(no subject)

[vxo.livejournal.com]

Later, this got even better...

A potential employer seems to want A+ certification... I was looking into what the exam entails, and was rather disappointed to find out that a lot of it covers versions of Windows back to 95.

This made me think for a while about that wonderful piece of crap, which was totally responsible for my permanent switch to Linux...

Here are my thoughts on Windows.

---

Windows 95 is not an operating system. Windows 95 is a warning of what is to come.

Windows 95 is when your mother decides to volunteer your services for repairing a friend's computer sight unseen.

Windows 95 is what's on the computer when you get there, and feel a very strong sense of disgust and disappointment.

Windows 95 is on that old yellowed beige plastic IBM Aptiva from 1994 that's buried on that desk covered in papers and trinkets in a room whose stale air and dust makes your nose burn and your eyes water.

Windows 95 is what tries to boot when you press the power button, to be greeted by the sound of the ground up remains of two fans and a screaming hard drive bearing.

Windows 95 is what takes ten minutes to start up to the point that it shows someone's horrible pixellated wallpaper on the 256 color video card and out-of-focus hand-me-down monitor.

Windows 95 is what you are going to be stuck with wading through when the computer's owner demands that you make it capable of doing impossible tasks, like connecting to the Internet, and running very modern versions of common software.

Windows 95 is buried in ten years worth of accumulated viruses.

Windows 95 is what you see and pretend to have an important appointment somewhere else before running from the house screaming.

That, friends, is Windows 95.

Comments

[sheryls.livejournal.com]

Windows 95 is what i attempted to shove on my old packard bell Back In The Day and eventually gave up and just stuck with DOS 6.0. Hey, QModemPro ran on it, who needs a GUI OS? :)

i wasnt cool enough to run linux.

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

Although i agree on your views of Win95, i'm curious as to what brought it up.

I can't speak for everyone else, as i know there are several different versions of the A+ exam...mine dealt very little with previous versions of Windows, though. The oldest version mentioned on the exam i took was 2000, i believe, and it was a blanket question that referred to Windows NT/2000/XP or something like that.

[vortex.livejournal.com]

Mine too, and I took mine in 2001...

[inahandbasket]

I'm still amazed that anyone requires an A+ cert.
IME, they seem to be the clueless employeers.

[inahandbasket]

I stand corrected, they have at least updated the questions. I took a test quiz and only missed the questions related to bios codes. heh

[vxo.livejournal.com]

old as dirt IBM bios codes.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a system throw a 201?

(Memory parity error, and I remember this only because someone once gave me an IBM PC Portable with a bad chip. We later tricked that baby out to be a 386, before the builtin CGA video just got to be too much of a PITA for anything with a GUI.)

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Employers require an A+ cert in retail computer shops because end lusers don't know that A+ isn't worth the toilet paper it's printed on and thus think the techs actually know something.

When it's asked for because they expect the people to actually know something as a result of having it... please pass $PSYCHEDELIC_DRUGS.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

The test is trivial for anyone who knows their shit (took me just over 17 minutes to finish both parts), but it's something you can't bullshit / social engineer your way through. Sure, it doesn't say anything about if you're competent or not, but at least it'll rule out a total dumbass.

[jecook]

Yep.

The A+ is a "He knows his ass from a hot rock" test.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

A good interview from a competent boss will rule out a total dumbass, and most tech positions require more than just general computer knowledge - they require some sort of other knowledge (customer service, a particular specialty, etc). Like I said, marketing tool.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

So Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and a good interview from a competent boss were all walking down the street...

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

...when an incompetent jackass was walking the other way. Thinking that Santa Claus didn't exist, he walked right through him and kept right on going. Having proved himself right, he did the same with the Tooth Fairy. Feeling pretty good about himself, he picked up a good running start on the competent boss waiting with some mind-probing questions. But this didn't work and he found that he was a shit-stain on the pavement.

(If I hadn't had some bosses I respected that could have flattened a cocky n00b and knew some bosses in this comm that could do likewise, I would have agreed with you on this one. But I must dissent.)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Yup. The instances do exist, but so very rarely it's disheartening. You need a good IT boss (rare) who is also good at interviews (rarer) and who hasn't been locked out of the interview process by someone higher up and/or in the HR team (near-impossible, at least at large shops).

[vortex.livejournal.com]

Oh Come on!
Windows 95 was a Godsend over Windows 3.1 and DOS...

[samwize.livejournal.com]

Yuh. I took my A+ Back In The Day(tm) and we had every goddamned ancient piece of BS you can imagine. Of course, Network+ was even worse- I had to learn thicknet and vampire taps and token rings oh my!

PITA.

[aethwolf.livejournal.com]

Windows 95 is what half the computers in my high school were running when I graduated in 2004.

[vxo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are still a few isolated pockets of machines like that... usually in places where they're totally orphaned with no Internet access. For... miles.

[aethwolf.livejournal.com]

These were online. All of them were connected to the DSL connection feeding the school (at least that's what I heard we were connecting to). We easily had 150+ machines feeding off that single connection.

We were just poor.

Also, my little group who went around fixing computer for the school (unofficially and without consent from the county) found some 386s and promptly decommissioned them.

[jecook]

Heh. One placed I used to service still had a windows 3.11 for workgroups acting as their file server as late as 1999. I think they actually kept that thing right up to the rollover, and finally moved on to something else. They uses a very funky old DOS program which was a pain in the ass to run on XP.

[jecook]

I took my A+ in 2003.

By that time, I have been out of school and in the IT industry for just under 7 calendar years. (We'll ignore the 3 or 4 years of me fiddling around with computers in high school)

The A+, IIRC, stands for the equivelent of 6 months in the IT industry.

The only reason I got it was so that I could get the manufacturer's warrenty work certifications, do we could do warrenty work on computers and get paid by them.

Work wants me to get my Network+. The only thing that I'm having trouble with is remember the various 802.x standards, which went out the window once ethernet and TCP/IP took over the corporate IT network en masse. (Yes, I know there are tolken ring holdouts here and there, and a few other goofy things.
To my knowledge, in my neck of the woods the mix of Novell, Active Directory, and Workgroup networks was about 25/35/40, primarily due to the fact that the places I serviced were mostly small businesses with no real need for a dedicated server. My current place is all AD, though, so I'm probably going to be forced to get my MCSA at some point if I want a decent pay raise.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

What timing... I just got a call about a Win95 box an old family friend was given as I was trying to get out of the house yesterday..... Squick!!!

[110billion.livejournal.com]

I'd never even come across the A+ certification until this thread. Shows how much we rely on them in Australia.

[lordstorm.livejournal.com]

I got my A+ in Melbourne back in 2002....and no Australian employer has recognised it since. I've had mostly a glimmer of recognition working here in the UK for the last 1.5 years.....and that's about it. *scratch head*

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

We have between two and four win95 machines in use here.

And a few hundred win98 machines.

And over 500 NT4 Servers.

And over 1000 NT4 Workstations.

And a couple hundred Win2k systems.

And a couple hundred WinXP systems.

And a dozen or so Win2003 systems.

And a bunch of unix boxes. Most of which (over 500) are running on Sparc2, 10, or 20 hardware.

So... yeah... fun stuff.

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

I didn't mind 95 as much as I hated 98 (not 98 SE). And the less said about ME the better. Gah. I shudder whenever I think of ME.

The thing I hated most about 95 was the bloody IRQ nightmare.