Aggravating stories from tech illiterates

[Densetsu]

A friend asked me to take a look at her laptop.
Me: "Sure, what's wrong?"
Her: "I think there's a virus on it."
Me: "What makes you think that?"
Her: "My laptop's been slow for a long time. Like, reeeeeallly slow."
So I had me a look-see, and immediately noticed that her laptop was badly in need of a Windows Update and an AVG virus definitions update.
Me: "When was the last time you updated AVG or did a Windows Update?"
Her: "Oh I never update those things. I haven't updated for 2 years."
Me: "What!?"
Her: "Yeah, I just close the update message thingies whenever they pop up."
Me: "Why!?" D:
Her: "Because it always takes forever, and my computer slows down if I update while I'm working. And after it updates, I hate having to restart my laptop while I'm in the middle of something. My computer is already slow enough as it is."

Spoiler: Me:

 

[Sicklyboy]

A friend asked me to take a look at her laptop.
Me: "Sure, what's wrong?"
Her: "I think there's a virus on it."
Me: "What makes you think that?"
Her: "My laptop's been slow for a long time. Like, reeeeeallly slow."
So I had me a look-see, and immediately noticed that her laptop was badly in need of a Windows Update and an AVG virus definitions update.
Me: "When was the last time you updated AVG or did a Windows Update?"
Her: "Oh I never update those things. I haven't updated for 2 years."
Me: "What!?"
Her: "Yeah, I just close the update message thingies whenever they pop up."
Me: "Why!?" D:
Her: "Because it always takes forever, and my computer slows down if I update while I'm working. And after it updates, I hate having to restart my laptop while I'm in the middle of something. My computer is already slow enough as it is."

Spoiler: Me:

My grandpa doesn't update his laptop because he's afraid of things changing. I don't even bother helping him with it anymore because I know what I'm going to end up saying to him.

 

[Sheimi]

When I started coding my own games in Sega Genesis coding (which I taught myself). So one person in my family thought I was hacking the internet when I was making my own game for the Sega Genesis hardware. I don't know why I laughed that day.

Friend: Can you help me out?
Me: Sure, what's the issue?
Friend: I extracted a game and there is no iso
Me: Hmmm....Do you see a bunch of rar files?
Friends: Yes and I do not have a program to extract the rar file
Me: *facepalm* just use 7zip
Friend: ooooh, yeah I forgot that I can use it.

 

[mysticwaterfall]

Back in high school, one of the secrataries said she needed a new computer because hers kept saying it was out of space. I asked if she had ever deleted/backed up anything. She looked at me all amazed "You can do that? Wow!'
---
About 2 years ago, I fixed somebodies computer who literally had 2 inches of toolbars on her IE. It was so ridiculous.
---
Back in the DOS days the computer got fatal error, which as we all know means nothing big. My mom saw it and totally freaked out that I had ruined the computer and pulled the plug to save it.

Probably think of more later...

 

[Sop]

Back in high school, one of the secrataries said she needed a new computer because hers kept saying it was out of space. I asked if she had ever deleted/backed up anything. She looked at me all amazed "You can do that? Wow!'
---
About 2 years ago, I fixed somebodies computer who literally had 2 inches of toolbars on her IE. It was so ridiculous.
---
Back in the DOS days the computer got fatal error, which as we all know means nothing big. My mom saw it and totally freaked out that I had ruined the computer and pulled the plug to save it.

Probably think of more later...

That's nothing. One of my friends mum's has about 7 inches of toolbars.

 

[Lanlan]

our internet was down at the office and this lady who at the time was made partner asked me, "do you think it's down because of the market crashed?"

but really the most aggravating thing in my office was from the self appointed techie. i was away on vacation and when i returned i found my apple studio display replaced with a samsung syncmaster - the shittiest display i have ever experienced. damn monitors have the shittiest color and gamma is all over the place. they actually had a "professional" come in to calibrated and it still looked like crap. i had to live with that display for 2 years before i finally got a new one. the "techy" traded in my old monitor which i missed dearly and was worth 2 times more than what i got

not only that but he filled all 8 memory slots in my computer with 512mb modules for a whopping 4gbs! a computer with the potential for 32gbs maxed out at 4! i'm so glad he is gone and i get to decide on my future hardware.

on the syncmaster did you change the name of the PC connection to PC or PC DVI? I just bought a syncmaster and it looked like crap til i did that.

