Technophobes and the power of suggestion

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A few weeks ago whilst I was visiting my parents, my mother remarked that my dad’s computer was much much slower than hers. To my shock & surprise he only had 256 MB of RAM which is far too little to run Windows XP effectively. As soon as he launches an application it slows to a crawl as it swaps stuff from physical memory out to disk and back again. Because of his general lack of technical awareness (he is > 70) he had been soldiering on like this for about a year. Since I had some spare RAM of the correct sort at home, I showed him how to install it in his system and sent him a 1 GB stick when I returned.

Forward a week: I get an email from dad thanking me for the RAM, proud he had been able to install it without me on the end of the phone, and delighted with the amazing performance improvement.

Now here is the point of the post…

… Visiting today I find he had ‘installed’ the RAM upside down!!! Effectively he still had exactly the same amount of memory as before and his computer sucked just as before. Yet he was convinced it was not just a bit better but alot better!

I have now installed the memory properly and what was frankly an appalling machine is now really rather good.

2

I’ve never heard of placebo hardware before. :smiley:

3

RAM makers don’t want you to know this but putting it in upside down puts in “Turbo” mode. They make it like that for their family and friends to use but they don’t want the general public to know because they would sell less RAM if the word got out. Your father is a technical savant.

4

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
RAM makers don’t want you to know this but putting it in upside down puts in “Turbo” mode.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but sometimes you have to reverse the polarity on the power source.

5

Really?

6

My Dell (several years old) only has 256MB. Certainly slower than what I use at work, but it runs XP just fine. Are you sure his computer isn’t full of spyware or other crap?

7

ya rly

8

No, the real reason is that most keyboards aren’t designed to work at that speed. The letters get backed up inside the cables. Fortunately, this problem is easily addressed. You just need to remember to type a few words in backwards at the end of every online session to pull the accumulated letters back down into your keyboard.

9

A Dvorak keyboard would solve that problem. Duh!

The slowness might also be attributable to a sticky hard drive. Pouring some melted butter into the machine usually helps.*

*Disclaimer: May not actually help.

10

[QUOTE=tdn]
A Dvorak keyboard would solve that problem. Duh!

The slowness might also be attributable to a sticky hard drive. Pouring some melted butter into the machine usually helps.*

*Disclaimer: May not actually help.
[/QUOTE]

Make sure to use the best butter.

11

Poor Dad goes nuts about viruses clogging up the PCs back home. It can’t be a little bit of malware or the hard drive with a few hundred megabytes free, certainly not.

It has to be teh hak0rs, who spending countless days building and sending viruses that don’t trash the computer, but quite cunningly slow it down a little day by day :dubious:

12

I like to have some fun with Teh Stupid at work by telling them that they should never- under any circumstances- try and sniff Ethernet cables. :smiley:

13

[QUOTE=rjk]
Make sure to use the best butter.
[/QUOTE]

Parkay.

14

[QUOTE=ticker]
… Visiting today I find he had ‘installed’ the RAM upside down!
[/QUOTE]

How…Ram only fits in one way.

15

Dad may have been polite and just said it worked better to not hurt your feelings.

16

I once put some RAM in backwords in my old Dell. It was very dark in the room (LAN party), I was low on sleep, and I was just stupid. Fried the Mobo I did. Nice little wiff of ozone and that’s all she wrote. Dell did send me a new mobo though. And the RAM still worked. Still have no idea how though.

MT

17

[QUOTE=ZipperJJ]
ya rly
[/QUOTE]
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18

It gladdens my heart to see ASCII art lives on…

However, from time to time, I do pine for line-printer art.

19

At least he didn’t break the cup holder.

20

I used to use my boss’s computer (to do his work for him naturally*) and he had a virus program that automatically scanned the hard drive for viruses everytime you turned on the computer.

The computer was not hooked up to any online connection.

I tried to explain to him that if there were no viruses on his hard drive today then they’re going to be any there tomorrow or the next day or ever. That viruses don’t spontaneously appear inside a computer and his computer had no way of receiving them. But he insisted on being “safe”.

*Which did enable me to imagine the scene a couple of years later when I left under rather bitter circumstances, knowing that not only was he going to have to reveal to his boss that he had no idea how to do the work that I had been doing for him all that time but that he was also going to have to admit he didn’t even know the password to sign on to his own computer.