The real fun is when you can’t watch what their doing because its over the phone, so you just have to hope they are doing it right. I used to hit them with the “Let’s try this; hold down the power button for exactly 30 seconds, then turn it back on.” Worked every time, but I did once have a guy ask me why that worked, and I didn’t want to call him an idiot so I made up some BS about it being a way to “flush the power from the system” and he bought it.
I don’t think it’s dumb to tell people that power buttons often just put computers to sleep now. It’s a relatively new behaviour. Until about 5 or 10 years ago power meant power off, not low power.
Even shutdown doesn’t actually shut down anymore in Windows. Even on desktops. You have to change system settings or shut down via command line to get a real shutdown.
That’s why update and shutdown does a reboot instead now.
One time a friend and I (both in IT at the time) tried absolutely everything to fix a bizarre computer problem, then he told me to literally pull the hard drive completely out if the case and sit unplugged overnight before putting it back in. For some reason that worked, even though unplugging everything and plugging it right back in did nothing. Asked him why and he said “No idea, I was desperate.”
I’ve had people unplug the system “just to be sure it’s plugged in properly” when they “absolutely restarted” but nothing worked. ‘Miraculously’, that solved the problem.
The real fun is when you can’t watch what their doing because its over the phone, so you just have to hope they are doing it right. I used to hit them with the “Let’s try this; hold down the power button for exactly 30 seconds, then turn it back on.” Worked every time, but I did once have a guy ask me why that worked, and I didn’t want to call him an idiot so I made up some BS about it being a way to “flush the power from the system” and he bought it.
I don’t think it’s dumb to tell people that power buttons often just put computers to sleep now. It’s a relatively new behaviour. Until about 5 or 10 years ago power meant power off, not low power.
Even shutdown doesn’t actually shut down anymore in Windows. Even on desktops. You have to change system settings or shut down via command line to get a real shutdown.
That’s why update and shutdown does a reboot instead now.
Funny enough, sometimes you used to have to hold the power button to drain the caps. That would (rarely) fix some laptop issues.
One time a friend and I (both in IT at the time) tried absolutely everything to fix a bizarre computer problem, then he told me to literally pull the hard drive completely out if the case and sit unplugged overnight before putting it back in. For some reason that worked, even though unplugging everything and plugging it right back in did nothing. Asked him why and he said “No idea, I was desperate.”
I’ve had people unplug the system “just to be sure it’s plugged in properly” when they “absolutely restarted” but nothing worked. ‘Miraculously’, that solved the problem.