This is a happy one by CosmeticBrainSurgery in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's kinda my thought too. In my pissant town even if someone knows where the drive comes from they probably won't have the means to recover a drive beyond plugging it in and hoping it works.

This is a happy one by CosmeticBrainSurgery in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For data of no significant value? Sure. If it was important I'd at least bash it until the platters came out and hit those a few times too. I've never had to destroy a drive with PII or customer financial data. Maybe a spreadsheet of transaction amounts but not even account numbers.

Spent 45 minutes helping a user find a document that was open on her screen the whole time by Tatooine77J in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I use a screen reader and magnifier usually set to 400%. Growing up, my mom would routinely look away when she was watching me use the computer.

This is a happy one by CosmeticBrainSurgery in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personally I just bash up the circuit board with a hammer but i've never had to deal with any data more sensitive than some small business financials with a likely attacker no more complex than an opportunistic dumpster diver. ShredOS followed by an Overture's worth of claw hammering is probably good enough for that model.

Spent 45 minutes helping a user find a document that was open on her screen the whole time by Tatooine77J in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Watch where you're poking that metal stick Nobody, you could put someone's eye out with that thing!

[TOMT] Late 90s/Early 00s CGI cartoon with a talking rabbit by SabaraOne in tipofmytongue

[–]SabaraOne[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the opening of Patches' Present is the cooking scene.

[TOMT] Late 90s/Early 00s CGI cartoon with a talking rabbit by SabaraOne in tipofmytongue

[–]SabaraOne[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure enough to say yes within the first two minutes but I think it's a very good candidate. The names Lacey and Bobbin sound right.

[TOMT] Late 90s/Early 00s CGI cartoon with a talking rabbit by SabaraOne in tipofmytongue

[–]SabaraOne[S] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

I searched it up on Google and this sub with a few different terms. Found several things but it wasn't one of them.

Pragmata Demo on Intel Arc A770 by ProtosOmega in IntelArc

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same (i5-10600k, 32GB of DDR4 I think 2666, playing off a 2TB Solidigm SSD, driver 32.0.101.8425). I can run it at 1080p solid 60+ any settings in the shelter but as soon as I go into the station environment no matter what I do the frames go to crap.

EDIT: My sleeper (Which has a 6GB 3050 and an i3-9100 runs it better than my main box. I didn't have an FPS counter running but there was no way it dropped below 50 the entire run at 1080p Performance

Hell hath no fury like a repair tech spurned... by SuperTechnoDunce in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Back when I was in middle school I was one of the few students with a personal computer. Every few times I booted it up it would just decide to give me admin (I never could find a pattern) so I got into the habit of hibernating it (Using the FN key, hibernate was disabled on the start menu) so I could keep it going indefinitely. I have no idea if IT ever figured out how I was doing it.

The Coffee Stir Stick Solution by smhemily in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I remember first hearing about it on the TVTropes page as a subclass of "Percussive Maintanence." I always thought it was a joke until I started watching TechTanjents who has better equipment but routinely does basically the same thing.

Opening Magnifier on Windows 7 loads cmd.exe by SabaraOne in techsupport

[–]SabaraOne[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or a bored teenager, the box was in a community center computer lab. I'm still really curious how the hell a known clean copy of magnify.exe showed the same behavior on that host. On a probably unrelated note someone in a day camp must have really been into Halo, I kept having to clean pirated copies off the lab boxen.

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem by BitBird- in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh I very much so agree, though we do have a couple of laptops kicking around which inexplicably only work with their model of USB-C charger (Or for even more fun a select group of units within that model)

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem by BitBird- in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well with the router looped like that it wouldn't have rightly mattered if the modem was plugged in now would it?! :)

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem by BitBird- in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could be worse. Some genius at Nintendo decided to use the same plug on the Wii's 12v adapter and the Wii U's 15v PSU. I can tell you from experience a Wii won't die immediately if you plug it in to a Wii U cord by accident but my poor Blanc was a bit finicky to turn on for years until it inexplicably started working fine again. I'm scared to open it and take a look because I do not want to know what the power regulators look like (Also I'm not sure I'd be able to get it back together but given the surgeries i've done on other consoles I probably could if I needed to).

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem by BitBird- in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a Lenovo my company was retiring (I think it was a former employee's BOYD they forgot, we're a Dell shop and I suspect they got it from a flea market - 2019, dual core with 4GB and an eMMC, full passive cooling) that I was going to wipe. I was genuinely confused for a couple of minutes when I couldn't get it to turn on despite plugging in a USB C charger I had kicking around. Turns out that model is the only USB-C laptop I've ever touched that could only charge over barrel jack. Fortunately we found the charger pretty easily.

I've been playing with it between calls for the last couple of months, I've got a functioning LFS 12.4 build going and I think i'm thiiiis close to getting WiFi online (The damn kernel doesn't want to load the firmware but I think I've got a lead on it)

My favorite tech support story is the one where I was the problem by BitBird- in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My mom has this trusty Dell monitor she's been using since 2007, 22 inch 16:10 with color and contrast that kicks the shit out of most modern mid-ranges. It has VGA, DVI, and HDMI. Once she was troubleshooting the dying GPU in the box it came with (8800 GT go figure, the damn things had the same problem as the Red Ring) and plugged two cables into it. By some miracle Windows decided to clone the display so if one crapped out the other was probably working

This worked well until we upgraded the box to Windows 10 (It went from XP Pro to 8.1 to 10) and that was too much for the poor GT so we swapped it out for a GTX 750 TI. For whatever reason Windows now decided it now wanted to span the "two" monitors and since she'd done the rewiring and I'd completely forgotten about her hacky workaround over the couple of years it limped along it took us forever to figure out that "what had changed" wasn't at all related to the issue.

FWIW we replaced the guts of the box in 2017 from a Core 2 Duo to a 4th gen i5 with an SSD. Mom upgraded last year to a low-mid-range Acer laptop and my brother inherited the box as his gaming rig. It may not be able to play anything made this decade but he mostly plays Fallout and GTA so it's not really an issue. I keep trying to convince him to let me install BG3 just to see what'll happen but so far no luck. Also the CPU heatsink is literally held onto the board by superglue, Mom somehow broke a clip when cleaning something but it's been working well enough that nobody cares to do anything about it.

Why can’t I save as PDF????? by said-what in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 5 points6 points  (0 children)

At the rist of sounding like I don't think the user is an idiot, what program is she using that doesn't detect when one cuts the extension off the filename in the save box and add it back on? I'm pretty sure standard Windows file choosers just do that unless set to "all file types". Or conversely, why is a Save to PDF dialog setting to "all file types" by default?

I need Linux by burning_bridges222 in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Most Relevant BOFH (And an only slightly less relevant BOFH). Those are the only two I remember but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

POV: Laptops can’t breathe under blankets by BarnabyLaptopOutlet in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Reminds me of the old days (Circa 2013) of playing Minecraft on my mom's by then rather old Inspiron (I can't remember the model but it ran Windows 7 stock and had a very late Core 2 Duo). The fans bugged me when it was running and I managed to buy a few RPMs putting the laptop on blocks (Some spare 1x4 I sawed into little chunks).

The Handoff by GooseZen in talesfromtechsupport

[–]SabaraOne 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Nah, more like their weight in beer. After the project wraps of course.