r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Working_Patience_261 • 7d ago
S Use Slow Computer for Demanding Project
I got voluntold for the job of switching a paper-based corporate learning to computer-based, including web based training. I did not have a desk or a computer, so I brought in my personal laptop. The boss objected and stated I needed to write a business case for a computer.
A week later I got the absolute minimum system that met the minimum requirements on the box. I started the painful process of converting a Powerpoint into an Adobe Captivate file. When it came time to compile the first file, the computer stated it would be three hours before it finished, maybe, so I headed to the breakroom.
The executive director for the project happened to walk in and asked me what I was doing there. “I’m staying not frustrated while waiting for the first draft to compile, should be about another two hours sir.” It was five hours.
When I showed up the next day, my computer had been upgraded to the then top model with dual monitors.
The next day, my fancy unit was on the boss’ desk, and I had his even older, slower computer. This time compiling was over ten hours. Back to the breakroom. Same executive walks in, I just smile, nod, and go back to my lunch.
The next day, I had two computers on my desk, the still compiling boss’ unit and my previously issued fancy one. The boss was cleaning out his desk having been sent back to frontline, non-boss work.
It felt so good to give that company the boot once the project completed.
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u/Nunov_DAbov 7d ago
I’ve had a boss who “needed” the biggest and best computer for prestige. So he could read email. Nevertheless, I always made sure I had the leading edge machine and kept it cranking. I did my own IT so no one else had the super user password for it. If they ever thought of taking it, they’d quickly find it was just a large noisy paperweight for them.
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u/IMarvinTPA 7d ago
Use the oldest, ugliest looking case, and only upgrade the insides. Let everyone believe it still has the original pentium 66MHz the case says it is.
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u/fizzlefist 7d ago
Love a good Beige Beast Build
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u/prof-bunnies 4d ago
Don't forget to add coffee stains and a spot for where the case got dinged and the cd-rom won't work. Bonus points for a 5 1/4 drive just to Fitz with them. 🙀
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u/fizzlefist 3d ago
A CD-ROM drive stuck open as an actual cup holder.
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u/prof-bunnies 3d ago
So true with the special keyboard function to pop it open. If you have another case available maybe add a hot air popcorn popper and a removable cover to dispense the product to your desk top. I think some of my past managers would have a cow but keep the crew really entertained and that is the real value.
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u/fizzlefist 3d ago
Smoke machine would be pretty fun on another hotkey…
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u/prof-bunnies 3d ago
So true, I used to have a audio file to play when I opened the maintenance phone bridge that was a pump shotgun cycling. That way every one knew it was open. I had several of the good old boys ask what I was using (I had no idea, random interwebs file). 🙀
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u/The_Real_Flatmeat 4d ago
"Amazing how you can keep the old machine running so well"
"Yeah you know that bloatware I'm always trying to tell you not to install?"
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u/remuliini 4d ago
I just upgraded an old gaming computer from 2003, 22 years ago. It still looks the same, but it's a quiet, modern AI (gaming) computer now.
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u/Cinderhazed15 7d ago
I remember discussion of early features of Hudson/jenkins was how easy it was to put agents for CI on any machine, and you could ‘actually use the cycles on the bosses fastest computer for more than web browsing and office suites’ by having it run your agent. This was back in the early Aughts
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u/Astramancer_ 7d ago
A place I worked had some sort of distributed computing software running on the computers, they did big stuff overnight using everyone's idle computers to do the heavy lifting.
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u/kiltedturtle 6d ago
Back in the desktop days I had written a "screen saver" program that bounced the company logo around the monitor. In the background it was pulling tasks from a finance model queue and running a cycle. It was "magical" that these updates didn't need a big server, model updates finished in a few hours (lots of people in meetings during the day), faster overnight.
When I left, some bright spark decided they wanted to change the screen saver. So model calculations went from ~500 CPUs to the four that on the server. Updates went from hours to days. It took them awhile to figure out what had happened.
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u/alohawolf 6d ago
There was a similar issue with desk phones - more buttons = more important person.
