Post interesting tips for the novice computer user

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Trying to get the thread back on topic:

Here is a tip I'm sure all you geeks know, but I didn't. At least, not until it happened to me. I had to phone a geeky friend for some help!

If your laptop has a system failure and gets the blue screen of death (i.e. it won't turn off and won't turn on), there may be a way to save it.

Before you panic and start to cry, or rush out to buy a new laptop, try taking out the battery (which will be inside a hidden, fiddly, secret compartment you've never noticed before) and then putting it back in again.

Voilá! My laptop worked again.

You obviously got skills there, mate. I don't have this multimedia imagination that I wish I had.

Sorry - this has turned out rather longer than I intended, but I wanted to give an example of why Microsoft should not be relied upon for anything at all.
Bear in mind that this is one highly technical individual seeking highly technical support directly from the horse's mouth, and that MCalavera is spot-on in that a user will receive worse than this; much worse.
OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) support is supposed to highly technical, and many levels deeper than typical user questions along the lines of "how to I change the colour of ...".
First-hand experience demonstrated otherwise.


I was involved with the compatibility and beta testing program for Windows 95, for a large UK OEM I worked for at the time - well before the days when beta versions were waved around for the public to play with.
That was also the time when I still thought Microsoft was pretty damn sharp and produced finely crafted code. Somehow I'd forgotten the convoluted mess I'd discovered after writing some code which traced system calls made to MS-DOS, but no matter: I actually felt privileged to be involved with it and looked forward to some interesting technicalities.

Then the fun started.
The first massive let-down was discovering that the "tests" were largely just very flaky program stubs, glued together by batch files.
Secondly, some of them simply didn't function at all and crashed with runtime errors.
What with this being compatibility/beta testing, I needed to be sure that the problems weren't related to the company's hardware. It seemed unlikely because despite appearances, IBM PC compatibles (as they were still sometimes called) aren't exactly rocket science, but I had to check.
Of course this involved communicating directly with the beta team at Microsoft.

It took days of FAXing before I was able to make them understand my difficulty - that I had to be sure where the problem was located. They were more interested in having me skip certain tests than in finding any resolution.
Having to skip certain tests also meant that I needed to modify some aspects of their own testing software, which seemed to me to be putting the cart before the horse - never mind the fact that some things would have just been passed untested.
More FAXes resulted and many times I felt like reaching for some sort of glove-puppet, just to try and make it easier for them to grasp, but eventually corrected code finally arrived for my (by now) somewhat jaded attention.

Eventually everything passed as expected and I felt satisfied that, crap though the tests were, the company's hardware was at least officially validated by Microsoft.
Job done.

The next job, occurring some time later, was to implement Microsoft's pre-installation methods so that customers would boot their machines for the first time to find a shiny installation ready and asking for their registration details.
This was Microsoft's first pass at providing Windows pre-installed by certain select OEMs, and it showed. I mean it really showed.
I'd already written my own methods for the production line guys such that they could plug brand new disk drives into a machine which would log into the (Novell) network and present them with a selection of prepared images. The image was sucked down from the server and dumped onto the new disk, which was then relocated to each machine coming off the production line.
I had a range of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x images available, many of which included other software such as WordPerfect, and it all worked beautifully. I'd even tweaked the normal Windows start-up methods to include a testing mode for production, which bypassed my usual tweak of requesting user registration details (it was also self-deleting: once its job was done it restored the standard Windows startup method and deleted itself).

What did Microsoft offer?
More batch files and shabby code stubs, with an utterly incomprehensible method of obtaining user registration involving some bizarre juggling of validity checking files.
There was no means of preselecting a video card, or of selecting locality, or of pre-configuring network hardware - all of which was already handled by my own pre-installation methods for the MS-DOS and Windows 3.x images, and none of which was an unusual requirement for an OEM producing a range of hardware with many common components.
So when a user started Windows 95 for the first time they would be expected to select for themselves the video card, the locality and any networking requirements which would have also meant they had various driver disks to hand as they (effectively) completed the installation. This was a huge backwards step from what we were already doing.

Including pre-installed software along with Windows 95 didn't appear to have been given any thought at all and I actually had to explain to Microsoft why this was valuable to our customers.
A few revisions later and it was possible, just, and only in a manner of speaking - to include pre-installed software along with Windows 95.
Unfortunately it did not include the pre-installation of 16-bit software - like WordPerfect, which was still very popular.

I never did get a resolution for that one, even though me and a manager visited Microsoft in Reading after arranging an appointment with some visiting whizz-kid from Redmond. That was rather like being summoned to the headmaster's office. There were two other people present and one was furiously taking notes of what was being said.
One thing really sticks in my mind - the utter astonishment of the guy from Redmond when he asked "But why would you want to install 16-bit software in the first place?", and the look of daggers I received when I said "Because it's what our customers want". (not that they asked for 16-bit specifically; it's just that most software was only available as 16-bit)

It's ironic, really, and quite funny that the thing which turned me away from Microsoft was the best that Microsoft was able to offer.
I resigned from my job a month or so after the meeting with Microsoft because it was quite clear they had no clue whatever, and I wasn't prepared to become a whipping boy for all the problems and failures their pre-installation method would bring.


