Aggravating stories from tech illiterates

[dickfour]

I think the worst of the worst tech illiterates are the smart phone tablet crowd who think because they can press their thumb on an app or post to face book a photo of lunch they are somehow tech gurus.

 

[ouch123]

Not too many things bug me from tech illiteracy, but there is one thing that gets me every time: the person who thinks he's tech-savvy and as a result, makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on his computer to get anything done. Example? I've had someone come up to me with a $3000 computer (purchased retail of course) asking me for help on why his sound doesn't work. He has, however, protected his computer with a thumb scanner, so I can't logout or restart the computer unless he's there with me. I get it working and send him off on his over-priced computer that he uses to send email and watch videos. A few months later, I receive a call from some stranger asking me if I've ever worked on this guy's computer. I say "Yes I have. Why?" He responds, "Well, he protected his BIOS with a password, but doesn't remember what it was. I was wondering if you knew it?" After a moment of silence and me strongly resisting the urge to face-palm, "No, sorry, I don't know it." (;;-_-)

 

[Foxi4]

Not too many things bug me from tech illiteracy, but there is one thing that gets me every time: the person who thinks he's tech-savvy and as a result, makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on his computer to get anything done. Example? I've had someone come up to me with a $3000 computer (purchased retail of course) asking me for help on why his sound doesn't work. He has, however, protected his computer with a thumb scanner, so I can't logout or restart the computer unless he's there with me. I get it working and send him off on his over-priced computer that he uses to send email and watch videos. A few months later, I receive a call from some stranger asking me if I've ever worked on this guy's computer. I say "Yes I have. Why?" He responds, "Well, he protected his BIOS with a password, but doesn't remember what it was. I was wondering if you knew it?" After a moment of silence and me strongly resisting the urge to face-palm, "No, sorry, I don't know it." (;;-_-)

Remove CMOS battery for effect. Protecting the BIOS with a password is silly, unless it's for child protection.

 

[Gahars]

Another from the mother:

She was taking a seminar, since the credits she earned could go towards boosting her income (plus, the school she works at offers you a full refund if you get a B or above in the course), and had to type up a 20 or so page essay. Well, 4 pages in and she accidentally deletes all of her progress. She finds me and asks if I can help, so I say "Sure".

Well, the document was still there; it was just completely blank. I asked her to explain what had happened, and she told me that while she was typing, she accidentally Select All'd the document and hit delete. Freaking out, she hit the Save button to "save" her work.

There was no way to redo or retrieve the stuff at all; I had to let her down gently.

 

[BORTZ]

Oh man, the day i had to teach my mother what the difference between "Save" and "Save As" was like the 3rd or 4th ring in Dante's Inferno.

In high school I had a friend who worked with the school news program. They all had a shared account that they would all (the newsies) long into. Of course, because of the anonymity, you could dick around and do what you want. So eventually they had to set up "per user" specific logins which broke the connection to the news media folders on the server. So these computers are middle of the road for like 2006 or 7 and running XP with Citrix for network support. My friend was tasked with getting the media off the server and into a new folder that the per user logins could all access. So he couldnt just move it all at once, so after downloading it, he makes a new folder and selects the folders from his harddrive. We all know windows transfer times are a bit wonky so it went from 5 minutes, to 5 hours, and up to about 2 and a half days. it futtered around 12 hours to 3 days for like a minute or two so he leaves while the computer works.

In a different class, he had to log into citrix to get a paper. He cant log in. No one can log in.

After class he goes back to check the drive. 3 days to transfer. And the progress bar hadnt really moved.

AT ALL.

It turns out that he managed to crash the school's server, school wide. No one could log in, get shiz or work on the network, even the teachers. The elementary school that is like a half mile away? Also down. haha

 

[Sicklyboy]

Friend gave me computer to fix. "Nick, my pc is sending out spam emails with my Yahoo account, WAT DO OMG" "CAN YOU FIX IT I'LL PAY YOU."

Told her I'd be done with it by tonight, haven't touched it, haven't had time. She moves in 10 days, too, as it turns out!

Look on back of computer, video outputs - VGA.

Couldn't find my VGA cable.

