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seramarias replied to your post: Phooey. Today has been a lackluster day, to put it…
Not a big helpful thing, but there’s a little trick that works on a lot of DVD drives. Is there a little pinhole right next to or under the tray door? If there is, there’s an emergency release you can toggle by poking a pin or bit of wire straight into that hole and pushing. Sometimes that’ll open a stuck drive tray.
Alas, I did look for that. The computer in question is a weird vertically-oriented tower-CPU model running Windows 7, if that gives you any idea of vintage, and there’s no pinhole thing in it. It’s got no expansion slots. The keyboard is PS2, to further elaborate on how fucking ancient this thing is. It’s currently the oldest functioning computer in the store, with the exception of the computer hard-wired into the Noritsu QSS printer, which is a wet lab the size of a refrigerator with a laser imaging unit and developing and stop bath tanks in it. That computer runs Windows 2000, which notably is not compatible with the new Daylight Savings standards that George W Bush enacted, so for a few weeks a year it’s an hour off when it starts the program timer to heat up the chemicals to operating temperature.
By those standards, my computer’s brand new, but by any reasonable standards, I’m kind of chugging away on a dinosaur. Which, again, it doesn’t matter really, I only need three programs, and most of my time is spent waiting for a VPN so slow I could probably be doing the coding on an abacus.
The CD slot probably doesn’t matter; I doubt we still have the disk that’s actually for this computer.
Oh, one more fun fact about my computer at work: we had to reinstall Windows on it, and we used the original disks, but because that serial number had been used before– for that same computer, mind, but it still counts as used– Windows now believes my software is counterfeit and pops me up a little notice about it every twenty minutes or so, so at least fifteen times a day I’ll be working on something and suddenly the cursor will disappear and i’ll have to sit and wait so I can close the window once it’s popped up.
Like, the main takeaway here is that this store doesn’t really deserve to still be in business, but it is, and I’m dumb enough to keep working here.

seramarias replied to your post: Phooey. Today has been a lackluster day, to put it…
Not a big helpful thing, but there’s a little trick that works on a lot of DVD drives. Is there a little pinhole right next to or under the tray door? If there is, there’s an emergency release you can toggle by poking a pin or bit of wire straight into that hole and pushing. Sometimes that’ll open a stuck drive tray.
Alas, I did look for that. The computer in question is a weird vertically-oriented tower-CPU model running Windows 7, if that gives you any idea of vintage, and there’s no pinhole thing in it. It’s got no expansion slots. The keyboard is PS2, to further elaborate on how fucking ancient this thing is. It’s currently the oldest functioning computer in the store, with the exception of the computer hard-wired into the Noritsu QSS printer, which is a wet lab the size of a refrigerator with a laser imaging unit and developing and stop bath tanks in it. That computer runs Windows 2000, which notably is not compatible with the new Daylight Savings standards that George W Bush enacted, so for a few weeks a year it’s an hour off when it starts the program timer to heat up the chemicals to operating temperature.
By those standards, my computer’s brand new, but by any reasonable standards, I’m kind of chugging away on a dinosaur. Which, again, it doesn’t matter really, I only need three programs, and most of my time is spent waiting for a VPN so slow I could probably be doing the coding on an abacus.
The CD slot probably doesn’t matter; I doubt we still have the disk that’s actually for this computer.
Oh, one more fun fact about my computer at work: we had to reinstall Windows on it, and we used the original disks, but because that serial number had been used before– for that same computer, mind, but it still counts as used– Windows now believes my software is counterfeit and pops me up a little notice about it every twenty minutes or so, so at least fifteen times a day I’ll be working on something and suddenly the cursor will disappear and i’ll have to sit and wait so I can close the window once it’s popped up.
Like, the main takeaway here is that this store doesn’t really deserve to still be in business, but it is, and I’m dumb enough to keep working here.
