Aggravating stories from tech illiterates

[BORTZ]

So I know we all have parents, relatives, grandparents, and non tech savvy coworkers. I want to hear the stories that make you grit your teeth in hate for their general computer illiteracy.
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Like the day when my mom learned she would copy and paste shiz? She didnt leave the computer for a week.
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"Why do i have to pay for internet when I have to plug the computer into the wall for power?"
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Or one time my dad was playing this card game on the computer. The computer got slower as he played it, over the course of like a year or so. Eventually the computer (a Compaq, with Windows ME :barf it kept overheating and we didnt know that. So we took it to the computer repair man and it developed hairline cracks in the motherboard because of the overheating. On the way home, my dad got on my case for installing so many games on it. Mind i was twelve and i had like 2 games. Sega Smash Pack 2 and Age of Empires 2.
He said the computer crashed because I had too much installed on it and that all the weight of my games cracked the motherboard.
WTF dad. So later i when we got a new computer i saw him playing the card game again.
This went on for a few years and eventually i started downloading things. One day i checked when my download went, into the download folder. Along with it i found the other few things ive downloaded, as well as OVER 500 COPIES OF THE CARD GAME MY DAD PLAYED.
Every time he played it, he would download it. Every effing time. Shizzz man.
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Me:Hey emily, i didnt know you had a Wii.
Emilyh yeah, but something is wrong with it.
Me: I can fix it probably (being real proud of myself and my GBAtemp database.
Emily: Oh yeah it wont play DVDs.
Me:...
(i know the wii can play them, but it doesnt do it out of the box.)
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Share yours. I find these hilarious.

OH and everyone that posts here get a like from me.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I could probably write a book. If I wasn't so busy watching Doctor Who right now I'd add a ton, but for now I'll just stick with the ever popular:

"I need to buy a new computer, my internet is way too slow"

 

[BORTZ]

I could probably write a book. If I wasn't so busy watching Doctor Who right now I'd add a ton, but for now I'll just stick with the ever popular:

"I need to buy a new computer, my internet is way too slow"

Please please do. Im excited to read these, they might be my favorite thing ever.

 

[Alexrose]

Back in school when I lived with my parents, my mum always used to snap at me for alt tabbing.

YOU'RE NOT HELPING, YOU'RE JUST FLIPPING EVERYWHERE.

And when you fix someone's computer and they uninstall the antivirus you put on and download Bonzai Buddy or some shit then claim you broke it and it worked just fine before you did anything.

My other housemate for someone computer literate is a real dick too. I built PCs for everyone in my house and 1 component was faulty and he's all like:

BUILDING PCS IS STUPID. I'D MUCH RATHER HAVE A PROFESSIONAL DO IT. THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN WHEN YOU BUY A PREMADE PC, AND THEY BREAK ALL THE TIME.

I can't reason with him.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

I could probably write a book. If I wasn't so busy watching Doctor Who right now I'd add a ton, but for now I'll just stick with the ever popular:

"I need to buy a new computer, my internet is way too slow"

My aunts and uncles do that all the time. They also buy a new computer if it gets slow altogether. I have asked them, instead of throwing out their PC that they give it to me. I haven't told them that I reformat them and resell them. That's a fact I'd rather leave concealed. If they choose to be ignorant even after trying to show them how to fix the problem, the least they could do is let me profit from their ignorance



Anyway, another exmaple:

My mother asked me how I could fit all those movies on the TV (referring to Netflix). "Doesn't all those movies take up hard drive space on the TV?"

 

[Foxi4]

I know the problem of re-downloaded files very well - my mum does it quite often when she gets photos over e-mail. Since she doesn't exactly know where the default downloads folder is or how to find it, she simply re-downloads them every single time. Then again, I do that with my time table for Uni - I'm a lazy ass. The difference is that I periodically clean up after myself. I also know the "too many installs, my PC is slow now!" issue - pops up every now and then.

We usually get to the point where my family members say "you're never going to use my computer again!", however in a matter of days there's meant to be an issue of some sort, to which they gladly sing the song of their people, called "Can you fix it, please?", to which I respond "Sure.", fix it and then use the computer yet again for an undisclosed amount of time, returning to the starting point of the adventure.

Another funny one is "what are all those icons on the desktop?", which is a recurring question whenever I install something. "It's my game, leave it." usually ends up with either the "You're addicted to the computer!" or the "You're putting junk on the computer!" arguments, but seeing that they both fly right over my head, I have no beef with those.

I also regret ever telling my mom "if the internet doesn't work, restart the router". Our old ISP had DHCP issues and every now and then, the adress lease would expire, but we would not get the IP re-assigned, resulting in no internet access. This was a way to fix it... however, now it's the go-to way to fix *any* internet issue. In fact, my mother often claims to know that I don't know what I'm talking about, the internet surely is "there" and all we have to do is reboot the router, when the internet is clearly dead.

 

[FAST6191]

I am sure we all have a few thousand of these

In very recent times

"please restore microsoft works" (this after not being able to save and send a document in a format anybody else could reasonably manage)

 

[shoyrumaster11]

My mother asked me how I could fit all those movies on the TV (referring to Netflix). "Doesn't all those movies take up hard drive space on the TV?"

