Speaking of that manager, Bryce learned that he was forced to dip into the pool of spare machines.

He can't have been a true manager or he'd have ordered the fastest workstation available and then done nothing with it apart from a bit of email and Powerpoint on it...

The state of the other employees' computers -->

Hey, don't knock it - that's my business model for getting fast end-of-lease laptops!

(And I don't think I'm alone in that).

Excellent revenge on the overzealous manager.

It reminds me of the time I got a replacement machine at work. As I was into fairly hefty image processing work, my old machine was not considered fast enough. It was, however quite a bit more powerful than my home desktop, so I asked the admins what they were going to do with the old one. The answer was that the would have to dispose of the old machine, but if I would want to "volunteer" in the disposal task this, that was OK. The machine I liberated was unusual in that it used RDRAM, and only 2 out of 4 slots were in use. I noticed an identical machine was slated for disposal, and asked the admins if I could liberate that RAM as well, which they kindly allowed. The machine worked neatly for many a year at home.

It really helps to be good friends with the admins

Back in that era I was living with a teacher. She was given a cheap laptop by her school which was rather slow. The school would only pay for a minuscule bit of IT support and apparently the guy was very unhelpful so she asked me to see what I could do.

I looked at her machine and it only had 512MB of RAM and was paging constantly, so I suggested trying popping a bit more memory in and unsurprisingly it was much nicer to use. Word got out amongst the other teachers so they went and spent their own money on making their computers usable!

I had a manager who did something very similar - except we knew what had happened.

It was a similar exercise, swapping a DIM module from a retired machine into a live one - something I'd normally have done but my boss, the IT Manager, decided he'd do it himself. He did comment, as he turned the machine back on, that the DIMM was a bit tight but he'd managed to get it in, I wasn't quite quick enough to shout, "Stop!" The inevitable puff of smoke from the machine signalled that he'd failed to seat the module correctly - in fact he's installed it completely the wrong way round and it was only half in the socket. He learnt his lesson and left future hardware changes to me!

It is surprising how a supposedly intelligent person can be so incapable of managing such things.

My own brother-in-law, who is an engineer btw, tried last year to self-upgrade his PC. He bought all the right components, motherboard, CPU, RAM, cooler, SSDs, etc, and put everything together.

When it didn't work, he called me, because he knew that I have extensive experience in upgrading my hardware. I tried to diagnose by phone what appeared to be a RAM problem. We tried removing all but one stick, putting the sticks in different slots, all to no avail.

Bereft of ideas, I asked him to remove all the DIMMS and try to boot. We got the same error, ergo it was not the RAM. At that point, I pointed him to a very good PC Repair shop because, if it was the motherboard, I didn't have any other solution.

It turns out that my brother-in-law had put the CPU in wrong. Which means he forced it in, because slotting in CPUs these days is as easy as just gently dropping it in place. All you need to do is align the marked tab on the CPU with the tab on the motherboard and drop it in. But no, he put it in wrong, forced it down and screwed the cooler over it. Obviously, the CPU was dead and the motherboard as well.

When I learned what had happened, I was speechless. But, that is how it is. He's far from stupid, but boy was he stupid there.

It's sometimes hard to know how much force is appropriate!

When I was but a mere student I was building myself a PC with an AMD Athlon (1.2GHz!) of which I was both very proud and very cautious - people had been known to crack the CPU die when installing the heatsink on that family of processors.

However, I hadn't even reached that point as I'd carefully aligned the CPU with the ZIF socket and closed the locking lever... which stopped half-way down, apparently binding on something.

Hours of careful removal, inspection, re-insertion followed - everything *looked* right but the resistance on that lever didn't *feel* right.

Then my housemate casually looked in and said "Oh! You just need to close the lever." and, to my dumbstruck horror, did so. I heard the terrifying click of... apparently, a ZIF socket locking neatly into place exactly as it was supposed to.

> It's sometimes hard to know how much force is appropriate!

Giving people experience of the correct feel could be a good use for old dead hardware.

I've never actually managed a PC in this manner, but it has been nerve-racking on occasion. And I did once fail to apply sufficient force to a ribbon cable connector on a 3D printer board.

I have an A/S in electronics and a degree in computer science, but I never build my own machines because I'm not confident in my ability to correctly install the CPU's heat-sink. I spec them out (IMO pre-designed ones always skimp on RAM) and get a local shop to build them.

