Interesting tech experiences

[gold49]

(Yes the title could use some work, I suck at names in every area)
Just want to hear weird/interesting experiences involving technology that others here have had. Anything ranging from you computer randomly crashing due to a program it had run hundreds of times to explaining the internet to your grandparents.

This just happened to me this week: at school hanging around, doing nothing in typing class due to most of the class not being there (last period, sports and everything else happens then for some reason) and decided to begin a tear down of a recently donated computer. The thing seems to have been donated for a reason, as it is windows 98 machine with a Pentium III, 128MBs of ram, and a 200w psu (oddly had a ATI gpu and what I can only guess is a NIC, not a expert on older or more enterprise leaning hardware).
So I begin by taking the side panel off and a classmate's younger sibling (for context we are highschool age, the younger sibling is middle school age) ask how I could get inside the computer. Then a classmate (this is a slightly...strange, I guess would be the term, highschool age student) grabs the second side panel and goes into the hallway for ten minutes with it, with my guess being she/he (being as vague as I can intentionally) walked around the hallway pretending to hit people passing him/her with it (don't ask me why). Then the younger student begins trying to yank out the gpu while I am turned away for a second, despite it being clearly screwed in. Finally decide this was a bad idea and quickly put everything back together (never got a look at the harddrive though, no chance to take out the bay and unscrew it all before this)

All together I have decided to leave the old computer tear downs to either my house or in a empty room.

 

[Pyure]

I'm just mindboggled that this old computer even exists in a school.

 

[gold49]

I'm just mindboggled that this old computer even exists in a school.

Just got donated by someone, we are not using it(however, 40% of the computers here are still running xp...)

 

[lenscas]

My weirdest technology moment was when the os (windows xp) of my old desktop died after a virus scan.

Turned out to be caused by 2 programs conflicting. Never repaired it though as it would not be worth the effort. 2gb Ram(maybe even less) single core amd processor. You probably get the idea.

 

[Sam Faria]

My weirdest experience is when I was copying a file and my computer randomly gave me a blue screen due to memory management. It wasn't doing anything but that and had 4GB of RAM.

 

[lenscas]

Talking about RAM issues a friend of mine couldn't safe a word file on flash drive because the computer he used didn't had enough ram available.

This was at school and the only thing the people that where supposed to maintain these computers did was saying that it was his fault and that his flash drive was not big enough and more stupid stuff like that. The teacher also ended up getting angry at him for not doing anything even though he was already finished (just unable to safe it) and trying to solve the issue by himself.

note: the flash drive was empty and was a few GB large and the error that Microsoft word gave clearly stated that RAM was the issue. I believe he ended up making that whole file again but I'm not sure though.

 

[gold49]

Do all school computers suck or something? Ours all have one gig and I cannot decide if the constant freezes are the fault of the cpu or the ram.
Also, once my parents told me the computer we have at home was saying it was having high memory usage, so I thought something like "Oh, that should me a easy fix. Just snipe the bloatware in task manager and it shouldn't be using more than half of the ram(has a total of four gigs)"
I check it out and task manager is reporting 100% harddrive usage and 3.9 ram being used
Even weirder is that it was a single windows task using all of the resources. I can only guess the computer was doing some majorly derpy disk defraying, but it had been doing this for two days so...
Works fine now, but I am checking it more often

 

[Sam Faria]

Our school ones are rubbish aswell,
1.26GB of Ram and a 5-year old pentium processor. Most IT sessions at least someone has a blue screen.

 

[lenscas]

The computers at that school also had the tendency to freeze for a moment even when you did nothing but move the mouse and the computers always seem to do it like a wave.
Explanation: first computer 1 as soon as its done freezing the computer at the left t does it then the next computer, until all of them have done it then it goes smoothly for a few minutes after that they start doing the wave again though.

 

[gold49]

We are lucky in that we do not get many blue screens (Even I would honestly freak out if we did, and many people here do not know how to even download something so it would be interesting), but almost eight year old core2duos only can take so much stress.
And by stress I mean Microsoft word documents. We always have atleast one person waiting a few seconds to see if their computer has crashed or has just frozen longer than usual.

 

[lenscas]

On another school I once had to run 2 windows 2012/2014(I forgot) virtual machines on my laptop.

Normally not a big deal until you factor in that mine only had 3 GB of ram at that time. To be fair this wasn't really his fault and he even looked at how much ram costs for that thing and discussed some of the options that I had(I was planning on buying new laptop anyway).
If only more teacher where like him that would spare so much computer pain and suffering at schools.

 

[gold49]

The computers at that school also had the tendency to freeze for a moment even when you did nothing but move the mouse and the computers always seem to do it like a wave.
Explanation: first computer 1 as soon as its done freezing the computer at the left t does it then the next computer, until all of them have done it then it goes smoothly for a few minutes after that they start doing the wave again though.

Now that is just weird and I may find it funny if you didn't have to deal with it so much.