 

[AlanJohn]

When I still lived with my parents, we had around 5 computers in the house, but everyone for some reason used mine. I locked my PC with a password, then my mother sent it to an IT guy who installed Windows XP Bloatware edition and deleted everything from my computer. Then, one time, my sister booted my PC, which was running on linux. She thought that my PC was "broken" since she couldn't open her precious .exe's, and sent it to the IT, again. They installed a fresh version of Windows XP bloatware edition, again, and deleted everything, again.

It is hard to be the only intelligent person in your family.

 

[Ace Overclocked]

When I still lived with my parents, we had around 5 computers in the house, but everyone for some reason used mine. I locked my PC with a password, then my mother sent it to an IT guy who installed Windows XP Bloatware edition and deleted everything from my computer. Then, one time, my sister booted my PC, which was running on linux. She thought that my PC was "broken" since she couldn't open her precious .exe's, and sent it to the IT, again. They installed a fresh version of Windows XP bloatware edition, again, and deleted everything, again.

It is hard to be the only intelligent person in your family.

You live on your own being 15 years old?
You finally caught up, i stopped living with my parents when i was 12

 

[AlanJohn]

When I still lived with my parents, we had around 5 computers in the house, but everyone for some reason used mine. I locked my PC with a password, then my mother sent it to an IT guy who installed Windows XP Bloatware edition and deleted everything from my computer. Then, one time, my sister booted my PC, which was running on linux. She thought that my PC was "broken" since she couldn't open her precious .exe's, and sent it to the IT, again. They installed a fresh version of Windows XP bloatware edition, again, and deleted everything, again.

It is hard to be the only intelligent person in your family.

You live on your own being 15 years old?
You finally caught up, i stopped living with my parents when i was 12

It's just that I had to move to this city in order to get a proper education.
I still live with my aunt & uncle. Thankfully, they are computer literate.

 

[BORTZ]

Word of mouth but i believe him. Hes actually a member here now @[member='wafflebeard']

He told me when he was a freshman in college he was working on a report. He was searching like Britanica and other educational prestigious sites. Every once and a while he could click on a link and be presented with a youtube page with a rick roll. Normally that would be hilarious, and it was. But this had been going on for a week.

He took it to tech services because he though he had contracted a hilarious virus. He got it back a few days later. Tech services said someone had installed a plug in for firefox. It was an April fools joke that went bad apparently. Everytime you click on a like there was like a 10% chance of you getting redirected to youtube for a Rick Roll. But only on April fools day. But his kept going for a week and a half lol

Not really tech illiterate but funny.

 

[mysticwaterfall]

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

Back in the 80s I remember my friend down the street believed that you needed the whole program on a floppy with the documents it made. So he had like 20 copies of a notes program, each with only a few dicuments, since the program took most of the space.
--

I remember my dad told me at work that they were always losing the key disks. So one day the manager attached them to the filing cabinet with a magnet.
----

So many times helping people in the DOS days telling them to put a space in to have them type "space" and then tell me it didn't work.
----

Once in school a mouse died on the computer. Student said it froze and asked for help. Person helping goes, "well, this computers toast". I get them where they want with keyboard shortcuts and just say we need a new mouse. Blank stares.

 

[Foxi4]

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.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

A couple months ago, I was cleaning up one of my mother in law's old computers. Started up XP, slow as all hell, and What do I see? None other than that little purple fucker BonziBuddy. I had to make a full reformat due to there being tons of spyware and adware, but I couldn't help getting all nostalgic. I kind of felt like I was deleting an old friend. My Mother in law looked over my shoulder before I shut down the computer and said "Oh hey! I remember that little guy! He was the most helpful program I ever had on a computer. I wonder if I can download that again..." And then I remembered why it needed to be destroyed.

 

[porkiewpyne]

My old computer which everyone in my family shares has very very little RAM. Dad almost brought it to the IT guy to get it reformatted. Glad I was home that day :\


Well, I kinda derped many times as a kid too. Remember those free smiley ads and all? Yeap I was a sucker for those. *sigh* I look back and I swear if I could go back in time, I'd beat the crap out of that idiot.

 

[learnin2hack]

This happened last year I downloaded two files under (less than 50mb between them) We went over our 15gb limit and got charged €70 (we went over by 1gb wtf?) They blamed me.

