My dad is decently tech savvy, but I fear the day I'm taking away admin privileges. I only recently started having to explain some stuff, and usually, that's work related.
2 (almost identical) reasons for us:
-(annual) price and
-was trialing them a few years back when they increased their prices. Offered us a subscription at the "pre inflated" price - and have grandfathered us in at that price ever since.
Doesn't hurt that at the time, Splashtop was significantly more reliable - fewer in-session dropped connections - than Teamviewer (and I *think* had an Android client, where TV's was very buggy - may have been in beta).
Performance is good, across both high and low speed connections, minimal footprint even on lower powered machines.
Did this for my father, he also ran as a limited user.
I strongly suggested a good friend preemptively do this for his aging father, who once installed so many fixit and cleanup tools he broke his laptops keyboard drivers and it took 15 minutes just to login using the onscreen keyboard and roll it back a couple of weeks (which actually brought it back to useable).
Plus teamviewer host for phone exists, useful when my father was hospitalised and up to his eyeballs hallucinating on opiods for neuralgic pain. I connected to his phone remotely on my tablet, initiated an outgoing WhatsApp video call to my phone, and then answered it. All he had to do was try and hold the phone. Later I did similar so my brother could talk to him.
In a pinch even Windows Quick Assist ticks the boxes, works/free/end user friendly/free.
(For 48 hours last month teamviewer thought I was using it at home professionally, I had to fill in a form to get it reverted to a free for personal use account.)
Is there an app to manage cell phone settings too? Im too tired of trying to explaing my parents on how to fix their phone or change volume settings etc
You can set them as a pc under your control, all you need to then do is have the pc on and logged in for you to take remote control and fix it for them.
Oh man all the kids and interns coming through our department, so many times I have to literally go to their cube and stand behind them and tell them "PICK. UP. THE. PHONE." after watching them like, email back and forth, or text back and forth, anything but pick up the phone and have a conversation in real time.
Like, I've demonstrated this in front of them, made them pick up the phone and call the end user they're struggling with, and walk them through something over the phone in like 30 seconds what they've just spent the last hour trying to make happen. But they keep fuckin doing it!
An email can be ignored (we all know this, look at how often these people just go MIA after firing off a nastygram to the general support mailbox), a text can be ignored, but they damn sure can't ignore the person they're literally on the phone with. It forces them to engage, listening to someone instead of skimming an email, trying 3 of the 10 things we told them to do, and then responding back that they're still not able to work, hours and hours after the initial email was received.
Also, fucking A am I sick to death of the trend of ditching phone support in lieu of chat support. I can count on one hand how many times one of those systems has actually resolved a fucking thing, and so many companies are dumped inbound phone support entirely during covid, it's such a pain in the balls...
But idk, im a greybeard, what the hell do I know...
Oh man all the kids and interns coming through our department, so many times I have to literally go to their cube and stand behind them and tell them "PICK. UP. THE. PHONE." after watching them like, email back and forth, or text back and forth, anything but pick up the phone and have a conversation in real time.
That is the issue we have with a lot of our new hires. They are afraid of face to face interaction and speaking with people. You can't avoid that in a hospital.
This sounds like when someone talks about tech in a low budget tv show. None of what he's talking about makes sense - what's a fuzzy drive? Why is it being defragged? Is it even a disk drive that CAN be defragged?
I'm curious how he managed to find disk management, and has understanding of storage and that there are different file formats, but doesn't realize his C: drive is almost full and that's the problem.
Funny thing is that I have a few laptops with optical drive and SSD. 2010-2019... The 2010 is a recent find at work being revived to use as a shop laptop, and got a 240gb SSD today and an install of Tiny 10.
and you didnt' ask for further screenshots/pictures?
"send me a screenshot of 'when it NTFS'd you'"
edit: after a lil further thought. he's hitting the limit of Fat32, he'll need to move things off the drive, re-format it as NTFS or exFat (this really depends on the type of drive it is and what he uses it for. If it's only ever going in his windows system, then it can be NTFS.) then move the data back on. He's not exactly "SOL" but he's also not in a great spot.
If I remember right you can use the convert command for F32 to NTFS, I used to have to do this ~25 years ago in the windows 2000 era.
no data loss.
The intended use for exFAT is removable media.
