SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 14 2015, @09:44PM
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.