This Is Your BIOS Speaking. Please Fix Me. Your PC Is Broken
The Register, Friday, June 12th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department.
"It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer," he told On Call. "We were a very casual IT group; nothing in the way of any formal policies or standards for anything at all. If someone needed a new PC, we just ordered parts and assembled them ourselves."
The department's PC fleet therefore had a diverse gene pool, with no two machines possessing the same bill of materials.