Once I found it, I programmed an activity into my Harmony 700 to switch my TV to VGA input. It's the bottom one.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

A story from the distant past, a friend of mine was experimenting with creating custom packets and in general doing some TCP/IP hacking. With out going into the gory details he had managed to get Earthlinks backbone network to DDOS itself (This was back before DDOS was invented....) was on the news since it knocked something like 300,000 people offline for something like 8 hours and required a reboot of eathlinks entire backbone in order to flush the packet from their network (it contained instructions to echo the packet and pass it along the network essentially a TCP/IP virus with the only intent was to copy itself and send the copy along the backbone.... went into a massive replication flood.... was pretty funny the packet would hit one server get copied and sent to the next one up and down the network each pass making more copies. Shut down a server to "fix" it and bring it back up just to get flooded again....)

Nasty little packet that all networks should be pretty much immune to these days since most networks filter out spoofed header information....

Amazing what a few bytes in the right place can do.... Needless to say that once they passed the whole online cyber terrorism laws that my friend completely stopped working on funny jokes like that one.

 

[Sicklyboy]

I would love to know what she downloaded to screw up this computer so bad. Not only do I find shit like BearShare and other obviously named "Make my PC better while giving MOAR ADS AND MALWARE" programs and using 2 Antivirii (Avast (as per my recommendation) and CrapAffee (kill me)), Avast has gotten to the point where only the GUI will run, service won't start nor will it update. This ought to be fun.

(inb4raulpica)

 

[ouch123]

Remove CMOS battery for effect. Protecting the BIOS with a password is silly, unless it's for child protection.

I didn't know you could reset the BIOS that way. Cool.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Remove CMOS battery for effect. Protecting the BIOS with a password is silly, unless it's for child protection.

I didn't know you could reset the BIOS that way. Cool.

Yep, did that all the time with people who thought they were being "smart" when they sold their PC to me.

 

[Zetta_x]

I swear to god I had this:

"I thought you upgraded my computer to windows 7 ... could this virus have reverted back to windows xp?"

We did not upgrade her to windows 7; she had xp with one of those security sphere variant malware. Where did she get that we updated her to 7?

 

[loco365]

Friend installing a torrented Maya 7 (Not really tech-illiterate but still funny) :

[12:32:19 AM] Bela: "Aladdin Device Driver is not installed."
[12:32:24 AM] Bela: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT
[12:32:35 AM] Team Fail: idk
[12:32:38 AM] Team Fail: got the same error
[12:32:41 AM] Team Fail: so I need to see why
[12:32:45 AM] Bela: why is aladdin here
[12:32:49 AM] Team Fail: loll
[12:32:57 AM] Bela: is his magic carpet going to come and take me to persia
[12:33:05 AM] Team Fail: lololololol
[12:33:12 AM] Bela: and that's where I do my 3d modeling
[12:33:40 AM] Bela: goddamn is it ever going to be done
[12:33:47 AM] Bela: it's just a hell of new status bars
[12:33:53 AM] Bela: configuring
[12:33:56 AM] Bela: initializing
[12:33:59 AM] Bela: writing registry values
[12:34:02 AM] Bela: unpacking
[12:34:04 AM] Bela: unboxing
[12:34:12 AM] Bela: cock-blocking you from using this product

I almost died laughing at the last part.

 

[Lanlan]

My mom's friend was gonna give me a computer, but it was running really slow. So I format it and reinstall Windows XP, it works like a charm. The friend's husband proceeds to tell me that I can't have the computer because it has "passwords stored on it" for important stuff. Despite all of us telling him that there's none of his old data on the computer due to me formatting it, he won't let up. Sadly I didn't get the computer but I did manage to create a user account with a password

 

[Arm73]

I got another one.
A few months ago I was having dinner in a restaurant, and next to us there was a group of 4 (very) old people discussing computers !
I wish I could have recorded their conversation, it would have been very good material for this topic, but anyhow, at one point one of them said that he recently purchased a new computer, and that was a MAC,
And the reason for it was that his old PC took eight minutes to start, 8 minutes ! While his shiny new Mac only took 30 seconds !
I wanted to turn around and tell him : What do you think it's gonna happen if you buy a new PC ?

 

[1234turtles]

Grandma "what's the internet"
Grandma "can't you get computers with internet already up there"

 

[narutofan777]

my mom asked me where the search bar was.

 

[1stClassZackFair]

I'll never understand how people get so many toolbars. Do they read nothing?