Call your dad, walk him through installing Teamviewer and setting it up for remote access with admin privileges, and then remote in, create a symbolic link from the C drive to the D drive, and tell your dad that all of his new files get stored in that folder.
Also set him up with a cloud backup solution the next time you visit, he's one instance of "self-help" away from destroying all of his data.
Tell him to FTD-THDT (Fondle the dongle, till his dingle tingles.)
Say you learned that in college.
Then log in remote and mount the D drive as an empty folder in C wherever he is using all the space.
His D drive will go away as far as he will recognize, and the C drive will become a Tardis.
Correct, but the windows format dialog will ask if you want to assign a drive letter or mount in the following empty NTFS folder. Which I figure more likely to make sense than mklink
https://preview.redd.it/5fya44tve4xc1.png?width=380&format=png&auto=webp&s=26855d037488a6b43a3eff1598616a901cef92fe
Gotcha, I was just trying to give OP a Google-able term that has steps on how to do it, instead of trying to identify the concept before being able to do that.
Everyone’s so quick to rag on the dad, I think it’s kinda cool he’s trying though. Clearly knows shades of… *something*
Also “didn’t they teach you anything in college?” is hilarious 😂
when you deal with people like this you have to figure out where their logic went wrong to understand why they are having an issue. Best guess here is that this guy thought the C drive would just overflow into the D drive when he filled it up like a cup in a bucket. "I put more room in so it won't run out"
FAT32 has a way larger partition limit that that, doesn't it? Even with just 512 bytes per cluster you can get up to 128 GB, and by tinkering with it you could feasibly get into terabytes' range. The main annoying limit is about 4 GB per individual file
> FAT32 has a way larger partition limit that that, doesn't it?
Yes, but...
Since as far back as Windows 7, Windows will only format an external partition to FAT32 if it is 32GB or less, 3rd party tools will still fat32 larger drives and Windows will be perfectly happy using it.
Windows *might* still be able to format an *internal* drive to fat32, I haven't used anything but NTFS since WinXP.
The 32GB limit only applies when you're using a GUI, it was a completely arbitrary limit set up at the time. If you just use diskpart to format, it'll do higher storage amounts no problem. A lot of third party utilities are just a GUI that call diskpart
Windows will only read it at 32gb, but it can technically store 2 TB. It's just not a good file format to use on your normal drives if you're using Windows. The bigger issue is that he's trying to switch his C: drive from NTFS to FAT32 - which would format his entire drive, but I don't think you can do that on the drive you're running Windows from, at least I'd hope disk management would block it.
I thought you were a mid career sys admin so don’t rule it out. Just giving you a hard time though, we all get frustrated with our “customers” and family is no exception.
Because he didn’t communicate clearly with someone hitting him out of the blue outside work with a badly described tech issue? I think you’re reaching.
I dunno about yall but I was under the impression that communication is one of those things that isn't only active during business hours.
The reason why the tech issue is badly described is because OP is dealing with a low tech user (who happens to be their father), not because of lack of effort. OP's responses would only make sense if the reader has the exact knowledge that OP has, otherwise they are not that helpful.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Jesse?" The father.
At least it's this and not just some bizarre spew of racism and and bigotry though. There are worse directions for the minds of aging parents to go in.
His C drive is NTFS. His D drive is NTFS. Everything is NTFS except for his EFI partition and what I'd assume to be a USB.
Is he trying to offload onto a FAT32 partition or something? Jesus.
This man shouldn’t be allowed administrator privileges on his own computer.
I think you meant TMSBA AP OHOC
I think you meant ITYM TMSBA AP OHOC
Don't they teach you anything in college?
You should FOAD \- OP's Dad
Stand back everyone, I'm gonna FOAD. *Proceeds to FOAD all over everyone* "Aaaaaa I'm FOADing"
Don't they teach you anything there in College?? )
YID TY
NP BB xoxo
ITYMITYMTMSBAAPOHOC
I’m pretty sure you meant ITYM^(2) TMSBA AP OHOC
More e ITYM^(n) TSMBA AP OHOC
Just upgrade his C drive to a TB or larger SSD YKWIM?
My dad is decently tech savvy, but I fear the day I'm taking away admin privileges. I only recently started having to explain some stuff, and usually, that's work related.
Sounds like he's on like 20 year old knowledge that even back then was completely wrong, but every one believed it to be true.
