I'm mad WMIC is gone. That thing was fucking useful, so of course Microsoft went out of their way to get rid of it.

Yeah. It's been deprecated for a while, but I've been running into some 11 systems where it is totally gone.

Have fun remembering a whole buttload of random PowerShell cmdlets to do the same fucking thing as that one tool.

turn off monitor

count to 10

turn on monitor

"Nope, didn't work"

PEBCAK

I used to see a lot of people log out and back in and think that was restarting. Still wish Windows had an uptime command

The real fun is when you can't watch what their doing because its over the phone, so you just have to hope they are doing it right. I used to hit them with the "Let's try this; hold down the power button for exactly 30 seconds, then turn it back on." Worked every time, but I did once have a guy ask me why that worked, and I didn't want to call him an idiot so I made up some BS about it being a way to "flush the power from the system" and he bought it.

I'm assuming you turned off and on the monitor rather than the pc, rebooted a different device, or did nothing.

I'd just run a continuos ping and see if it dropped offline at all, and for how long.

Still works on my Win11. Now you got me anxious waiting for it to die.

I don't get as mad at Microsoft as most around here, but this is some boolsheet.

Does it not still show in Task Makager?

I clicked the little minus button on my Internet Explorer, is that what you mean?

It shows there, from the CPU under Performance. I just like command line options

Someone said you tell them to turn it off and unplug it, because you need a number from the plug side going into the computer. Then you coach them through the process to find the right plug, and they don't feel stupid because this is a strange process.

Then when they say there's no numbers on the plug, you pretend like this is new and useful information, tell them to hold the power button and make sure no lights come on, and then you tell them to plug it in and turn it back on

Now, not only have you confirmed they definitely turned off the computer without asking a bunch of potentially insulting questions, the showmanship makes them feel like this is arcane knowledge you've taught them

Too many people think that just turning off the monitor is what you want them to do. They're usually the same people that refer to their entire desktop PC as "the hard drive". At least that was my experience about a decade ago.

goes on to show, pressing the monitor button on and off
See! Not working!

I don't think it's dumb to tell people that power buttons often just put computers to sleep now. It's a relatively new behaviour. Until about 5 or 10 years ago power meant power off, not low power.

Hah! I'd do that when they were reboot recalcitrant. I'd let them know, but if they were really a pain in the ass, lunch reboot.

"No idea why it rebooted. Maybe it caught an update?"

(No, I managed updates.)

I used to see a lot of people log out and back in and think that was restarting. Still wish Windows had an uptime command

Too many people think that just turning off the monitor is what you want them to do. They're usually the same people that refer to their entire desktop PC as "the hard drive". At least that was my experience about a decade ago.

Funny enough, sometimes you used to have to hold the power button to drain the caps. That would (rarely) fix some laptop issues.