this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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someone told me their sound for meetings was coming out of their hard drive the other day. I knew what they meant but still.
now if it was a floppy drive I could believe them
Hold up, what did they mean because I cannot translate that
Non-technical people will sometimes refer to whatever piece of plastic or metal that contains electronic components of any sort but does not consist of an LCD display or obvious input device as a “hard drive”. This includes desktop boxes, external modems, docking stations, UPS systems, teleconferencing platforms, and far, far more. If it has das blinkenlights anywhere on it you can expect it to be referred to as a “hard drive” at some point. It will save you a headache if you just mentally translate their “hard drive” to mean “hardware” instead.
Alternatively, if it is a display device (an LCD monitor), expect that to be called either “the computer”, “the server”, or “the internet”.
Additionally, the entire desktop box is a CPU and the display is the computer
Tech support has evolved since I got out. I don't remember this specific point of confusion. However, during the last job I had that involved any level of help desk support with non-technical people, Obama was still in office.
Probably the desktop tower. I've seen many people call it a hard drive, but I'm actually not sure how common it is to have speakers in the tower.
In Chuck, the TV show about a nerd accidentally getting a secret government computer stuck in his head while keeping his job at the nerd herd (geek squad) as a cover, they refer to all desktop PCs as hard drives. Including Chuck himself who is generally portrayed as the kinda nerd who'd know better (he and his college roommate had written a MUD, though it wasn't specifically called that, just called a game).
Literally less believable than the whole getting a CIA/NSA joint supercomputer "stuck in his head" part of the entire show.
Technically most motherboard has a piezo speaker for POST beeps. Not sure you can route meeting audio through it though.