Long before I wrote blogs on the internet, when I was but a teeny college student with an LJ and a dream, I did tech support. And I saw things. I wasn’t the only one. The people who work tech have heard every excuse and seen every horror your mind can conjure.Having been a computer help person, I know that we’re an ornery bunch, and that people coming in might feel a little intimidated. To better help you when communicating with your tech support agent, I’ve consulted with fellow survivors of the tech support field, and have carefully cultivated a list of lies you should not tell your tech support agent because it will waste everyone’s time.Peter Lopez from Brooklyn Tech Guy says that about once a week a person calls with a computer problem, swearing that they’ve already restarted their computer. They haven’t, because the majority of minor tech support issues are resolved with a restart. It clears out all the minor software hiccups that occur as your computer processes all those millions of lines of code that make it run.

Is that program you just updated constantly crashing? Is your computer slow after running for three months straight? Is the wi-fi inexplicably down when it works on all your other devices? Restart. RESTART! Same goes for routers and modems. They’re just tiny computers sans monitor or input devices. Restarting them will, nine times out of ten, resolve major issues with your internet. This is why that plug that automatically power cycles your internet setup is so popular.Though Lopez would remind you that "Have you signed out and signed back in?” is a good one too and works nearly as often as a full restart.Lopez also gets a lot of calls about devices that are broken—doomed to never work again. He’d just gotten off such a call when he spoke to Gizmodo. "They just didn’t have the printer cartridges in right,” Lopez said. The customer reseated the cartridges and the printer started working.You might be positive you’ve plugged everything in and are certain there is some other reason you don’t have internet, or your keyboard isn’t working, or your printer isn’t printing. You are wrong. It’s okay. It’s happened to everyone. I spent twenty minutes on a call with my ISP once because I didn’t have an ethernet cable pushed all the way in.

Just tell them you have no idea if all the things are plugged in. This is especially important if you do not know what an ethernet cable, USB cable, or power cable are.3) Don’t tell them you don’t know how you got that ransomware, virus, or malware on your computerDo you know how you get malware? You go to sites you shouldn’t go to and click on links you shouldn’t click on and download apps you shouldn’t download. Sometimes you hit an OK button you have no business clicking.It’s very easy to avoid getting malware in most cases. If a Windows looking OK button appears on your Mac or vice versa—don’t click. If you’re on a free porn site and see a neat ad, if the site promises super expensive software for free, or if it all seems to good to be true—don’t click. And yet people click all the time. People just like you.According to the technician from Portland, it isn’t just unsavory sites that are the problem. "Nowadays you can just stumble into the wrong thing by misspelling websites,” he told Gizmodo. So be very careful with the web addresses you enter, and if you’re a bad typist maybe invest in some anti-malware and antivirus software.

"We get that one a lot,” Umer Perez, a technician from Fort Worth says. "When they say that, we know where it’s headed.” Though he’s quick to note that it doesn’t necessarily mean a computer is infected with malware, ransomware, or viruses.It’s just something people say as they deliver a computer. As if to prep the tech support agent for all the porn they might come across in the course of their repair. But any tech support agent is accustomed to finding porn on a computer. "Because porn happens,” Perez says. Embrace your porn; don’t pawn it off on the teen boys in your life.Tray-style disc players are much less common than they used to be, because slot-loading disc players look cool and take up less space. Unfortunately slot-loading disc players are also just big holes and if you have a person in your home under the age of ten they will, at some point, take it upon themselves to fill it with something that does not belong."I’ve found quarters in the SD card reader,” a technician from Portland who preferred to be anonymous told Gizmodo. "I don’t know if its kids though. A lot of stuff makes its way into computers because of the backpack.”

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So if you’re disc player isn’t working, it might not just be a tiny person that has fucked up your computer, it could be your own sloppy bag. Putting your laptop in a case, or using a bag with a section specifically for laptops, will cut down on wandering quarters, and a spacious dog crate will help with curious kids who like to stick things in places they shouldn’t go.6) Don’t tell them you don’t know how the computer got covered in apple schnapps You know how that computer got covered in apple schnapps. You were making an appletini. You drank that appletini. You made another appletini. You drank that appletini. You made another appletini. You drank that appletini. You made another appletini. You drank that appletini. You made another appletini. You drank that appletini. You made another appletini."It will be obvious the second the tech opens the machine (maybe even beforehand!),” says an Apple Service Tech Provider based out of New York who preferred to be anonymous. "It doesn’t matter who spilled it or if you were present at the time, the liquid residue/corrosion voids your warranty and lying about it is just going to waste everyone’s time.”The tech support provider is not an idiot, so trying to con them into giving you a free repair is usually not going to work. They’re like Sherlock Holmes when they hear something like "I opened the box and it was already broken.” They’ll notice that the keys are shiny from days of use, or the telltale scuff that only comes from the laptop getting tossed in a bag.