 

[BORTZ]

God this thread is gold. Or diamonds.

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.

Gosh whats that little ad down there at the bottom? Thats soo annoying. lol

When i was younger (like gradeschool) we would take our papers that we had written into school on 3.5 floppie drives. We would play with them sometimes and i would always flip over the little metal piece that covered the tape where your shiz was stored. One of the kids was like "Dude! You just erased my paper!!!" and had a tanturm. So i took out mine and flipped the little metal piece over mine like 40 times reallly fast and still printed that 4th grade paper lol.

 

[loco365]

Hopefully if I get a job at a computer store, I'll have more stories like these to one day tell.

I just remembered another though. When I was in Grade 4, our school had the awesome Apple computers with the colored tops. Like these:

Spoiler

Anyways, at this point in time, I wasn't really computer-literate, but I knew that if it did weird things I normally wouldn't see from the other students using the computer, I knew something was wrong. And one day, we all came into the lab and sat at our stations. This one girl turned on her computer, and it made the most twisted sound I've ever heard a computer make in my entire life. It sounded like fingers on a chalkboard, but MUCH worse. Only after the teacher hears that does she tell her NOT to sit there because the computer crashed.

And 2 years later, all the schools in the district were switching over to Windows XP computers. At this point in time, I was really good with Windows and knew the ins and outs of it rather well. We were having a small discussion on the computers and to not go overboard because they were still being set up. She then went on to mention that we'd have to go through some kind of "training" on how to use these computers. Thank god we didn't. But she said, that she'd have to teach us some keyboard shortcuts. "All of the Windows shortcuts are similar to those of Apple computers.", she said, "And I'm pretty sure that Ctrl+S is for saving, and Ctrl+Q is for quitting." I then raised my hand and said "Uh, quitting is Alt+F4 on a Windows computer." She looked at me and said "I'm pretty sure it's Ctrl+Q." I said to her, "No, it's Alt+F4. I own a Windows computer and I know how to use one." She still denied it.

And another 2 years later, in Jr High at a different school, we still had the shit of Windows XP computers. The network they were on was simply awful. Some days, it'd take about 2 minutes to log you in, but on a bad day, it could take 15 or 20 minutes. Just awful. But anyways, one day, a student was having fun playing around with his friend's account on one of the many computers in the school. What he did, was set the background as a tiling image of a woman with the worst shirt on, and she had rather large cleavage. Like, reeeeeeeeealy large. As he was logging off, a teacher was walking by, so he yanked the plugin from the wall. Which was a really bad idea. He got in crap for undoing the computer, but the teacher also wanted to know what he was doing that required that act of desperation. So he had to log back in. And show them the background. And the fact that he damaged the fragile connection the computer had to the server. It took 15 minutes of logging in, 15 minutes of that background, 15 minutes of having a teacher watch him as he fixed the persons account, and after that, he lost computer privileges for the rest of the year.

 

[the_randomizer]

Ah yes, perhaps one that sticks to me happened about, oh, maybe ten years ago. We had a 120GB HDD and over time the PC got slower. What does my sister do? She tells me I have too many games on the hard drive and because of that, it's ruining the computer. I told her "no, it's a large-capacity hard drive, it's meant to store a lot of data, so why should it matter?" Then there's the infamous "you should have bought a mac instead, they're so much better than a PC." News flash, buddy, a Mac still falls under the definition of a personal computer. Most of what I know about computers is self-taught ever since getting our first family PC back in 1995, 8MB RAM and an Intel MMX 133MHz CPU. There are too many technologically impaired stories to list, but if I think of more, I'll certainly post them.

 

[chyyran]

My friend was writing a paper and accidentally deleted everything. I happened to lean over and "CTRL-Z". Next thing he tells me, he's had to rewrite 2 papers before, due to accidentally deleting stuff.
Facepalm.

 

[nando]

on the syncmaster did you change the name of the PC connection to PC or PC DVI? I just bought a syncmaster and it looked like crap til i did that.

I dont remember but as opposed to what. I didnt set it to any magic settings and it is hooked up via dvi. I searched online for adequate color profiles for this display and consensus amongst graphic designers is that it is simply unworkable. I mean it looks sharp and has high contrast and bright colors but in my field thats bad. It needs to be accurate. Im pretty sure you have a different and better model. Samsung is all over the place in quality.

The displaymate tests pretty much confirm my issues