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Later today, I’ve promised to help someone with an unspecified problem with their laptop running Windows.

I know sod all about Windows these days, which is still a bit more than they do, but please send me your thoughts and prayers.

(Probably not “just install Linux/BSD”, no ;))

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in reply to Neil Brown

@Neil Brown Could you fake your death and hide in Panama? That might work.
in reply to Sarah Brown

@goatsarah I wondered why he was boasting about booking a kayaking/canoeing holiday in County Durham.
in reply to Neil Brown

I volunteer at my local library one day a week as an “IT helper”. Which is to say, I help people who don’t use computers much to do stuff on the library computers (using Windows, obvs) and really, I don’t use Windows much either, but hey, I sort out their problems.

Tho mostly, people want help with printing haha!

in reply to Neil Brown

Thoughts and prayers go out!

From my perspective: Mostoften it's bloatware and adware and sometimes multiple virus scanners that, in total, make the windows notebook unuseable. Low memory (not enough space for swapfile) is also a problem.

There are worse problems, though, I hope for you it's none of the latter!

in reply to Neil Brown

For thoughts, if you still have time/energy, you might want to go through the checklist github.com/StellarSand/privacy… . I find the it makes windows a bit more usable.
in reply to Neil Brown

I've done this. I start my visit with, "I don't really know much about windows".
in reply to Neil Brown

Problem: laptop does not recognise certain keypresses.

Diagnosis: there's rice - yes, rice - under the pertinent keycaps.

Solution: remove rice.

Outcome: laptop recognises all keypresses, and bonus free rice.

No Windows knowledge needed 😀

Brian Smith reshared this.

in reply to Neil Brown

Windows System Expert solution: pay for upgrade to Windows Pro.
DEC FIeld Service solution: replace rice with other grains until one meets the Standard Keyboard Specification.
in reply to Neil Brown

we've all been there, I'm sure.

"Turn keyboard upside down and tap it" is one of the first things on my keyboard faultfinding checklist 🙂

in reply to Neil Brown

We had an Olivetti PC in the workshop (early 1990s) with a stuck space bar. The keyboards of the time were built like tanks and expensive so we'd repair them. Having dismantled the keyboard, the engineer found a whole length of very dried bread crust underneath the space bar. We reckoned the user must have pushed it down the gap because there's no way it would have fallen in. A mystery to this day.
in reply to Neil Brown

i thought I'd you got rice on your device you put it in water
in reply to Neil Brown

I'm sure I read somewhere you're supposed to insert a wet mobile phone...
in reply to Neil Brown

Well if they were using an Open Sauce system, maybe there would be some Soy in there as well?
in reply to Neil Brown

Reminds me of when I got my first own computer.

Set it up, powered it up. It displayed its startup message “COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2…” etc. Then the text would slowly disappear again, one character at a time, starting with the last character.

I had no idea what was going on, but this felt wrong.

Smashed some random keys, they would appear and disappear in the same way.

Power-cycled the thing, still the same issue.

1/2

in reply to Neil Brown

I'm agnostic, atheist or whatever, but given the grave situation:

Sending thoughts and prayers!!!

Brian Smith reshared this.

in reply to Neil Brown

If you'd posted that on the Microsoft support forums, there would have been a guy saying Hi, I'm a support engineer, please reinstall Windows.
in reply to Neil Brown

Oh holy Just Install Linux/BSD hear my prayers please help Neil Brown see the light and come into the true faith