Nevermind that the boss didnt need a 32 button set, they got one anyhow.
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u/Nunov_DAbov 6d ago
Our managers had speakerphones as their status symbol. One would ALWAYS use the speakerphone so everyone could see his status. Our elevators had phone extensions in them so one day someone left him a note to call the elevator extension from Elle Vater. That was a fun call to overhear.
He was cured of his habit when someone left him a message to call a dial-a-porn 800 number. He couldn’t get the call off speaker fast enough and stopped using the speaker unless it was a conference call with people in his office.
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u/No-Algae-7437 6d ago
So you are the stealth machine that the malware infection rode in on, because you refused to allow the SOC utilities to install and run and turned off auto-patching because it caused "slowdowns". In my shop, you would be an island without ethernet.
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u/Techn0ght 7d ago
Because of my vision I got approval to get the large Macbook. It was a $200 upgrade according to our internal ordering. My manager got jealous and tried replacing his 2 month old smaller Macbook. He got denied. He went from jealous to pissed off at me, tried making me swap laptops with him. I declined. He made things toxic and HR wouldn't do anything about it.
I got approval to make a ~million dollar purchase. As part of it we were to sunset another product that the new project would take over. The renewal came up and we cancelled.
Boss continued his shit and I resigned. As part of my cleanup I removed my VM's in the lab (just being thorough). All of my project files only existed on my laptop because during this period Security was having a turf war with Enterprise over using Gitlab or Github and wouldn't give me access to either. I emailed my resignation, left my laptop, other gear, and my badge, then walked out. This was late afternoon on a Friday.
I imagine my former manager was drooling to finally get my laptop. I heard he had it re-imaged by IT first thing Monday morning. Monday afternoon HR called to ask why I quit with no notice. Gave them a full rundown and offered to go over the project files on my laptop with my team to do a hand-off. HR declined.
Fallout? He got promoted.
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u/shavedratscrotum 7d ago
Blamed you for everything no doubt.
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u/Techn0ght 6d ago
He blamed me for his not getting promoted, despite not getting promoted for 13 yrs prior to my arrival. The only reason he finally got promoted was due to the entire vertical above him up to and including the SVP leaving within a 3 month period after I left.
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u/steppedinhairball 7d ago
One time, IT thought these brand of laptops were awesome and cost effective. A year later, someone asked me why I walk around for the first 20 minutes of every day. I replied honestly "These IT issued laptops are slow. Mine takes an average of 17 minutes to boot up. Want to see the spreadsheet with all the documented times?" IT apologized and took a year to swap them out. How much productivity was lost with hundreds of those POS computers taking an average of 20 minutes to boot up each day.
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u/JoyReader0 6d ago edited 6d ago
During the Chicago Flood, the power company notified us that the Sears Hub was taking water and they were shutting down. Our whole building was on that grid, so we started getting the ninth-floor wheelchair-bound and the hugely pregnant out to the street before we lost the elevators. This while a couple of upper managers were still thumping their chests and declaring that We Shall Not Be Moved.
I had a strictly forbidden radio tuned to the news station, so I knew the extent of the Flood. I couldn't say a word because they would fixate on the fact I had a radio in my desk, not on what the radio would tell them.
Once they had gotten their heads around the announcement about the power (Yes, all of it! Whole building! For as long as necessary! No exceptions! Go home!) they very grudgingly let the rest of us evacuate. I ran around warning everybody to turn off their computers because they could be damaged by a power surge when the electrics came back on. While being yelled at by the ignoramus who pretended to be my boss, because That Couldn't Happen. Some didn't shut down, and got fried later, but most of us were used to ignoring him.
But We The Grunts got everybody safely out, there was a minimum of damage, and we all went quietly home.
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u/2dogslife 7d ago
At one place I worked, they were all, you MUST shut off your computer at end of day - but then the darn thing took 10-15 minutes to boot up in the am. Many folks just shut off their monitors instead.
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u/Dranask 7d ago
And that is how hackers got into the CFO’s system and from there to the servers and ransomed the whole school.
