Category: Rants

I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies.  All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain.  So here it goes…

Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less than 8 separate times, and to, in the end, blame me for causing a problem which could only be repaired by tweaking their own registration servers. Just to get Photoshop to run.

HP:spent the better part of three hours bouncing my call between different call centers, different divisions of the company, taking over remote control of my PC, forcibly causing the loss of installed drivers and patches and lecturing me extensively on how I knew nothing about computer hardware to troubleshoot a problem, only to claim that the “outgoing phone lines are down” so that they couldn’t call me back for three days.  In the end, I relented and used the combination of the Internets free help (from other poor, tortured HP owners souls) and a Linux boot CD to restore functions to my USB ports.

AT&T: sent me around and around in circles for more than a week, trying to explain to me that “new services are available in your area”, but then deciding that no service has been improved, but that they can save me money if only I would switch to a new plan.  This led to nearly a week without any working DSL service, a series of confused support technicians, a promise of a new DSL modem that never appeared and a considerably more expensive bill than I started with for the same level of service I had before.  Extra pain points are awarded for having the local repair truck workers tell me that in 30 days or so fiber will be available in my area that will render all of this moot.

So who is the winner of this round?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups.  Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s.  I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity.  Obviously something is up.

I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for the most part this is a very stable and good performing platform.  I have thrown a lot of modern hardware at it, including 4GB of DDR2 RAM, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode and an AMD Phenom 9950 quad core CPU, so Vista can really go fast.  However, to test out the theory that Vista might be taunting me I fired up one of my spare PCs running Windows XP with SP3.  Sure enough, transferring files to and from the NAS with XP works fine at over 22 MB/s.  Something must really be hosed with Vista, IMHO.

So, off to Google I go in search of answers, and low-and-behold I found this article at ZDNet explaning what I feared: Vista thinks it is smarter than me when it comes to prioritizing what needs to get done on the PC.  Whenever the media sub-system in Vista is active with either audio or video playback the network connection gets crunched down to its lowest level.  No matter what I tweak, disable or alter Vista will not transfer at a respectable speed unless all audio and video sources stop.  This includes playback inside of a browser such as IE7 or Firefox.  I take a deep breath and sigh.

So now I must sit in silence or play music on a separate PC if I want full network capability on my main work machine.  For this fine, new feature I award Windows Vista the “Poo of the Day” award.  I’m sure more of these awards will follow soon enough.  Windows 7 can’t get here soon enough.

When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something.  In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.

First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time.  Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer.  Browser windows would pop open for no good reason.  It was time to make a trip to my old friend MSConfig and enable the clean-boot options.  Only after booting into Safe Mode with everything disabled (and my system all but useless) did I find the culprit files hiding and renaming themselves in the Windows/System32 directory.

What followed were many reboots, the forced termination of IE7 and Explorer.exe, a reload of some critical OS files from DVD, then a determined and lengthy process of online virus scanning.  Only when all of these processes were completed was the threat finally removed.  I must once again return to my old paranoid ways: never install anything from the internet directly onto my critical PC AND always keep some kind of security (the dreaded User Account Control) turned on to slow down an attack.

And to think I was worried about being bored this holiday week.  Shame on me.

If you have a new HDTV set and are looking to hook up some glorious Blu-ray or PS3 goodness you know that you will have to run to the store and purchase one special component not bundled with any device shipping in quantity: an HDMI cable.

Unlike the days of old when you could run into your local Radio Shack and pickup whatever cheap cables they had on hand and make the new device work, in today’s digital era you are treated the one of the greatest fleecings in modern retail sales history.  You see, Monster, the cable provider of over-priced and over-hyped speaker cables from days past has moved in and pushed just about every other provider of HDMI cables off the shelves, leaving only their own brand at the most outrageous prices.  And the problem is that retailers gladly let them do this because the margins (that’s the money retailers actually make on each good sold) can be 50%, 100%, even 200% on these cables.  Typical devices like TV’s and cameras sometimes net the retailer less than 10% margin.

I don’t begrudge Monster on pushing their cables on the unsuspecting and clueless at the store, that is their business after all.  My problem is that their retail strategy has pushed every other provider of similar products to do similarly stupid things, like raise the price for the same product.  Don’t believe me about nearly all of the cables being the same regardless of price?  Go look at this article on Gizmodo and tell me that you don’t cringe after reading how badly we’re getting ripped off.

The point to this whole story is this:  I had to have a new HDMI cable for some new hardware at home, I can’t go get the cheap cables because they simply don’t exist locally any more, and I got ripped off to the tune of $22.99 for a $5 cable.  Next time no matter how badly I need one of these things, I’m headed to Monoprice where saner heads (and prices) reign.