Toolbars for web browsers should be made illegal all around the world, there should be a global cursade to destroy them unless they're downloadable extensions available in their corresponding App Stores so that only those who actually want them install them without fearing that they'll get one after breezing through an installation paying attention only to where the "OK", "Next" or "Finish" buttons are.

Relevant:

Spoiler

If I ever wanted my browser to be s*it, I'd just switch to IE.

That's how the pc's in my school are. Even if you disable the toolbars they'll be there the next day so yesterday I told the computer lab head to install Google Chrome on them instead and he said "I like Internet Explorer because it's easy to use". Then I said "why don't you try safari from apple?,it's very simplistic." He said "I don't think the computers have enough space to install that." Then I looked at all the computer's specs and they each had around 290GB of storage,dual core processors,and 4 gigs of ram, then i just facepalmed and left.

 

[Deleted-236924]

I'll never understand how people get so many toolbars. Do they read nothing?

Toolbars for web browsers should be made illegal all around the world, there should be a global cursade to destroy them unless they're downloadable extensions available in their corresponding App Stores so that only those who actually want them install them without fearing that they'll get one after breezing through an installation paying attention only to where the "OK", "Next" or "Finish" buttons are.

Relevant:

Spoiler

If I ever wanted my browser to be s*it, I'd just switch to IE.

That's how the pc's in my school are. Even if you disable the toolbars they'll be there the next day so yesterday I told the computer lab head to install Google Chrome on them instead and he said "I like Internet Explorer because it's easy to use". Then I said "why don't you try safari from apple?,it's very simplistic." He said "I don't think the computers have enough space to install that." Then I looked at all the computer's specs and they each had around 290GB of storage,dual core processors,and 4 gigs of ram, then i just facepalmed and left.

I think the fact you suggested Safari would be enough to make a post on this thread.

 

[Sicklyboy]

I forgot about this thread.

So, here's my latest.

I don't remember if I mentioned it in this thread, can't be arsed to look back a page, but friend messages me on FB "Nick, computer is sending out spam emails through my Yahoo account and I am getting delivery failure messages from the mailer daemon. What do I do?"

Give her the runaround "Disconnect internet/turn it off so it can't do any more harm, change your passwords from a known clean device, etc". "How do I fix it?" "Give it to someone who can clean it for you." "Do you do that?" "Yep."

Gives me the computer, I decide to try my hand at detection and removal without just reinstalling Windows like I usually do, give myself a bit of a challenge for once. After a bunch of hours put into it, it's clean now, running a hell of a lot better than it was when I got it, too. "I removed a bunch of problem stuff including BearShare, which is more or less as big a security concern as Limewire is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your computer got its malware infection through something you got off of it." "Yeah I think that's where it came from." /noshit

Bring it back, we had never discussed any pay except that there would be pay involved. I was fully prepared to say a price, but she says "Let me go get the money." Brings back money, I put it in my pocket (I don't like counting pay in front of people...) and I go leave, count it in my car.

I made a wallet-stuffing $35.

 

[Sterling]

I forgot about this thread.

So, here's my latest.

I don't remember if I mentioned it in this thread, can't be arsed to look back a page, but friend messages me on FB "Nick, computer is sending out spam emails through my Yahoo account and I am getting delivery failure messages from the mailer daemon. What do I do?"

Give her the runaround "Disconnect internet/turn it off so it can't do any more harm, change your passwords from a known clean device, etc". "How do I fix it?" "Give it to someone who can clean it for you." "Do you do that?" "Yep."

Gives me the computer, I decide to try my hand at detection and removal without just reinstalling Windows like I usually do, give myself a bit of a challenge for once. After a bunch of hours put into it, it's clean now, running a hell of a lot better than it was when I got it, too. "I removed a bunch of problem stuff including BearShare, which is more or less as big a security concern as Limewire is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your computer got its malware infection through something you got off of it." "Yeah I think that's where it came from." /noshit

Bring it back, we had never discussed any pay except that there would be pay involved. I was fully prepared to say a price, but she says "Let me go get the money." Brings back money, I put it in my pocket (I don't like counting pay in front of people...) and I go leave, count it in my car.

I made a wallet-stuffing $35.

How many hours did you put into it? I'd have at least charged 50 bucks for that cleaning, plus some if it took more time than it should have. At 5 hours of time spent, you're only getting 10 bucks an hour. Any more than that and you're losing money.