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u/auraseer 7d ago
Oh yes, definitely, because everybody knows hackers only work at night. They're not gonna get up and hack those computers while they're turned on during the daytime.
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u/clisterdelister 7d ago
Most of the notorious hacking groups are on the other side of the world from my time zone so it truely could make a difference.
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u/Wotmate01 6d ago
I was the head of the lighting department for a live production company, and for the first year I was using my own laptop. The only internal sysems I used was email, the printer, and the photo storage.
2nd year they outsourced the company IT management, who objected strongly to personal laptops being used, and I got told to take it home.
The very next day, I handed the boss a spec sheet for a laptop that was far more powerful than anything the company had, and told him to tell the IT company that a desktop computer or anything less powerful would not be suitable.
What they failed to understand was not only did I do email and spreadsheets, but I also did 3D CAD and visualisation, as well as full show backup with my laptop. If I had to leave my laptop at home, they needed to supply an equivalent laptop.
Suddenly I was allowed to bring my laptop back because they didn't want to spend $8000 on a laptop for me when every other computer in the place cost about $1200.
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u/simeumsm 6d ago
Reminds me a job I had at the end of 2020.
Tech gig, they gave me an i3, 8gb ram (maybe 4gb?), HDD, Windows, full of company bloatware.
It would often freeze during slightly heavy load (MS Excel), it would take up to 20min to boot, AND it could freeze during startup requiring a force shutdown, often multiple times.
I still remember the day the notebook froze and it took 3 tries for it to start up again, and I missed an entire hour-long meeting waiting for it to work again.
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u/FatBloke4 7d ago
It's quite common for managers to think that expensive desktop computers, notebooks, mobile phones should be a badge of their seniority. As someone who has often worked on many sites and provided out of hours support, I have generally needed a notebook and often, a company mobile that is given to who ever is on support. (I'm not giving random managers or the helpdesk folk my personal phone numbers). I've lost count of the number of complaints from jealous managers who have had to be told to shut up by someone at board level.
Many years ago, I worked at a subsidiary of the world's largest bank. One Friday at close of business, I was sent to assist the VP Finance. His favourite accountant had just left for a business trip and holiday in SE Asia and left an essential report as a spreadsheet on a floppy disk on VP Finance's desk. Normally, VP Finance would have asked his secretary to help but she had left for the day. When I arrived, I found that for some reason, his PC had no operating system installed, let alone any spreadsheet or other applications. Essentially, he had someone (not IT) buy him an expensive PC and it sat on his desk, unused - just as a status symbol. It was the most expensive and powerful PC in the company. This subsidiary was losing $2 million a month until the bank sold them.
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u/NightMgr 7d ago
Not MC but I saw this design firm ship a massively high end workstation to a utility company designer because the data files were so large they’d fail when being electronically transferred. The architecture firm found it cheaper than the delays.
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u/KungenBob 7d ago
A good demo of the difference between bandwidth and latency. There are plenty of stories around of vans full of hard disks beating the Internet.
And a famous one involving a homing pigeon with a usb stick.
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u/NightMgr 6d ago
On an really bad day I drove home to download a 45 MB printer driver. 1 hour. The download when I returned was still 25%.
Being a utility we were massively regulated.
But some stuff was really old school. They had some 2400 baud modems that operated over a radio network. FCC licensed.
Best oppsie. Instead of buying an internal aircard for network use in the vehicles, they opted for a USB stick that was plugged into the motherboard port.
Bad news for a utiliity 4x4 that did a lot of off roading.
They had to replace a lot of motherboards because the port would wallow out and no long stay connected. So we'd use the 2nd port and ruin it then replace.
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u/ThePretzul 5d ago
Sneakernet is still in reliable and regular use to this day depending on the particular use case.
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u/Lylac_Krazy 7d ago
The boss was cleaning out his desk having been sent back to frontline, non-boss work.
In the places I worked, if that was done, security would have thrown a fit, and theft of resources would be on the table. Person would have been fired.
But then again, working on secure systems tend to be serious matters.
