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posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-Milliner-Time! dept.

We put a lot of trust in big companies, so when they let us down it can have serious consequences.

I recently went shopping for a new computer. I wanted a low-end laptop for light work, and the HP Stream seemed like a good deal. That deal was made even sweeter when Best Buy offered to sell me a returned one for almost 20 percent off. The salesman assured me that it was in like-new condition and that they would honor all warranties. Sold.

I always get a little thrill opening a new gadget. The computer looked like it had never been touched and all the paperwork was still in sealed bags. There was even a slip of paper in the box with the ID of the tech who cleaned and certified the unit.

So it surprised me when I booted up and saw someone else's name and Hotmail address at the login prompt. So much for like-new!

As I stared at the full name and e-mail address of the previous owner—let's call him David—I wondered. Could I get into this computer another way? It was mine after all. And how much more could I learn about him? How bad of a mistake had the store made?

Any similar stories out there Soylentils care to share?


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by necrophage on Sunday June 14 2015, @03:31AM

    by necrophage (3568) on Sunday June 14 2015, @03:31AM (#195973)

    A long time ago I bought a used tape drive with some extra tapes. After installing the device I found some data still on the tapes. They were secret Intel emails about the testing of a 486 pentium for laptops. The files were even marked "Secret." There was a lot of technical data about pin ### and the Voltage was wrong and what they were going to do to change it etc. There were pictures of the tech that had tapes, with his family and a lot of Star Trek sound effects wave files. Gave quite an insight about testing new hardware for Intel.

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  • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday June 14 2015, @01:09PM

    by Geotti (1146) on Sunday June 14 2015, @01:09PM (#196112) Journal

    a 486 pentium

    Huh?

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 14 2015, @09:44PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 14 2015, @09:44PM (#196252)

      One of these probably early 90s anecdotal story:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_OverDrive [wikipedia.org]

      I had a cousin of this chip, that put a fast 486 in a 386 socket.

      This general kind of thing has been around since the 80s. V20 or V30 or something was a faster pin compatible 8088 "IBM XT" and there was a hitachi chip compatible with a 6809 that added some nifty features.

      Obviously this didn't help the memory IO speed, but it usually did wonders for on-chip cache performance and on-chip FPU performance etc.

      Obviously these gadgets work better with "intel style" architecture where even a NOP instruction takes like 47 clock cycles to process. On a "motorola style" architecture where everything is RISCy and takes like one clock cycle per instruction the payoff is minimal.