The new computer is to small
Posted by tero999@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 79 comments
First, I'd like to say that English is not my first language, and I’m from a small country in Europe. Just before COVID, I helped a small grocery store—what I think you’d call a "mom & pop" shop—with their IT problems. Now, I’m not an IT professional, but since they were family friends and I have some IT knowledge, I figured I could help.
This was a small grocery store with just one cash register and a POS system. They had a "server" in the backroom that, as far as I could tell, managed their product database and other stuff. But this "server" was actually just an ancient PC running Windows 98, with their database software (I can't remember what it was) running in DOS. They told me that sometimes the computer wouldn’t turn on, and other times it would. They had to press the power button on and off for at least half an hour to get it to wake up. My first thought? Bad capacitors.
So, I opened it up, and sure enough—every capacitor looked like a water balloon!
Now, I had to figure out what to do next. Should we replace the whole computer or just fix it? The biggest issue was that they were planning to close the store in about a year, so of course, there was no budget for new equipment (and after COVID hit, they closed even sooner). So, I came up with the idea to simply copy everything and try to run it in DOSBox on a new computer. But I guess I wanted to show off a little, so I installed DOSBox on a Raspberry Pi, hooked everything up, and configured it.
And it worked! I was so proud of myself. When the owner came in and saw what I’d done, I explained that his entire huge, old tower had been replaced by something so small. His response? "This is unacceptable. I asked you to check and fix the computer, not replace it with this small piece of s... It looks like a toy! The previous computer was a real computer. I’m going to pay someone to actually repair our computer."
And that’s exactly what he did. He paid some company several thousand euros(!) to repair (well, replace the motherboard of) that ancient computer. :)
ascii4ever@reddit
The customer is always right.
Z4-Driver@reddit
Typical for US folks. It's the same for cars, they can't comprehend, you can drive very well with a smaller car. Those ridiculous monsters of trucks aren't necessary or useful in most cases.
BreeKn@reddit
Theoretically r/USdefaultism
meitemark@reddit
Well, yes, we allways think it is stupid americans that does this, because those kinds of thinking should not exist in a proper part of the world (europe (uk not included)).
fullmetaljackass@reddit
You do realize everyone in this story is Slovenian, right? Typical Swiss moron. . .
Z4-Driver@reddit
Oh, my bad, sorry.
ninjatoothpick@reddit
It's crazy how some people think we can manufacture microchips and boards small enough to inject them into our veins but others think that computers have to be so big to actually do stuff.
archangelzeriel@reddit
My partner is a nurse and had a BUNCH of that "injected microchips" pushback during the first round of covid vaccines -- I ended up melting the plastic off a credit card with tap-to-pay and mounting it on a piece of cardstock so they could show it to vaccine-hesitant folks and say "this is how much antenna it takes to communicate with something the antenna is TOUCHING." while holding up the vaccine needle/syringe next to it.
Surprisingly, having the visual aid right there actually worked on a majority of folks who were worried about microchips/5g. People have to have it connected to something they're day-to-day familiar with, a lot of the time.
meitemark@reddit
/u/archangelzeriel used logic and visual aid against stupidity. It worked?
Ich_mag_Kartoffeln@reddit
What's even crazier is when one person believes both things.
Golden_Apple_23@reddit
Like Tea and Not Tea? (circling back to the HHGTTG talk)
CrazySD93@reddit
the enemy is both powerful and weak at the same time
sir_mrej@reddit
Speaking of which...I need to get my bill gates microchip updated. I'm just not getting the LTE signal into my brain like I was a few years ago. Anyone know any cyberpunk bars where I can drink a pan galactic gargle blaster and get it done?
Slackingatmyjob@reddit
We got a lot of hoopy froods replying in this thread
Hope everyone has their towel
StoneyBolonied@reddit
If you drink one PGGB, you best follow it with a second to make sure the first does its job.
Follow that swiftly with two more so that they may join forces and get the second to pull itself together.
Then all three may go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well.
If you feel uncertain that the fourth drink understood all of that, then try a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support.
TerrorBite@reddit
I think that's beer you're thinking of
You can only really have one PGGB at a time, because it's hard to have a second one when it feels like you've just had your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
StoneyBolonied@reddit
Baby, with three arms and two heads, anything is possible.
Or at least very, very improbable
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
I know some tea bars where you can get a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster :)
maroongrad@reddit
you lost me at "think" for those people.
Visible-Ambition6626@reddit
You should not run serious stuff on a raspberry pi
BioHazard1992@reddit
These type of people are why fake progress bars exist.
GodOfUtopiaPlenitia@reddit
"You CAN'T HAVE searched the entire internet THAT FAST!" internet searches should be near-instant
Speed_Alarming@reddit
No, no, no. You need to search the internet yourself. Manually. Page by page.
