> I’ve recently been trying to resurrect my old PC. I haven’t used it at all over the last 3 years and moved twice in the meantime
Anyway, I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this for 3 years. But when applied to software (to which this story lead me), I often hear "it took them 3 years to fix this". It's pretty much the same here. The bug was there, it caused serious issues (also with other systems), I applied various random workarounds and I spent a lot of time on it and yet, it got fixed by an accident much much later.
It's perfectly reasonable in general to say it took you 3 years when you weren't actually working on it all that time. Like, say, if you were talking to a friend who you tell everything to.
But when it's in a title or headline, it's implicitly presumed to be the most significant thing about your story to a stranger, thus what makes it notable and interesting. Given that baseline, one tends to interpret it as meaning you were working most of the time on it, because that makes it worthy of attention.
That's why it seems not unexpected to me for a person to feel disappointed and mislead.
Your title literally says it took you 3 years.
Tragic how clickbait has become so normalized.
I 'actually' thought that, of course - it's what it says, or what I read it as saying. (One of your most recent comments says "It took 3 years for 20 people to build CKEditor", which presumably means you worked on it for 3 years, but now I'm kind of uncertain what to believe.)
That went on for about five months. I was crazed with frustration, and a growing pile of electronics boxes, tools, and testing devices filled the corner of my room. I had a collection of components which I was sure were working: the system at least appeared to boot to BIOS when lying on the workbench, but when all the parts were hooked up inside the case, we got five red lights again: major hardware fault. Finally, at the limits of my frustration, I turned to my brother for aid: "It works on the bench, but not in the box. I don't know why. You figure it out."
He returned not five minutes later with the widest grin you can imagine. I was incredulous, and this was a better practical joke than he could ever have devised. He showed me that having the case's reset button (correctly) connected to the motherboard caused the error condition. I was so thankful that I almost didn't want to strangle him!
I'm just still amazed that he figured it out that quickly; I really didn't tell him much about what had happened, and I'd hardly had time to leave the room before he'd solved it. What a jerk :)
Guess I should dig out my old writeup of blowing up the floppy drive I needed to boot my PC by dropping a pencil in it, and the ensuing repair..
Only one thing, it is sluggish as hell. Mouse clicks not responding, everything feels slow. Except when I undock it from the docking station and redock it again. Then you feel the fan spinning up, the CPU doing work, and everything becomes smooth. I checked the clock speed, its the same before and after docking. There is nothing keeping the CPU busy either. Its like something is somehow preventing the system from executing efficiently until the system is re-docked.
The solution? I don't know, I might never find out. I will just keep redocking my laptop every time I boot Windows.
If you can find a bit of time - CPUID & HWMonitor are handy tools for just capturing what your CPU and motherboard are currently up to (compare when slow and when fast)
My eclipse on fedora has a hideously annoying flashing effect while editing e.g HTML files. Seems to be caused by the top menu disappearing and then appearing again a second later. The janky effect is infuriating, but at the same time, half an hour or so of googling has led to nothing, and I can sense a rabbit hole of frustration if I try and get to the bottom of it.
The most pragmatic approach feels to be too just put up with it until something else happens - perhaps a shift to Ubuntu so that I can screen share again will resolve it.
