Well yesterday was interesting.
We went to visit my Nana and also some retired friends and had some interesting conversations about computers.
My Nana was talking about how at the doctor’s surgery she was told to go sign in on a touch screen computer thing by the receptionist after she had already been confused about which desk to approach. How ridiculous, why not just take the details from her verbally? My Nana has never used a computer in her life; prefers the cashier’s desk to a cash machine and won’t use direct debit as she prefers to pay at the post office. Whilst I would doubtlessly find signing in at the doctor at a computer very convenient we really must not assume that everyone in society would feel the same!
Later she was talking about BT. She was complaining that intermittently when phoning a relative a voice comes on the phone saying “You have dialled the wrong code”. After hearing her elaborate on this over the course of the morning it became clear that she believes that the voice is not a recorded one but is a human being who is paid to intercept her phone call at random times. Bless her, it seems almost implausible but then why should she expect any different? Again, it is a welcome reminder that not everyone has grown up with technology.
Finally, when at our retired friends I volunteered to have a look at his computer. He had been using a very dated laptop on dial-up for a long time but, without consulting me as he would not want to impose, decided to take the plunge and buy a new desktop PC. He walked away with a machine that has a good processor but a meagre 512MB RAM with, guess what, Windows Vista pre-installed. Oh dear. 512MB RAM is fine for XP … but for Vista?
This however was just the beginning. The desktop was absolutely full of shortcut icons for Napster, Internet services etc. Great - the first thing I do with these is uninstall/delete but if you are not a tech savvy person you are going to leave them forever as you think that deleting a shortcut deletes the program and you do not know whether deleting an unknown program will break your machine.
Loads of crap seemed to run at startup and something was thrashing the hard drive constantly meaning the machine ran like a dog. It was not the anti virus, it did not seem to be the defrag program on schedule, it should not have been paging RAM at that point so God only knows! The point was that his brand new spanky machine ran as slow as his archaic old laptop and used more electricity so what was the point?
Finally, the point of my looking at his machine was that his Internet had broken. He had paid some guy, at a fair price, to sort it out but for some reason it had stopped working again.
I ended up concluding that I needed to re-install the speedtouch modem software. I put in the disc, it fired up we went through all the routines and followed the printed instructions on the disc about removing the Vista driver first. Well after about an hour of scratching my head I realised that the installer was installing the Windows XP driver! To install the Vista one I had to browse the CD and install it manually - but this was not documented as far as I could see!!! How on earth could my friend have ever figured this out for himself?
If you bought a TV but could only watch half the channels on it you would take it back wouldn’t you? Why not do the same with a PC? If manufacturers and suppliers want the benefits of mainstream revenues then they should offer mainstream support. It is an absolute disgrace that between the supplier and his broadband provider he ended up having to pay for someone to come out to help him and then had to embarrassedly ask for help off a friend.
Vendors: sort your act out, make sure your crap works, stop wasting my time and stop making me subsidise your inability to give your customers what they need.
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