My sister called this morning. BIOS error message on her business PC! Should she reformat the drives?
Tonight my friend Farrell was on the phone. He’s moved to California. The cable installer made him remove his network before installing his service and now there’s nothing!
I’m not sure what’s happened with my sister’s problem, except to say the BIOS checks happen before the disk drives are in play. So, it’s unlikely her data was in jeopardy.
I’ll call her a little later to see.
Farrell just needed some hand holding. No – not in the Gayle/Oprah sense. He just needed someone to talk him through the problem.
Surprise – I read the manual while we spoke and fixed the problem.
However, in his defense, there are so many possible outcomes that manual reading probably doesn’t help those who don’t know what’s going on in the first place.
Here’s the real problem. In order to be versatile, computers have to be complex. I don’t think there’s a way to separate the two.
If all a computer did was run a spreadsheet… or play a game… or act as a word processor, life would be easier. But we want our computers to do all those things and often at the same time.
Last night I was transcoding video off a DVD, browsing the web and playing poker – all at once.
We don’t want PCs that are single task. We want robust machines that do whatever we want whenever we want it done. That means we need to step up and better understand how everything works.
Right. Even I don’t believe that’s likely, or even possible. By nature, people are unlikely to delve deeply into technical minutiae.
What we really all need is someone like me. Scary.