Pandahatbear@reddit
Well I do now that Google insists on giving me an AI overview for my medical questions. I am not trusting that shit for my patients
AshleyJSheridan@reddit
Add &udm=14 to the Google search URL (lot of plugins that will do this for you) to remove the AI summary stuff from the results. There's even a website set up for it.
soberdude@reddit
I'm glad you're not trusting it for your patients, however, it does disturb me a little that a medical professional finds out what's wrong with me the same way I do.
Does that just mean everything is cancer now?
Pandahatbear@reddit
Nah, the trick with medical school is that it teaches what sort of things to search for. Mostly Latin terms
soberdude@reddit
Fair enough. If you have the entirety of all human knowledge in a little pocket rectangle, I don't blame you for using it.
I was just a little uneasy at first, but not too horrible.
Pandahatbear@reddit
Obviously if you have to Google everything then that's not ideal. And you have to be able to sense check it , which is the trickier part. But I'm certainly off the mindset it's safer to double check things. Med school was many years ago, even if I remember correctly what I was taught, it doesn't mean it's the appropriate treatment to use now. Science will have (likely) moved on.
(But also our biggest secret is a lot of conditions are just what the patient is saying translated into Latin. My partner was upset when I mentioned I had plantar fascitis and he giggled it and was all, that just seemed to be Latin for effectively sore foot. Sure is!)
soberdude@reddit
Yeah, the sense check is always the tricky part in any job.
And keeping up with the latest is always tough, and I just deal with industrial paints. Can't imagine how much new stuff comes out in the medical community all the time.
CodeArcher@reddit
This is one of the sickest burns I've ever seen,
espositorpedo@reddit
There is an expression about how too many people don’t appreciate a person’s good work or efforts on their behalf: No good deed goes unpunished.
centstwo@reddit
I came up with Better To Do It The Old Hard Way, BTDITOHW, bi-dit-OW! Ow, because it hurts more.
espositorpedo@reddit
I like it! Being as old as I am, you reminded me of the old song, “Draggin’ The Line” by Tommy James and the Shondells. The opening line is, Making a living the old hard way…
centstwo@reddit
The funny thing is, well another funny thing is that even the old computer was probably way over powered also.
markhadman@reddit
Shoulda put that Pi inside the old PC case. You probably wouldn't have even needed to remove anything.
georgiomoorlord@reddit
Yep. Put it in its own case and mount it to the back with double sided tape. Plug the original power button into the pi's power feed and job's done
notfork@reddit
I have a Pi running inside my computer, It is in its own case, in a HD bay and I use one the of the USB headers to power it. This was my original implementation of home assistant, before switching to unraid. Now I am looking for a use for it.
IAMA_Plumber-AMA@reddit
Put PiHole on it
Projammer65@reddit
This is the way.
DiodeInc@reddit
That's a good idea.
georgiomoorlord@reddit
I have a HA Green and wondering what to do with my pi 4. May make a docker box, but i don't know
afcagroo@reddit
I worked at a place where we did something like that. Designed a PC and sent it for trial usage. Biggest feedback was that it was perceived as a low performance computer because it was small. So we used a much larger case and it did well in the next trials.
Wendals87@reddit
Loud/bigger = performance to many people
Cars and vacuums are two big ones
Golden_Apple_23@reddit
And with both, they're losing so much power to make the noise.
tero999@reddit (OP)
That would be a great idea actually... But i just did not think that the owner would react like that. :)
TheBestMePlausible@reddit
Nah, he was doing someone a favor. If they didn’t like how he helped them, fine, go spend 3 grand on nothing then.
Vidya_Vachaspati@reddit
This is the way!
I_wasnt_here@reddit
Then we could read about it next year when someone else is asked to do a migration or something...
pockypimp@reddit
I've run into a similar kind of reaction at my current job. Every now and then corporate orders the Dell Mini form factor desktops. Slightly underpowered as a machine since they're using laptop CPUs but always an improvement over the 3-5 year old machine. Most people are going from a small form factor box to the mini when this happens and they're all amazed at how small the box can be.
Sometimes I'll open one up next to the old desktop and point to the M2 drive and stuff to show it's the same thing.
kor34l@reddit
Hang on
You opened up the power supply??
Or are there also capacitors on the motherboard and that is what you're referring to?
Forgive my ignorance, I don't know if MBs have lots of capacitors too, I just know opening the PSU is dangerous and generally a really bad idea.
Then again, replacing a PSU is much easier than what you did, so you are probably talking about the motherboard.
Taulath_Jaeger@reddit
As other commenters have already noted, these would be capacitors on the motherboard. Somewhere around 2007-2009 (I think) Dell had a rash of bad caps on their desktop motherboards. Most of our clients at the time had at least one failed PC due to these caps. We eventually bought a stock of replacement caps and started recapping the motherboards.
tero999@reddit (OP)
As someone said it was an older motherboard. I actually did not look at the model or even check the cpu. I just seen the electrolitic capacitors on the motherboard itself. But funny enough i actually did open the power supply and there the capacitors look fine.
icedak@reddit
On older motherboards there were caps on the bord that weren't Solid-state like current motherboards. Some may still have electrolytic capacitors. They may or may not have checked the power supply. I personally have recapped a motherboard a few times and had it work.
