I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?
- Reference: 1614932104
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/05/on_call/
- Source link:
Our story takes us to the mid-1990s and a reader Regomised as "Liz" who had just landed her first IT gig in a rural US computer store. The magic words "I'll work for free" were apparently what swung things for her.
[2]
Unlike her burger-flipping peers, Liz found herself helping out with all the different tech jobs in the store, from dealing with networking for local businesses to updating kit for customers. "Once," she said, "one of my coworkers gave me the precious gift of letting me hold the very first brand new Pentium processor we had just gotten in, even though I was too low on the food chain to get the cushy job of building a new system.
"Heady stuff!"
[3]
Heady stuff for Liz's family too, who were "of course delighted to have an adorable pigtailed baby techie to provide them with free tech support."
The undoubted downside of "knowing a bit about IT."
While Liz was happy to show Grandma how a mouse worked, things got altogether more intense when it came to getting her uncle surfing the web.
The uncle was a mechanic and had built Liz a car from components that were scattered around his yard. A bit of cash across his hand, and she was mobile. Any help keeping the contraption on the road was, however, off the table: "He had made it very clear I was to take the car to a mechanic thereafter because he wouldn't be offering free repairs or even repair lessons."
Still, a car is a car and Liz was both grateful and keen to help out in return for the wheels.
However, when she answered the call to help get her relative online she found herself confronted by something considerably older than that shiny new Pentium in the store: "I was faced with a hopelessly outdated 286 system, which I'm sure still worked fine for word processing and solitaire."
The uncle had managed to get hold of some RAM that would work on the ancient board and Liz had no problems fitting it. Anything more, however, was very much pushing the envelope of what the long discontinued chippery and the OS that could run on it would handle.
As carefully as she could, Liz explained that even if she could source an old enough copy of Netscape that could actually run on the system, the graphics-heavy nature of the World Wide Web – even in those days – might make the experience... less than optimal. A replacement was needed and she specced up something that would do the job while not costing anywhere near the amount demanded by her co-workers for fancier rigs.
"He got increasingly upset," she told us, "and finally roared at me about how he had 10-year-old cars that still ran just fine!"
Liz snapped back: "That's because they don't repave the roads every other year with special asphalt that requires everybody get new tires, only they don't make the new tires to fit older cars!"
She stalked home, arriving in time to hear her mother's side of a heated phone call with the uncle where another analogy was being tortured in order to drive the point home: "She was telling him he wasn't poor and could damn well afford to buy a power saw like everybody else, rather than whining about how unfair it was that somebody told him he shouldn't try to cut down a tree with a hand saw."
And so it came to be that Liz's cousins were soon to be found playing Tetris on a brand spanking new Pentium desktop.
"Thankfully, though," she said, "between my uppity mouth and my uncle's pride, I was never again 'asked' to do free tech support for him."
[4]
We've got pants that have lasted longer than some computers, thanks in part to the excesses of the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Ever had The Call from a family member, mown down by the march of progress? We had one just last night. Share your story with an email to [5]On Call . ®
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When you say "pants",
do you mean that in the American or British sense?
Re: When you say "pants",
Yes.
Re: When you say "pants",
With some of my colleagues I'm convinced that they were a packaged purchase. I can't be sure, unlike the certainty I had about one guy's shirt re-use cycle when I noticed that the bloodstains on Wednesday's short were exactly the same as the ones that I saw on Tuesday.
Re: When you say "pants",
In the doggie breathing hard sense
Re: When you say "pants",
Lemme think... My oldest machine still in regular use (ok, as a radio / media player, mpdroid is a wonderful thing!) is a netbook bought ca. 2010. I still have some pairs of trousers that are that old. I have gained about a stone or two since then, so they don't fit any more (well, some of them). Some are still ok. The netbook has a weird heisenbug with the display, it sometimes does not want to work. I guess travelling the world (and daily commutes) for five years didn't do it good. Then I bought the "current" notebook. Not sure when I will replace it, maybe in a few years.
Back then, processor power increased a lot faster, or the need for more RAM, faster CPUs etc. was increasing much faster than today.
