IT disaster zone

[Booksandstuff]

Eldest came back on 23rd till early this morning. Brought his pc with him because it wasn't working properly. He gets very agitated very easily and wasn't allowing hubby to just have a "quiet look" at things. Contrary to OH's and my advice, he decided to uninstall windows, reformat HD and reinstall windows. Of course that didn't do anything, apart from creating many hours of work reinstalling all his applications. One of his mates had messed around in the bios and changed settings, which was the cause of all malfunctioning!!!. He then decided to put in all windows updates in one go after which he lost his wireless networking. There are a number of updates that are renowned for causing this phenomena, but it was a question of finding which one and deleting one by one - again quite a few hours work. OH spend all of Xmas eve and Xmas morning messing around with that PC, without getting it fully functional again. That was finally done yesterday.

Youngest got a load of ram for his pc - when they went to slot it in they inadverted pulled the keyboard plug out of the back of the PC and blew the socket! Because of one particular switch in the bios, they won't be able to ever get into the bios again, so if anything fails, the PC will be rendered useless.

When eldest came home, we unplugged our 2nd pc for him to use that screen, mouse and keyboard - when we went to reconnedct it this morning it wouldn't boot!

About an hour ago, youngest has come down, announcing HD failure. He got 2 HD's in his pc and his data drive has failed - they (him and OH) have been trying by various means to retrieve all his data, because in spite of numerous reminders from us, he's never backed up his stuff!!!

So much for spending time together as a family over Xmas. Have seen less of them these last 5 days then I do when it's ordinary working days!

[shelleywelley]

Ooops :eek: Hope he didn't lose anything vital.

I spent most of Friday sorting out the pc belonging to my OH's mum. She was complaining about it not working properly. Not surprising, she had 81 viruses in it :rolleyes:

[Booksandstuff]

In amongst all this, I forgot to mention that we spent Boxing Day at my sister in law and her daughter had computer problems. So OH in one room and me in another room on their main pc looking up stuff online spent most of our time there messing around with her pc - one of the problems was viruses.

[Booksandstuff]

he wouldnt be an it person by any chance would he now
No he isn't, at least not as a job. It's a hobby and all our current pc's (including the boys') are built by him. He's very good with the hardware, but has several weaknesses in the software - I am competent in one of the fields he's weak in, so whenever there's a problem along those lines I have to "jump into action".

Our very first PC had DOS as an operating system (that one was bought as a package and the good old 5" or 5.5" floppy as a back up/install device), well before home PCs were the norm. We both developed an interest in IT, although in completely different fields. I expect we were "online", before the majority of the population was even aware of emails - only used to get/exchange one about once a month!

[Booksandstuff]

now your going back in time, 5.5 floppys, only ever seen one once :eek:
used to be the only thing there was. Can't remember the spec of that one; our 2nd pc had a 356 mb HD and 4 MB of RAM with a 3" floppy drive and windows 3.1 as operating system. I remember a pop up stating: "you have too many windows open, please close some, before trying to open any more" and me exclaiming "Well, how do you do that?"

[shelleywelley]

now your going back in time, 5.5 floppys, only ever seen one once :eek:

:eek: When I left school (1992) I did day release on a YTS thing and the college I went to, all their machines had 5.25 floppies and used word perfect 5.1 and MSDOS. The company I worked for were slightly more upto date we had 3.5" floppies Windows 3.1, Lotus Smartsuite and not a cdrom in sight :D

[kengillam]

Nothing wrong with DOS 3.3 it all started going downhill for Mickysoft with DOS 4.0 :D that was when DRDOS stated making a big dent in them, which frightened them and thus woke them up so they procduced DOS 5 which was probably the last one that didn't need loads of revisions. Patches seem to be the norm now, it's a pity they don't get a proper secure working system, before adding fancy transparent windows rubbish instead of concentrating on the important things.

[Booksandstuff]

it kinda hard to make a secure system when its usually third party software that contains the exploitsBy now they should be aware of what third parties can do. After all they are the major OS provider and try to squash anyone else to death. Having said that, I am looking forward to the next release of wndows; as far as I am concerned Vista has been a total disaster - they'l also have to learn to strike a balance between "IT illiterate" and "IT literate" people. It's outrageous that I cannot transfer a large folder to a new location without switching off "administrator controls", when switching them of provides a potential security hazard!