1718 Lucky Strike.

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One of the problems of working on a Microsoft Surface is that it overheats seemingly at random. It’s not something that happens all the time, but every so often it gets completely out of control. Today was one of those days. The little fan inside it started up and would not stop no matter what I did to try and cool it down. My best guess is that it was working on updates in the background which must require a lot of thinky power.

Microsoft, like most companies now, don’t have tech support in any meaningful way. They have forums they use to trick other users in to doing tech support for free. A practice I very much despise. It you do that in addition to actual dedicated tech support that’s one thing, but the way things are now is just laughable. Almost every question you have leads you to a random forum post from a minimum of 4 years ago. It’s very frustrating. In concert with the internet’s need to feast on pageviews any search you do is a goose chase of copied articles and clickbait. The spectre of this device suddenly passing on looms ever over my life. At this point I could probably afford to replace it, but it would be painful financially. I’d rather not until I absolutely have to. It’s been a very stable device and paid for itself many times over since I purchased it.

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John may have got a lucky strike, but while Alex seems to be having a ball it doesn’t look like she is going to spare him …

Alex is just having one?? ;D
Well, if Alex gets one or two balls today, I think she’s really scoring in [this] sport! :)

Maybe I’m just a cold, clueless bastard. Or maybe I just believe in brutal honesty. I feel as though he should have said what he had originally (accidentally or otherwise) said. After all, he isn’t speaking for himself, but for another. “I just didn’t think he’d be interested in someone of your body type. But hey, if he’s into you, go for it and good luck.”

Reminds me of the classic catch 22, the “does this dress make me look fat” argument. I can understand when people tell me that all they want is validation of your affections for them, but part of me would want to say “No, you are skinnier than a twig” or “No, your body makes you look fat, the dress has no bearing on that.” I mean, I understand if they would want validation, but if I’m already dating them, why would the way their body looks in a dress matter to me any more than if they wore any other dress. But I digress.

He was gonna call her dumb, not fat.

Also, however you choose to respond in this kind of situation can reveal how you feel as much as whoever you’re speaking about, which can be similarly dangerous.

Well, seeing as how John doesn’t particularly hate Maddison, I guess skirting around the truth can be viewed as a necessary evil. Of course, Crave, this is only true for that situation. In terms of myself, I don’t care if someone I hate knows how I truly feel, because keeping them around is more dangerous for them. Also, in the case of morons like Maddison, I’m a condescending bastard who revels in lording his intelligence over the retarded masses. This isn’t to say I won’t share my knowledge with those who prove mentally capable, but that’s the catch nowadays. I need the company of intelligent people, preferably women. Maybe if I get laid, I’ll stop being so jaded…

I choose not to weigh my mind and accomplishments against other people. I’ve been burned before.

Some people are humble. Some people are truly not smart, but follow instructions. There is always, *ALWAYS* someone better.

YIKES that was an unfortunate thing to read.

Yikes…

Maddison may not seem bright, but at the very least she’s genuine, friendly, and endearing. I think that trying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings with a little fact can be justified! There’s no reason to have a big head, be rude, or just look down on others.

The weird thing about honesty is that it’s not 100% a good thing, despite what everyone tells you. I’d rather have a tactful friend than a 100% brutally honest one.

Also, she’s not a moron, per se. She’s just ignorant and blissfully unaware of certain things. And remarkably observant and right on the money with others. Her priorities are not the same as some people – she puts having fun above being overly intelligent.

That’s not bad, it’s just different than you. You can look for intelligent conversation, more power to you.

The original creator of this thread does not reflect or condone the views of the responders to the thread.

Actually, I don’t think of Maddie as “dumb.” But she’s definitely not the type of smart that Reggie goes for. As I think I’ve said before, for every point of IQ she lacks compared to the average, she seems to have at least one point of EQ.

Not my type either, to be honest, but still a good person to befriend. :)

It probably was updates. I know my desktop got a push today and it bogged down the processing and the internet for a bit while it tried to manage it.

Given the set up he was scripted into, he was scripted back out of it better than I would have fumbled through something like that.

You might get better tech support by going to a different place.

There is a whole family of sites, collectively called “StackExchange”, and one of those might help you: SuperUser.com is for computer user questions.

The StackExchange sites are in some ways quite strict, and if you ask a question they may tell you it was a bad question or should be asked on a different site. (If the latter they will tell you which site they think would be best.) There’s another site where you can just ask a question, no categories, so this one site has all kinds of questions: Quora.com

There are also various enthusiast web sites, and they may have forums that may be useful. If I were going to recommend one I think it would be: https://forums.anandtech.com/

I mentioned these because sometimes asking a question and getting an answer is better than searching forums and finding 4-year-old posts. StackExchange was, in part, founded just to solve the problem of getting out-of-date search results.

