Have you tried rebooting it?

Do not use your school or work email to sign up for things, unless they are specifically school or work related.

This is not a "they are watching you" thing, although with your work email there's an element of that, it's a "you might not have access to this email later" thing.

Your best bet is to open two gmail (or any other long-standing free email) accounts. One, you use to sign up for stuff. The other you use to talk to people. You may occasionally use the first to talk to companies, but it's going to fill up with spam soooo goddamn fast-- even just from the people you signed up for.

But the point is that this email address will be available if you drop out/quit, get kicked out/fired, or graduate. Yes, I know a lot of colleges give free email for life to alumni. That can change, especially as most of those colleges haven't thought about the server/storage costs of such a promise in perpetuity. If you do have such an email, you'll want to sign into it regularly, if only too see if the school has sent you a notice explaining what you need to do to keep this email, and what date you need to do it by, and how apathetic they're going to be if you didn't read it and lost the email.

You can't reset the password for an email you can't access, so don't provide an email that can be taken away from you with little or no notice. (When I got laid off from my job at a fortune 500 company, I had twenty minutes before they shut off my email.)

I would say 5% of the calls I take are people who desperately need access to an email that no longer exists, because they signed up for something important with it, and now they can't reset their password.

I'm Bulgarian, same as Prof. Popova here. My country was among the least affected by the fallout in the Eastern Bloc but still affected severely enough for us born after the disaster to have to be given mandatory iodine pills at school in the late 90s/early 00s to not "get goiter" (to expel any residual iodine 131, the radioactive isotope released in the disaster).

So my mother told me that not only did the communist top brass (those who didn't flee to western Europe, that is) get food imported FROM HALFWAY ACROSS THE SOVIET UNION, from fucking KAZAKHSTAN, but also that normal people were left completely in the dark to eat local irradiated produce, oh, and the annual May 1st rally? It took place while rain was falling. Radioactive fucking rain.

However, all the foreign students except for the East German ones left the university (and the country) very quickly.

Oh, and in the following weeks, her university's dormitory had the rule where one of the people living in each room had to stay in the room "on duty" and wash the floor every couple of hours. So in practice, you'd wash the floor by hand with a wet rug, then hang that rug outside the window to dry in the air, and then use the same rug to wash the floor again. Which, should any particles by on it, would have only helped spread them. That's basically all the precautions there were.

My mother was in the UK when the accident in Chornobyl happened. She tried calling home as soon as the news broke in Europe, got through, tried to warn dad to keep me indoors.

"But it's been so lovely outside all week, we just got back from a walk in the park!"

The phone line got cut off as soon as she started giving more details. Something bad and dangerous happing in our great ally and friend the USSR? Absolutely not, only an enemy of communism would say that.

@in-the-drowning-deep That might possibly have helped in this case, but I've had multiple cases where I do that, and they make noises like "uh-huh" and "got it", and then, when it's all done, it turns out that no, they didn't got it, they got confused at step two.

It's still better than when the caller thinks he knows what I'm telling him, gets ahead of me, and gets lost... and because he stopped listening he genuinely doesn't realize that he's on an entirely different screen, he doesn't give me that information.

I've been doing tech support since the mid-90s. I am very much appreciative of the fact that now, when I'm dealing with a caller who's too old, too obstinate, or just too dumb for this shit, I can actually remote into their computers. (Although this is sometimes a hassle, despite the fact that the instructions are on the screen in front of them.)

i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom

as well as the three laws of fandom:

When computers get down to business...

Me when I contact IT and tell them yes I restarted and followed any instructions I could but computer still angry and IT says they are escalating this because it is an actual issue: I am getting a good grade in service desk ticket. Something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

Caller: I'm getting this error message that says [this] went wrong and I should [do that].

Kettle: Did you [do that]?

Caller: No... I wasn't sure what to do.

Kettle: [Do that].

And speaking from a tech support perspective, I would much rather have to tell someone "okay, press the down arrow three times until this option is highlighted" rather than "okay, find this and click it" because users are very much capable of not seeing what's in a gui.

BIOS doesn't need to be pretty. It SHOULD be stark and a little intimidating to folks who've never worked on a text terminal. The kind of user that needs a GUI to function is exactly the kind of user that needs to stay the fluffy fuck out of the BIOS.

(Not to mention that adding a GUI gives your code about a billion more Points of Failure.)

As for PS/2-- it's there so you still have an option in case something goes wrong with the USB Drivers. (Also, a lot of those PS/2 keyboards from the 90s are still around, because they still work as both a peripheral and a +2 melee weapon.)

For example, Microsoft has inserted AI into Windows and Office. Those products are profitable. Therefore, AI is profitable. It doesn't matter that nobody wants it, nobody needs it, and it doesn't really work as advertised, because Microsoft can point to it and say "Look, investors, AI is already making money."

Office365 now costs more, because of AI tools. Again, nobody wants the tools, but they want OFFICE, so they will end up paying for it.

(Note: Existing subscribers can 'downgrade' to a non-AI package. If you subscribe to Office365 already, look into it. Or better yet, get LibreOffice, which is free.)

Of course, Microsoft is playing a very dangerous game. Their whole thing is that they have set themselves up as THE desktop operating system and THE Office suite. And they've held that position because they are too big to compete against-- switching to Linux has historically been a huge trade-off in terms of available software and the learning curve, and most people are completely unaware of LibreOffice.

Problem is, they fucked up with Windows 11. They told a huge chunk of Windows 10 users that if they want to continue using Windows, they have to buy new computers. (There actually is a way to extend support for 10, but they're not advertising it-- instead they're shouting "If you're running Windows 10, you are vulnerable to attacks".) And those people were perfectly happy with their computers. Hell, some of them can't afford to upgrade. Add in the fact that a lot of people don't want AI, and they're literally sending customers to their competition.