When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop
- Reference: 1605860113
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/20/on_call/
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Today's dip into the archives comes from a Register reader dubbed "George" by the Regomiser and takes us back to the golden days of Windows 3.11.
George's task back then was providing tech support to a team of researchers, some of whom were clearly not entirely at ease with the then new world of windows, icons, menus and pointers.
"The librarian," he told us, "was a sweet, kind person, full of knowledge about labour law and card indexing systems, and was one of the first in her team to get a PC."
Her knowledge, alas, did not extend to the workings of Program Manager.
For the impossibly young, Program Manager was the Windows 3.x (and NT 3.x) shell. It consisted of icons arranged into program groups. Those icons would launch applications such as File Manager, Excel, and so on.
Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it [2]READ MORE
Windows 95 did away with the poor thing in favour of the Start Menu and Windows Explorer, a move that generated nearly as much gnashing of teeth as the [3]dumping of the Windows 7 Start Menu did many years later.
By default, Windows 3.11 would "remember" where the icons and program groups were so that on restart a user's configuration would be as it was left. This was all well and good, except in the case of this librarian, who would accidentally delete or move around the icons, "leaving her desktop looking like a box of Lego strewn across the screen, every day," according to George.
"She was always mystified when it happened, swearing that's how she found them in the morning."
Ah yes, those pesky evil Program Manager pixies. Coming in the night and fiddling with the desktop.
Every morning George would get a call from the librarian, wailing that all her work had been lost. Every morning he would bound up the five flights of stairs (using the fire escape because the lift was always out of order). And every morning George would rearrange the desktop icons and warn the user not to delete or move them around.
Eventually George worked out what he needed to do to stop the PC retaining the messed-up desktop and boot back to a pristine configuration every time.
"I changed the setting in triumph," he said, "and explained that if she 'lost her work' she must just reboot. I showed her how to reboot and went back downstairs, looking forward to a future of quiet mornings without the daily step exercises."
"Not two hours later," he said, "she phoned. She had lost all her documents."
Patiently, George explained that all that was needed was a reboot. The user, naturally, had forgotten how to do that.
"Just switch it off and switch it back on again," said George.
Ten minutes later the phone rang again, and an increasingly tearful user insisted that everything was still missing.
George trudged up those stairs and, as expected, the icons had been messed up. Sighing, he asked the user why the PC had not been put through the power-cycle fandango.
She managed some indignation through the snot and tears: "I did! I switched it off and back on again!"
Gazing at the screen, George insisted that she could not have. However, being a kindhearted person, and conscious of the tears and wavering voice, George gave her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they'd stumbled over one of Windows' many, many bugs. Perhaps this PC had missed the configuration update. Perhaps it was those evil Program Manager pixies.
George asked the user to try the reboot again.
Tearfully she did so, and hit the power switch.
Of the monitor.
Mystery solved.
Ever had a user swear that black was white, only to find the actual colour was a fetching shade of puce? Or had to draw upon reserves of goodwill that you'd thought were exhausted by a career in IT support? You have? Then perhaps the time has come to share your story with an email to [4]On Call . ®
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[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/13/on_call/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2013/05/31/sinofsky_no_regrets/
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In defence
of the poor inexperienced user, this was a perfectly understandable error to make, a little gentle education by the PFY earlier on might have helped.
Re: In defence
Are you thinking Clue Stick here?
Re: a perfectly understandable error
When it happens once or twice, yes, but when it happens every day without fail, it is no longer an error and the gentle education needs to be upgraded to cattle-prod instruction.
That said, it would have probably been beneficial for the PFY to hang around a bit in the morning to witness just exactly how she managed to mangle her desktop icons like that every single day. By catching her red-handed, the lesson would have likely had more impact.
Opposite and identical problem
"Help - My screen's gone blank and I've got customers to sort out NOW!"
Brief check, pull keyboard out from under the monitor, press the monitor power button to turn it on again.
"All sorted - try not to jam the keyboard or anything back under the monitor where the switch is..."
Icon for the state of so many of their keyboards. Yeuch!
Toshiba
Ah Tosh again.
When they made a short foray into desktops they recounted a tale to me of a woman who had to have the monitor replaced due to going bang one Friday morning. A replacement was shipped to site and it was swapped the following Monday.
A week later, the replacement went the same way.
And a week later so did the third.
Someone asked her to leave the machine exactly as it was so that they could investigate the environment. When they turned up they immediately noticed that she had a potted plant on top of it. No saucer or plate or bowl. And yep, she watered it the night before. Water dripped through into the monitor and it inevitably blew.
The thing being that because she watered it on a Thursday night, she didn't make the connection. And because it was only a small amount of water, by the time it got back in for diagnosis, it'd dried without a trace.
Potted plants
Clearly, computer support involves out-of-the-box detective work.
Re: Potted plants
If the plant had stayed up there much longer, there would be a root kit installed.
Re: Toshiba
Reminds me of a nice plant in a pot I had on a wooden floor.
A couple of years later it turned out the pot had holes in it and no saucer..
Mom also called that the computer didn't work turned out sis did turn of the
screen the day before.
>>Or had to draw upon reserves of goodwill that you'd thought were exhausted by a career in IT support?
Nearly every day...
What amazes me is that I have not yet exhausted my reserves of goodwill after 30-odd years in IT. Every day one or other of the users manages to restore my reserves a little... how that keeps me (mostly) civil I don't know!
Beer cos well it's Friday innit? and nearly Christmas to boot!
"Every day one or other of the users manages to restore my reserves a little..."
This struck a note for me. Yes it's fun to rag on the lusers, and lord knows we all have plenty of difficult ones to deal with. But there are a few that genuinely do appreciate the work we do for them, will try their best not to burden unnecessarily and will repay the favour in kind if the opportunity arises. There are a couple of users in my company that I would do an awful lot for.
