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Amazed again

21 09 09 - 21:25 Just when you think PCs can't sink any lower... they surprise you.

Just spent the last hour, yes HOUR trying to get a Toshiba laptop to boot from a CD. You would think this would not be such a Herculean task, but it was. Was the crappy white text on black BIOS set to boot from the CD first? Check! Blows right past it. Perhaps there's a key you can hold that will force it to look for a CD? Why not F12? Look, it brings up a little selection, how cute. Does it work? Nope. Blows right past it. Finally in desperation I physically removed the drive to see what would happen. Oh, not so tough now, are we? Finally it boots from the CD. So I format the freaking drive to "free space" on my Mac (you know, the machine that is SANE) meaning no real formatting at all. Then it finally works. Toshiba, you owe me an hour of life.

Elsewise the same old crap again today. Shopping, which is fine. Then the ancient Mac came over. Which of course booted fine even though it's 12 years old. He was surprised, I guess it wasn't acting right for him? Seemed fine to me. I scrounged up a flakey zip drive and looked through backup CD #1 (made in 1997) for the iomega drivers, which worked well enough to make him two zip disk backups of some flight simulator software he had.

You know guy, they still make that kinda stuff. You could get a newer machine and still do it. But whatever.

Took a little time to work on that VPN stuff. Shoved the software into virtualbox, where I'm running Win2k. Amidst my efforts, suddenly I couldn't connect to the router anymore. Looks like their internet is down. Super. I got a call from him, he didn't say what was wrong, but I'm betting that's it. I should have just said, "sorry, no way to do what you want to do, bye bye now" rather then work on this VPN crap. Won't suggest it again, that's for sure. There's only eleventy billion settings, why I don't know. Why do I need all these settings? Why can't I just "turn on" VPN at the router (give username and password) and point my VPN software to X address? Give username and password, and I'm in. But no, there's page upon page of directions to follow, and the error messages are oh so very helpful.

NOT.

Then setting up a new Vista machine. Once again people who know no passwords, or how they did anything previously. Of course, Vista itself doesn't help, nor does it help that every time I try to browse for the shared printer, the wireless connection dies on both machine. Fun! Did I mention I hate PCs?

Then only a half hour late to my old neighbor. 256 MB of RAM, and you know my feelings on that good reader. But even paring his system down and replacing a 128 chip with a 256 one it was still pathetically slow, so I look at his hard drive. It's some 20GB piece of crap running at 5400 RPM. Well, there's the reason. You not only got the absolute minimum RAM dell could possibly sell you, they shoved in the absolute cheapest piece of junk hard drive they could too. Which you've been running the last 4-6 years. Congratulations. Doesn't seem like such a great deal now, does it?

Got home in time to have a little dinner and relax for all of thirty seconds before making my 6 phone calls for the evening. More whining and complaining, as expected. Should be a great day tomorrow, filled with love, understanding, and the desire to disembowel someone. And then I get a pup, until Sunday! Which only complicates my life a little bit, no problem, I can handle it, because I'm pretty, and people like me.

Current Mood: Pretending to be pretty and that people like me.