On the tech support: I got out of that after my dad called about some probelm (which I did solve in the end, to be fair), and I started troubleshooting it by asking "what is in the bottom left corner of the screen?" His reply was "the 'start' button". I then asked "what's on that?", which was, of course, the windows logo, and then I just replied by "aah, that would be it". As I said, I did figure out the problem, but that was the last time I got called for tech support - my brother (being a Windows guy) was not as lucky ;)
Re: When you say "pants", - nothing wrong with old tech
2008 MAC Pro Quad Core, makes an excellent MInecraft server for my kids and their friends to grief each other on!
Re: When you say "pants",
My oldest machine still in regular use (ok, as a radio / media player, mpdroid is a wonderful thing!) is a netbook bought ca. 2010. I still have some pairs of trousers that are that old.
I'm with you on the netbook thing - I have one of a similar vintage plugged into my midi hifi system (old school!) as a source of online streams.
In the trousers department....as I type this I'm wearing a pair of jeans that are at least pre-Y2K. They're a bit tatty around the edges, but perfectly serviceable in these working-from-home days. I hate clothes shopping more than just about anything else in the world, but thankfully my waistline has never expanded with age.
Re: When you say "pants",
I played the opposite card, I am a Windows guy so made sure parentals got Samsung tablets so Brother could do the support.
Re: When you say "pants",
My "daily driver" is a 17 year old laptop running Slackware-current.
Only relative tech support I give is my parents and siblings (not often, their kids know more than them)
So many tales
Say you work in IT in a social situation and shity kit/phones appear like magic. Best to say your a proctologist, unlikely they ask you to stick your finger up their arse in the pub, but your milage may vary.
"But I hardly use it."
My dad mainly uses his laptop these days, but in his study has a old tower PC I built for him. I recently got a call from him, "My PC won't turn on."
Me: "Well, it is quite old, it's probably given up the ghost."
Dad: "But I hardly use it."
Me: "Didn't you tell me that you never used to turn it off because it took too long to start up?"
The next time I was around my parents, I cracked open the side panel to see if I could spot anything obvious but nothing jumped out at me. Out of curiosity, I did a search for the motherboard model number. Released in 2004, so a 16 year old PC, most likely running XP.
Me: "Yeah, after 16 years, I think it owes you nothing at this point."
Fortunately I was able to pull the IDE(!) HDD and successfully copy his files to an external HDD.
Uncle sounds like my father
Although my father had a chain saw, as children we had to saw the wood up by hand, because you got warm twice - once cutting it up, and once burning it on the fire.
We kids left home, my brother worked for the water board clearing timber from river banks. He came back one day and used his chain saw to cut up the pile of logs. Mum was every so grateful, as she could light the fire more often, and it made Dad even more unhappy because the wood got used up faster!
Re: Uncle sounds like my father
You kids using the hand saw was probably to keep you from pruning body parts accidentally, and had nothing to do with keeping warm twice. I can assure you I get just as warm making wood with a chainsaw as a hand saw.
Besides, it keeps you warm four times: Once when you cut it, once when you split it, once when you stack it, and once when you burn it.
Arg....
Apple stuff.... "I've got a new ishiny and I cant get my old stuff anymore"
Do you know your icloud username/login ???
"Whats that?"
Cant help sorry - take it too the apple shop.
Windows stuff
LMGIFY ........
:-)
I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...
...lack of back button etc, but for the elderly Apple is usually the answer
Yes, overpriced, hobbled in file transfer, etc etc but the volume of "IT Support" calls drops to almost zero once you get them off laptops and onto iPads. And they last a fair while too.
For those who must have a PC or laptop, an SSD upgrade from spinning rust (where possible) is a cheap way to speed up an older PC or laptop.
The older stuff does have an analogy with old cars - the people who can keep those running are the ones with the knowledge, the cupboards stuffed with old parts, and so on.
SSD
I've recently resurrected a few Windows 10 systems by replacing the HDDs with SSDs. One 10 year old Samsung (originally Windows 7), a new Acer and a new HP (both sold with Windows 10).
All were unusable, with Task Manager showing the disks running at 100% all of the time and major Windows Updates taking up to 12 hours to complete. Once the SSDs were installed, disk use went to virtually nothing and updates install in a more "normal" time frame.
I can understand the 10 year old Samsung having problems, but I would have taken the other two back as "not fit for purpose" if they had been mine!
Re: SSD
The reason for that slowdown could well be the amount of system RAM. Frequent swapping on spinning rust slow things down significantly. With Windows 10 and all its bloat and things you can't properly turn off like "Cortana", you need a lot more base RAM just to run the OS without it slowing down.