And, back to rag-on-lusers-mode, there are plenty that I curse daily due to their complete inability to perform even the slightest act of problem-solving for themselves, or even to retain a piece of information for longer than a day.
There needs to be a tea / coffee icon. I've not yet appropriately caffeinated for the morning.
My new pc isn't working
Had a very irate customer on the phone, was very vocal about his brand new pc wasn't working. Went through the usual, all plugged in correctly, power light on monitor. Asked him to tell me if anything happen when he hit the pc power button. His reply was "I'm not turning it on till I know it's working". Gotta love the user
Too Many Stories!
After over 35 years I've probably got too many power switch stories to relate them all but here are some highlights. These mostly go back to the days when you had to physically turn a computer off!
The HP full height tower with the power switch adjacent to the floppy drive eject button, fixed with the aid of a hinged cover made from a tape cartridge case.
There was the user who phoned late one afternoon asking how to turn her computer off (back when they had physical power switches). When asked if she'd turned it on that morning and it being suggested she use the same switch the reply was, "I know that, but I've forgotten!"
Apricot managed to produce a PC-Compatible where the power switch was on the back of the box and shaped just like a grey plastic cover over a port. Even I struggled with that one.
I had a Schneider PC at home acquired from the company I worked for. It would turn on OK in a morning but wouldn't turn off again (by this stage desktops had "soft" power switches). We eventually found that the 12v line on the PSU had failed, the PC ran fine on 5v but for some reason wouldn't register the switch-off button press.
IBM's PS/2 Model 50 was notorious for blowing PSUs if turned off and on again too quickly, providing support for a large number of them remotely was a nightmare. If we had to ask a user to power-cycle them it was a case of saying, "Turn the switch off and now take your hand away, don't switch it back on until I say so !"
More recently I inherited a large floor-standing IBM server used for a photospectrometry system. Whoever had installed it had made it "secure" by removing the power and reset switches from the front panel and leaving them dangling loose inside.
Re: Too Many Stories!
I just remembered - back in my electronics engineer days, the company that I worked for built a new workshop.
We weren't a big team of engineers - half a dozen or so.
The new workshop was actually a very nice place but for some reason the builders decided to put the emergency stop buttons on the front edges of the bench.
We all leaned back on them at least once before they came back and put a transparent lift-able shield over them (which I am sure was not compliant with any kind of regulations).
Re: Too Many Stories!
Transparent liftable shields over emergency stop buttons almost certainly *do* conform to regulations. They even have a name - "molly-guards" (originally named for one "Molly" who kept turning off a mainframe).
The scary thing is that Molly is probably only in her 30's now.
Re: Too Many Stories!
shite designs of desktops is still alive and well today. I have the misfortune to use a Lenovo ideacentre 620S-03IKL at work, its all style no substance. its a vertical design slim but tall. For starters its 2020 and there are NO USB ports on the front of the box just a 3.5mm jack socket! All the ports are around the back, so a pain to access, but the really show stopper (literally) is the placement of the power button on the TOP of the box! Just in the position that you naturally find yourself placing your hand to hold the box steady when reaching around the back to plug anything in the ports! FECKING awful design how these things pass UAT is beyond me!
If only it was just then
Only yesterday in my office a colleague asked how to turn the computer on.
I pointed to the big ugly base unit and suggested they try that. The indignation in their voice was palpable as they blurted out that they 'thought it was one of those all in one desktops that some staff have'.
I did not feel the need to point out they had tried the power button on both of the monitors in this supposedly 'all in one' setup.
Always check everything
Many years ago I had a summer job as an accounts clerk, literally just counting and tabulating the daily take from a bunch of shops. They knew I was "computery", so I was also asked to fix various things. One morning, the company secretary said that her new 21" CRT monitor was broken, could I take a look.
2 hours later, having lugged this monstrosity to a different PC, reseated graphics cards and checked drivers, I found out that the contrast wheel was all the way at zero, making the screen completely black.
I don't think I even fessed up to it, I think I told her a driver update fixed it, or it was misconfigured.
some people have a block
they can't remember some basic steps, it's all wizardry for them, they will never make heads or tails out of it.
Lest we forget.
Win 3.11 ran on top of DOS on a FAT filesystem.
Habitually turning it off and on again was guaranteed to get the Disk Corruption Fairies[1] to sit up and take notice.
[1] As in: "Did you turn it off with the power switch again ?".
"No I didn't!"
"Right. Must have been the Disk Corruption Fairies at work then."
How do you shut down Windows?
I remember being rather cross that there was no way to shut this fancy software down. In desperation I tried clicking on START.
Always amused me doing desktop support when you asked the user to press the power button and they replied "Do you mean on the computer or the box under the desk?"
I got everything sorted, saved a copy of the desk.ini (or whatever it was called), put a line in autoexec to copy it back, and - crucial part - set a timer to log off after 30mins inactivity. That saved loads of heartache, morning logon everything was neat and tidy; turn off the monitor and wander away, eventually the machine closed itself down.
I also replaced the shutdown screen, replacing "You can now turn the power off" with "You can now turn the power off **or press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to restart**" (my emphasis). Way way way too many times I'd see people approach a logged-off machine and in order to log on they'd turn the power off.
We from the movies
Many films have the computer "blowing up" as we see when the monitor explodes. Therefore the switch on the monitor controls the computer. Obvious!
I think everyone who did desktop support back in the day, especially if it was over the phone, learned very quickly to get the user to positively identify the beige box under the desk, or under or close to the screen, before getting them to press any buttons, precisely because of this problem.
Users have always found ways to confuse even the most straightforward of requests. Hell, they still do.