My uncle swore by dial-up AOL chat rooms for tech support - told me to just ask a stranger about my PC freezing in 1997

He said 'someone in the Windows 95 room will know' and after three hours of waiting and getting a response from 'CyberDude42' who told me to delete system32, which I thankfully didn't do, is there anyone here who actually got decent advice from a random AOL chat room or was it all just chaos?

2 comments

2 Comments

pat36017d ago

My buddy got legit advice for his 1998 Gateway that kept blue screening. He posted in the "AOL Help" room and some guy named "TechWiz99" walked him through updating his graphics drivers step by step. It took like an hour of typing back and forth but it actually fixed the problem. I think people forget that not everyone in those rooms was a troll, some were just bored tech nerds who actually wanted to help.

taylor.betty17d ago

Oh man, my old Dell from 1999 had the exact same problem with blue screens and I ended up in a "Windows 98 Support" room on AOL. This person named "SiliconSam" spent like 45 minutes with me trying different things. I mean, we went through all the standard stuff and nothing worked, then he suggested I check the RAM sticks because apparently they could get loose over time. Turned out one of them was just barely popped out of its slot, pushed it back in and it ran fine for another two years. Idk, I think those random strangers in chat rooms really saved a lot of people from having to buy new computers or pay some repair shop a ton of money they didn't have back then.