Oh they did indeed mind them. There were the guys who got shut down for cloning Battle.net (for either Starcraft or Diablo II purposes iirc) and they made sure to shut down the server being run by my brother and his friends. Vivendi Universal isn't a nicer company than Activision.

If you're going to fix the bugs anyway then why not take the money and put it into an organization you do support?

Dell learned the hard way about cutting out the discs. They never shipped one-button recovery discs like Compaq used to. Instead it was always the Windows disc, the "Dell Resource CD" and some more driver/software discs.

In 2005 or 2006, I forget which year, they stopped shipping the discs by default because they decided the built-in recovery worked well enough. I started working there in 2006 and they realized they needed to start shipping discs again. We used them for fixing problems or of course just reinstalling when all was lost, so we ended up sending them out like candy. If we needed to use one and we realized the customer had an old version of the XP disc without the latest service packs we would send a new one. We also sent them if the customer asked.

Why Dell didn't also supply discs that did what the recovery partition did I can't guess accurately. They never seemed to mind sending out endless replacements for the numerous discs you needed to do everything manually (assuming they had discs available).

I haven't used a new Dell machine since 2008, so I can't say anything accurate about what they include now.

You don't. So what? Nobody said you need one. They said Microsoft has nothing to offer the people who do think they need one. Keep your Windows box (I know I will). They aren't going anywhere for a while.

Cue the "If Microsoft Had Designed the iPhone" Photoshop contest!

I always encouraged customers to call their credit card company's fraud number as soon as they were done with me if I learned they purchased one of those scams. How many followed up I don't know.

My friend's dad also bought a rogue antivirus one day. He refused to believe it was fake. We quietly removed it and decided to let him deal with the consequences of giving his card number to con artists. Some people are just too much effort.

William Hartnell had one: Episode 7 of "The Daleks' Master Plan" in 1965. It was a farcical addition to a way-too-long serial.

That's a very non-googleable computer. That fact made me sad. Does that make me sad?

Perhaps they took that into account, thinking they might clean that up a bit while they go along. It would make no sense at all for most businesses to do something like that, but Google makes strange business decisions.

100,000 points if you can trick them into wrecking their software, their phone or flicking that voltage switch on the back of their workstation. (I wonder what the sentence would be for such an awesome crime.)

I think I had an easier time giving people things than you did. Despite not working in hardware support I once had to send a customer a new computer because hardware hung up on me when I did the transfer to get it replaced (mentioning I had the L2s on board). They'd tried to fix it three times and utterly failed.

The worst transfer from India was a lady looking to buy a spare part. She and her husband had a desktop where the power button broke. They wanted to buy that part that has the button, the LEDs and the little, colourful wires. So they ordered it twice and each time got the front face plate. So they tried again and instead of hardware sending her to spare parts she got me. I offered to check the part # she was given just in case. It was wrong. So I spent 30 min looking for the correct part.

When I was about to send her to spare parts an L2 walked by and told me to confirm with hardware. So I get some guy in India and ask him if I have the right part number for the part. He puts me on hold and comes back with a different number. I asked what it was and he says, "this is a six-foot power cable, sir." So I got kind of mad at him and reiterated what I was actually looking for. He says, "yes, yes, that is the right part" without even checking. I ended up thanking him for blowing me off, hanging up and sending the lady to parts because I knew I had it right. Maybe his centre didn't have enough "Be The Reason" posters.

In the case of the Optiplex systems the red screen also said to replace the motherboard immediately without troubleshooting. I started there in 2006 so I don't know when they added that part. It could easily have been after they caved and added three-year warranties for all those boards.

I did notice an awful tendency for hardware support to be useless unless you had Gold Support. They once hung up on me when I tried to get a customer's computer replaced and we had to do it ourselves as they had failed to fix it three times in a row (I did exclusively software support).

Different parts of the company had conflicting goals, information and widely variable competency. The outright lies and agents hanging up are just wrong and I don't blame anybody who runs away and doesn't come back. Sadly, the support from HP and Sony seems to be consistently worse (Sony forcing customers to reformat *before* troubleshooting comes to mind).

Indeed. I'm treating this like a job and calling myself gainfully unemployed. This will end when school starts again. Because I'm lucky enough not to be hungry and still have the internet while in this situation, there are other interesting, useful or educational things I can do.

I wouldn't mind finding a temporary job. Getting paid to be useful is nice.

Lack of exposure. Even a popular mod for a popular game has so little exposure -- especially among non-technical users -- that it's not worth exploiting as a vector. It's easier to go with the familiar vectors discussed here all the time.

Malware still shows up in packages claiming to be pirate copies. My bro tried to grab a copy of Worms Armageddon. What he got was Worms Armageddon with the installer replaced by a trojan neatly disguised as the installer. I had a good laugh while I removed that. I've never seen, or even heard of a malicious mod, though.

My last three computers have actually done this. It appears to involve unshielded electronics somewhere between the sound chip and my headset and it happens continuously. With practice I can learn to tell what's happening on the screen by the changes in the static in my headset. The mouse-moving noise is very quiet and subtle, but rendering a PDF or dragging a window over another one can make an impressive array of odd noises.

It doesn't bother me at all because it's so quiet. What bothers me is how everything that isn't a computer makes constant beeps, and loud ones at that. The girl in the back of the bus wakes up everybody because her Blackberry beeps with every text received, iPods click, and microwave ovens are the worst. They not only beep loudly (and often uncontrollably), but they have doors designed to make as much noise as possible at all times, preventing any kind of late-night stealth usage.