For some reason, lately I keep being asked PC questions, despite my vitriolic hatred for all things Windows. When did I become the PC Technician?
I’m actually very happy to help people with problems – especially so technical ones. Except when it comes to Windows. Even though often I can answer the question and help the person solve the problem, but the fact that the process is so arcane, frustrates me no end. I think this is because I take the problems personally.
One friend had her USB port go bad – probably because of plugging a USB2 into a USB1 port (actually it was a USB2 device into a USB1/USB2 hub into a USB1 port – and I’ve heard of this happening before). So the USB ports on her (generic) motherboard died – everything else worked fine. Luckily she didn’t need them for keyboard or mouse – tho she did need them for printer, palm, nicer mouse, etc. My inclination was to believe it was a software problem – but after the usual rigamarole Windows XP gave no indication anything was wrong. So I ripped out the heart of the beast, and we took a field trip to Fry’s. A new motherboard, the same but with USB2 (how convenient!) was $50. Back home, and there are about 16 different connections that have to be made from memory and video cards and ethernet cards (’cause the onboard one never works), and power and drives and lights and switches and the front USB ports which never did work before because they needed to be plugged in to the mother board upside down and backwards. Back up and running, as far as I know – and my warranty as always was till I got out the door. (I’ve never had to replace a Mac motherboard, and components in the desktop machines are usually a lot easier to get to. I can open my G4 while it’s running if I want to.)
Yesterday morning, got a call from another friend who’s a mechanical genius and has the most amazing metal shop in his garage and is always super helpful – but he’s not much of a computer wizard (tho more so than he thinks, I believe). He picked up a Dlink wireless card for his Windows 98 laptop, and dilligently followed all the install instructions, software loading, configuration, rebooting, network settings, etc. (With a Mac you just…plug it in. But I digress.) And he was sitting in Starbucks and he couldn’t get it to work. Turned out there were some other hidden settings that the manual didn’t explain, that needed to be switched on, then of course you need to buy an account from Starbucks to use their service (he wasn’t near a friendly independant coffee shop like Lestat’s on Adams that lets you use their network for free, you don’t even have to buy coffee but if you do it’s a damn sight better than Starbucks’). He actually solved the problem, somehow; he explained to me what the problem was, something to do with configuration settings, that I couldn’t be bothered to remember but will probably give me nightmares anyway.)
So now I’m at work, and the investor guy I work with tells me his Windows 98 system at home won’t open PDFs even tho he’s loaded the latest Adobe PDF reader it keeps looking for the old one, or asking for a component or something (on Mac OSX, Acrobat reading AND printing is standard, or you can get Acrobat Reader or Writer if you need to do more with it). He’s trying to tell me the bizarre error message that comes up. I really hate trying to answer computer questions over the phone – far worse to try to answer them from (their) memory!
Why must this be so complicated? (A: it doesn’t have to be…but you’re already tired of me talking about the Mac!) Anyhow – just wanted to disclaim that if I’m grumpy when you ask me Windows questions, it’s not that I don’t want to help you, I just tend to accept the massive stupidity of the whole computing universe as a personal failing of my own fault. Mea maximuma culpa.