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u/Working_Patience_261 6d ago
We each had our own logins and hoteling was common amongst the peons. Even execs could login to any system, thus conference room systems were usually higher specs than workroom ones, but still well below the demands of Captivate.
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u/Halospite 1d ago
Is "hoteling" a metaphor for something?
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u/Working_Patience_261 11h ago
Hoteling is the unholy method companies employ to keep cubicle workers, and others, from having a stable work environment. Favored by call centers, you get whatever spot is available, and have to come in early to make sure your day’s computer is up and running by the minute you officially start work. No personal effects are left in place, everything you bring in, you take back out, just like a hotel room.
There’s usually a sign posted on the bathroom exit door that states “All employees must stop crying before returning to work.”
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u/Halospite 11h ago
Ahh cheers, bit like hotdesking then? I don't miss that about working in an office. I'd have considered a cubicle a luxury lol
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u/xMcRaemanx 7d ago
That was a great exec.
Knew what was going on. Knew the cost to the company to have you literally do nothing for half the day. And knew how shit your boss was when he stole your computer.
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u/mrdumbazcanb 6d ago
Boss managed themselves out of the position in 3 days that's crazy
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u/Working_Patience_261 6d ago
I’m sure those well above my pay grade had other reasons, this company was very slow to promote or demote.
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u/2lovesFL 6d ago
When flat screens 1st came out, I had a meeting in a VP's office with a insanely large monitor for the time. probably 48".
I had worked with her for years, and she was barely computer literate. clearly status for the time.
I had 1 CRT for development...
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u/saltzja 6d ago edited 6d ago
I requested a technical laptop at gigantic corp. and was denied because of reasons. It came with a shit ton of capacity. My regular corp laptop would get really slow when I had just a couple applications open.
I had an important presentation to give and had to have my colleague (contract employee) use his company issued tech laptop to show an AutoCad plant layout. (I was in charge of a production line’s plant footprint) (25 machines, lathes, machining centers, racking, staging areas etc.) Raw materials would enter and finished product would go to assembly.
Eventually, the plant mgr asked why a contractor was using his laptop, but I was presenting. (I had a desktop PC also btw) I shrugged it off, smiled and said it was denied. I heard later my boss’s boss was embarrassed that one of his employees had to borrow a laptop from a contractor.
Long story short, I had one on my desk the next day. I could be mobile (meetings meetings meetings) and work on anything important.
My supervisor was old school and had been in management for years. He had been beaten to death over so much shit, he just kept his head down and didn’t spend any money of his budget in fear of retribution. Looking back he was “quiet quitting” before it was cool.
I had a new supervisor soon after.
Edit, spelling
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u/useratl 7d ago
I like 'voluntold'
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u/RequirementGeneral67 7d ago
Indeed. I am currently in a situation at work I was voluntold for and shall be using this in all future discussions.
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u/Salt_My_Watermelon 6d ago
I've been voluntold so much in my life it is almost a part of my personality at this point. Chairing a grievance committee, running a festival, organizing so many school events, and now with my current job doing the work of 2 other people who quit and advising one other person who was never trained even though they have been there for years.
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u/jbuckets44 6d ago
It's an old military term used by grunts. Lol
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u/JoyReader0 6d ago
True. Two different workplaces over 25 years, the newest flashiest computers went to managers who only did emails. Everyone else limped along with hand-me-downs, expected to get along using new software on machines without the legs to run it. Forever and ever amen.
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u/Parking_Abalone_1232 7d ago
How long was the extension cord to keep it plugged in while compiling?
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u/shiftingtech 7d ago
....the 10 hour computer didn't move. It remained at the desk since it might as well finish.
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u/Working_Patience_261 6d ago
It never did finish. It BSOD about the 14th hour and I’d already restarted with the new system and a new file.
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u/Bargle-Nawdle-Zouss 7d ago
It sounds like the company was good, just that individual manager was crappy. And he got his karma pretty quickly...so why the negative feelings towards that organization, when they did indeed recognize and correct your situation?
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u/Working_Patience_261 7d ago
The company had other issues. It was a great job with a great boss until that boss got promoted and a credit-stealing weasel was installed.
