Why I kinda stopped

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 05:13:42 GMT

I read something on Reddit this evening that gave me a flashback to the time when I decided that I was no longer going to help build computer for anyone other than immediate friends and family members.

A co-worker came to me because he had a friend who was looking for a new computer, and he told her that he knew a guy who was good with computers.

He gave me a list of her requirements, and her desired budget. I spent a few hours researching parts, and managed to put together a pretty capable system that would fill all of her requirements with some headroom to spare, and still came in a bit under her budget. I printed off the parts list for him and he took it to her.

A couple of days later he was back with the list and a few questions - neither unexpected, nor unreasonable since this person was looking to lay out a fair bit of money for a new computer, and they wanted to feel comfortable with the choices I'd made for them. She preferred to go with a more expensive brand for one of the parts, but since it still came in under her budget, I swapped out the part on the list and sent him away again with the new manifest and cost estimate.

He came back a couple of days later because she was questioning my choice of an AMD processor rather than an Intel. She preferred Intel, and she was concerned that AMD might not be compatible with [some trivial bit of software that did not care what processor it ran on] I explained that there was a significant price difference, and even if I went with a slower Intel processor, the motherboard with that socket was also more expensive. I did up a modified list for him with the Intel solution - I'd had to make compromises on almost everything (HD, Memory, speed...). When I gave him the list, I assured him that nothing in her original requirements indicated that she would benefit from an Intel chip, or suffer for having an AMD processor.

A couple of days later he was back again. He said that she was still reluctant to go with AMD, and she didn't understand why she had to give up so much to get the Intel one, but if I could assure her that it was somehow better, was 100% compatible and would never cause any problems down the road...

I stopped him before he was finished and said, "No."

"You mean 'no' it won't cause any issues down the road?"

I replied, "No, I'm not going to build her computer. She 's going to blame the CPU for every problem she has going forward. If she installs a game that's not compatible with the sound card, it's the fault of the CPU. If her power supply smokes, it's the fault of the CPU. If her monitor dies..."

He reluctantly agreed that I was likely right, and he let her know that "something came up and he can't build this for you after all".

I feel like I dodged a technical support bullet.

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Two annoyances resolved.

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 02:12:45 GMT

When I first started loading up Windows 10 with my selection of programs back in the day, I had two programs (Semagic and a graphics editor that I use) that both refused to run, citing permission errors.

I eventually set both of them to run in Administrator mode to get around the issue, but it always added an extra step when I'd run them.

It occurred to me this evening that there had been several version updates to Windows 10 since I first installed these, and also an update to Semagic in that time (the other software, though, is long orphaned and won't see any updates).

I tried disabling the Administrator mode in Semagic, and it runs fine now. Whatever had been irking it earlier has been fixed. Now if they could just do a version that would read the music data from Spotify so that I didn't have to manually copy that data over...

The other program still gave me the error when I disabled Admin mode, though. I did what I should have done years ago and ran a Google search on the error message. After a couple of false leads, I eventually found an old forum where somebody else had the same problem. It turns out that this software was ignoring my environment variables and trying to access a folder to which it did not have access. I made the changes suggested in the forum, and the problem is solved. No more Admin access for those two programs.

For me, the most interesting part in all of this was the tone of the person who answered the question on the forum. The preface of his answer could be distilled down to, "I'll weigh in here with how to fix it because the rest of the people in these forums are useless, arrogant morons."

Once I had made the fixes, I scrolled through the rest of the answers and realised that this poster had been correct. It was full of people blurting out answers that were technically correct, and then refusing to give details when people asked, "Okay, so how do I do that?" Or they were defending the software and blaming the users. Or they were tossing out off-the-wall suggestions that came nowhere near to addressing the actual issue. Or...

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and things went downhill from there

Why I kinda stopped

Two annoyances resolved.