30
Remember when you actually had to know the boot order to fix a PC?
I was helping a younger guy replace a dead hard drive on a Dell Optiplex last week and he spent 15 minutes looking for a Windows boot drive before I told him to just hit F12 at the Dell logo. He had no idea you could change the boot order manually from the BIOS menu without a USB. Back in the early 2000s, I used to have to set IDE master and slave jumpers with tweezers and then hunt through a menu to pick which drive had the OS on it. Now everyone expects the computer to just figure it out. Has anyone else noticed people skipping the basics like checking if the PSU switch is on before calling for help?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
henrygrant21d ago
F12 at the Dell logo is basically a secret handshake at this point, but try telling that to someone who's never had to set a SATA mode to IDE just to get XP to install. I bet that guy would have a meltdown if he saw the jumper settings on a old PATA drive with all those little plastic caps that disappear into the carpet forever. My favorite is when people call me frantic because their PC won't turn on but they just forgot to flip the switch on the back of the power supply. Makes me wonder if they think the computer runs on good intentions and fairy dust these days. Man, kids today don't know the struggle of having four drives on one cable and praying the master/slave jumpers are set right.
4
maxmurphy21d ago
The "plastic caps that disappear into the carpet forever" line got me. I still have a little Ziploc bag in my toolbox with like 20 random jumpers I found over the years. I remember one time in 2003 I was setting up a dual-boot system with two hard drives and a CD-Rom all on the same ribbon cable. I spent an hour trying to get the master and slave jumpers right on a Western Digital drive that had a diagram printed on the label that was basically impossible to read without a magnifying glass. Finally got it working, only to realize the second drive was a dud and the whole thing was pointless. People today would just buy an external USB dock and call it a day.
3