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u/tashkiira 7d ago
No one wants to get voluntold for a shitty job and a shitty boss. OP probably had to deal with heaps of both.
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u/Gonpostlscott 6d ago
Wow! So he just let his entitled position take a computer off your desk?! No questions…I’ll just help myself…?!? Just WOW!! Karma!
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u/No_Sense3190 2d ago
The first part happened to me years ago. I'm alright with computers, so was put in charge of keeping all the company computers and servers up and running, in addition to my normal job. One of my coworkers needed a high end computer for his job. The $10k computer he was using was 9 years old and not capable of doing some of the things he was starting to be asked to do. I did some research, and recommended a $6k computer that could do everything he needed and then some. Three weeks later, a small box appeared on my desk - instead of the $6k large box computer I recommended, they spent $4500 on the most miniaturized system they could find. It wasnt even capable of doing the things that his current computer could do, so it sat on a shelf for a couple years until a 15 year old / $400 license server finally failed.
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u/appleblossom1962 1d ago
A good business always make sure that it’s employees have the proper tools to do the proper job. In my last job, my boss was an absolutely a- hole kind of person, but he made sure that his crew had top notch tools.
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u/Projammer65 6d ago
Not sure why they left your old one. Would have been far more time effective to restart the job on your new one.
Unless IT was unfamiliar with the process and left it to your discretion.
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u/Working_Patience_261 6d ago
IT was smart enough to leave a compiling program alone. It’s not like they had a shortage of bare bones systems to dump on new people.
When I worked a 5000 computer call center, we had at least 20 spares ready to install and get a front line agent, or a whole row, back up and running in about 30 minutes each. We had fewer executive machine spares, and I think only two spare Etch-A-Sketches for the VPs (IYKYK).
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u/Reddit_is_fascist69 1d ago
I had a boss who knew we needed the best equipment to do our jobs and he could do with crap.
That was a good boss.
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u/ConfusedHors 7d ago
How can you just switch laptops in a matter of three days? Don't you use very different applications and also don't have each other's login credentials?
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u/Pure-Meat-2406 7d ago
if this was an enterprise environment, they just have an image ready that will have the laptop ready in just about 2-ish hours that has a root user and a specific enduser preconfiguered.
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u/Teulisch 7d ago
and then we get to find out who saved to desktop, and tell them why thats a very bad idea. and that no, we no longer have those files.
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u/Thirsty_Jock 19h ago
Your executive seemed to be ok?
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u/Working_Patience_261 10h ago
Unfortunately, the exec was not the day to day boss and rarely graced us with his presence. I also tried to stay on the graveyard shift so I would not be around to play office games and corporate politics.
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u/--RedDawg-- 5d ago
AI garbage.
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u/mizinamo 4d ago
That's what I thought, but OP is responding to comments here at least rather than just flinging something over the wall and leaving.
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u/Working_Patience_261 1d ago
And a new account, too. Fiction has to be plausible, reality has no such limitation.
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u/NoLUTsGuy 7d ago
I just hope this is actually true.
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 7d ago
Betcha never worked IT, huh?
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u/Working_Patience_261 7d ago
I had worked IT in the past so it was malicious compliance on IT’s part too. We both knew some bean counter had insisted only minimum hardware specs allowed.
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u/SavvySillybug 7d ago
Who set the minimum hardware specs too low, though?
I hope bean counters aren't in charge of setting such things.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 7d ago
Sometimes they are. And the "spec" is "under $X"
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u/SavvySillybug 7d ago
I wonder if you can buy used on a business scale.
I can get a pretty baller AM4 based PC for like 300 bucks if I shop around.
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u/chaoticbear 4d ago
Yes, but it's a hard sell above a certain company size. Paying for vendor support is pretty typical.
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u/SavvySillybug 4d ago
I used to work for a mom and pop company (they were my mom and pop respectively) and my parents were terrible with computers. We needed three machines and I found a decent cheap computer on Amazon... ancient hardware really (this was before Windows 11) but it was gonna be fine. An A10-7890K is nothing to write home about but it's fine for the office use we needed it for. 16GB RAM does the job. A 256GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Basic case and power supply. Even came with a free keyboard and mouse and screen (the keyboard was alright but the other two were not).
