"I need all the space"

Posted by average_guy54@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 35 comments

Back in the last century, my workplace was a 24/7 operation with a mix of HP-UX workstations and Windows PCs. The PCs were basically used for WORD though, as literally everything else on the the HP boxes.
Then came Outlook. Everyone was getting their own email and I had the job of installing it on all the PCs.

First PC - install failed. Second PC - also failed due to Insufficient disk space. Third, fourth, fifth and sixth, ditto.

Those PCs had 100 MB disks. They should have had lots of space for Outlook! Why didn't they? A quick check revealed dozens of ZIP files with names like Fenway68 or Wrigley72, in that style. And a baseball program installed on each and every PC. End result was that all the machines had less than 10 MB free space.

I knew who the baseball nut in the office was, but when I went to the manager, I only said "Someone installed unauthorized software. Do I have your permission to delete it so I can install Outlook?" He didn't ask what the software was, but did ask "who did it?" I replied that there was no way to know.

When I deleted those files, I left a note for the baseballer to never again do what he did. And he didn't.

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robjeffrey@reddit

You did them a solid.

I'll give anyone a free pass once as long as it's not a legal issue. I find most people appreciate the warning and shape up quickly. Those that don't I haven't found sticking around for other issues anyway.

Giving the boss a heads up there is shenanigans going on and indicating to the person you know who it is gives a clear message. You're not ratting them out but the behaviour is not acceptable.

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Epistaxis@reddit

I think most people don't think that anyone else will ever notice. As soon as they know that you might, it changes everything.

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Corgilicious@reddit

This is so true. I work with many users in my company, and would you recommend that we start their PC now and then given this world of updates and such. Many times I’ve talked with the user having an issue and when I asked them when the last time they restarted was they swear that they do it every day. Well I could easily bring up a tool that told me when that had last happened. So I’d say oh, that’s odd because I see here in the log with the last restart was 10 days ago. They’d be silent and be like oh, you can see that?I would give him a very gentle statement of fact that yes, admin can see essentially everything that has been done on a machine.

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ZestyOrangeSlice@reddit

To be fair, a shutdown (at least of my work pc) doesnt reset the clock of uptime in the task manager. Only restart will clear it.

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warlock415@reddit

That's because Microsoft decided to redefine what words mean. 'Shutdown' now means "I want to turn off my computer, please remember where I was." You have to actually Restart restart to do what turning-it-off-and-on-again used to.

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ColdStorage256@reddit

When I rebuilt my computer in the early 2010s, I was sold the dream of having an SSD boot drive, and installing everything else on my HDD. As such, I got a 128GB drive - remember 64GB was common at the time too - and off I went.

Well, things were great for just over 5 years, and then slowly but surely more apps started to store app data on the drive, with no way to move it elsewhere. Microsoft stopped giving you the choice of what drive to install some of their apps on altogether.

Now, because my SSD is too full to store a page file, I have fast boot disabled. In the end, shutdown still means shutdown for me.

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Eryn-Tauriel@reddit

I suffered this debacle of a setup too. Was never so glad to upgrade my laptop as with this one.

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Shahelion@reddit

Then what does Sleep do?

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Zappowy@reddit

Sleep leaves the PC in a low power state. Memory is kept powered on and the state of the CPU is maintained.

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KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

All hail the audit file and the audit fields.

"I can't despatch $stock!"

*Pokes around the inventory systems*

"Okay, I've fixed it. Please don't adjust $status inventory values."

"I didn't!"

"Really? Your username is the one that performed the adjustments. Either you did it, you gave someone your account details, or we've been hacked. Do I need to change your password?"

"..."

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ascii122@reddit

The keyboard did it! Don't blame me the thing was typing like a mofo so I went to lunch

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ThunderDwn@reddit

Oh for the days when 100 meg disks were huge....

I had Novell fileservers with less space than that.

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SteveDallas10@reddit

My first hard drive was 10MB. I had it on a machine running CP/M (-80, but CP/M-86 hadn’t been written yet).

I thought it was a huge amount of space.

Yes, I’m old.

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Diminios@reddit

My first PC was a 486 DX/2. 270MB hard drive. I remember thinking "There's no way I'm ever going to use that much space!".

Well. That thought aged like milk.

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syntaxerror53@reddit

Back in the last millennium, remember colleague telling another that he had come across someone at head office who had 128Mb RAM on his Unix Workstation and that was more than the measly 20Mb HDD that he had in his laptop and desktop put together.

Was a long long time ago when days were the days.

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Ol_JanxSpirit@reddit

"Back in the last millennium" that feels like an act of aggression.

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syntaxerror53@reddit

feels like a long time ago

and retirement feels like a long time to go

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vaildin@reddit

I was expecting the manager to be the baseball nut.

OP: "Can I delete this unauthorized software" Manager: "Yes"

Later - Manager: "What happened to my files?"

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ConstanceJill@reddit

Those PCs had 100 MB disks.

Huh really, that small? How old were those computers anyway? It'd be hard to even fit Windows 98 on that.

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NotYourReddit18@reddit

According to Wikipedia Windows 98 needs ateats 140 MB of disk space when doing a fresh install on a FAT32 disk, with the typical usage being around 175 MB.

Windows 95 would have filled those drives to about half of their capacity as it needs between 50 and 55 MB.

Windows 3.1 was happy with 6.5 MB and a floppy drive, or 14 MB with the full Windows for Workgroups update.

Windows NT 3.1 would have needed about 75 MB of disk space.

Judging by this it would be reasonable to assume that they were probably running Windows 3.1 or older.

But the oldest Outlook I was able to find in 5 min of using Google was part of Office 97, which requires Windows NT 3.51 or newer, which in turn alone needs 90 MB disk space.

Maybe the commentor is confusing Outlook with it's predecessor, the Microsoft Exchange Client, for which I couldn't find system requirements.

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average_guy54@reddit (OP)

This would be around 1996, and they really were sub-par machines, as in the cheapest possible 486s.

What with software requirements changing so fast, It wasn't too long after that we made the jump from 486 to the Pentium 1, and the old machines were junked.

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AdreKiseque@reddit

What exactly is a "baseball program"? Like a game?

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average_guy54@reddit (OP)

Yes, a game. The zips were for various teams at the various baseball parks and ... things were done. I really don't know just what those things were, but Mr Baseball had had a lot of fun with them on the quiet night shifts.

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average_guy54@reddit (OP)

Shared PCs, and he had many more files than would fit on a single machine.

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