:laugh: Tech support horror stories
I used to know some people who worked at a comp shop. Carol (who owned the business) told me of two:
- Someone bought an Alpha NT system from them. Mind you, this was back in the days of winNT 4.0 when there were seperate compiled versions of the OS for the PC, Alpha, Power PC, and MIPPs systems...
Anyhow, the person decided to upgrade some hardware one day. After getting it properly plugged into their computer (this part they did OK), they then went online and downloaded
the x86 drivers for the device. They installed these and their computer wouldn't boot.
So they brought it back down to the shop and complained. After they explained it, Carol tried to explain to him that one can't use x86 drivers on their Alpha NT system, that they need drivers compiled for the Alpha platform.
The guy was like "It's the same difference isn't it? It's Windows..."
"No, it's Alpha NT. PC drivers won't work on the Alpha..."
Guy
- Another person was apperently messing around in Disk Manager. They don't know what the guy did, as they only saw the aftermath. Lets just say that she had the painful experience of low level formatting the person's 9.1 GB Baracuda, that even being a 7200 rpm SCSI drive, was still quite painful... There was no other way to recover his drive, or get it bootable again.
tbh, I have no clue what he could have done in Disk Manager to cause this myself... Then again, I have no idea how when I took a PC into a shop after I put winNT 4 on it...the guy managed to get pagefile.sys into the recycle bin
when it was on the NTFS partition. Somehow he did, and within a month after he touched that install, it had slowly gone to the crapper... There was no second install of winNT to give him access to the NTFS partition either. This was around 1996 time frame