aysiu
July 12th, 2006, 05:58 PM
I've often heard it said here that people don't like Windows because it treats its users like idiots.
Well, I spent some time last night with some wonderful people. They're moral people, fun people, and intelligent people. When it comes to computers, though, they're idiots. Unfortunately, there are some problems that go beyond even the power of Clippy or the search doggy (not Beagle/Kerry--the other one).
When you don't know you need a USB cord to download pictures from your camera, even Windows' "What do you want to do?" dialogues won't help you.
I'd almost forgotten how much a pain drivers were. They said their internet connection wasn't working. They'd called Comcast and gotten the Comcast CD. They even tried to use the D-Link router CD to fix things. To no avail, unfortunately. My wife and I had to hunt around to see what the problem was.
The winipcfg command didn't work, which prompted my wife to say, "Maybe this isn't Windows XP...?" (The computer had a Windows classic theme--not Luna or the Silver one.) But then she thought again and said, "No, I used the winipcfg command even in college on Windows 98." We knew something else had to be wrong. We dug around the Control Panel trying to remember how Windows did stuff with the internet (my wife uses OS X; I use Ubuntu). The Internet Connection wizard certainly didn't help us. Eventually, we found that device manager thing with all the yellow question marks.
Ah, the yellow question mark. My old buddy. It quickly reminded me why I love editing configuration files.
The people we were trying to help out had no idea where the driver CD was. They didn't even know what a driver CD was, so my wife and I ended up digging through their things to find Dell's restore disks. There were four restore disks. Three appeared to be driver CDs, and the descriptions on the CDs themselves weren't very helpful.
So I tried having Windows search for the driver on each CD. It couldn't come up with anything and wanted to find a driver from the internet. Uh... I'm not able to get on the internet--that's why I'm looking for the driver! Argh!
After a while, I gave up.
My wife took over. She looked through each CD, looking at the descriptions for each driver. Four of the drivers' descriptions looked promising, but since all we saw in the device manager was a big yellow question mark, we had no idea which driver to use. So she just double-clicked and trialed and errored until she found the driver that "worked." She still had to manually go in and select the driver.
Finally, though, it worked, and everyone was happy. Of course, our amazing-in-many-other-ways-but-computer-illiterate friends also needed her help setting up iTunes and their printer. My wife had to defragment their computer. Sigh.
It did make me think... despite the fact they'd have never have figured out the yellow question mark stuff by themselves... maybe they wouldn't mind Clippy popping up and saying, "It looks as if you're trying to type a letter. Do you want help with that?"
P.S. They were going to take it to some computer store to get the computer "repaired." Instead, we got a lovely homecooked dinner. My wife and I had to work for our meal...
Well, I spent some time last night with some wonderful people. They're moral people, fun people, and intelligent people. When it comes to computers, though, they're idiots. Unfortunately, there are some problems that go beyond even the power of Clippy or the search doggy (not Beagle/Kerry--the other one).
When you don't know you need a USB cord to download pictures from your camera, even Windows' "What do you want to do?" dialogues won't help you.
I'd almost forgotten how much a pain drivers were. They said their internet connection wasn't working. They'd called Comcast and gotten the Comcast CD. They even tried to use the D-Link router CD to fix things. To no avail, unfortunately. My wife and I had to hunt around to see what the problem was.
The winipcfg command didn't work, which prompted my wife to say, "Maybe this isn't Windows XP...?" (The computer had a Windows classic theme--not Luna or the Silver one.) But then she thought again and said, "No, I used the winipcfg command even in college on Windows 98." We knew something else had to be wrong. We dug around the Control Panel trying to remember how Windows did stuff with the internet (my wife uses OS X; I use Ubuntu). The Internet Connection wizard certainly didn't help us. Eventually, we found that device manager thing with all the yellow question marks.
Ah, the yellow question mark. My old buddy. It quickly reminded me why I love editing configuration files.
The people we were trying to help out had no idea where the driver CD was. They didn't even know what a driver CD was, so my wife and I ended up digging through their things to find Dell's restore disks. There were four restore disks. Three appeared to be driver CDs, and the descriptions on the CDs themselves weren't very helpful.
So I tried having Windows search for the driver on each CD. It couldn't come up with anything and wanted to find a driver from the internet. Uh... I'm not able to get on the internet--that's why I'm looking for the driver! Argh!
After a while, I gave up.
My wife took over. She looked through each CD, looking at the descriptions for each driver. Four of the drivers' descriptions looked promising, but since all we saw in the device manager was a big yellow question mark, we had no idea which driver to use. So she just double-clicked and trialed and errored until she found the driver that "worked." She still had to manually go in and select the driver.
Finally, though, it worked, and everyone was happy. Of course, our amazing-in-many-other-ways-but-computer-illiterate friends also needed her help setting up iTunes and their printer. My wife had to defragment their computer. Sigh.
It did make me think... despite the fact they'd have never have figured out the yellow question mark stuff by themselves... maybe they wouldn't mind Clippy popping up and saying, "It looks as if you're trying to type a letter. Do you want help with that?"
P.S. They were going to take it to some computer store to get the computer "repaired." Instead, we got a lovely homecooked dinner. My wife and I had to work for our meal...