Even modern cheapo laptops often come with only 4GB, which is woeful these days. The first thing I'd suggest, before replacing the HDD with a SDD is popping the back off and putting another stick of memory into the empty second slot, or even better, replacing both with higher capacity sticks. Just make sure you get the right sort (laptop memory != desktop memory, DDR3 != DDR4, etc.) and I'd recommend getting the fastest RAM the system supports.
You'll probably find this negates the need for the system to be at 100% disk usage right off the bat. You can then think about replacing the disk with a solid state one, but that will likely come with the ball-ache of reinstalling the OS and copying all the files over.
Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...
Or why not a Chromebook? Much cheaper than Apple kit, and basically nothing to support. I bought my sister one six months ago, brand new, for the princely sum of £179, and she's pleased as punch with it.
Mother and Mother in Law
My Brother having escaped brexit Blighty set up a VPN router so we could remote support our Mother. The last instance was to plug in the new printer. Boy print drivers are better than when I used to do desktop back in the day. The challenge was to persuade her that the cable did need to be plugged into the back of the PC.
On the MiL side. We had made up a PC for them with Ubuntu installed and they even managed to get some broadband when they moved back to Jamaica. As she worked as a home help and had never seen a computer before it was a real struggle to explain the relationship between the mouse and the arrow on the screen. Still, we did get a few emails till the broadband provider over there decided to jack up the price too much. We are back to phones and snail mail now. I might give her my old iPhone once we can escape lockdown and fly down to the land of the humming bird and Wray & Nephew rum.
So why isn't IT kit like Jet Engines ........
Circa 2009 and I was with a very senior leadership team of a large aero engines manufacturer, one of the questions they wanted to understand in more detail is why is it that they can design an engine that has an effective lifespan of many decades and yet the computers systems go obsolete much much quicker. The reason for the question is that they were maintaining all the systems used to design the engines and keeping them in place for the lifespan of the engines, this is so if there was an issue they had all the original software, data etc in place. The challenge being a 20-30 year old system (Think VAX, SPARC workstations etc) became increasingly expensive to maintain and fix (In fact for some systems they had to get some items they required via eBay). The conversation was difficult as they could not relate to the pace of change in IT against what they were doing in terms of development cycles etc - However we did introduce them to the world of Emulation and virtualisation - Impressed seeing a VAX system moved to a Intel Server running a VAX Emulator with a PCI to UniBus adapter and running about 10 times faster !
Old kit
An unnamed family member is still using a 2010 Lenovo X201 running Windows 10 which is well past its prime. It takes ages to get going, and is then very slow. I have tried, many times, to persuade the owner to upgrade to something newer and shinier - say only five years old - but so far I have not been able to break through the perception that if a laptop was expensive when new then it should still be going strong now. So they struggle on, with frequent tirades of verbal abuse directed at the underperforming item and complaints about how slow it is...
Said family member is also addicted to Microsoft Word so there's no chance of replacing the OS with something more suitable.
Personally ...
... I have told my friends & family that I no longer support Redmond or Cupertino computers, but if they will let me install the version of Slackware that I put together for MeDearOldMum, GreatAunt and Wife I'll be more than happy to to keep their systems running. I have had quite a few takers, and most are vocally enthusiastic about the change once they realize that it works pretty much as they are used to computers working, but without the crashes, slowdowns, missing files, and whathaveyou.
MeDearOldMum, GreatAunt and Wife needed precisely zero technical support in all of 2020. Right tool for the job and all that. (I handle their software updates and backups from my desk here in the office.) My sister, on the other hand, who insists that if she doesn't run Windows the entire planet will implode, is constantly trying to get me to fix her computers ...
One thing people tend to forget about FOSS.
By it's very nature, FOSS will be around as close to forever as makes no nevermind. Corporate closed source software, on the other hand, is just as ephemeral as the company in question. IBM is doomed to die, eventually. So are Amazon, Goophabet, Apple and Microsoft. Shirley the proverbial Thinking Man should throw their lot in with the obvious long-term winners and eschew the obvious losers?
Before you poo-poo this, think about it. Where are Burroughs, Sperry, Allied Signal, Philco, Amdahl, Remington Rand, DEC and ROLM? We won't mention the likes of HP, the poor mewling thing, so senile it doesn't know it's dead. And that's just for a start.
Apple-achia