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me

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me

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me

5 (10%)

help i'm trapped in a poll i don't know why i'm here i'm so scared someone please help

29 (58%)

me

6 (12%)

Total Members Voted: 50

[LordSlowpoke]

My comp isn't actually broken - that was more a reference to my main job (working on computers, esp. old broken ones that won't boot from USB) taking up a lot of time lately.

GOOD SIR IF YOU HAVE NOT INSTALLED WINDOWS 98 BY SPLITTING THE INSTALL DISK INTO 418 PARTS AND MOVING IT FLOPPY DISK BY FLOPPY DISK TO THE TARGET COMPUTER you have not endured this pain but you soon will and good lord will i smile

[Toaster]

I think I'd rather smash my face in with a rusty hammer.  I had an old laptop I had to put DOS 6.22 on to via floppy before I could load Win98 via CD, but that was only six floppies.


If we're talking ancient, though, I have an 8 inch floppy on my shelf.  It's gloriously huge.

[flabort]

The other month the college I work at slinging coffee had a big power outage. I ride home with my Father, who works in IT. Nothing happened that night, but once they got the power back (a day or two later), all the computers and servers had to be rebooted, in the correct orders, and all the systems had to be checked and double checked that all their dependencies were working, and nothing was broken from the hasty shutdown, etc.

This took all night.

So I slept in my dad's office, while the entire crew went back and forth, and while some of them had an hour or two between tasks (they were done with whatever areas they specialized in, for a while), they'd entertain themselves. Me, since I don't work in IT (I work in Tim Hortons on the other side of the college), I had no tasks, but when I woke up for a while, I decided to chat with some of them.

My dad's boss has an RPG on punch cards.
He also has a hard-drive made of... looked like vinyl records to me, enough of them to be almost as tall as me.

Worst I've ever done myself is install a 3D modeling program from 5 floppies.

Tell me, what on EARTH is booting from USB? I've never heard of it.

[GreatWyrmGold]

My dad's boss has an RPG on punch cards.
He also has a hard-drive made of... looked like vinyl records to me, enough of them to be almost as tall as me.

What.
Woah.

Tell me, what on EARTH is booting from USB? I've never heard of it.

From what little I know about computers, I'm guessing that it involves either booting up with a device in the USB port or booting up via an OS on a system connected by USB cable.

[freeformschooler]

Tell me, what on EARTH is booting from USB? I've never heard of it.

A modern convenience where you can use a USB stick as the boot device. Not present on most computers made before the last several years, but carrying around USB boot drives is a lot more convenient than CDs.

[Toaster]

Sure it wasn't this RPG?

[Darkmere]

Tell me, what on EARTH is booting from USB? I've never heard of it.

A modern convenience where you can use a USB stick as the boot device. Not present on most computers made before the last several years, but carrying around USB boot drives is a lot more convenient than CDs.

This is one of the best recent inventions ever.

-unrelated IT story-
When I was a freshman in college one of the upper-class guys got permission to dig through the university's deprecated hardware, put win 98 on there and loan them out to students so they could check email from their rooms and stuff. The warehouse was hilarious (ERMAGERD 30" CRT monitor! but it had its own proprietary vid card still attached and the card had proprietary pins... so it was useless even in glorious VGA). I nicked an old 486 ceramic and 8" heat sink, dunno where they are... anyways. One of the guys I took a remade machine to was... well he wasn't really dumb per se, just technologically unsavvy. I had to go back there twice because he kept plugging a phone cord into the ethernet jack. He'd get pissed at me because it didn't work, then do it again.

[Toaster]

I got a call once about a scanner that wasn't working.  The previous user of the scanner (who had just quit) ate so much salty crap at her desk that the scanner buttons were crusted stuck with salt.

[freeformschooler]

Spoiler: IT derail (click to show/hide)

One time, I was called in to fix a POS machine that wasn't reading credit cards. After trying to make sense of the completely nondescript error messages, I noticed the system clock was set to 2004. The CMOS on the machine had apparently been replaced the weekend before, setting the clock back, and the POS software couldn't read credit cards because they were from the future.

[GreatWyrmGold]

"Dammit, I can't service the credit cards of time travellers. They're probably from some kind of postapocalyptic future where they can't get things with credit cards, we wouldn't be able to collect. Like, ever."

[flabort]

Sure it wasn't this RPG?

Yup. He said it was one of the first games like it.
Though I might be misremembering.

...Come to think of it, heheh, it might have been cassettes. Sorry.

Edit:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My dad recently described a favor he did for a friend. The friend was running Window's Millenia (or ME, or something like that). Anyways, none of his stuff was working right. So my dad backed up all his files, formated, reinstalled Windows 98, installed all his friend's junk again, and restored his files. Everything worked like a dream (for that day and age).

The next day, his friend calls him. "Thanks for fixing it, but now it's broke again! Everything's doing funky things!"
"What did you do?"
"Well, I upgraded to ME, and-"
"Sorry, can't help you, I don't work with ME."

They're still friends, but dad has learned to tell people what not to do under any circumstances, instead of assuming it's obvious, and not to do favors for people who will just undo them.

[Toaster]

Spoiler: IT lol (click to show/hide)

*shudder*  WinME is the devil.  Don't speak of it lest you invoke it.  I had a buddy running it (2001), so I slapped XP on there and he was shocked and amazed how much better it ran.

[GreatWyrmGold]

What's WinME?

[freeformschooler]

What's WinME?

Spoiler: IT derail (click to show/hide)

http://bit.ly/19xKEFG

[GreatWyrmGold]

Let me rephrase that: What's so horrible about WinME?