And, dear reader, if you think things have improved since then - believe me, they have not.
Just for laughs (hah) around 2008 IIRC, I called the Microsoft UK user support people, being a fully-legal owner of Windows XP and having a problem with it.
After being cross-examined about my address, purchase date, serial number, budgie's feather colouring etc. and after being warned that I would only be allowed one more free support call, he was finally ready to hear my question. The alarm bells were already deafening because it was clear I'd been transferred to some anonymous call centre and I was likely to get some droid reading from a prepared script - which I did, of course.
The upshot was that he thought it might be a virus and he laughed - he actually laughed - when I said that I wasn't running any sort of a scanner and snottily said that these days, it's essential to run one. (I'd already told him that the machine had no access to the big wide world, only my local network, but that sailed over his head).
He then suggested a recommended site which would perform a free virus scan for me. As it happened (and as usual) I was sitting at my Linux box so just out of interest, I tried this site from Firefox.
Lo and behold - apparently Linux has a System32 folder, a Windows folder, and a 'My Documents' folder. It must do, because that's what this website told me it was scanning. There it was: an animated display of various Windows-related directory names as they were being 'scanned'.
(and for those in doubt - Linux has none of these things)

I hung up.

So you'll have to excuse me if I appear somewhat anti-Microsoft - that I am, and I think justifiably so.
The emperor has no clothes.

I work in the service department at a large computer store. I have to deal with customers on a daily basis. Not my favorite part of the job, let me tell you....

We recommend re-imaging, (or formatting) a system only if it's going to be the fastest way to fix the problem. We are graded by how many computers we get fixed, so speed counts for a lot here.

Yep. At one customer-support related job I did that was the standard approach, for similar time-related reasons.
Support? Yes, they'd heard of it.

Strange thing is that most customers, even after being warned they'd lose everything, tended to just say "Oh. Ok then".

Sh*t, you're good.

Not that I'm just going to stop working with Windows, but I bow down to your awesomeness. Hoping to reach your level one day.

I was embarrassed enough about the length and what to you do? Quote it all over again! (Ok, that was a joke. )

Much of the software available for Windows is without doubt very impressive and extremely useful, and no-one would have any issue with that. Of course I'm not including MS Office here and certainly not Internet Explorer, but you see what I mean.
But I've spent most of my technical life scraping away at the bare metal while tinkering with the nuts and bolts and tend to take a different, more detailed and pessimistic view of the underpinnings which allow all this interesting 'userland' stuff to exist at all.
To have my suspicions confirmed, time and again, that the coding quality simply reflected the overall quality of the company producing it was a real shock and to witness over the years the attempts at forcing proprietary 'standards' onto the wider IT field, the rapaciousness and "Embrace and Extinguish" methods, ad nauseum - was just horrifying.
I actually liked Microsoft at one point and had a huge amount of respect for them.

If someone can make a living from bolting the wheels back onto this rickety, trumpet-blowing sideshow of an OS, then great.
God knows there's enough to keep people busy doing just that!
I just got fed up with doing it. Fed up with fixing things that the user hadn't broken.
And most of all, fed up with watching Microsoft's grisly PR machine in action, telling everyone that this is the best and most secure version of Windows ever.
Again.

But I do wonder how much longer Microsoft will continue getting away with what has to be the biggest con-trick of all time.

You know, I always shake my head in wonder at the masses that think Windows is the worst OS in the history in computing and why can't it be perfect and secure and etc.

Myself, and many of my friends never seem to have the issues that most people complain about. Maybe its that we're better educated on using computers, maybe it's that we're more cautious in the software we run and the things we download. I just don't understand why users can't at least *try* to understand the software that they're using and how it works, rather than simply expecting it to do everything right, regardless of what they're telling it to do.

I get a lot of customers who bring computers in with viruses, malware, registry issues, configuration errors, the list goes on and on. And every time, *every time*, they insist that they didn't do anything!

Remember, a computer, a piece of software, a peripheral, does no more than what it's told to do.

I run any software on my PC, but that's because I use Virtual PC.
Best way to test softwares after all~♥

I wouldn't necessarily expect "perfect" - reliable and consistent would do for starters. Unix and derivatives have managed that for years.
And you only need look as far as the botnets and the truly staggering amount of Windows-specific malware floating around for an indication of just how bad it is.

Of course. There is actually more to owning a computer than jabbing away at icons but unfortunately, few are interested in anything beyond that and care even less.

God yes, if only.
But the more infantile the interface becomes, the more users are encouraged to not think about what they're doing (aka. making computers "intuitive" and "easy"), the worse this situation will become.
It's almost an anti-education.

And most times, they won't have done anything. I've met the compulsive fiddlers too but in my experience, they tended to be the minority.
The majority were rather like this (poor) Haiku:
Yesterday it worked.
Today it does not work.
Windows is like that.

In most cases this is perfectly safe because it can only do what it's designed to do. If there's no menu option to 'wipe disk' then the disk isn't going to get wiped, etc.
The fun starts when it's a 'little visitor' telling things what to do - like 'join a botnet'.

Hey, it brings me good money so what are you worried about?

Do you know why Windows has the most viruses and malware? Because it's the largest target, not the least secure.

If Apple had 90% market share, I have no doubts that the situation would be reversed.

Oh God no, I'm not worried about you because I can see you know what you're doing, and earning money from this mess is definitely a bonus!
I'm just saddened that the mess exists at all. It shouldn't.
There are more interesting things to do with an operating system than continually bolting its wheels back on.

Oh dear, that old chestnut again.
By that reckoning entire Internet would have crashed and burned years ago because it's practically all Unix(like) based and I think you'll find, despite Microsoft's efforts at distorting reality, that Windows forms but a small (and very noisy) part of this bigger scheme.

An operating system is compromised because it's insecure, not because it's popular (and you've conflated 'popular' with 'ubiquitous', too).
If an insecure system is spread all over the place, then 'all over the place' becomes equally insecure.

By using the "Alt+Tab" keyboard shortcut on Windows, a box will appear listing the windows you have open. Click "Tab" to switch throught the windows until you reach the window you want. Release tab, and that window will immediatly open.

I think I already posted that tip earlier in the thread. Nice to see it popping up again!