On another school I once had to run 2 windows 2012/2014(I forgot) virtual machines on my laptop.

Normally not a big deal until you factor in that mine only had 3 GB of ram at that time. To be fair this wasn't really his fault and he even looked at how much ram costs for that thing and discussed some of the options that I had(I was planning on buying new laptop anyway).
If only more teacher where like him that would spare so much computer pain and suffering at schools.

I could go all day on my school's handling of anything involving computers, but it would just be a ten page rant so I will not do that.

 

[lenscas]

Now that is just weird and I may find it funny if you didn't have to deal with it so much.

The fact that it did that was probably because of the program used to check what you where doing at the computer. Yes that school had programs running that showed the "IT" people there precisely what you where doing at any given time.
Not really a problem normally as they only looked if you played games or did other stuff that was not allowed, except that they often let that program running and visible when they had to do something else and thus left that computer.
No I rather not want everyone be able to see my mail/whatever.

Another "good" idea was that every teacher needed to switch to a laptop instead of a desktop in each classroom not a big deal you might think.
This should be true until you realize that every classroom had a smart-board and that that those things don't like it when you switch computers.

 

[gold49]

The fact that it did that was probably because of the program used to check what you where doing at the computer. Yes that school had programs running that showed the "IT" people there precisely what you where doing at any given time.
Not really a problem normally as they only looked if you played games or did other stuff that was not allowed, except that they often let that program running and visible when they had to do something else and thus left that computer.
No I rather not want everyone be able to see my mail/whatever.

Another "good" idea was that every teacher needed to switch to a laptop instead of a desktop in each classroom not a big deal you might think.
This should be true until you realize that every classroom had a smart-board and that that those things don't like it when you switch computers.

Sounds like how someone donated a few dozen smart boards to my school, but we do not have the money to buy the software needed so several hundred dollars of smart boards are sitting in classroom corners rolled up.

We also have the teachers use laptops, however ours are "refurbished" vista era laptops who's batteries died long ago. So we have a load of small desktops basically

Although one laptop died and I got to try taking it apart (try because I didnt have the correct screw bit to get the whole thing apart) so that is sort of a plus

 

[lenscas]

We also have the teachers use laptops, however ours are "refurbished" vista era laptops who's batteries died long ago. So we have a load of small desktops basically

Well the switch to laptops was in the same year they updated all the desktops to windows 7 and all the desktops as far as I know where just thrashed away. What a waste off money.
Oh well don't have to deal with it any more and there are still more good points about that school than bad ones even the computer side had some good things. Yes thats shocking I know.

 

[psp]

My school just got *some* new computers. 90% of the computers are crap, but every few years or so, we get like 10-15 somewhat new computers. So we have so many different versions, and they all suck. They aren't as bad you guys said yours were, but my god, it takes around 5-10 minutes for them to turn on and another 5 minutes for it to "load" after you logged on. (We have some pretty annoying ******** who like to turn of all or some of the computers right before they leave)

 

[lenscas]

My school just got *some* new computers. 90% of the computers are crap, but every few years or so, we get like 10-15 somewhat new computers. So we have so many different versions, and they all suck. They aren't as bad you guys said yours were, but my god, it takes around 5-10 minutes for it to turn on and another 5 minutes for it to "load" after you logged on. (We have some pretty annoying ******** who like to turn of all or some of the computers right before they leave)

I feel your pain but if we go that route...

The computers at that school for the students to use where basically in the hall, handy for if you just wanted to print something out while you had a break.
Now comes the fun, you where only allowed to use them or use the printer before or after school or when you had class. Any other logically time frame was forbidden because the "IT" people had to take a break / other stuff that really was not important at all.
Well I don't have to say what they did when they where supposed to work do I?

 

[psp]

I feel your pain but if we go that route...

The computers at that school for the students to use where basically in the hall, handy for if you just wanted to print something out while you had a break.
Now comes the fun, you where only allowed to use them or use the printer before or after school or when you had class. Any other logically time frame was forbidden because the "IT" people had to take a break / other stuff that really was not important at all.
Well I don't have to say what they did when they where supposed to work do I?

The only printers we have are in the classrooms. And guess what, they have no ink or the teacher wants to save the ink and tapes a "no printing" sign on it...

 

[lenscas]

The only printers we have are in the classrooms. And guess what, they have no ink or the teacher wants to save the ink and tapes a "no printing" sign on it...

We had to pay to use the printer the same system was used for teachers but they where allowed to go in the minus.
To clarify this was done using a special card and you can put money on this thing.
One of my teacher had at a point -300 Euro on her's and it was not even at the middle from that year.....

 

[psp]

We had to pay to use the printer the same system was used for teachers but they where allowed to go in the minus.
To clarify this was done using a special card and you can put money on this thing.
One of my teacher had at a point -300 Euro on her's and it was not even at the middle from that year.....

Thats just dumb...