I, and I’m sure many of you, could not get out of bed this morning. I stared through my laptop screen wondering if I would feel this empty for the rest of my life as I waited for society to collapse around me. But then, I saw an image of this puny pup—a baby gray seal. Not everything is bad, I thought. The world isn’t ending for everyone. It certainly is not ending for this seal.The female gray sea pup was born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo on January 21 at 12:43AM (an Aquarius, of course) to her 33-year-old mother Kara and 26-year-old father, Gunther, and weighs a hefty 37 pounds. While 33 might sound young for a mother, Kara is in fact the oldest grey seal ever to give birth in a zoo, according to a National Zoo press release. The pup doesn’t have a name yet, although a National Zoo press spokesperson told me that names typically come from donors, keepers, or even contests.We’ve all had to throw away leftovers or cuts of meat and cheese that spent a little too much time in the fridge or freezer, but vacuum sealing your foods can keep them safe from freezer burn pretty much indefinitely, and dramatically extend their shelf life everywhere else.

It sounds like an expensive proposition, but today, Amazon’s selling this well-reviewed FoodSaver 4840 Starter Kit for $125, or about $45 less than usual. There are cheaper FoodSaver models out there, but the 4840 justifies its cost with a retractable vacuum sealing accessory, allowing it to vacuum seal specially designed zipper bags, in addition to the usual heat-seal bags. This also comes in handy for drawing a vacuum in a marinating dish, which can reduce marinating time from hours to minutes.Of course you can use this to store meats in the freezer for a long time, but it can also keep cheese from molding, lettuce from wilting, or cookies from going stale, just to name a few examples. Think about how much food you throw away, and you’ll get a sense of just how quickly this purchase could pay for itself.With a faster processor, brighter screen and thinner design, Apple's latest MacBook Pro was certainly an exciting update to the company's popular range of laptops.Unlike these traditional keys, the Touch Bar adapts and changes to the app you're using – bringing interactive ways to adjust or browse through content.

Express.co.uk recently reviewed the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and gave it a big thumbs up - however, there was one issue that mean't it didn't get the full five stars.We found battery life to be wildly less than Apple's stated 10 hour usage and at times we only got 4 hours from this state of the art machine. Shortly before the festive period, the high-end laptop had the ignominy of becoming the company's first machine not to be rewarded a seal of approval from influential tech blog Consumer Reports.Citing ‘wildly unpredictable’ battery life issues, Consumer Reports’ damning verdict suggested the laptop’s battery would last anywhere between 3.75 hours and 19.5 hours.Now, however, Apple has hit back and claimed that the Consumer Reports battery tests aren't accurate.The tech giant suggested the variable battery performances were caused by a bug unlikely to affect many actual consumers.Instead, the company has suggested that an obscure issue in the developer build of websites accessed through Safari triggered the issue.In a statement, Apple said: "We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache... We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test."

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The iPhone and iPad maker added: "[Consumer Reports’] use of this developer setting... triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab."After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life.” If you've been experiencing similar fluctuations in your MacBook Pro's battery performance, updating your Safari browser could help improve your battery life.The stunning home surveillance video shows two teenage boys sitting on a couch, playing video games and eating pizza, when suddenly a laptop bursts into a ball of fire just three feet away.
"Thank God it didn't explode in my face," said 18-year-old Devon Johnson, describing the fireball that engulfed his Dell laptop, while it was charging on the couch in his parent's Thousand Oaks home last month.
There have been hundreds of reports of laptops, cellphones and other consumer electronics catching on fire in recent years. But rarely are these spectacular fires caught on video. The Johnson's home security cameras captured their laptop catching fire not once, but four times.
Devon had plugged in his four-year old laptop to charge, and a few hours later smoke began shooting out the side of the computer before it burst into flames. The fire burned a large hole in the sofa and destroyed the computer.

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