ConnedswiftyisNOTevil writes, "I have recently become obsessed with the BBC Three show 'The Real Hustle' - personally, I think of it as a 'How To' show for aspiring con artists."
Have you carried out a successful con? Perhaps you hustled a few quid off a stranger, or defrauded a multi-national company. Or have you been taken for the wide-eyed, naive rube that you are?
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chthonic, Thu 18 Oct 2007, 13:02)
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An old one from some years agoI've been building PCs for some time now, and early on I was doing a lot of tech support for local voluntary agencies. One of these pieces of work involved the production of three machines for local charities.
If memory serves they were AMD K6-300s or possibly 350s and based on Soyo mainboards. I never found out what the underlying problem was, but these machines were pretty flakey. Given that this was under Windows 98 you can be assured that these aren't the best systems I've ever configured.
Anyhoo, there was this one time where I'd been called out, not long after delivery, to find out what was up with one of these systems. Bluescreening or something. So I'm working on the system, the software seems to be installed OK, they aren't Internet-enabled and they seem free of sh!tware, so I'm tending to the opinion that it's flakey hardware.
The layout of the office is thus: there's about three, maybe four feet of worktop on a solid desk; therefore the machine is sat on the desk on a level with the monitor. And I decide, without properly engaging my brain, to reseat the memory and see if that helps.
Many of you will probably guess the next bit. While seating this memory - a 64MB DIMM that cost around £130 - my elbow brushed against the surface of this shitty (switched-off) monitor and I feel the telltale prickling of static electricity. Shit.
I power up the machine and it won't even POST. I'd fscked the memory. Damn.
My con was when I got suited up and went through to the suppliers advising that 'one of the three memory sticks I'd recently acquired was DOA'. As the receipt had a shedload of other hardware I'd bought at the same time they were happy enough to exchange.
There is one redeeming thing though. The 'tech' who checked out the ram stick advised me that they'd sold me a 32MB DIMM in error and not (as was clearly marked on the stick, and which BIOS had asserted to be before I'd fried it) a 64MB stick. I did feel somewhat consoled in that the bods I'd ripped off were at least as stupid as I'd been.
Length? 133.22MM according to the Intel Specification.
YS
(, Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:45, 1 reply)
That machine....Flakey behaviour on that machine? I bet it was a K6 350. AMD actually released a chip that, for nasty technical maths reasons, wasn't compatible with Win 98!!!
(, Wed 24 Oct 2007, 1:12, closed)
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