Re: What is the worst computer you've ever had
While it's not technically a computer I've owned, the worst computer I had the displeasure of using was an old XP laptop I used in high school. I had better computers at home, but while I was at school I had to use their stuff. For various reasons, the computer was just awful. Firstly, installed on it was whatever security/account management facility the school was depending on, I think it was something by Novell but I can't recall anything too specific. That in it of itself wasn't a huge problem, but one year they upgraded everything and made policies more strict. I could not open word documents or executable programs. Although, I could launch Word, go to the open dialog, select all files from the file type list, right click a file and press the open option to run it. Don't ask me why but it's how I launched half of the installers for stuff I needed, like book readers and other such things for school. Even that wasn't a huge issue because the co
mputer was still working fine, but then it began blue screening constantly. If I was unlucky, it'd do it right in the middle of a tech lesson, and the teacher would get pissed at it. If I was even more unlucky, it would blue screen in the middle of a study hall and I would lose my work, which only happened once before I wised up and learned how little I could depend on it. As time passed, it blue screened more and more. By the time I officially stopped using it, it would do it every 10 or 15 minutes. It especially didn't like being suddenly moved or tilted, but it would also do it, it seemed, all by itself, and when plugged into the wall. And of course when it blue screened it would just shut down suddenly so I'd have to wait and hope the system would boot so we could read the event viewer and see what was up. If memory serves, we sent it back for repairs several months before I graduated, and when it came back, I no longer had a need for it as I had gone on well with
out it. The plan was for me to leave it behind so that hopefully someone else could use it, and prey that it didn't act up for them the ways it did for me.
Turns out my plan to just leave it was taken quite literally. One of my vision support teachers, who is still a friend of mine, called me a few months ago to ask me if I could remember my old log-in. Apparently when it was repaired, whatever suite they were using was still installed. Nobody had bothered to touch or reformat it because they wanted to keep Jaws and some of my other school software around, just in case someone would need it. As it turned out, someone else needed Jaws and my old computer conveniently had Jaws installed on it. Their logic was, if they could retrieve my old log-in from me, they could get in, update Jaws which I think was running off a school license, and update the suites that were installed on it from 5 years ago, and be home free. It didn't work that way because firstly, I couldn'
t remember my log-in exactly, and secondly, I knew from experience that if you got it wrong three or so times, you'd be locked out and have to, at a bare minimum, wait like 45 minutes to try again or call in the IT department to reset everything, which from what I was told wasn't a viable option as they were transferring the computer to another school and wanted to kill whatever crap my school had installed on it. It made sense, but was full of holes. Reformatting the darn thing would've been easier imho. But they didn't want to do that, because the person using Jaws supposedly "only knew how to use Jaws, not NVDA." To a point they're right actually, there are things you don't learn about a computer until you switch to NVDA full time as I did 18 months ago. But keeping a crappy computer around just to preserve a Jaws license is imho pretty desperate these days. I'll never go back to those times of my life again, I like being independent w
ith choosing what I will run and what kind of computers I will run it on.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