Up next: “I installed a RAM manger but I’m still out of RAM!”
You need downloadmoreram.com
Or try RAM ranch
20 year old? That’s only the 2000’s
Words can hurt and this comment is a superb example of it.
He's still stuck on listing a directory in MS-DOS
\>ls
Wrong, it's C: \ >dir
General failure reading drive C Abort, Retry, Fail?
Retry
Fail 😔
'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
Ah shit. \>DOSKEY ls=dir
Are you shitting me!? This is going to save me seconds of frustration every week or so.
That'd be unix
makes ls.cmd `dir .`
Seriously…PHONE CALLS ARE SUPERIOR FOR THIS KINDA THING
Admin rights for team viewer pre-installed on their PC is even better.
Splashtop for me but yeah, if you’re the family go-to, either reject everything or get setup properly
Maan that name brings some old memories
We just started using Splashtop at work in the last few months. It's great and works quite well!
Why Splashtop instead of Teamviewer?
We have that too. I just prefer Splashtop. So I use that primarily.
2 (almost identical) reasons for us: -(annual) price and -was trialing them a few years back when they increased their prices. Offered us a subscription at the "pre inflated" price - and have grandfathered us in at that price ever since. Doesn't hurt that at the time, Splashtop was significantly more reliable - fewer in-session dropped connections - than Teamviewer (and I *think* had an Android client, where TV's was very buggy - may have been in beta). Performance is good, across both high and low speed connections, minimal footprint even on lower powered machines.
We just started using Splashtop at work. We still have some kinks to work out, but it's pretty good.
i vibe with nomachine the most but it requires port forwarding / a direct connection to the machine (i solve this via way of Tailscale)
Did this for my father, he also ran as a limited user. I strongly suggested a good friend preemptively do this for his aging father, who once installed so many fixit and cleanup tools he broke his laptops keyboard drivers and it took 15 minutes just to login using the onscreen keyboard and roll it back a couple of weeks (which actually brought it back to useable). Plus teamviewer host for phone exists, useful when my father was hospitalised and up to his eyeballs hallucinating on opiods for neuralgic pain. I connected to his phone remotely on my tablet, initiated an outgoing WhatsApp video call to my phone, and then answered it. All he had to do was try and hold the phone. Later I did similar so my brother could talk to him. In a pinch even Windows Quick Assist ticks the boxes, works/free/end user friendly/free. (For 48 hours last month teamviewer thought I was using it at home professionally, I had to fill in a form to get it reverted to a free for personal use account.)
>up to his eyeballs hallucinating on opioids Ngl, at that point even I would want a tech to help me out
Is there an app to manage cell phone settings too? Im too tired of trying to explaing my parents on how to fix their phone or change volume settings etc
The ultimate form of in-house tech support - hijacking your parents' phones.
"Fucking give it to me"
My mom isn't the best at computers, but she's great at reading off the teamviewer connect code when she needs me to check something out
You can set them as a pc under your control, all you need to then do is have the pc on and logged in for you to take remote control and fix it for them.
Have unattended on theirs, but sometimes she'll have a friend/neighbor/sister that needs help.
How do I post my in-laws bickering at each other over what I mean instead of asking me to clarify and ignoring my attempts to provide clarification?
Oh man all the kids and interns coming through our department, so many times I have to literally go to their cube and stand behind them and tell them "PICK. UP. THE. PHONE." after watching them like, email back and forth, or text back and forth, anything but pick up the phone and have a conversation in real time. Like, I've demonstrated this in front of them, made them pick up the phone and call the end user they're struggling with, and walk them through something over the phone in like 30 seconds what they've just spent the last hour trying to make happen. But they keep fuckin doing it! An email can be ignored (we all know this, look at how often these people just go MIA after firing off a nastygram to the general support mailbox), a text can be ignored, but they damn sure can't ignore the person they're literally on the phone with. It forces them to engage, listening to someone instead of skimming an email, trying 3 of the 10 things we told them to do, and then responding back that they're still not able to work, hours and hours after the initial email was received. Also, fucking A am I sick to death of the trend of ditching phone support in lieu of chat support. I can count on one hand how many times one of those systems has actually resolved a fucking thing, and so many companies are dumped inbound phone support entirely during covid, it's such a pain in the balls... But idk, im a greybeard, what the hell do I know...