HeadacheCentral@reddit
One of the most appropriate truisms in this industry is "A fool and his money are soon parted.".
You just proved it again.
EruditeLegume@reddit
"A fool and his money are some party".
/s (just in case!)
RandomBoomer@reddit
I wish you hadn't mentioned that English isn't your first language. It's always so painful when non-native speakers are so effortlessly articulate and idiomatic compared to native speakers.
tero999@reddit (OP)
Well... I just first write it and then copy paste to chatgpt to correct it and make sure the msg is still there what i was tryting to say... SO no. I am not that good at english.
RandomBoomer@reddit
Oh. So now we know you're more clever than we are!! Keep digging that hole, buster. :)
jak_hungerford@reddit
My wife speaks 6 Languages, English is her third Language (she also holds an English Degree and a Degree in Linguistics)
She speaks English better than I do and I'm native!
Shadow5825@reddit
They clearly had better English teachers than we did!! I only had two actual English teachers between grades 7-12!!
alf666@reddit
You made a common mistake done by IT people.
Only 10% of IT is actually fixing the problem.
The other 90% is spent convincing users to actually use your solution by making it aesthetically appealing to them.
If you want to see a case of this in action, just ask a crowd of PC gamers whether they prefer Nvidia Control Panel or GeForce Experience (or whatever Nvidia's new thing is called).
DiodeInc@reddit
What settings can you even change in GeForce Experience? Other than updating drivers, you can't do anything in GE that you can do in NCP
Expensive-Bill-7780@reddit
Uhhh GeForce Experience is crap because it takes like a lot of resources in the background
alf666@reddit
You're absolutely correct, but don't tell the idiots who like shiny objects.
da_apz@reddit
Long ago I found similar situation, but replaced it with a modern PC, running Dosbox under Linux. Everyone was happy until Linux was brought up. The shop owner told he thinks Linux is a toy for nerds and wanted a "proper" OS to run Dosbox. Someone else did that.
protogenxl@reddit
You needed a full tower Beige case
fullmetaljackass@reddit
Were you running it off the SD card?
Penguinmanereikel@reddit
And the customer was gonna be closing up shop within a year so...
Ziginox@reddit
This type of person is exactly why those stupid HP towers with oodles of empty space exist. The ones with a mini-ITX board and laptop components (including external power supply!) in a case originally meant for microATX.
YankeeWalrus@reddit
Size isn't everything usually, but I have a ridiculous story about the gaming PC I bought secondhand and by proxy. My friend's roommate was selling it and he bought it for me to clear away a debt he owed me. This was in probably 2018-19. I didn't turn it on for over a year because I had nowhere to set it up, but I eventually HDMI'd it to my TV and played with the keyboard in my lap and my mouse on a lap table next to me.
It performed well for a while, but about a year after I moved the GPU started crashing, even when doing something so simple as watching a youtube video. I told my friend about it and, despite knowing the basic specs of the machine when he acquired it for me, he didn't know or remember much about its innards and figured the graphics card was failing. We opened it up and it turns out the GTX 1050 wasn't necessarily causing the crashes and it was more likely that the 250w power supply was the culprit. The casing had also been stripped off the GPU and the motherboard was so old that it wasn't compatible with the pin configuration on the new power supply. My friend could only guess that his former roommate had built the rig to size due to space constraints. As such, the new GPU wouldn't fit the case and neither did the motherboard. The fan on the new power was also facing the wrong direction. All in all, we replaced the case, GPU, motherboard, PSU, CPU, and RAM either with parts we ordered or spare parts my friend had. The RAM at least was an upgrade I had planned to do beforehand and not necessitated by that whole... situation, but suffice it to say that when I opened my PC I didn't expect to be building the Six Million Dollar Man. The only parts in my PC that remained from the old build are the hard drive and SSD.
kor34l@reddit
I think I'd have just said "Uh, do you not understand how time works? Moore's Law? Computers get waaaay more powerful, AND smaller, year after year. That PC was well over 20 years old. This toy is thousands of times more powerful than the PC it replaced. THOUSANDS. So is your phone, by the way."
JustNilt@reddit
Eh, sometimes it just isn't worth arguing. It's obvious the guy doesn't know any of that and doesn't care. It's why part of the job of doing this professionally is understanding what the client cares about as much as the technical solution. Not that OP did anything wrong, as such, of course. It's just that the solution has to cover both needs: the customer's desires, irrational as they may be, as well as filling the technical need.
AcousticOnomatopoeia@reddit
The spoon is too big.
gmlogmd80@reddit
I am a banana!
AcousticOnomatopoeia@reddit
That's a wrap, folks, that's all we need!
Unless... angry ticks fire out of my nipples!!
ryanlc@reddit
But, there is no spoon.
Maxfire2008@reddit
This "small piece of s**t" doesn't have dying capacitors on it. Good job OP.
sinfaen@reddit
Would not have guessed that it's not your first language 👍