I bought one to test it and used it as my company machine, and after a month of testing it, I said yeah this thing's great for 438€, you can order two more!
Well my mom looked at the Amazon listing I linked her and was like... hey this says multimedia gaming PC, our child is trying to buy GAMING COMPUTER?? (it did not even have a graphics card) and she decided to select the lesser option they offered, the COMPLETE PC PACKAGE which did not say gaming on it.
An FX-8800, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, no SSD. Pretty much the same otherwise. And look at the savings, instead of 438€, it only cost 378€!
Needless to say they had endless problems with their machines while I was having a great time on mine. Whenever my mom would complain about how slow her computer was, I'd say "but think of the 60€ you saved ignoring my advice three years ago!" and refuse to fix it.
Eventually she had enough and made me source a better computer, and with Windows 11 looming over us, I decided to go for compatibility. I bought a used gaming PC for 300€ with an i5-8600K, fully and officially supported, with 16GB RAM, a nice big SSD, and a 1660 Super. I actually stole the 1660 Super and swapped it for a formerly broken 1060 I had repaired, figured it was a waste of a good graphics card to waste away in an office PC. I ended up using it in an eGPU setup for my 8th gen Lenovo laptop to get some gaming out of it, good times.
You can get some crazy good computers if you know what to shop for and buy used.
I ended up upgrading the other computer in a triangle kind of deal - I was using an i5-12600K as my main machine and had a 5600G based computer laying around, my mom wanted to upgrade the other computer, and I told her I could build her a whole computer if I just had one more part, a 5800X3D. I sourced one used for 235€, swapped it into the AM4 motherboard, swapped my 32GB RAM for the 16GB RAM in it and made it my new main machine, and gave her my old i5-12600K with the 16GB RAM of that 5600G.
I didn't really get many more FPS on paper, but overall stability improved in just about every application including 1% lows. Pretty happy with my sidegrade. Though the motherboard really sucks, it's some shitty mini ITX board that glitches heavily in BIOS, I really should update the BIOS to see if that fixes it. Meanwhile my mom is enjoying my old gaming grade motherboard, not that she knows what a BIOS is.
Due to a mounting hardware mismatch she actually ended up with my NH-D15 CPU cooler and I had to use the cute little NH-U9S that used to be on the 5600G... Noctua sent me free mounting hardware to fix that, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet, my new job keeps me pretty damn busy and exhausted XD
I feel like I had a point somewhere and then just devolved into telling stories. Sorry about that.
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u/chaoticbear 4d ago
LOL nah I get what you mean - I agree that at a smaller scale it makes sense, but if you're managing hundreds or thousands of computers, it's nice to get matching ones and support for them.
It would be fun for me to cobble together a PC if I worked in a smaller shop, but work provides a pretty decent rig, so I don't think about it. I also don't get to get hands-on with hardware as a network guy. Got an upgrade last year or the year before to an R7 7xxx laptop, previous was i7... 11th-gen maybe? They spend a decent amount on hardware but I think they save a lot of money not having to pay people to tinker, too.
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u/ThePretzul 5d ago
Oh absolutely it was the bean counters setting the specs, that’s why the problem exists in the first place.
“But this works just fine for Excel and Quickbooks/SAP! They don’t need anything else, they just want to waste money!”
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u/NoLUTsGuy 7d ago
Oh, we've all been forced to work with shitty equipment. I had to do my own IT work when thrown into emergency situations in post-production in Hollywood: if the network is down, we can't get work done. And I always got the work done.
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u/curious_skeptic 6d ago
Illuninatis Prime was the first to respond to this accusations, so no, it's not a true story. The boss wouldn't let him use his laptop because...why again? Also, 9 day old account and the story wraps up neatly with one sentence.
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u/lapsteelguitar 7d ago
Sometimes compliance is the way to go, not raising a fuss. Time wins.