Getting a new computer can cause serious frustration

Posted on October 21, 2006
Filed Under Ranting

This past Thursday my new computer arrived from Dell. I won’t even go in to the fact that it took nearly a month to arrive. That hardly factors in to the frustration level I reached while getting the new machine set up.

Here’s a basic rundown of things I ran in to:

First off, purchasing the computer itself is NOT where the spending ends… I was “forced” to purchase upgrades for at least 4 products that I had purchased online and had downloaded the original install file. At one time or another I deleted the original install so I went to the website and downloaded a new copy of the software. In nearly every case, the version that I had was way out of date and the older file was no longer available for download. So, I download the latest version, type in my registration information and find that I need to pay for the upgrade…

Oh, that’s not the only money I spent. As you may know, I have 4 monitors on my system here at home. This requires 2 video cards. In my old machine, I had 2 ATI Radeon cards. They worked great. In my new machine, I have a GEForce nVidia card. It too works great. HOWEVER, when I removed one of the Radeon cards from the old machine and placed it in the new machine, shit hit the fan! Apparently, Radeon and nVidia are mortal enemies. If one finds the other in the same machine, they start an all-out war for PC domination. I tried everything under the sun I could think of to get them to work. At one point, I wasn’t even able to boot the machine with both cards installed. So, after 90 minutes of swearing, a trip to Best Buy and $150 for a GEForce 6200 card and I was back in business. It took exactly 7 minutes to install the new card and it’s drivers.

Next it was time to try and map a drive letter on the new machine over to the linux server I have sitting under my desk. I use some software called Samba that makes this a pretty easy gig and an enormous time saver since I don’t need to write files to my local drive and then FTP them over to my server. Living without this creature comfort would be entirely unacceptable. So, you can imagine my frustration when I tried to map the drive using the following location format: \\192.168.1.124\www - My machine sat there for 5 full minutes with the message “Trying to connect to location.” I figured it had to do with the Samba installation not letting me access the drive. I tried to call my guru Todd, but that failed. So, I chat with Matt about the issue. He says to check the smb.conf file. I check it to find that Samba is configured to allow anything from the 192.168.1. domain connect.. That’s great, but why the fuck isn’t my machine connecting to it? For some stupid reason, I clicked cancel on the connection attempt and tried again using the following format: \\192.168.1.124\www\ - This took all of 1.24 seconds to work. Crazy frustration all for the sake of a trailing slash. In the example given on the dialog box there isn’t a trailing slash. I’m almost an idiot for even trying it.

And don’t think that Microsoft Outlook went without kicking me in the nuts… Here’s a fun one to try and explain. I set up my first email account and was able to check my email with no problem. Sweet! Then, this evening I tried to reply to an email and it failed to send. Hmm, that’s odd. I double checked the settings and remembered that I needed to use a different server for outgoing mail. No problem, right? Just change the smtp server to the correct one and all should be fine, right? Not so fast… Even though I had changed the settings, the email that I had written while the settings were wrong still wouldn’t send. For some reason, it was still trying to use the old settings. After 20-30 minutes of swearing, I tried the following: Copy the text from the outbound email. Delete the outbound email. Hit reply on the original message. Paste my text in to the message. Hit send. At this point, the email sent immediatly. This makes ZERO sense to me.

I would like to throw a big ‘ol thanks out to Matt. He turned me on to a program called UltraMon. It’s a tool used for managing multiple monitors. I couldn’t do justice to explaining what it does. Just go visit their site and download the trial. As Matt says, “It only takes 10 seconds for you to realize what you have been missing all this time.” I know it’s rare, but he’s right.