Back in the early days of my career I worked at a Computer Repair outfit in South Wales (capitalisation intended). Apparently when the boss came in one morning a customer machine was waiting to be rebuilt and he took it upon himself to replace the RAM and get it ready to go out.

When my colleagues came in he reported that the machine had a faulty motherboard and RAM. They checked and saw that he had forced the RAM in the wrong way around. I didn't know it was possible to do that but apparently with enough force you can get a DIMM in that way but it has a catastrophic effect. He denied this had happened but stopped helping out in the repair shop afterwards.

He wasn't incapable, in fact he'd started the business doing all roles but somewhere along the way he'd lost the attention to detail required to do it properly.

My brother always used to swap out devices that he had broken for mine that actually worked, chargers, batteries, remotes etc.

Thanks for reminding me of that :')

I wanted a laptop for home (all my machines were desktop). So I asked our Wintel team (who managed old laptop refreshes) if there was an employee scheme to purchase old hardware. I was very pleasantly surprised when he told me to just take it, as it was cheaper for him to give me the laptop than it was to pay to dispose of it.

Another place I worked they apparently had storage units full of old laptops. They didn't have a disposal process in place - which was intriguing for a large Indian outsourcing company, but on the flip side hardly surprising.....

When working for a now defunct arm of a large national energy company, staff were graciously allowed to *buy* redundant PCs and screens. These were fairly cheap but also quite elderly, in many cases the CRT monitors had burn-in issues (I grabbed one for a server). The "high end" kit was to be redeployed in other branches of the company, so I asked if I could keep my on call PC as it was a little better than my own desktop at the time. I was given the OK and my mighty machine (4gb RAM, 386 running Windows 3.11) was saved from the outside storage cage where the rest of the better spec machines ended up.

This term, "RAM raid" made me laugh. Or sob.

As an ex-IT mgr, the workplace looting habits of some make me climb the curtains in rage.

So many times, I've found some unique and not free items went missing in the workplace: shared meeting rooms Jabra, cables, etc ...

It's just like people, during (and after) Covid, thought they could just loot the workplace, so as they would WFH just like in the office !

But the poor idiot who needs to get the inventory back doesn't have a magic budget for "looted kit" !

One final story after this rant:

I was supporting the move of 700 staff for a large organisation. Big bang move. Basically, we had planned to have the 700 desktops cabled, with a docking station, one screen, etc ... all ready for the laptop of users to be plugged and working.

700 desktops, all with the same screen + docking station.

Everything went according to plan and all people were able to work at day 1.

One week after, we began to receive calls that "my desk is missing its screen". Weird, as all 700 desks had been configured the same with the same screen.

Going on the spot, we quickly discovered that every corner we had with, say, 3 missing screens, we also had 3 active desktops with ... dual screens.

This was to the point we would vocally exclame "weird, mate, we have 3 missing screens here, and look, those 3 dudes have dual screens, how cool is that ?". Needless to say, said dudes had their face quite pale ...

TLDR: My machine broke so I replaced it.. How enthralling!

What is that annoying noise, oh, it's the sound of the barrel bottom being scraped. This used to be an interesting column but sadly it appears all the decent tales have been used up

So where's your enthralling story then?

This used to be an interesting column but sadly it appears all the decent tales have been used up

So why don't you supply us with a decent tale?

I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU[0], gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing. Was actually quite common back in the day.

As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...

[0] Actual CPU (and RAM) sometimes, sometimes the entire motherboard, sometimes the entire box.

At a place I worked, there was a strict hierarchy of job titles and computer-power. The Head Cheese got the newest, most powerful PC, and underlings got less-powerful models.

Thus, there was rarely such thing as replacing a single PC. If Middle-Manager Mary got a new PC due to a budgeted upgrade, her somewhat-less-powerful old PC would go to Middle-Assistant-Manager Mike, and so on and so forth. This was during Windows 3.X/Windows 9X days. Techies had to interview each user to determine where the user's data was (against official policy -- data was supposed to be kept on network drives) squirrelled away on their C: drive, then copy it to their "new" computer. We'd start both computers on the network, then run Frye Utilities' nice TUI copy program, which sent the data over raw SPX. For non-networked PCs we'd use LapLink.

A single new computer could result in 20~30 "pushdown" migrations. Gods! The time we wasted doing that! Everyone was so jealous of their "PC status" that any box-swapping would have been instantly noticed. We used Compaq PCs at that time; only techies had the Torx screwdrivers needed to open those boxes, and I never heard of any RAM-raiding incidents.

Icon for time-wasting, ego-driven managers.