this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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I got very lucky with my tech support session yesterday. I just had to set up a scanner, which could have been simple enough, but the laptop wasn't connected to wifi, nor was it picking up the hotspot from my phone.
Fortunately, the laptop was old enough to still have a disc drive. So I was able to install the drivers from the disc that came with it instead.
Every house with those demon driveless devices should have at least one usb cd/dvd rom. People mock the humble optical drive until the shit hits the fan, then they roll around squealing
I have one of these. I also have a usb 3 1/4 floppy disk drive, do I get bonus points for that?
Those floppy drives are mad useful when you do a deep clean and find Ye Olde Shite. I've still got one kicking around, amazing how many times it gets used once people realise you have one
I don't have Ye Olde Shite, those li'l guys are in current use here. My sewing machine uses them for design files, so they are my link from the computer.
PII-200 running dos 6.2.2 and win 311 with a working 3.5 and 5.25 drives for retro gaming here :)
fuck all network capability tho, so I keep my USB floppy handler for anything I snaffle from the net
I have a zip drive which I proudly display at the back of a cupboard somewhere.
Used to be used for a medical practice where they'd send disks up to Syd. every week for back ups.
It worked in this case. But it was so weird with this laptop, it wasn't picking up any wifi networks. They had an ancient laptop at home as well and that one was connected to the wifi there. I was even able to connect the printer to the wifi via WPS. This laptop was picking up nothing. I was ready to drive down to the nearest Jaycar and pick up an ethernet cable.
I think I assume to much of a tech competence baseline in these sessions. At first I was worried they wouldn't be able to login to the laptop because they bought it a while ago specifically to scan photos and hadn't touched it in years. I should ask people to have their diaries with their passwords handy, make sure they can login to the devices and accounts they want to work on, and I should bring a couple of common cables just to make sure as well.
My older laptop stopped working with my WiFi at some point, I had to buy a wireless dongle to work with the newer wifi equipment.
That's what's so weird. This laptop isn't ancient but it couldn't find anything. The older laptop looked like it was from 2009 and was connected to the internet
what os on the non-ancient laptop? I'm guessing some proprietary wlan handler that windows is having a bargy with
It was out of the box Windows 10. It seemed like a mid-tier laptop for the time, I can't remember brand. These people probably just go to JB Hi-Fi and buy a $500 laptop when they're on sale so I haven't seen anything too exotic in my support sessions so far
I plugged a leftover usb sata hdd controller into an internal cd-rom drive to get USB CD action a few months ago. Kinda surprised, kinda impressed.
nah that's all standard connectivity.
What was insane was watching a friend with a busted touch screen on his phone attach a fucking computer mouse via a USB to micro USB adapter cable in the charging port and use it like that for a couple months