What?

 

[Sheimi]

"Want to know why the internet is going slow? Go delete your email and it will go faster" wat

 

[Clarky]

I will have to try my best to remember some...know there are plenty tucked away in my memory

one that comes to mind was over 10 or so years ago when the DC was doing its rounds, I recall one part about the DC I quite enjoyed the idea of was Bleemcast (a PSOne emu for the DC for those who don't know) and eventually a boot disc for GranTurismo 2 was released which amongst other things allowed the game to load quicker, run at twice the normal resolution, basically a few enchancments which even went beyond what a PS2 which had built in PSOne compatibility built into could do. Anywho after paying the sum of £5 for said disc it eventually arrives and my brother and a few friends are excited to see Gran Turismo 2, a game we have all enjoyed in each others company many times to be "improved", so anyone after an amusing boot screen which states how Sega doesn't endorse Bleem and they have made it without a license from Sega we swap discs over and heads get strached by people when they are suprised that GT2 doesn't look like either Gran Turismo 3 or Metropolis Street Racer. After spending a good amount of time explaining how emulation works we ended up playing that bad boy for a number of hours

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Ok ok, another one I thought of that's no so much a thing someone says but a thing someone does.

At my school, whenever there's a problem with the PCs the tech guys just reinstall Windows XP instead of bothering to fix it, even if it's something stupid such as...oh, I dunno, putting something in the Startup folder on some PCs. Yeah, they actually did that, and yeah, my school actually pays them to do that.

 

[Depravo]

I have all this to come yet. I recently donated my old computer to my aged mother.

 

[Foxi4]

My other housemate for someone computer literate is a real dick too. I built PCs for everyone in my house and 1 component was faulty and he's all like:
BUILDING PCS IS STUPID. I'D MUCH RATHER HAVE A PROFESSIONAL DO IT. THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN WHEN YOU BUY A PREMADE PC, AND THEY BREAK ALL THE TIME.
I can't reason with him.

He's right - PC's in stores are made by brownies and chip fairies - the components are never touched by filthy men. Their insides are always properly cliped in, they always have proper ventillation and they're never made of sub-par components.

 

[yusuo]

I dont really have anything too annoying, just the usual shit like when i fix someones pc and stick new anti virus, programs etc on and then later down the line shit goes wrong, i inevitably get the blame as it was all my fault, Weird cause I have all the same shit on my laptop and i've never had any viruses/malware/problems.

At the end of the day it comes down to regular maintenance, I run Advanced System Care and Diskeeper Defragmentor once a week to keep everything running nice and smoothly

 

[Castiel]

Me to my brother (because it's so easy to annoy him when I act stupid when it comes to technology):
"Our Xbox is running out of space and being all slow like. Should I go out and buy a new motherboard?"
I know the Xbox isn't a computer but I figure this counts

 

[BORTZ]

Oh man i am SOOO excited watch this thread populate. I LOVE these stories.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep sharing and I will read EVERY one.

 

[Arm73]

Well back in the 80's, I needed to connect my computer ( a Spectrum ) to the living room old CRT TV when I wanted to use it, and every time something was wrong with the TV ( like the power supply burned out or the TV tuner wasnt working ) and we had to call a technician to fix it, automatically it was my fault because I was playing too much with my computer !!
Or just in general, I wasn't supposed to use the computer for more then one hour or the TV would break !!

 

[Clarky]

a recent enough one just came up, although its hardly funny. My brother who in recent years who has learned how to turn a computer on in recent years has tried to set up a media centre (unsucessfuly) and he phoned up me up to tell me about this great deal he found on a "wireless portable hard drive". After straching my head for the best part of 10 minutes it suddenly dawned on me he had ended up buying a NAS server, safe to say after about a week he ended up trying to sell it to my dad because he couldn't figure it out, and tried to sell it on the strengh of "you could store all your e-books on it", yep, all 2TB's worth of ebooks....

 

[shoyrumaster11]

Hmmm.... For me, it would definitely be the teachers in my school. They have computer problems all over the place! A few examples would include sound problems when connecting their cheapo laptops to an electric whiteboard! They never seem to have any luck with the sound! Like they don't select the driver that the electric whiteboard relies on for sound. Another would have to be the witeboards and their video feature! It almost always seems to glitch! My final example was when a video codec was being installed but, after that it didn't work. Leik, whats installing it TWICE going to do?!

 

[Sheimi]

Parents: Go delete all your stuff off the computer and it will run faster
Me: Ok (transfers all my stuff to my flash drive) and deletes it off the computer and uninstalled all my programs
*few hours later after not using it and it's off*
Parents: It still runs super slow, your fucking grounded.
Me: If you put more RAM into it, it might run faster
Parents: It's not the RAM, it's your files on it.

So, a few years later after I knew more about computers, the problem was the RAM. So I went out and bought more RAM for the old desktop computer and maxed out how much RAM you can put in it and now it's my gaming computer. (It was custom built from what I knew and it costed over $1,500)