At college, I once offered to type out an exam paper for a friend. First time I was using a wordprocessor (Wordstar, if you care abiout such things).

After a while, my friend came up to see what was taking so much time, and then burst out laughing.

Accustomed to typewriters, I was carefully formatting each line and pressing a hard return every time I thought one was required.

Things did speed up after that and a year later managed to type out my thesis using Wordstar + 6 floppies (backups!) in no time at all.

Man, I can still remember (and prefer!) the Wordstar key bindings. I think Wordstar was originally developed for an Abacus and that Adam used it to compose love letters to Eve in the garden of Eden.

There's a modern clone (WordTsar) if you miss it: http://wordtsar.ca/

There are still text editors for Linux and Unix that use the Wordstar key combinations. I use joe as a quick text editor, and it uses many of the combinations of Wordstar.

In an office I worked at in the early '90s, the machines we used were DOS systems. As such, they employed an autoexec.bat file to configure things as the system finally reached usability. It was considered a good joke to set the text color to black or similar little pranks by editing the batch file. We kept a bootable floppy on hand with edlin on it to correct any "edits" to the file.

Takes me back to school where we’d programme the BBC micros to sound alarms in the middle of our lessons or the next one.

A few of us would do a lot of pranks like this but I did get sent out ICT classes way too frequently :)

My favorite misdeed of all was to write a script called by the autoexec file that blanked the screen and then started a count down in very large numbers. I added it to the office manager's system. She screamed and ran out the door when it popped up. She was a firm believer that the world would be ending RSN at the time.

When I was at college, Win95 was the OS at the time. I remember you could cause Win95 to bluescreen simply by opening the "Run" dialog and typing in "null\null". As a Computing student, I wasn't the only one who knew this however and it was surprisingly common to sit down at a PC, switch on the monitor and see a nice BSOD left for you as a present by the previous user...

Was doing some maintenance on the kids laptop a few years ago as a Windows 10 update was required. Left it to do it's stuff and, some hours later, all was well. Or so I thought.

"Dad, I can't see anything on the screen".

I plugged it in to the PSU on the desk, opened the lid and all was well - so I handed it back.

"Dad, I still can't see anything on the screen".

I watched them starting it up. BIOS screen was ok, pre-boot screen was ok, but the screen went blank when Windows started the GUI.

Turns out it worked perfectly when on power, but not when on battery. "Ah", I thought, "Power settings". Unfortunately, that was not the case - the screen was set to 100% for "on power" and "on battery".

For some reason, I decided to reduce the brightness when on battery - which fixed the issue!

Turns out that there was some strange interaction between the Windows update and the hardware (probably some driver issue) that meant "100% brightness" was interpreted as "100% darkness" when on battery - confirmed when minimum gave full brightness.

I once spent at least an hour trying to get the wifi on my laptop to work. Turns out there was a physical switch (black, labelled in black on a black background) that turns off the wifi somehow, but doesn't report the fact back to Windows (The adapter was still enabled, just didn't get any signal). I must of bumped the switch off without noticing as it was working fine previously.

Dammed annoying.

Was that in Disaster Area's stunt ship?

Do not push this button again.

Have a beer.

I've dealt with laptops that had hard WiFi switches, on one it was a "slide" switch just in front of the power switch on the side, very easy for the user to catch as they turned the laptop on.

Been there, done that. A friend's daughters had received identical laptops for Christmas, could I call around and configure them for wi-fi access? First laptop, I got it onto their wi-fi no problem. Second one, just wouldn't. Went through a few cycles of driver installs and other diagnostic steps until I noticed a little slide switch on the front edge of the laptop. *Click* and the laptop could see the wi-fi.

When you have to fix the exact problem multiple times for the same C or D level... I finally mentioned that when you have to do X call me before you get up in front of the whole effin company with a presentation. I don't mind being the roadie hero who flies on stage tinkers and runs away, but it's gotta to look bad for the C or D level!

But only once if you've got anything upstairs. It also long predates Laptops... all the way back to monochrome TVs of the 1950s.

In the early days before dual screens were common, I remember helping someone one who had a problem.

The screen on the laptop showed the desk top, but there was no mouse visible, etc.

Eventually we twigged that it was plugged into an external monitor - which had the brightness turned down!

It had been turned down because a previous person "didn't want to waste electricity by having a bright screen", and thought dark was better.

Why laptops with grayscale LCD had a dimming slider. Always felt like a pointless thing since no-one in their right mind would turn it down unless they were some kind of psychopath who liked ghostly text on the screen.

Though I do miss the old early 90's laptop keyboards. They always felt so solid to work on.

After several days in a dull training course in the 1990's that required students to handwrite their notes, verbatim, from a pair of CRT screens, I needed some light relief - even the coffee was dreadful.

During one morning's refreshment break, I 'accidentally' turned down the display brightness.

End result was strained face muscles from not even a twitch of a smile, an extra 20 minutes of break while the instructors + tech support work out what the problem was, followed by dire threats of serious, life altering punishments.

Alas - no financial reward in this case.

After several days in a dull training course in the 1990's that required students to handwrite their notes, verbatim, from a pair of CRT screens, I needed some light relief - even the coffee was dreadful.

During one morning's refreshment break, I 'accidentally' turned down the display brightness.

End result was strained face muscles from not even a twitch of a smile, an extra 20 minutes of break while the instructors + tech support work out what the problem was, followed by dire threats of serious, life altering punishments.

Alas - no financial reward in this case.

There appears to be an echo around here!