A small rant

As a computer professional, here are the top 10 things I'd like to get off my chest:

10) Spyware sucks! The vermin that put this stuff out take advantage of the ignorance of the general public. For example: one of the most common ones that we see in the shop on XP machines is a time sync app. Has anyone ever double clicked on the clock on the toolbar BEFORE they install this junk? It has this nifty little tab that says "Internet Time" that automatically syncs your clock to the server of your choice: Microsoft's or the Government.

9) Have a little common sense! We have this lady who brings in her beater Win98 computer about every 6 months. She considers herself a computer geek, and loads every utility that claims to clean- fix - speed up- scan - protect ---you get the idea. She ends up spending a couple hundred dollars having us try to pull her PC back from the edge of the smoldering abyss. After each time we tell her to stop loading all this extra junk and stop using the net sharing programs (see #8). Each time she ends up trying to tweak more performance out of a PC that should have been a boat anchor years ago. Do the math: (3 years*pc in shop 2 times a year)*average cost of each repair $200= You could have had a new computer $1200 ago. STOP IT!

8) PLEASE! Have a LITTLE common sense! Unfortunately for the afore mentioned lady, she's a download junkie. From Napster to Kazaa, she's consantly downloading songs and apps. "It's legal," she says. "I paid for a subscription." Let's read from Kazaa's site... shall we:

"Having Kazaa is 100% legal
On December 19, 2003, the Dutch Supreme Court confirmed that Kazaa peer-to-peer technology and its distribution is legal.
On April 25, 2003, Judge Stephen J. Wilson of the United States District Court for the Central District of California ruled in favor of Streamcast Networks, Inc. and Grokster, Limited, distributors of peer-to-peer software which functions similarly to Kazaa, in a summary judgment concluding that such peer-to-peer software and its distribution is legal.
Use of the software in the manner authorized by Kazaa’s End User License Agreement is legal in most jurisdictions. Use of the software to download copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owner may be illegal in many jurisdictions. You should therefore be certain that your use of Kazaa complies with the End User License Agreement and you are not authorized to use Kazaa other than in compliance with the Kazaa End User License Agreement. You may review a copy of the End User License Agreement here. For further details on complying with the Kazaa End User License Agreement, please see the “Share responsibly” section below. "

That's lawyer-eeze for "We told you not to" and "If you share copyrighted material we'll give you such a pinch" and then leave you hanging naked by the road side with your... you know what... in a sack, whistling "Waltzing Matilda" backwards when the FBI comes a-kickin' down your door (doo-daa, doo-daa). Lest we forget... guns don't kill people, people kill people... over and over and over ....

7) Smart kids can sometimes be the dumbest people. Had a kid in the ninth grade at one of the schools I work with discover that he could get the password from an encrypted PWL file from the Win98 pcs in one of the labs. He proceeded to gather these PWL files, take them home, crack them, and then generate a list of passwords and users that be gave out to his friends... at school. List gets in the hands of a teacher, teacher turns list over to tech, tech has to figure out where said list came from. Meanwhile, laughing boy has figured out how to block access to his website from any IP address coming from the school (unknowingly, actually blocked it from every school in the district), sounds like he about to post the list. Tech suspects laughing boy is up to no good, but can not prove it. Calls laughing boy in to the office and asks "So... why do you think your here?" Laughing boy sings like a canary. As he's singing, I find (from shop) that his site that he had been bragging up to his friends, has potentially malicious code posted on it. Laughing boy now has no computer access at school AND a file with the State Patrol. By the way, if your going to use a nickname on your website to try to hide your identity and you want to give your dad's site a plug, don't name the GIF file of the banner "Dad's Banner" when dad's name is all over his site.

6) Phone Support people have one of the hardest jobs in the world, give them a break. I did phone support for a small software company for four years. The first year was challenging, the second year was fun (at least entertaining, Y2K), by the end of the 3rd year I was ready to hurt someone. From the calls like "My typewriter seems to be ok, but my TV is broken" or Q:"When I turned my PC on this morning I heard a crackling noise and smelled smoke, what should I do?" A:... being 300+ miles away and on the phone "Did you turn it OFF?" or the ever popular "The PC is not locked up, you have to leave the mouse on the desk when you move it, not wave it at the screen." If you ever get a Phone Support person that seems a little short tempered and seems to be talking down to you... cut them some slack... 4 out of the 5 calls before you were most likely clueless asking the same questions they hear everyday, for eight hours a day, 5 days a week.

5) I know that your computer is your baby, but you are not the only person on the planet. Sorry that may come as a shock to some of you, but its true. Take this from a tech's point of view: 6 units on the bench, working alone, answering the phone and running the front counter. 9 am- Customer A brings in a unit and claims that they can not get out on the internet. Get unit on bench and start once over, answer phone, continue checking progress of scans and/or misc on other 6 units, check in other units, answer phone some more, check out unit, answer walk in questions, touch customer's unit just in time for the phone to ring again. Customer A comes back from coffee and errands to "see how it's coming", give them basic "still on the bench" answer, but do not promise anything until it can be checked over properly. Afternoon goes pretty much like the morning, 4:30 get call from customer A who can not understand why their unit is not done yet. "If it had been easy to fix, you could have done it yourself" goes through your head but "still on the bench, but making progress" comes out of your mouth. By the end of the day there are 8 units on the bench, 5 new ones on the shelf, all wanting them now, but the only one that matters is Customer A. Ah... another day in the trenches... maybe I shouldn't have gotten out of foodservice.

4) If you don't have a backup of your critical data, don't kill the tech when he tells you you're hard drive is dead. Hard drives have lots of moving parts moving at high speeds, THEY ARE GOING TO FAIL EVENTUALLY, sometimes for no reason at all. MAKE BACKUPS!

3) It is very nice that some people want to donate their old PCs to schools, but if their more than 4 years old, I beg you, don't do it. Some poor schlep (like myself) is going to have to figure out how to make that old clunker work with the apps the the school system needs for their classes. Clean it up and give it to your kids/grandkids, put it on a garage sale, burn it, sell it for scrap, weld a chain to it and use it for a dead weight, start an artificial reef... anything, but please don't give it to a school that may actually feel a need to use it.

2) Wait for the complete answer. Kind of ties back to #6, if someone is trying to walk you through repairing something or changing a setting, don't try to anticipate what they are going to say next and try to work ahead. Most of the time there is a specific sequence or pattern to what they are doing. Adding your idea or suggestion is not always going to help.

1) Don't be gullible. Also spawned from #6. One of my most memorable calls when I was on phone support was from a green house. One of the vents had not closed properly and one of their $300 keyboards with credit card swipe had gotten wet and was no longer working properly. They called to find out if that would be covered by warranty... uh... no. Gave them the price of a new keyboard, and they decided to limp along with what they had. About 2 weeks later they called back and ordered the new keyboard, saying "Well, we ran this one through the dishwasher and it did not seem to help." ........ I had to put them on hold. Someone had convinced them that the keyboard was just dirty and that running it through a cycle in a dishwasher (without soap) would help to clean it out. OK... First: the keyboard got wet to begin with... so MORE water is going to fix it? Second: You just turned a $300 mag stripe reader into a paper weight. Please down believe EVERYTHING you read or hear, a lot of it is just a crock that someone with a sick sense of humor came up with just to see if they could get someone else to do it.