If you had it for a while now and used it in all kinds of enviroments, it would probably need some cleaning of the internals, fresh thermal paste, fresh thermal pads, general de-dusting.

You don’t want the delicate BGA solder points to stress themselves to the point of failure.

That “innocence” can always be corrupted by knowledge.

It isn’t so much innocence as naivety, and if she had some particular knowledge, she would have the edge in the bedroom over Alexandria. Maddison is the feisty, straightforward one, after all.

When that fan stays on, do the + and go to task manager and see what process is taking up the most resources. But, really, just try to find what it is and see if you can either replace it or reschedule when it runs. Antivirus because of the i/o overhead can make things warmer.

Always save your work before messing around, natch.

You might try ifixit.com I have a few friends who work as repair techs and they swear by it

ifixit is a decent (but by no means comprehensive, and not always very good at all) source for opening up things and putting them back together again. Though tablets are generally low on fixability. A tablet in general and the big name stuff in particular tends to be risky and not for beginners to fix.

But ifixit is still a good suggestion since habitual overheating may well be due to the thing gumming up with dust, which would be fixable with a good cleaning, perhaps re-applying heat paste, lubricating or replacing the fan if worn, that sort of thing. You can look at the air vents for a first impression.

Tech support used to be a big thing because everyone used the same point of contact for issues. Little people and giant corporations alike.

Now, giant corporations have their own tech support, who consults with the vendor’s subject matter experts. This moved the burden from an actually “tech support” network in a vendor to what is called “case-by-case SME work.” Little people lose out because when a vendor can’t prove their tech support is saving them more money than it uses, the vendor discontinues phone/email tech support.

I am the Director of Global Service Desk in a corporation and we provide tech support for internal clients and our network. We have a Help Desk that serves outward facing clients. We consult the vendor’s subject-matter-experts (SMEs) via opening a case and escalating it. They get back to us and we troubleshoot with an assigned expert. I know that one of my vendors (Cisco) stopped having a real tech support group years ago in favor of paying people they certified as experts (CCIE) to answer questions in a forum. They started that ball rolling, proved they saved 80% of their budge on tech support, and now everyone does that.

Even well before the move to “user support forums” (what a scam) redmond’s support was pretty bad. Lots of wooly word salad and no content. Cisco’s stilted prose at least did contain some information, though now and then you still needed third party sources to make sense of the jumble of low-quality content. And all of the big boys are very good at gauging you for “support” at premium rates but low expected yield, at least in my experience. Maybe if you’re a fortune 500 company and so you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing, it’s acceptable. Where I shot trouble, not so much.

But since “everyone” does it anyway, even goes so far as to cook up entirely useless “FAQs” that serve only to drag you down so for the love of their bottom line they deter you from contacting them as hard as they can, it must be fine, right? Well, no.

Computers are massively complex and the lusers kept uneducated on purpose, so it’s no surprise there’s a “need” for helpdesks and such. That this is partly due to cascading effects due to marketing shticks, poor quality in software and hardware, and so on, can be seen from IBM –of all big companies– seeing its support costs drop by throwing as much macintoshes as they can at a formerly very windows-y “seat park”.

It is money driven.

I always have to do a speech to other higher-ups the value of tech support, because in nearly every IT company I’ve worked at, C levels are always questioning keeping things that do not generate revenue. Tech support costs money, generates no revenue, and you can’t really point out where it is saving you money until a truly impacting issue happens.

I blame this on the fact that VPs and up are usually 1. former bankers; 2. former retail managers; and 3. former fabrication/production managers. They’ll promote each other internally in companies so you can’t get rid of them. With these people, business divisions either make money or they close up. They barely understand quality control or support. They only see these things as an expense that holds back revenue collection. The downside is that it almost always leads to a company going into a slow dive into oblivion. Since they have credentials stating they were CEOs or SVPs or whatever, they move to the next job and take over. Restarting the process.

As far as I remember, Microsoft has never done direct tech support for end users. Only enterprise customers, and that you have to pay for. There’s a whole sub-industry supporting MS software.

Although speaking as an IT guy, Google-fu is definitely a key job skill, because of what you describe. Also, get Adblock if you haven’t already.

I agree. Google-fu is a fundamental skill, since tech manuals no longer exist in a format you can find anywhere decent.

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