Last Man Posting

[Technic[Bot]]

Oh that! True
I thought you were talking about someone else.

[Bellhead]

It's awesome how when I call tech support after exhausting every possible avenue of repair, that they tell me to do the exact things that I already did, and when that's over, they just ghost me.

Nice to know that the people we call for help aren't any smarter than we are.

[Technic[Bot]]

This reminds me of my job.

There is a support department which is supposed to help people with problems with our product. My team and I build and design said product so it is not uncommon, in fact it is more usual than it should, for support to ask us how to troubleshoot stuff they can't figure out. After all we build the damn thing we are the only people in the world who know it inside and out and should be able to fix any issue... right? Well occasionally customer just find some stuff than stumps me, my colleges and my boss. On one hand is a pain to deal with angry customers on the other it is interesting seeing 3 senior engineers (not me yet) completely stumped by the weird corned case on the product they built.

[Tornir]

It's awesome how when I call tech support after exhausting every possible avenue of repair, that they tell me to do the exact things that I already did, and when that's over, they just ghost me.

Nice to know that the people we call for help aren't any smarter than we are.

Ah.
Those tech support people; minimum-wage employees in a call center, with no understanding of what they're supporting, reading the script from the expert system in front of them. You just have to politely, but firmly request they escalate your call to a CS manager - they should have some understanding of the product.

This reminds me of my job.

There is a support department which is supposed to help people with problems with our product. My team and I build and design said product so it is not uncommon, in fact it is more usual than it should, for support to ask us how to troubleshoot stuff they can't figure out. After all we build the damn thing we are the only people in the world who know it inside and out and should be able to fix any issue... right? Well occasionally customer just find some stuff than stumps me, my colleges and my boss. On one hand is a pain to deal with angry customers on the other it is interesting seeing 3 senior engineers (not me yet) completely stumped by the weird corned case on the product they built.

You ever had a situation where a customer found an issue, that got fixed, and a patch was rolled out, then another (larger) customer complained you broke it, because they'd found a use for the buggy functionality and had incorporated it into their use of the product?
I got to see an R&D manager cursing like a Klingon over that one...

[Bellhead]

I actually have. Windows used to have those kinds of "features"... then it would update. Certain bugs like those make people's jobs easier, and you get used to them. But I still wouldn't blame the engineers for fixing something that's technically broken, it's just that I wouldn't.

[Technic[Bot]]

I am sure it is not common but our support guys I work with are definitely not minimum wage drones. Yet sometimes they are as useful as one. It doesn't help our product is rather niche and not widely used.

I have not found those type of errors myself.... Yet. But We did change some defaults from one version to the next and turns out most customer who upgraded did not wanted that...

[Bellhead]

Like upgrading from Windows XP, it doesn't matter if the new system is better; only that it behaves differently.

[Technic[Bot]]

Sometimes people are simply New bad! old good ! but there is also a a reasonable expectation for features not to break on upgrades.

If you do not mind me asking, what esoteric discontinued features/bugs of windows did you use.

[Bellhead]

Ctrl-Alt-Del used to automatically open the Task Manager, which always opened above all other windows and windowed full-screen programs. Now, Task Manager opens in a state that other windows can be above it by default, there's an intermediate menu with the shortcut keys, and it takes full control of boot devices, which used to be managed by typing "MSCONFIG" into the command prompt. It makes setting the default boot drive exceedingly difficult when a drive contains OS's from both this era and the XP era.

A lot of those old windows core functions have been moved to more "user friendly" locations, where users of the old systems (such as myself) have trouble finding them. They also set defaults to new Windows-based programs, even when they don't work. Case in point: our service manuals open in .PDF documents, with several dozen documents all linked together, and Microsoft Edge was set as the default for that file type and can't open those documents. It gets frustrating.

But personally, I just like the direct feel of XP in general. It does what you tell it to, controls are in predictable locations (if a little bit out-of-the-way), and it doesn't mess with your settings when you're not looking.

[Technic[Bot]]

Nowadays you can do right click on any empty spot of the task bar and then click task manager on the contextual menu that appears. Honestly I like that change as It was more convenient for me to access the boot order from there, back then I had to change my boot order from windows every time i wanted to boot into a different OS because windows bugged out my custom boot.

But yeah nowadays microsoft wants to gaslight us into believing Windows is not and OS but a service. Every upgrade seems to break something and not just: " I liked the other buttons style better" thing but break things hard: hard crashes and blue screens of death, it is also annoying they move al functions around on every upgrade and RAM requirements have skyrocketed over the years . Those are some of the reasons i do not daily drive that thing anymore.

[Bellhead]

Heh... I still have an internet-capable XP machine right here, next to my 10 machine. It idles around 150 MB of RAM. The 10 machine has 12 GB, and is never below 20%, even with everything closed.

Side note, after several months of being left on 24/7, a power outage finally killed the power supply. Good thing I have a spare, but still... Rest in peace, 20-year-old transformer, you have done your job well.

[Technic[Bot]]

I used to wonder why my supossedly medium range gaming laptop ran like molases whenever i booted windows.
Turns out my windows partitions idles at around 4 GBs and my linux partition runs at 4GB with actual load, a couple dozen firefox tabs for example. With only 8GBs of RAM it was quite constrained. Ended up having to increase memory to improve performance and now windows runs ok. But ram requirements keep increasing for windows.

[Bellhead]

Idling at 4 GB is pretty nuts. What's using it?

[Neutral Smith]

My computer is idling with 6.6GB of RAM in use. But I have 32GB, so plenty more to go. (most of it is Firefox, quite a few tabs open)

[Technic[Bot]]

Just the OS yeah i know it is bad. Specially considering Windows partition is basically empty.