as a way to check if they were telling the truth about being good with computers and having tried everything, or something.
I actually tried that right after the screenshot. It responded with something along the lines of “Im sorry, I can’t share information that would break Amazon’s tos”
programmer_humor
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