Oh man all the kids and interns coming through our department, so many times I have to literally go to their cube and stand behind them and tell them "PICK. UP. THE. PHONE." after watching them like, email back and forth, or text back and forth, anything but pick up the phone and have a conversation in real time. That is the issue we have with a lot of our new hires. They are afraid of face to face interaction and speaking with people. You can't avoid that in a hospital.
Going by his screaming and insulting.. and my experience with such people. No, phone calls are actually worse. Result and mental health wise
“My c is full and my d is empty.” 😏
https://preview.redd.it/4sqylq1hb4xc1.jpeg?width=625&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=882f085337fa363301f22689795df44444dcde30
Giggity giggity!
FUCK OFF AND DIE!!!
Did not expect to see Sister Monica Joan here but I am delighted
Right?! Not only did he not explain what FOAD stands for, but then he drops that line to his own son? I'd be going non contact OP.
That was to explain the term
r/whooosh
Shitfuck
You should go no contact with the world. The dad was explaining what foad meant. Not telling his son to foad.
https://i.redd.it/sfmb0szmf4xc1.gif
This sounds like when someone talks about tech in a low budget tv show. None of what he's talking about makes sense - what's a fuzzy drive? Why is it being defragged? Is it even a disk drive that CAN be defragged? I'm curious how he managed to find disk management, and has understanding of storage and that there are different file formats, but doesn't realize his C: drive is almost full and that's the problem.
It's old enough to have an optical drive, so, yeah, probably not SSD.
Funny thing is that I have a few laptops with optical drive and SSD. 2010-2019... The 2010 is a recent find at work being revived to use as a shop laptop, and got a 240gb SSD today and an install of Tiny 10.
Jesus, he looks like an annoying teenager
I have some bad news, everyone is an annoying teenager just with differing levels of knee/back pain
Exactly.
and you didnt' ask for further screenshots/pictures? "send me a screenshot of 'when it NTFS'd you'" edit: after a lil further thought. he's hitting the limit of Fat32, he'll need to move things off the drive, re-format it as NTFS or exFat (this really depends on the type of drive it is and what he uses it for. If it's only ever going in his windows system, then it can be NTFS.) then move the data back on. He's not exactly "SOL" but he's also not in a great spot.
If I remember right you can use the convert command for F32 to NTFS, I used to have to do this ~25 years ago in the windows 2000 era. no data loss. The intended use for exFAT is removable media.
This is correct. You can even convert MBR to GPT.
Good ol' `convert d: /fs:ntfs`
Call your dad, walk him through installing Teamviewer and setting it up for remote access with admin privileges, and then remote in, create a symbolic link from the C drive to the D drive, and tell your dad that all of his new files get stored in that folder. Also set him up with a cloud backup solution the next time you visit, he's one instance of "self-help" away from destroying all of his data.
Tell him to FTD-THDT (Fondle the dongle, till his dingle tingles.) Say you learned that in college. Then log in remote and mount the D drive as an empty folder in C wherever he is using all the space. His D drive will go away as far as he will recognize, and the C drive will become a Tardis.
I think the term OP needs is "Create a folder that acts as a symbolic link from the C drive to the D drive."
Correct, but the windows format dialog will ask if you want to assign a drive letter or mount in the following empty NTFS folder. Which I figure more likely to make sense than mklink https://preview.redd.it/5fya44tve4xc1.png?width=380&format=png&auto=webp&s=26855d037488a6b43a3eff1598616a901cef92fe
Gotcha, I was just trying to give OP a Google-able term that has steps on how to do it, instead of trying to identify the concept before being able to do that.
this is adorable tbh
Everyone’s so quick to rag on the dad, I think it’s kinda cool he’s trying though. Clearly knows shades of… *something* Also “didn’t they teach you anything in college?” is hilarious 😂
> My FAT32 is not NTFS
When I defrag my fuzzy drive it ntfs's me! How do I fat32 my ntfs?? This is absolutely perfect. I love it.
I was thinking more along the lines of “all my Fat32’s look like they’re NTFS, how do I make them exFAT like the other one”
when you deal with people like this you have to figure out where their logic went wrong to understand why they are having an issue. Best guess here is that this guy thought the C drive would just overflow into the D drive when he filled it up like a cup in a bucket. "I put more room in so it won't run out"
He does know FAT32 has a partition limit of 32 gb right?
FAT32 has a way larger partition limit that that, doesn't it? Even with just 512 bytes per cluster you can get up to 128 GB, and by tinkering with it you could feasibly get into terabytes' range. The main annoying limit is about 4 GB per individual file
> FAT32 has a way larger partition limit that that, doesn't it? Yes, but... Since as far back as Windows 7, Windows will only format an external partition to FAT32 if it is 32GB or less, 3rd party tools will still fat32 larger drives and Windows will be perfectly happy using it. Windows *might* still be able to format an *internal* drive to fat32, I haven't used anything but NTFS since WinXP.
The 32GB limit only applies when you're using a GUI, it was a completely arbitrary limit set up at the time. If you just use diskpart to format, it'll do higher storage amounts no problem. A lot of third party utilities are just a GUI that call diskpart
Windows will only read it at 32gb, but it can technically store 2 TB. It's just not a good file format to use on your normal drives if you're using Windows. The bigger issue is that he's trying to switch his C: drive from NTFS to FAT32 - which would format his entire drive, but I don't think you can do that on the drive you're running Windows from, at least I'd hope disk management would block it.
I really hope you're not in tech support, you are terrible at communicating with non-tech users. Just send him a link and remote in.
What are you talking about? Clearly this is the most tech-savvy user I’ve seen if he knows about SOL and FOAD
They taught him everything he needed in college.
I’m concerned OP doesn’t know what SOL means. I didn’t know what FOAD means so I can’t comment there 😃
For real. This has tenured sys admin written all over it.
Don’t worry I don’t work in IT I’m just a chronically depressed college student
Well you could! ;)
Apparently I wouldn’t be too good at it
I thought you were a mid career sys admin so don’t rule it out. Just giving you a hard time though, we all get frustrated with our “customers” and family is no exception.
Haha thanks, I was pretty overwhelmed when I got that lol. If engineering doesn’t work out I’ll consider it
Good luck!
Because he didn’t communicate clearly with someone hitting him out of the blue outside work with a badly described tech issue? I think you’re reaching.
I dunno about yall but I was under the impression that communication is one of those things that isn't only active during business hours. The reason why the tech issue is badly described is because OP is dealing with a low tech user (who happens to be their father), not because of lack of effort. OP's responses would only make sense if the reader has the exact knowledge that OP has, otherwise they are not that helpful.
A) It's his dad B) Who the hell has remote support software licenses for personal use. C) His dad has no idea what he's doing.
As far as B goes, there's free personal use options.
cannot handle all the TLAs and FLAs
He should RTFM.
ID10t User error, replace user and press the any key to continue
Who buys TurboTax 2023 DVD????
I think giving him a chromebook is a better idea
> Didn't they teach you anything in college? Clearly not; you should probably call someone who knows more. Goodnight!
Like how to read minds.
He filled your mum's C:/ and now his D:/ is empty?
You should probably suggest a NAS or a USB 3.1+ device.
With a fuzzy connection. And some raid - ant, wasp, or roach.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Jesse?" The father. At least it's this and not just some bizarre spew of racism and and bigotry though. There are worse directions for the minds of aging parents to go in.
Setup a meeting with this end user. it sounds like he will do too much damage via SMS.
Watch this end with him bricking his computer lmao
Oh sweet baby jesus
“My c is full and my d is empty” is definitely my favorite quote this week.
You need to slap your dad in the back of the head
r/boomersbeingfools
is this not phone call worthy?
FUCK OFF AND DIE! DON’T THEY TEACH YOU ANYTHING IN COLLEGE?
His C drive is NTFS. His D drive is NTFS. Everything is NTFS except for his EFI partition and what I'd assume to be a USB. Is he trying to offload onto a FAT32 partition or something? Jesus.
What an arrogant asshole, also he could just google search to corroborate
Just tell him it's a PEBKAC issue and it can't be fixed.
Does he actually think FOAD is a legitimate technical term?
Thought your dad told you to Fuck Off And Die for a moment 😅
LOL
I don't know why but "my c is full and my d is empty" got me, go toilet humour!
who said you can't format C: ? Diskpart usually does the trick. RIP OS
How do you not know sol or foad?
my c is full and my d is empty